“So how did you guys meet?” I’d asked that night.
Mom had glanced at Dad. I was maybe eight then and they’d only recently started talking to me about the Collapse and the war.
“P Eleven had just started up,” Dad said. “There were rumors about a quarantine in San Diego, so your grandparents and I piled into the car, using Grandpa’s military ID to get us through the roadblocks. We thought we’d head out east to this old army installation in the desert to wait things out. On our way out of town, we stopped for gas at the station your mom’s parents owned.”
“By then my whole family was gone,” Mom said. “My sister, Sarah, went first, then Dad, then Mom.”
Mom’s face had darkened, remembering it.
“I heard the bell ding as your dad and his folks pulled up. I came out from behind the station to meet them. I was filthy. It’s funny — I was such a prissy little thing when I was little, playing dolls and insisting everything I owned be as pink and frilly as possible. But by that point, I barely bothered to wipe the dirt off my face before going to fill up their gas.”
Dad had held out his hand, stretching it across the space between them, and Mom had taken it.
“I pumped it for your grandpa, and when I was done, he dug down into his pocket to pay, but all he had was a hundred. When I told him I didn’t have change for a hundred, he started yelling and screaming, claiming I was trying to cheat him! I laughed. I was like… the world is coming to an end, man! I mean, the sky is falling! I just buried my entire family out in the desert, and you’re having an aneurysm over your eleven dollars and fifty cents in change? Finally I just said forget it. Go with God, Ebenezer!
“So he took his hundred and jumped in the car, but by that point your father here had gotten out of the car and said he wasn’t getting in until his dad agreed to take me with them. Well, if you thought your grandfather had been impolite before, imagine the tidal wave of profanity that erupted when number one son decided to stage a little coup. Your grandpa screamed and hollered, he stamped his feet, even hit him! Can you believe that? Hitting something as adorable as your father? Didn’t matter, though. Your dad was a brick wall. He wouldn’t give an inch. Not one inch. I hadn’t said two words to him yet! And here he was… my noble man.”
“Why’d you do it, Dad?”
Dad had locked eyes with Mom over the orange flames. The snow swirled behind him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t really even think about doing it till then. It was just… the second I saw her, it was like a jigsaw puzzle. You know? You’ve got all these pieces and, on its own, each piece is a splotch of blue or a bit of green. But then a bunch of them click into place and you’ve got the sky or the grass and the whole thing just makes sense.”
I’d recognized the look that came over his face then. He got it a lot when looking at Mom. It was like he was seeing her as she was right then, bright and rosy in the fire’s glow, but at the same time seeing her as she was on the day they met, and when they’d first kissed, and when they’d snuck away from Grandpa to be married, and then as he imagined she might be ten years down the line, then twenty, then thirty, and finally as the old woman he had no idea she would never have the chance to become.
It was like he was looking at his whole life with her in that one moment.
I stepped out of the tree line and into the Greens’ backyard. There were no candles lit in the windows and I couldn’t hear any sign of movement from inside. Still, I skirted around the edge of their backyard garden toward the front door. I knew they wouldn’t mind my coming, but I thought it would be better if they didn’t see me. Hiding behind the corner of the house, I peeked out into the neighborhood.
It seemed strangely quiet, empty, almost as if everyone who lived there had picked up and moved on the night before. I told myself it was just my imagination.
I came out around the side of the house and went up the front steps, letting myself inside. Dad lay in his usual place, looking exactly as he had the night before. His face, more and more drawn as the days passed, was still framed with his great swirls of black hair, shot through with veins of white.
He had become a different person the day he met Mom, like a switch had been flipped inside him. He stood up to Grandpa in a way he never had before, and then they somehow managed to hold on to each other as the world tore itself to shreds around them. They even had me when the idea of bringing another person into that wreck of a world must have seemed crazy at best.
I thought maybe the man he was back in the plane, the one who rescued those two people, was the man Mom knew emerging again after being so long without her, the man who wouldn’t admit that the world was really over.
She would have been so proud of him.
I realized, maybe for the first time, that I was too.
“Jenny wants to come with us when we go,” I said quietly, my hand on his shoulder. “I think you’ll like her. I was thinking maybe we won’t even go back on the trail. You know? Like you said before we came here? Maybe we’ll find someplace to have a house. Maybe we’ll—”
I stopped myself short. It was fine when it was all in my head, but it felt foolish to imagine that life out loud.
Driving back the sadness I could feel swelling inside me, I knelt down by his bed and collected the books, piling them up in my arms.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said.
I reached for the doorknob, but as I did I noticed the coatrack that hung on the wall next to the door frame. Something about it struck me, but for a second I didn’t understand what or why. And then I got it.
It was empty.
Each time I had seen the Greens come inside, they would take off their jackets and hang them on the coatrack’s pegs. If Jackson or Marcus ever forgot, Violet would ride him until he took it from wherever he dropped it and hung it up.
The Greens should have been upstairs, maybe a half hour or so from getting up and starting their day. So why was the coatrack empty?
I set my books on the floor and stepped into the kitchen, listening intently for any sound coming from upstairs. Nothing. From the bottom of the stairs, I could see Jackson’s door hanging open into the hall. The stairs creaked as I made my way up, but there was no answering sound from any of the rooms. There were clothes scattered on Jackson’s floor and his bed was disheveled, like he had gotten up and dressed in a hurry. I made my way to the end of the hall, to Marcus and Violet’s room, and found it the same way.
So what? Something came up and they all decided to get an early start. It’s nothing.
It made sense, but I didn’t believe it. Maybe it was that weird abandoned feeling I’d noticed as soon as I’d gotten to town this morning. I went downstairs and peeked out the front door. Just as I did, a door opened and slammed shut somewhere across the park. A man ran from his house and then down the road that led to the school.
I closed the Greens’ door behind me and eased out onto the porch. I knew I should take my books and go back to Jenny. After all, what happened in this town was no longer my business but, curious, I went down the road toward the school.
I reached the edge of the parking lot just as the man threw open the school’s front doors and disappeared inside. I circled around the side of the building, looking in each window as I had that first day, but saw nothing until I came around to the back of the school and looked in the window above the main classroom.
The room was packed with what I was sure was every single resident of Settler’s Landing. A hundred people or more. The desks and chairs were pushed aside and everyone stood facing Tuttle’s empty desk in tight groups. A murmur rose and fell in waves. I eased the window open.