Shadows Have Gone (7 page)

Carly and Justin exchanged a look. They had. And not just on the news.

“Dad knew it, too. That’s why he made me make that promise, just in case. Mom was already raving when they went out there. But after they shut themselves in the garage, I never heard anything out of her again. Just Dad. Just Dad. He cried. He pounded on the door and screamed. And cried. I cried with him. I knew it wasn’t really him. My dad would never say the kind of stuff he was saying. But it still stuck with me. I hear it in my head sometimes, in his voice. Sometimes, at night, I still hear him screaming, begging me to let him in.”

He glanced over at Carly, then back at the cairn, and his voice was gruff. “That’s why I know ghosts are real. Not visible phantoms floating through a house and throwing stuff. But the ghosts in your mind. They haunt you. Sometimes forever, I guess.”

Carly wanted to hold him so badly. She took a step toward him, but Justin gently wrapped his hand around her arm. She glanced up at him, and he gave a tiny shake of his head.

“My brother . . . I had to fight with him to keep him from opening the door to let Dad in. We’d never fought, even as little kids, so it was hard. I always looked up to him, even though he was only a year older. I made his nose bleed, and he told me he hated me. I tried to think of it like the stuff my dad was saying . . . he didn’t really mean it. But words are ghosts, too.

“He ran upstairs and locked his bedroom door. I knocked and tried to get him to let me in, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even talk to me through the register. Soon I was the one crying outside the door, pounding on the wood until my knuckles were raw. I could hear him start coughing, even throwing up sometimes, but he still wouldn’t open the door.

“Once he got sick, I was afraid to go in. I left him food outside the door. A couple of times, it had disappeared the next time I went upstairs. But then it just piled up. And I didn’t hear anything from inside. I guess it’s weird, but I kept leaving him stuff there, because it was, like, the only thing I could do. Even after it was silent in the room.”

Carly thought about the note she had slipped under her parents’ door before she and Justin left Juneau, and her eyes filled with tears.

Kaden rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “I kept telling myself I should go out to the garage. And I should go get the key to my brother’s room from the utility drawer. I should check on them and see if they were . . . I knew they were. I knew it, but I felt like I ought to . . . but I didn’t want to see it. I told myself I was being a pu—” He glanced up at Carly and flushed a little. “Uh, I mean, I was being a wuss. I knew I should go out there and . . . you know . . . cover them up or something. Treat them with respect. I should wrap them up and take them over to the church where you guys were cremating everyone. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I still feel bad about that. Like I should have done more for them. But I just couldn’t do it. I finally left. Just left them there. I know when you guys went around the town . . . went door to door, and . . . took care of things, I should have said something. I don’t know. Done something special for them, or . . . or . . .” Kaden began to sob, his shoulders shaking as he hung his head.

Carly pulled him into her arms, and instead of allowing the boy to let his grief go, the embrace seemed to compel him to force it back down, to choke back his tears and straighten his shoulders.
 

Carly felt helpless. Hadn’t they all done that? Forced back the grief, the horror, the shock of their situation? None of them had fully dealt with it. How could they? Their entire world had changed, and they grieved not only for the loved ones they had lost but for the world they had lost, as well.

“Kaden, in the end, graves are for the living,” Justin said. “They’re to help us grieve or help us to remember. To have a place to visit, if we need it. It’s not really for those we’re burying. They don’t care. And if having done something special for your family would have hurt you more than helped you, they wouldn’t have wanted that. You remember them in your own way.”

“I haven’t been back,” Kaden said. “To my house, I mean. I thought I should, you know, to take some pictures or some of my parents’ stuff. Like Carly had her
Lord of the Rings
DVD and her mom’s pearls. Even if not for me, for the kids I might have someday, like as a family inheritance thing. But I couldn’t go in. A few weeks ago, I went back and sat on the lawn for a while. Just looking at the house and remembering my life there. It seems like something I once watched on TV. I can’t remember what my mom’s voice sounded like any more. But I remember the perfume she wore. It was called Sunflowers. I got her a bottle every Mother’s Day. My parents’ bedroom used to smell like it in the morning after she got ready. I wondered if I went in there, if I’d be able to smell it, but I just couldn’t make myself walk up to the door.”

Carly put an arm around his waist. “You go back when you’re ready. When you want to. I haven’t been back to my home, either. Yes, that’s because it’s so far away, but you know what? Even if it were nearby, I don’t think I’d want to anymore. Because that was my old life. The life that’s gone. And maybe it’s better to leave it behind and not go back. It would only hurt me. I lost almost all the last vestiges of that life in the fire. I was carrying those things around like tombstones. None of them were things I could really use in this life or help me in the journey I’m taking now. At the time, it hurt to lose them, but I don’t really miss them now. I still have the important things, the memories, the love.”

“I don’t think about love,” Kaden murmured. “All I can think about is my dad hammering on that door and that fight I had with my brother.”

“That will fade,” Carly said. “I promise. Someday I’ll tell you the story about what happened with my dad. It isn’t a story I like to remember. For a long time, I had bad dreams. I still do sometimes. I think we all do. But in time, you start remembering the other things. The more important things.”

Justin joined them and put an arm around Kaden’s waist, too. “Let’s go home.”

The townspeople crowded around the wagon as Carly’s group drove through the gate, unsure if they should be respectful, expecting the remains of one of their own to be inside, or excited to see any supplies they’d managed to scavenge.

Justin decided to assuage their curiosity and yanked back the tarp. There wasn’t much. A dozen or so cans of food. A case of bottled water. A few bottles of beer, and one bottle of whiskey Justin had already commandeered for medicinal use, stashed inside Stacy’s toolkit. But there were gasps of delight when the toilet paper was uncovered.

“Oh, thank God,” said Jason with deep sincerity.

Because of his mechanical knowledge, Jason had been drafted as community plumber and was continually frustrated by clogged toilets. He had nagged Carly until she had brought it up in a meeting. As disgusted as people were by the idea, they needed to use cloths and wash them afterward or use pieces of paper they would dispose of elsewhere, but neither could go down the toilet. Despite the discussion, Jason could be seen at all hours, deployed with a plunger, a hand-cranked plumbing snake, and a scowl already in place.

Justin—drat the man—had laughed and said he couldn’t help. He’d said the social aspects of the community were Carly’s job.

“Some parts of human behavior are just so deeply engrained, it’s gonna take a lot more than you’re willing to do to change it.” He shrugged. “Let them break their toilets.”

“That’s what happened to the Guthries,” Carly said in a sour tone. “Now Andy is badgering me to let them move into another house because, as he said, not having a working toilet is a health hazard.”

“They’re still
using
it?” Justin asked. “Even though it doesn’t flush?”

“Apparently so. Stop laughing. Won’t even consider using a bucket or setting up an outhouse. Stop laughing.”

“Remind me again why we can’t just throw them out?”

“We can’t evict people just for being idiots, Justin. We wouldn’t have any people left. Everyone is an idiot about something. He’s indignant because he says we have plenty of empty houses.”

“But then they’ll try to flush something unflushable and break that one, too.”

“Exactly.”

“And perhaps only after the last toilet is plugged, mankind will learn,” Justin had intoned in a deeply solemn voice, then burst out laughing again.

Well, Justin may have found it funny, but Carly was the one who had to deal with complaints about broken toilets and listen to Jason’s plaintive despair when he was nagged to fix the unfixable.

The crowd surged forward, eyes shining and eager hands outstretched.

“We’re going to pass it out equitably,” she said. “Divided up by household.”

“That ain’t fair. Some households have more people than others!”

“Maybe everyone should get a share, not just households.”

“Adults and kids? What about Dagny? She’s just a baby, and babies don’t use toilet paper, so why should she—”

“Jesus, people.” Justin rubbed his face. “Look, there are twenty-seven of us—”

“Twenty-three,” Carly said softly. “The Swintons left, and then we lost Kross.”

Justin grimaced. “I’m sorry. Twenty-three of us. There are three cases of thirty-six rolls here. That makes one hundred and eight rolls, divided by twenty-three. Four rolls apiece. We’ll distribute it that way.”

“There’s sixteen rolls left over. Who gets those?”

Justin took a deep breath. “We’ll keep them in reserve, okay?” He glared around at the group. “There may be more people coming this way in the future now that—”

He stopped because he didn’t need to say that travelers and traders might start coming around again now that Marcus’s men weren’t preying on them, and once the bad reputation this area had gotten began to dissipate.

“Any problems with that? Good.” Justin tore open the plastic wrappers and began to distribute it to the eager hands that reached into the wagon.

“It’s like being a kindergarten teacher,” Justin muttered to Carly when the last of the crowd had scurried away with their bounty. “Good grief, none of them even asked for the food.”

“The person who reinvents a way to produce toilet paper is going to be the richest person in the wasteland,” Carly said.

“Carly?”

She turned and found the Reverend standing by, Dagny in his arms. She was chewing on her favorite toy, a set of plastic keys that she held out to Carly in an offer to share.

Carly took her baby into her arms and kissed her plump little cheeks. “No, thank you, sweetie, but thank you for offering.”

“Mom mom.” Dagny snuggled her forehead into Carly’s neck.

“I’m home now,” Carly said. “Sorry I had to leave you.”

“Where is Kross?” the Reverend asked.

Kaden was sitting on the end of the wagon, silent, staring off into the distance. The Reverend eyed Kaden for a moment and then rubbed his chin. “I see.”

“There were more,” Carly said. “More people. Beside Marcus’s crew, I mean. There were . . . victims.”

“The whole damn place is a blight on the earth.” Justin’s jaw clenched, and Carly saw that hard glitter in his obsidian eyes. “Cursed.”

The Reverend gazed at Carly. “Did it convince you that what you’ve done was right?”

“I don’t know about right,” Carly said. “But I know it was the only thing that could be done. What I’m asking you about is . . . they didn’t have any kind of funeral, and I feel like I should . . .”

“The dead don’t really need prayer, Carly. The prayers are for those who have to live on. But I’ll say a few words for them at our next Sunday service.”

She gave him a brief smile. “Thank you.”

Carly shrugged into the baby carrier, and Dagny kicked her legs in excitement. She said something that sounded like
home
, but it might have been
hum, mum
. Carly turned her head to smile at her and said, “Yes, going home.”
 

She took Shadowfax’s bridle, but before she could begin to draw the horse toward home, Justin leaned over to murmur in her ear. “I’ve got something I need to do before dinner.”

Carly suppressed a sigh. Didn’t he always? But this was the life she had chosen for them. “Go on. I’ll have your plate waiting for you.”

He smiled and kissed her before pecking a kiss on the top of Dagny’s head. She let out a little squeal and reached for him, but Justin just gave her a little wave.