Sophie laughed and cried as she stared at this one picture Tom had slept with, the sounds and emotions coming out of her all at once.
But that house. She had completely forgotten all about it. It was a sun-bleached Victorian mansion of the Gilded Age, built upon the windblown plains of northeastern Colorado as the harbinger of a gingerbread-porched suburbia for wealthy ranchers and their romanticized ideals, dead dreams blossoming over the wake of Colorado’s dying gold rush and the merciless riot age of the Coal Strikes. But that one house only had been built, and the other dreamers and all their children and burnished fortunes had never come. In the thirties at last, the Dust Bowl arose and as far north as the Rocky Mountains the dreams had all been choked away.
The unlikely wasteland mansion had been built by a French Canadian industrialist named Conrad Henry Saint-Germain, passed down through the generations for a single-threaded bloodline of lonely authors and highly eccentric ladies. Sophie had only been there once, when Mitch had “forced” his dear annoying brother to introduce his new girlfriend, Sophie, to the odd spinster great aunt who lived out toward Kersey amongst her cats in that gingerbread monstrosity.
Jemm. Auntie Jemm.
“Oh my God!”
Sophie dropped the Polaroid and laughed into her hands. She knew, with an absolute and burning sun of conviction flaring over her heart in a surge of revelation, where Mitch had built his own survival shelter.
Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You know where?
“Oh, oh.”
Sophie rocked back and forth, her bare heels pushing off the metal frame of Tom’s old cot. It was all she could do to force herself not to throw together a pile of gear, suit up and go out into the cave and try to start up the H4 and drive headlong out to Kersey.
The memory of that illumined day came back to her in a rush. How had she ever forgotten it?
Because I spilled hot tea all down my crotch, and as I shot up screaming with a cat flying off of my shoulder, silver-maned Auntie Jemm with her sea-green glassy eye and her meshed-over widow’s peak had bitten down on her knuckle and had cried out, “Oh, sweet patoo!”
What in the Hell was a ‘sweet patoo’? Sophie laughed and cried some more.
Oh, I was mortified.
Mitch had joked about the two-hundred-mile road trip and social call for a week before they went up in his clattery old Volkswagen Type 34 coupe. All the way up I-25 and over eastbound Highway 34, Mitch had been joking about the anti-comedic potential inherent in their “Hot Victorian courtship ritual.”
“Oh Hell, Tom-Tom,” Mitch had called, his black eyebrows going up-and-down Groucho style as he winked at Sophie who had been hugging her knees in the tiny, spring-squeaky discomfort of that back seat. “Tea time! Can you believe it? Haven’t had God-damned tea time since we were twelve. Hey, you know? This’ll be badass. Maybe sweet ol’ Jemm will even allow you two to blow très petite kisses over your gloves and crumpets or something. Aw, yeah!”
“Hmm. She was always good to us,” came Tom’s oblique reply. His forehead was touched against the side window. He had laced his fingers through Sophie’s own, turning the little silver mood ring he had bought for her at Celebration! in the Springs. “Been too long.”
And Mitch had said, “Way too long. And her crazy cats raised us a Hell of a lot better than old Uncle Zack’s backhand did. Tom, am I right?”
Tom’s fist had clenched so quickly that Sophie had stared at him in alarm.
“Hey, Mitch, I have an idea about regaling Soph with our family history,” Tom had said. His voice held sun-fire, plains-wind. Controlled, measured and perfectly on the threshold of an indignant rage. “How about you tell the story ‘bout that one day, that one single day, when you remembered how to shut the fuck up?”
And as young people do, as Mitch hit the gas and they sped to ninety miles an hour and passed an Army convoy of ugly new Hummers (“Never going to own one of those damned things,” Tom had muttered), they had forged a rapid and heady trinity of peace through a single rude, shared outburst of wind-touched sun-glow and laughter.
Mitch had laughed the longest, ending in “Sorry. I don’t know. I don’t how to say things, real things. I just miss him. I miss Zach.” And he had lowered his head, no longer winking at Sophie and dead-set focused upon the wheel as he arced back out of the passing lane and coasted down to a leisurely eighty.
The inch-wide gap of the window blew the wind down through Tom’s hair.
Sophie had stroked the back of Tom’s hand almost absently, wondering why Mitch had begun to cry.
Sophie returned, alone, to her own present and reality.
Aunt Jemm’s house, northeast of Kersey out in the wind-sheltered oaks, out in the Nothing. That house, she thought, that has got to still be standing.
And Mitch’s Morse transmission thrummed in her mind: You know where? Have car. Can’t get out.
Oh, it has to be.
No longer in need of sleep, Sophie rose and rushed out of the Sanctuary. She pushed her way through the door seal and made her way to the work table. How could she contain this, this terrible and glorious secret? Mitch alive, Lacie alive, and she knew where. And they were safe in a secret shelter Mitch had built beneath the house he had inherited from Auntie Jemm.
Oh, the mansion. Was that, then, the secret of the fight that had erupted between Mitch and Tom after their father had died? The golden child, the Harvard graduate bound for work as a government agent, he had been gifted with the family land in Quebec and even more along the flanks of Fairburn Mountain. And the black sheep, Mitch, he had been given a dilapidated mansion filled with circus antiques and fractured dreams, an urn full of Aunt Jemm’s ashes, two hundred miles away from anything…
She wanted nothing more than to call Mitch on the Grundig radio right then. She knew that she could not, it was far too risky. What if any of the survivors within a hundred miles had shortwave radios for themselves?
Channel not secure.
Anyone else who was still alive out there would be cunning, equipped, prepared. Even the dying were almost certain to be in possession of police cars, or armored trucks, or even military vehicles. Many would have shortwaves, and many more would be bristling with weapons. If she gave away too many hints about her location in speaking with Mitch, such people would have no qualms about seeking out her shelter, blowing their way in, killing her and taking over.
No.
She would need to wait even longer before she could dare to call Mitch again. He had said to come in several weeks, but he had surely been guessing about how long it would take the winds to carry the first maelstrom of burning waste and fallout away. Even if she was not certain of the days, if she was late, he would wait for her.
Can’t get out. You know where?
She needed to remain silent awhile longer, until she had learned all that she could about the shelter, her tools, her weapons, her suits, the ultra-light crane. Everything would need to go with her. And if Aunt Jemm’s house was unlivable or Kersey itself had grown too dangerous, she might even need to drive Mitch and Lacie back to live inside Tom’s shelter.