Contaminated (17 page)

We find empty seats at the back of the bus. My mom’s more careful this time when she sits. We perch on the edge of our seats with the backpacks taking up a lot of the room. People don’t even really give us a second glance.

The ride to Foodland’s only about five minutes, but it would’ve taken much longer than that to walk. We get off and watch the bus drive away. The temperature’s colder out here on the edge of town, I guess because the wind can whip through across the empty fields that once grew corn and now harbor monuments to corpses. I shiver, glad for the layers.

“C’mon. Let’s start walking.”

Mom follows me easily enough. We climb the grassy hill where there used to be houses but now is empty land,
and pass a half-finished bank that’s been under construction for the past couple of years. I don’t think they’re ever going to finish it. Down the other side of the hill, we hit the parking lot of a Sheetz gas station, and a warm waft of coffee-and-egg-sandwich-scented air reminds me I didn’t eat much today. Also that soon it will be lunchtime, and though that would be more than enough time if we were driving, we’re walking and the clock’s ticking. We cross the parking lot, through the gas pumps. Only one set is working anymore, but I guess it doesn’t matter because there are so many fewer drivers these days. We get to the edge of the highway, where there’s no sidewalk.

There’s still traffic, even though most people who used to commute regularly to work have either moved closer to their jobs to use public transportation or aren’t around to work anymore. Most of it’s trucks, construction vehicles, cleanup crews. Still a lot of military. Our world’s been put back on its feet, but like my mom, it’s still a little too unsteady to walk on its own.

There is a good chance, though, that we can hitch a ride. People aren’t as afraid of hitchhikers now, since sometimes it’s the only way to get anywhere. You wouldn’t think that’s the case, that people would be afraid of picking up Connies … except I guess that Connies don’t stand on the side of the road with their thumbs out—they just rush at the cars and run them off the road.

I’m not even hitching, but only a few cars pass us before
one pulls over. The driver rolls down the passenger-side window. “You need a ride?”

He looks okay, but while I might’ve taken him up on it if I were alone, I have to think about my mom. I shake my head.

“No, we’re good.”

He frowns. “You sure? You look like you could use a lift. Those bags look heavy.”

When I hitch rides, I always try to get them with moms in minivans and baby seats in the back. This guy looks like someone’s grandpa. Nice face, but … still.

“No, really, we don’t have far to go.”

He shrugs. “Okay, you sure?”

Through all this, my mom’s standing quiet and still. The wind’s blowing up, making me shiver. I can feel heat drifting out to us from his open window. I calculate the odds that this guy, out of everyone else passing, is a serial killer, and decide to take the chance.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I open the back door and help my mom slide in, then put my bag back there and get in the passenger seat. I want my hands free, just in case.

“Where’re you ladies headed?” He glances in the rearview mirror, but if my mom’s silence is strange, he doesn’t act like it.

“Spring Lake Commons.” I hold my hands out to the heat blowing from the vents.

He gives me a curious glance. “What’s out that way?”

“I … we live there.” I turn to give my mom a look, but she’s staring out the window.

“All the way out there? I didn’t think anyone lived out there anymore. Wasn’t it closed off?”

I look out the window, too. We’re passing by a nice neighborhood with big houses set very close together. “Yes. But not anymore.”

I don’t really know if that’s true or not.

“Huh.” He drives in silence for a minute or so, then looks into the rearview again. “You okay back there? Not too hot? Too cold?”

“She’s … shy,” I blurt.

The driver gives me another of those curious glances but nods. The drive is so much faster than walking would be, I’m counting my blessings. We pass the last of the houses, and the road moves along through one of the fields.

The memorials aren’t big and grand, the way they made the ones for other places. Supposedly those are coming, big marble walls engraved with the names of the fallen, like for the Vietnam War. Or maybe just a stone obelisk like the Washington Monument. But for now all that’s there are low metal fences. They’re curving and long, surrounding the entire ditch where they’d buried the Connies and covered them with concrete. They planted flowers there but nothing’s growing on top of the ditches now, and the rest of the fields have gone to weeds.

My mom makes a long, low noise that sounds like a plea.
She has both hands pressed to the glass. Her face, too. Her breath fogs it.

“Mom …” I want to hush her, but how without making it too obvious?

She slaps the window with the flats of both hands. The driver jumps. He doesn’t just look in the mirror this time, he twists to stare behind him.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. Mom, please!”

He’s going to know. She’s not restrained. He’s going to throw us out, worse than that, call the cops. Worse than that, wreck the car and kill us all because now she’s really freaking out, making that low, harsh noise and rapping on the glass, and what will happen to Opal then, if I die? Who will pick her up from school?

“Does she need to stop?” He’s already pulling over to the side of the road.

My mom opens the car door, I don’t know how, before he’s even stopped. She falls out, rolls, her backpack snagging on one arm and then falling off. She’s on her feet faster than I’ve ever seen her since before she got sick. She takes off running across the field. Her feet tangle in some grass. She goes down.

“Oh, no, oh, no …” I barely realize I’m saying this over and over as I struggle with my seat belt.

I’m caught, I’m stuck, I can’t get it undone. I’m trapped. I slap at the glass myself, then hold back. I can’t act like
that, even if I want to. But then I feel the driver’s arm across me, his hand clicking the belt. I tense, I jerk, startled and freaked out, but his face is kind.

“You’d better go after her,” he says. “Before she hurts herself.”

I yank my heavy backpack out of his car, careful enough to know I don’t want him driving off with it, but I can’t carry both mine and the one my mom dropped. I drop mine beside hers, and I run.

“MOM!”

She doesn’t slow until she reaches the wall. She goes to her knees beside it, both hands clutching the cold metal. The ground is frozen, which saves her from getting muddy, but it also tears at her pants. She’ll be bruised, maybe even cut up.

The cold air burns like fire in my lungs as, panting, I drop down beside her. “Mom. Please. Come back to the car.”

Her hood’s fallen off her face. I haven’t seen her in light this bright, and I’m sorry to see the shadows around her eyes. The hollows of her cheeks. She has cracks in the corners of her lips, which are dry. Her hair tangles in the wind, blowing. She is my mother, and she used to be so beautiful, but now I struggle to see anything lovely in her.

She’s crying. Bright tears are slipping down her cheeks. She weeps silently, rocking, with her hands gripping the wrought-iron fence. Her forehead hits the metal, not hard enough to bruise, but it’s definitely leaving a mark.

“Mom, please.” I can only manage this in a whisper.

I put my hand on her shoulder. Beneath my fingers, the layers of clothing soften what would otherwise be bony and sharp, since she’s gotten so thin. “Please. Mom. Please.”

She doesn’t hear me, or she can’t. Her grief is so great, it overwhelms her. She shakes with it, and I worry it’s the Mercy Mode kicking in again. If it hasn’t already, it might soon, just from her agitation. I don’t think I can go through watching that again.

I’ve never been to one of the memorials. I know my dad is probably in one of them. We know he’s dead, even though nobody was ever able to tell us when or where, who’d done it. Where they’d put him. It seemed pointless to visit any of the places they’ve decided shouldn’t be forgotten, the places we should commemorate. He could be here, under the dirt and concrete, jumbled up alongside a lot of other bodies, or he could be anyplace else. He could be in none of them. All we know is that he’s gone.

She knows he is gone.

My parents fought sometimes, but they always made up. My mother sometimes seemed exasperated with my dad, who could be absentminded and whose sense of humor often included things she didn’t appreciate, like farts. She complained that he didn’t pick up his socks or when he forgot to bring home the dry cleaning. Their arguments never lasted long, and they kissed more than they fought.

Now she presses her face to the place in the dirt where he might be, and I can’t refuse her the chance for this grief.

I know that what I felt for Tony is nothing like this. We were too young, we didn’t have time, we were just kids. I loved him because he was the first boy to really pay attention to me, and I’ll admit there were times I had a fantasy or two about what it would be like to marry Tony. Have some kids. Argue with him fondly about his taste in cars, whatever it was.

But that was nothing like what my parents had. I lost my dad. She lost her husband. I remember overhearing my mom say once to her best friend that if something happened to my dad, she’d never get married again. I can’t begin to understand how it feels to love someone that much, to have made a life with that person, to have children with him, and then to lose him. I put my hand on her shoulder, but there’s nothing I can say or do about this except try to show her that I love her.

A shadow falls over us. It’s the man from the car. He has a handful of tissues. His eyes glint, shiny, as he gets down on the ground beside us. He hands me the tissues, and I press one into my mom’s hand. She doesn’t use it, but she doesn’t drop it, either.

“Your mother?” he says, and I nod. “Your mom hasn’t been here before, has she?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“But she knows what it is, doesn’t she?” He looks around the field. On the highway, not so far away, cars zip past without even slowing. The wind picks up, ruffling the
weeds. He looks at me again. “Funny, how they know what they’re not supposed to know.”

He
knows. Maybe he knew the moment he stopped. But, as with the lady at the bus stop, I don’t see condemnation. Nor pity, either, which I’d take even if it made my skin crawl.

“My wife,” he says, then stops. He swallows hard, shakes his head. “My wife.”

He doesn’t have to say anything else. I don’t know if he means she’s in one of these mass graves, or if she’s at home, wrists restrained and wearing a shock collar to keep her subdued. It doesn’t matter.

He understands, that’s what matters, and the three of us sit there together for a very long time.

THE DRIVER’S NAME IS MR. BEHNEY. HE EASES my name and story out of me with a few carefully asked questions that have me talking before I think I should keep quiet. I tell him about Opal. About having to leave the apartment. He says very little after that, but he looks thoughtful.

There never used to be a gate in front of the entrance to the neighborhood, but there is now. Mr. Behney slows the car before he turns in. I lean forward to get a better look.

“Are you sure?” He sounds doubtful.

“It’s open.” I point to the other side of the metal gate, the one behind the stone planter with the sign that says Spring Lake Commons. Nothing’s planted in it now. The gate is open on the far side. “See?”

He sighs, but makes the turn. The car inches forward through the opening. The trees have overgrown here, too, with branches that reach to scrape the sides of the car, but in half a minute we’re past that.

The road’s full of potholes, like something chewed it up and spit pieces of it back out. That’s from the treads of the army vehicles, not from regular cars. It’s not scary knowing what caused the holes. It’s scary knowing how long they’ve been there without being repaired.

We don’t pass a single car as I direct him down the long roads to our house. Spring Lake Commons is a huge neighborhood, not like the ones in town with big houses on tiny lots, all crammed together. Here you can’t even see most of the houses from the street, even in winter, with the leaves fallen off the trees. Driveways are long and narrow. There are a lot of hills. The neighborhood’s built onto a mountain, so the streets can be steep.

The only thing that crosses in front of us is a pack of dogs, all sizes. I see a couple of golden retrievers, a German shepherd, a Saint Bernard I’m sure belonged to the neighbors down the street. They look scruffy and wild, and they don’t pay us a second’s attention as they streak across the road. Mr. Behney puts on the brakes a little too hard. “My God.”

“They’re just dogs,” I say, my voice a bit too shaky to convince him. “Lots of people had dogs out here. That’s all.”

He gives me a sympathetic look and starts the car moving again. We follow the long, twisting road, make a turn or two. For a minute I’m afraid I’ve forgotten, actually forgotten how to get to my house. Everything looks different overgrown and not taken care of. Then I recognize the bend in the road.

“It’s just up here, on the left.” I point, leaning forward, eager now.

My stomach should be used to twisting and knotting by now, but this is different. I’m anxious, but excited. I want to go home. Oh, how I want to go home.

There’s a fallen tree blocking the end of the driveway. It’s knocked down some wires and sent the telephone pole tilting at a steep slant. Mr. Behney can’t get up the driveway, so he pulls up as far as he can to park.

“Velvet, are you sure this is what you want to do?” He peers through the windshield, clearly not impressed.

“Yes.” I don’t tell him we have no other choice. He’s just nice enough that he might tell us to come home with him—and I’m almost desperate enough to want him to. But what if he doesn’t? What then? “It’s our house. I think it’ll be better for her. You know, be in a familiar place. It might … help.”