Ashes, Ashes (6 page)

Lucy hobbled over to her backpack, unbuckled it, and pulled it open. She pushed her hands down to the very bottom, letting her fingers dance over her flint and tinderbox, her journal, a dead flashlight, her transistor radio, one last precious book of matches, until she felt the smooth leather cover. She hardly knew why she had kept it when so much of her life before was strewn in piles on the floor of her New Jersey home. The last weeks there were a blur in which only endless phone conversations with her parents’ doctors and the countless forms to be signed stood out in her memory. A jumble of decisions were made while she could scarcely remember her own name, until at last the bodies were packed into the ambulance and taken away, leaving a silence that felt heavy and buzzed in her ears. She’d scanned her mother’s phone book, called women she remembered as being kind, but the phone rang and rang and no one ever picked up. And after that the house was almost unbearable, and the neighborhood she’d grown up in felt empty and forlorn, like a ghost town. She had become increasingly nervous, jumping at sounds, scared of the lights that came on in the adjacent houses in the middle of the night, the strange, silent men in hazard suiting who seemed to be looking for something, the white vans they drove. Lucy had taken to sleeping on the cold linoleum floor in the mudroom, which had no windows but did have a door that double-bolted and let out into the yard with its thick screen of cedar hedges. She’d listened to reports on the solar-powered radio her dad had kept on a shelf by the cellar door with stubs of emergency candles and freeze-dried camping meals. The college stations she was familiar with were not transmitting, and one by one the big news stations stopped, until finally there’d been nothing but a pirate channel, fuzzy and frustrating to pick up strongly. But in the early days, she’d lie on an inflatable mattress with the radio pressed to her ear, happy to be hearing another human voice. The host, who called himself Typhoid Harry, had been the first and only person to explain the plague in words she could understand. From him she’d learned that most people had contracted the plague in the first wave of contagion. Out of every one million people, 999,999 had died. Most of the survivors were picked off by the second wave. However, there were a scant few who seemed protected by the routine childhood vaccine given out with those for chicken pox, measles, polio, and bird flu, and an even fewer number who somehow survived the disease, horribly scarred and insane—the S’ans.

On the day she’d left for good, she’d run from room to room, breathless, crying jagged sobs that hurt her chest, careful not to look at too much, but becoming transfixed by the sights of her mother’s faded dressing gown still hanging on its hook on the bedroom door, her shawl draped on her favorite armchair, her father’s coffee mug on the draining board in the kitchen. She’d spent most of the time in her dad’s home office searching for she didn’t know what, catching the lingering scent of his aftershave, and finding the hunting knife and sheath in the bottom drawer of the desk.

Lucy had taken the knife not so much for defense. At that point everything was odd, surreal, but she had no notion of any physical danger to herself. She’d slipped it into her bag with her mother’s shawl, a box of assorted freeze-dried food, and a bottle of spring water, because it was so unlike her father to own a weapon. He was all about leather attachés and legal briefs and dark, perfectly pressed suits. It was a puzzle to be gnawed on.

And she had taken her tenth-grade yearbook, too, even though she’d hated school, never infiltrating the groups of popular kids. The yearbook was a superficial slice of high school life that completely ignored the pain and boredom of it. She couldn’t help thinking that Aidan would have fit in perfectly at her school, although she had to admit there was an edge to him that was different from the preppy, stuck-up boys she used to have classes with.

She opened the yearbook. The blank pages in front and back were empty of those insipid
Have a great summer
! messages. Inside she’d scrawled over pictures of the hair-sprayed, shiny lip-glossed, made-up girls in her class with a big, thick, black pen, giving them punk hairdos and raccoon eyes and thought bubbles that said stuff like “Do you think I’m pretty?” Somehow their deaths had changed it all. The yearbook touched on the life before. It had become something to remind her that things had been normal once.

Lucy flipped the pages with difficulty. They’d swollen from the damp and stuck together, and the red cover was warped. Past the graduating seniors’ portraits, where everyone was posed like they were selling wristwatches; carefully avoiding the formal photo of Maggie, who was smiling so widely, happy and secure in the knowledge that she had her pick of Ivy League schools; past Rob and the rest of the ninth graders who looked like little kids and always would be. She got to her class picture. Ran her eyes over the list of names: Julie, Scott, Chad, Angie—people who’d barely noticed she was alive even though they’d known one another since kindergarten. In the class roster she’d been marked absent, but she’d been there. It was like a bad joke that even her teachers seemed unaware of her existence. She stood at the end of the row toward the back, shoulders hunched and hair pulled forward across her pale face, which appeared to float like the moon above the unrelenting black of her combat boots, jeans, T-shirt, and zippered hoodie.

Chad was standing next to her, but he’d squeezed over so that there were at least a couple of feet between them. God, she had hated him! He’d always acted as if she were diseased or something.

Lucy chewed her thumbnail, remembering how strange life had been that spring. The flyers with the lists of symptoms had appeared, plastered all over school, and it seemed as if everyone visited the nurse’s office complaining of headaches and muscle cramping and fever. A few girls had fainted in class. Lucy had felt perfectly fine. She turned the pages of the yearbook slowly, flicking past photos of football teams and teachers and school staff. She paused at the picture of the nurse, Mrs. Reynolds, looking so neat and trim and motherly in her white outfit.

But she hadn’t been so calm the last time Lucy had seen her, when she was called into the health office for yet another blood test. Mrs. Reynolds had seemed distracted. Even her smooth blond hair, normally pinned in a neat bun, was messily tucked behind her ears, and she’d had dark circles under her eyes. There’d been none of the usual chatter, the casual questions about Lucy’s health or how the school year was going. She’d been nervous, preoccupied. And she’d flubbed the test somehow. Instead of blood squirting into the needle, it had dribbled all over Lucy’s arm and the black-and-white tiled linoleum floor, and quite a lot of it had spattered onto the woman’s white brogues. And although Lucy knew from sex ed class the previous year that the nurse could field the most embarrassing questions lobbed at her by Chad and his idiot posse, she had mumbled when Lucy asked her how many kids were sick and if it was contagious.

“What is it?” Lucy had said. “Strep? Or is it mono?” For some reason there was a coolness factor associated with mono. It meant you’d been kissing someone. Julie Reininger’s rep had been cemented by having mono and being out of school for a whole month last winter.

“Maybe that bird flu they were talking about on the news?” Lucy had continued, and she’d been almost mesmerized by the weird spasm that quivered across Mrs. Reynolds’s fingers and the way her eyes skittered away. And then she’d bitten her lip, as the nurse jabbed the needle into her arm again. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Reynolds had left the room, clasping the full tube of blood and closing the door firmly behind her. Lucy had heard the sound of the lock clicking shut. She had waited, until her sweaty thighs had stuck to the paper covering the gurney and she realized that she had to go to the bathroom. Finally, after looking at the closed door and the frosted glass window, she got up and walked around the small room, sliding drawers open and checking out the plastic-wrapped syringes, the tongue depressors flavored with cinnamon, the model of the female reproductive system all shiny purple and pink plastic—she’d wondered if the colors were anatomically accurate—and blowing balloons with a couple of powdery surgical gloves. She tried not to think about how full her bladder was. One of the bottom drawers held a thick stack of folders. Lucy was about to close it when she noticed Chad Grey’s name and casually flipped the cover open. Chad had been absent for the last few days, and Lucy couldn’t say she missed him. He always had some lame comment to make when she walked past his locker in the hallway, and he liked coming up with stupid words to rhyme with her name. Being called “Goosey” or “Moosey” might not have been exactly insulting, but it was almost impossible to walk to your desk with any kind of poise when a crew of boys was hissing it under their breaths. Maybe he had an STD or something….

A wallet-sized student photo was clipped to the top of the page. A black bar was slashed across his eyes in marker, and the letter
D
was carefully marked next to his name. Lucy would have liked to believe that it stood for
dumb
but even then she was afraid it meant something much more terminal. She read: “Student complains of abdominal pain, fever, headache, backache, nausea. No lesions. Subconjunctival bleeding, subcutaneous bleeding. Hemorrhagic variant suspected. Sent to Dr. Lessing/R. Island for confirmation.”

And there was a folder for Hilly Taylor and one for Samantha Barnes and that massive jerk AJ Picard, and, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen any of them around for a while. She had trained herself to ignore them for so long, but now it seemed crazy that she could go from class to class and sit there doodling in the margins of her notebooks without noticing the empty desks. And each photo had been altered in the same way, black bars slashed across their eyes, the letter
D
written in thick, black lines, and the same listing of symptoms.

Suddenly she had to pee so badly, she squeezed her legs together like a toddler. She kept rifling through the papers and there, almost at the bottom of the pile, was one marked “Lucy Holloway.” It was thicker than the rest. Seeing it made the latest needle hole in her arm twinge. They’d turned her into a pincushion these last few weeks. And there’d been no explanation. Just more tests following the first physical exam, when Mrs. Reynolds had run her fingers over the smooth skin of Lucy’s upper arms, looking for the puckered scar of a vaccination that wasn’t there.

“My parents didn’t believe in them,” Lucy had whispered when the nurse had finally thought to ask her and she’d begun to feel afraid that there was something really wrong with her. It was one of the only ways her straight parents deviated from the norm. She remembered when Maggie had told her, in a hushed voice, about their older brother, who’d died when he was barely two years old from an allergic reaction to a shot. “That’s when Mom and Dad moved out of New York to Sparta, here in New Jersey,” Maggie had said breathlessly, her eyes round with delicious horror. “Because it’s less crowded and people are healthier, so it doesn’t matter.” Then she’d added, “Alex’s face swelled up like a pumpkin, and his hands looked like shiny pink balloons, and then his tongue turned black.” And even though there was no way Maggie could have known all that, the image had given Lucy nightmares for years.

Now she opened the folder slowly, half-afraid she’d see the black bar and the D, but then thinking that if she did then that would indicate it meant something other than
deceased
. And that would be good, right? Her startled face looked back at her from the photo. It was a copy of the picture on the student ID she was supposed to wear clipped to her backpack but never did. Her thick, curly bangs obscured her left eye completely, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line that almost made her lips disappear, but there was no black bar, no letter
D
.

She’d picked up her folder and stumbled backward to the gurney, spilling pages covered in weird symbols, rows of numbers and decimal points, percentages and charts. Too much information for someone who had suffered many scraped knees and cuts and broken bones but had never contracted anything worse than a head cold. One thing you could say about Lucy Holloway was that she had near perfect attendance. She wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the science stuff, and her bladder had finally demanded that she do something about it. She peed in a blue plastic cup and then dropped it in the biohazard receptacle, trying not to tip it over. The can was filled with used syringes and marked with a yellow and black skull.

And then Mrs. Reynolds had come back; the clicking of the lock opening gave Lucy just enough time to stuff her folder back into the drawer and vault onto the examining table. The nurse had jotted down a few notes and then made the calls that brought a legion of white-coats in, their faces blank behind their masks, and the battery of testing had begun again, until finally her father had shown up. He’d seemed twelve feet tall standing in the doorway, swinging his briefcase like an axe, his face purple with rage. She had never seen him with his cuffs undone, his tie unknotted, his carefully combed hair bristling. Something stony in his face had stopped her from asking any questions when he’d dragged her out of the room. Afterward, there’d been no time. Lucy never went back to school. Missed final exams, never picked up her report card, and soon there had been no reason to think about school. She’d received her yearbook in the mail a month or so later, sent directly from the printer with a computer-generated mailing label affixed.

A few pages further and there Lucy was again, a shot of her hunched over her journal, her hair a tangled curtain drawn across her face, scribbling away furiously. All around her were people caught in the midst of laughing and talking, their hands a blur of motion, moving around her as if she weren’t there. And she kind of hadn’t been. In her mind she’d been traveling and thinking about the day she could escape, and she had written it all down in her journal. Even to herself, though, she had to admit she looked like a strange, dull girl. Lucy closed the book, thinking not for the first time that she should burn it or throw it away, and ended up stowing it safely in a fold of the orange tarp against the wall. She sat back down next to the fire and clasped her arms around her shins, resting her chin on one bony kneecap. Her body thrummed with exhaustion.