Chapter Twenty
“Ex rememdium salus. (From the cure, salvation.)”
—Printed on all American currency
By some miracle, I must make a good enough impression on Brian and Mrs. Scharff to satisfy Carol, even though I barely speak during the remainder of their visit (or maybe because I barely speak). It’s midafternoon by the time they leave, and although Carol insists I help out with a few more chores and she makes me stick around for dinner—every minute that I can’t run to Alex an agony, sixty seconds of pure, driving torture—she promises me I can go for a walk when I’m done eating, before curfew. I inhale my baked beans and frozen fish sticks so fast I almost puke, and practically sit bouncing in my chair until she releases me. She even lets me out of dishwashing duty, but I’m too angry at her for cooping me up in the first place to feel grateful.
I go to 37 Brooks first. I don’t really think he’ll be there waiting for me, but I’m hoping for it anyway. But the rooms are empty, the garden, too. I must be half- delirious by that point because I check behind the trees and bushes, as though he might suddenly pop out, like he used to do a few weeks ago when he and Hana and I would play our epic games of hide-and-seek. Just thinking about it brings a sharp pain to my chest. Less than a month ago all of August still stretched before us— long and golden and reassuring, like an endless period of delicious sleep.
Well, now I’ve woken up.
I make my way back through the house. Seeing all our stuff scattered in the living room—blankets, a few magazines and books, a box of crackers and some cans of soda, old board games, including a half-completed game of Scrabble, abandoned when Alex began making up words like quozz and yregg—makes me overwhelmingly sad, and reminds me of that single house that survived the blitz, and that cracked and bombed-out street: a place where everybody went on stupidly doing everyday things, right up until the moment of disaster, and afterward everyone said, “How could they not have known what was coming?”
Stupid, stupid—to be so careless with our time, to believe we had so much of it left.
I head into the streets, frantic and desperate now, but unsure of what to do next. He mentioned to me once that he lived on Forsyth—a long row of gray slab buildings owned by the university—so I go that way. But all the buildings look identical. There must be dozens of them, hundreds of individual apartments. I’m tempted to tear through each and every one until I find him, but that would be suicide. After a couple of students give me suspicious glances—I’m sure I look like a disaster, red- faced and wild-eyed and close to hysterical—I duck into a side street. To calm myself I start reciting the elemental prayers: “H is for hydrogen, a weight of one; when fission’s split, as brightly lit, as hot as any sun . . .”
I’m so distracted walking home that I get lost in the tangle of streets leading away from the UP campus. I end up on a narrow one-way street I’ve never seen before and have to backtrack to Monument Square. The Governor is standing there as always, his empty palm outstretched, looking sad and forlorn in the fading evening light, as though he’s a beggar, forever condemned to ask for alms.
But seeing him gives me an idea. I dig in the bottom of my bag for a scrap of paper and a pen, and scrawl out, Let me explain, please. Midnight at the house. 8/17.
Then, after checking to make sure that no one is watching me from the few remaining lit windows that overlook the square, I hop up onto the statue’s base and stuff the note into the little cavity in the Governor’s fist.
The chance that Alex will think to check there is a million to one. But still, there’s a chance.
That night, as I’m slipping out of the bedroom, I hear rustling behind me. When I turn around, Gracie’s sitting up in bed again, blinking at me, her eyes as reflective as an animal’s. I touch my finger to my lips. She does the same, an unconscious mimic, and I slip out the door.
When I’m on the street I look up once toward the window. For a second I think I see Gracie looking down at me, her face as pale as a moon. But maybe it’s just a trick of the shadows skating silently over the side of the house. When I look again, she’s gone.
The house at 37 Brooks is all dark when I push my way in through the window, and totally silent. He’s not here, I think. He didn’t come—but a piece of me refuses to believe it. He must have come.
I’ve brought a flashlight with me, and I begin a sweep of the house, my second of the day, refusing for superstitious reasons to call out for him. Somehow I can’t stand it. If he doesn’t answer, I’ll be forced, finally, to accept that he never received my note—or, even worse, did receive it but has decided not to come.
In the living room I stop short.
All our things—the blankets, the games, the books—are gone. The warped wooden floor lies bare and exposed under the beam of my flashlight. The furniture sits cold and silent, stripped of all our personal touches, the discarded sweatshirts and half-used bottles of sunscreen. It has been a long time since I’ve been afraid of the house or frightened of walking into its rooms at night, but now a sense of the cavernous empty spaces around me comes back—room after room of tumbling- down things, rotting things, rodents blinking at you from dark spaces—and a deep chill runs through me.
Alex must have been here after all, to clean up our stuff.
The message is as clear to me as any note. He’s done with me.
For a moment I even forget to breathe. And then the Coldness comes, a surge of it so strong it hits me in the chest like a physical force, like walking straight into the breakers at the beach. My knees buckle and I go into a crouch, shivering uncontrollably.
He’s gone. A strangled sound works its way out of my throat and breaks the silence around me all at once.
Suddenly I’m sobbing loudly into the dark, letting the flashlight fall to the ground and blink out. I fantasize that I’ll cry so much I’ll fill the house and drown, or be carried away on a river of tears to some distant place.
Then I feel a warm hand on the back of my neck, working through a tangle of my hair.
“Lena.”
I turn around and Alex is there, bending over me. I can’t really make out his expression, but in the limited light it looks hard to me, hard and immobile, as though it’s made out of stone. For a second I’m worried that I’m only dreaming him, but then he touches me again and his hand is solid and warm and rough.
“Lena,” he says again, but he doesn’t seem to know what else to say. I scramble to my feet, wiping my face on my forearm.
“You got my note.” I’m trying to gulp back the tears but just succeed in hiccuping several times.
“Note?” Alex repeats.
I wish I was still holding the flashlight so I could see his face more clearly. At the same time, I’m terrified of it, and of the distance I might find there. “I left you a note at the Governor,” I said. “I wanted you to meet me here.”
“I didn’t get it,” he says. I think I hear a coldness in his voice. “I just came to—”
“Stop.” I can’t let him finish. I can’t let him say that he came to pack up, that he doesn’t want to see me again. It will kill me. Love, the deadliest of all deadly things.
“Listen,” I say, hiccuping through the words. “Listen, about today . . . It wasn’t my idea. Carol said I had to meet him, and I couldn’t get a message to you. And then we were standing there and I was thinking about you, and the Wilds, and how everything is so changed and how there’s no time, there’s no more time for us, and for a second—a single second—I wished I could go back to how things were before.” I’m not really making any sense, and I know it. The explanation I’d reviewed so many times in my head is getting all screwed up, words leapfrogging over one another. The excuses seem irrelevant: As I’m speaking I realize there’s only a single thing that really matters. Alex and I are out of time.
“But I swear I didn’t really wish it. I would never have— if I’d never met you I could never have—I didn’t know what anything meant before you, not really. . . .”
Alex pulls me toward him and wraps his arms around me. I bury my face in his chest. I seem to fit so precisely, just exactly as though our bodies had been built for each other.
“Shhh,” he whispers into my hair. He’s squeezing me so tightly it hurts a little, but I don’t mind. It feels good, like if I wanted to I could lift my feet off the ground and stop trying at all and he’d still be holding me up. “I’m not mad at you, Lena.”
I pull back just a fraction. I know that even in the dark I probably look horrible. My eyes are swelling up and my hair is sticking to my face. Thankfully, he keeps his arms around me. “But you—” I swallow hard, take deep breaths in and out. “You took everything away. All our stuff.”
He looks away for a second. His whole face is swallowed in shadow. When he speaks his voice is over-loud, as though he can only say the words by forcing them out.
“We always knew this would happen. We knew that we didn’t have much time.”
“But—but—” I don’t have to say that we’ve been pretending. We’ve been acting as if things would never change.
He places a hand on either side of my face, wipes the tears away with his thumbs. “Don’t cry, okay? No more crying.” He kisses the tip of my nose lightly, then takes one of my hands. “I want to show you something.”
There’s a small break in his voice, and I think of things coming unhinged, falling apart.
He leads me to the staircase. Far above us, the ceiling is rotted away in patches, so the stairs are outlined in silvery light. The staircase must have been magnificent at some point, sweeping upward majestically before splitting in two, leading to landings on either side.
I haven’t been upstairs since the first time Alex brought me here with Hana, when we made it a point to explore every room of the house. I didn’t even think to check the second floor earlier this afternoon. Here it’s even darker than downstairs, if possible, and hotter too, a black and drifting mist.
Alex starts shuffling down the hall, past a row of identical wooden doors. “This way.”
Above us, a frantic sound of fluttering: bats, disturbed by the sound of his voice. I let out a little squeak of fear.
Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine. That’s another reason I’ve been sticking to the ground floor. During our initial exploration we came into what must have been the master bedroom—an enormous room, with the half- collapsed beams of a four-poster bed still standing in the middle of it—and looked up into the gloom, and saw dozens and dozens of dark, silent shapes massed along the wooden beams, like horrible black buds dangling along a flower stem, ready to drop. When we moved, several of them opened their eyes and seemed to wink at me. The floor was streaked with bat shit; it smelled sickly sweet.
“In here,” he says, and though I can’t be positive, I think he stops at the door to the master bedroom. I shiver. I have zero desire to see the inside of the Bat Room again.
