“Fine,” Nora sighs, capping the vodka and handing it to Tomsen, who tucks it away with visible relief. “We should give these two the big bed,” Nora tells her, indicating Julie and I and the “bedroom” at the rear of the RV. “And I hope you have earplugs, because they’re wild ones.”
I feel heat in my face at the irony in her voice. It’s been so long since Julie and I had a moment alone, I had almost forgotten about our difficulties. But what were those difficulties, really? What could possibly be left of them after the fires we’ve passed through?
“Seriously, though,” Nora says, “we’re all taking our clothes off, right? We just survived a hurricane and I’m not sleeping in this soggy shit.”
There is a tense silence.
“I’m good,” M says, folding his hands on his chest. “But you should definitely strip.”
Tomsen glances around uncomfortably. “Goodnight,” she says, and curls up on the couch-bed as close to the wall as she can get, her shape disappearing beneath her baggy safari gear.
Nora shrugs and begins stripping.
“Goodnight!” Julie chuckles and drags me into the bedroom before I see more than a bare stomach. She slides the curtain shut, and we’re alone.
We slip under Tomsen’s ratty old blankets and I inhale a bewildering array of scents, from mildew to craft glue to various shades of body odor. Then as Julie begins to peel off her wet clothes, draping them piece by piece on a shelf, I forget about smell and focus on sight.
“Come on, R,” she says, tugging at my soaked shirt. “You’ll wet the bed.”
I shed my clothes while I watch her shed hers. She stops at her panties, which I take as a signal, so I leave my boxers on too. We curl up together in the back of this ancient RV, parked in some weedy field whose former crop I could never guess. I press my body against hers, both of us cold and clammy at first, then slowly warming, and despite the damp cotton between us, I feel myself responding. I want her, in every way. I always have, and I think I’ve finally thinned my hedge of fear. But a barrier remains, and it’s not mine. She eases away from me, a subtle retreat from my pressure.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she mumbles. I wait a moment and ask again.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just…I still don’t know who you are. Not really.”
I give this a moment to settle. “I’ll tell you.”
I feel her shaking her head, rocking it back and forth on the pillow. “Not now.”
“Not now,” I agree. “But I’ll tell you.” I lean in, burying my face in her hair, but she curls up tighter.
“There’s too much.” She is nearly in the fetal position, like her nightly program of bad dreams is already starting. “My mom…everything. There’s just too much.”
I let my electricity dissipate. I relax my body, still touching but not pressing. “We’re going to find her, Julie.”
She doesn’t reply.
“Your mom. The kids. We’re going to find all of them.”
“Do you ‘know’ that?” she asks with her face still in the pillow. “Is that one of those things you ‘know’?”
I sense her alertness as she asks this. A step into dangerous territory. A question for the man she’s not ready to meet.
“I don’t know it. But I feel it.”
She breathes quietly. I can hear her heartbeat. “I know we won’t have long,” she whispers. “I just need to be with her at the end.” Her whisper trembles. “I need to hear what she has to say to me…before I say goodbye.”
I place a firm hand on her hip. “You will.” It comes out with surprising conviction, and although I don’t know the future, it doesn’t feel like empty comfort. “Before we deal with Axiom, before BABL and the rest of this ‘war’…we’re going to find our family.”
She’s silent for a long time. I kiss the back of her head and close my eyes. “Goodnight, Julie.”
She reaches behind her and places her hand on the back of mine, her fingertips nestled between my knuckles. Then she slides my hand off her hip and up her stomach and presses it around her breast. I surrender to sleep with the soft weight of her resting in my palm, breathing the sweet, spicy scent of her hair, and I allow myself an indulgent thought: maybe we’ll get through this. Maybe the home we left behind won’t have to become a memory. Maybe somewhere in the space between bullets, we can still find room for a life.
WE
ABRAM KELVIN is fifteen years old, and he is picking up his brother from school. A normal thing, a normal day. The wrongness is all in the details: the crumbling brick of the school, the sage brush that chokes the playground, the distant specks of patrols making their rounds on the barren hilltops.
“You don’t ‘love’ her,” Abram tells his brother. “That’s stupid.”
“I do too,” Perry says, smiling across the playground at a little blond girl whose name Abram has already forgotten. “I love her and I’m gonna marry her.”
“You’re only five,” Abram says.
“So?”
“So five-year-olds can’t fall in love.”
“Why not?”
“Because love is complicated and only grownups can do it.”
Perry shakes his head, still smiling. “I can do it.”
“You’re a weird kid, you know? At your age you’re supposed to think girls are gross.”
“Girls are cool. I like girls.”
Abram sighs. “Come on, weirdo. We’ve gotta pack.”
He grabs his brother’s soft hand and drags him away, wondering if Perry realizes he will never see that girl again, just like Abram will never see the girl in his combat class, the one who gave him that wicked smile when she flipped him on his back, a private invitation that he’ll never get to accept. This place. All these people. Gone and soon forgotten.
“Do you love anybody?” Perry asks him as they walk back to the house.
“Nah,” Abram grunts, then turns his head and spits for no reason, the way older men do. His father doesn’t do this but all his father’s friends do, spattering the garage floor with their milky phlegm. His father doesn’t always act like a man, even though he builds houses and works on motorcycles, and this troubles Abram. What if his father is weak? What if he can’t protect them from the world? If he can’t, it will be up to Abram to do it. Abram spits again.
“Why not?” Perry says. “Why don’t you love anybody?”
“I love our family.”
“Nobody else?”
“Nobody else sticks around. They’re not real.”
Perry squints at him. “Not real?”
“Think about it. Last year you said that Jeff kid was your best friend. Where’d he go? Do you even remember him?”
Perry frowns at the ground.
“Now you say Mike’s your best friend, but when we leave, he’ll disappear and you’ll forget him too. So was he really even there? What was the point?”
“Well…” Perry says, considering the question, “having fun. Playing and stuff.”
Abram shakes his head, suddenly embarrassed at his outburst of openness. “Forget it. Just remember to stick close to the family. Things might get bad out there.”
“Where are we going, though?” Perry asks.
“Don’t know yet. Somewhere safe.”
“But I like it here. I want to stay here.”
“It’s not safe here anymore. Even Dad says so. You want to be safe, don’t you?”
Perry looks over his shoulder at the town’s red roofs and cherry trees, the distant burble of the playground. “Nah.”
Abram snorts. “Then you’re weird and stupid. Wait till some-thing really bad happens to you, then you’ll understand.”