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When we reach the intersection to Silvia’s house, Abuela waves us past it. I’m out of breath from the pace and weight of the wagon so I can’t question her. It’s probably better to get the wagon safely home first anyway. I can run back for Glo after it’s secured. The predators are only focusing on the stations so we should be safe enough if we are quick.
By the time we reach the house I’m desperate for water. My mouth and throat feel like the desert that surrounds us has invaded. There’s no way I can lug or lift the wagon up the stairs so I pull it around the side of the house to the back door. Abuela rushes ahead of me and into the house but she’s back quickly with a large glass of water. I take it from her gratefully but only allow myself a few swallows before trying to hand it back. She pushes my hand and the glass back at me and I can’t help but look over towards the well. I don’t know if I have the energy to pump anymore today.
“DÍA! Forget the well! Drink it all and then help me get this beast inside.”
I compromise by chugging half the water in the glass down before thrusting it back at her.
“You drink the rest!”
She’s forced to take it from me or it will spill so I turn away from her and heave the wagon up the one step at the back door and into the kitchen. I’d like to say it's cooler in the house but it’s not. The only difference is that the sun isn’t beaming down on my head. I leave the wagon still covered and rush deeper into the house to the atrium. Full sun is beaming down onto my poor plants and I want to cry at my stupid mistake. I should have pulled the curtains before we left. It’s part of my routine but that got all messed up with the station run and I forgot. I can only hope that none of the plants die from my error. I back out of the room once the curtains have shut out the sun and wearily trudge back to the kitchen. I will be pumping water today after all. If I want the plants to survive then they’ll need another watering.
When I reach the kitchen, I find Abuela moving quickly to empty the wagon of rations. I’m still surprised at her energy after she was confined to her bed for so long. She’s stacking everything on the counter but not putting anything away into the cupboards. I glance over to the table and want nothing more than to sink down onto one of the chairs with the faded yellow cushions, even though they are paper thin from years of use. I sigh and look away. I need to help get all this put away, fetch Gloria, and then start pumping for water. Everything else on my list will have to be bumped to tomorrow.
Abuela places a bag of rice onto the counter, turns and sees me standing in the doorway. She looks down into the half empty wagon and gives a curt nod before coming over and taking my arm. She guides me over to the table and motions towards a chair. I shake my head.
“No, I can’t. There are too many things to get done. If I sit now, I might not get up.”
She points at a chair with a stern finger. “Sit! We have things to discuss now while Gloria is not here.”
It only takes me a half second to cave in. As much as the rest will do me good, answers will be better. She settles across from me and folds her hands in front of her on the table.
“Día, we must prepare to leave this place.”
I bark out a surprised laugh. That was the last thing I expected her to say.
“Sure, and just where do you think we should go? How about the North Pole? I would love to see snow! Glo could build a snowman!”
The look I received for my sarcasm has me shrinking down in the chair and looking away in shame. She just keeps pinning me to the chair with that look until a meek, “I’m sorry,” squeaks out of me.
“Claudia, you must listen now. Your lives may depend on it! It’s not just the well I’m talking about. This town has been on its death bed for years but the funeral will happen tomorrow. The stations are closing! There will be no more food or water for the people here and that’s when things will become the most dangerous. You and your sister must leave before that happens!”
I open my mouth to argue with her but pause as flashes from earlier fill my brain. The man saying to make the rations last. Asking if she understood why. The soldier saying “last day”. I know she’s right. They aren’t coming back. That means...My eyes flare wide as the realization sinks in. It will be chaos once word gets out. The station riot will be nothing compared to what’s coming. She reaches out and grips my hands.
“You see? They will search for food and water everywhere. No place will be safe. You must be gone before that begins!”
I start shaking my head. “But where? Where can we go? And why do you keep saying me and Gloria? You must come too!”
“Yes, I will come too, but I do not know how far I will get with you. I feel Him calling me Home to Heaven. Your Abuelo is waiting for me there, but first, he has sent me a dream to get you and your sister to safety.” She shakes a finger at me when my expression fills with doubt. “Don’t look at me like that! I’m old but I’m not senile! The dream was just a reminder of where we should go to find salvation.” I nod slowly for her to continue but I'm still concerned she’s losing her faculties.
“You know your Abuelo was a prospector? You remember the stories I used to tell you about his adventures? He did quite well for us. He built this house and we had a very nice amount of money in the bank from all his mining claims. But the one thing he always wanted was for us to live in his secret garden, his ‘jardín del paraíso’. It was a hidden valley he stumbled upon in the Black Mountains of Arizona. He said there was no evidence that any other human had ever been there. Lush with vegetation from a natural spring! It was his dream for us to live there in peace and raise a family away from all the troubles of the world. He showed me pictures of it and the small house he built by hand for us.” She looks down at her hands and shakes her head sadly. “He gave that dream up for me when your Mother was born. I couldn’t imagine living in such isolation with an infant. I felt the need to be near doctors and other families so she would have playmates. He never said a word but I know it broke his heart. When he didn’t come back from the desert the last time, I thought maybe he had gone there to live out his dream. I was relieved when they found his body but so sad because I could no longer pretend he was alive and living where he wanted to be.”
I leave her lost in memories for a few moments and wonder why I had never heard this story before. It doesn’t take long for her to straighten up.
“So, this is where we will go! There are no bandits or gangs to plague us and there is plenty of water to grow more crops. The wildlife flock to the valley so there will be meat to hunt. Yes, this is where we will go!” She pushes away from the table and rises to her feet. “Come, there is much to prepare for the journey.”
I stay seated and look up at her, feeling both bemused and frustrated.
“Abuela, it sounds like a lovely dream but how do even know if it’s there and even if it was, how are we supposed to get there? We are surrounded by desert! Do you really want me to drag a nine-year-old child out into that on a vague memory of a place that might not even exist?”
Her hands hit her hips and a scowl crossed her face. “You think I would suggest this on a whim? I know it’s there! I’ve seen the pictures he brought back. He described it so vividly, I could feel the cool mist from the waterfall on my face.” Her hands fell to her sides and her shoulders slumped. “Día, we have three choices. Go to one of the labor farms and be little more than a slave for one meal and one cup of water a day and then die. Stay here and face attack, starvation, and death by dehydration and die. OR take a chance for a life in paradise. Yes, it will be hard and dangerous but of the three options, it’s the only one with a possibility of life!”
I lower my head in defeat. There is no happy ending open to us. “Show me this picture,” I say in a voice that is almost a whisper.
I hear her shuffle away but keep my head down, imagining all the futures we face. I can see Glo’s withered body as she toils at manual labor in the camps. I see her lying in a pool of blood after looters break in to steal the little food we have. And then I see her slowly being covered by sand in the middle of the desert when we don’t find the paradise Abuela speaks of. Not once can I picture her laughing beside a waterfall of clean, cool water.
When she returns and tosses three pictures onto the table in front of me, I reach for them with no hope left in my soul. The pictures are thinner than paper, blurred, and faded with age. I can still see the waterfall she speaks of that falls into a large pool before it turns into a stream. There’s one taken from above of the valley that shows the house she says my Abuelo built for her with the waterfall and pool beside it. It’s bigger than I thought it would be with a front veranda that runs the length of it with rocking chairs on it. The last picture is of a small group of what looks like deer drinking from the stream. I drop the pictures back to the table and look up at her.
“It’s beautiful but if it’s so remote and untouched then how did he get the building materials there? If there’s a road in, someone else would have found it.”
She pulls out a chair and sits. “No, no road! He took it all in with a hover sled train.” At my confused expression, she explains. “We used to have amazing technology. The things we were capable of were like miracles! After the water wars, it all went away. Only the people in the north have the tech now. A hover sled was a machine that could carry heavy loads over the ground on a cushion of air. They used to be used regularly but I haven’t seen one in use for over twenty years.” She looks out the window to the back yard. “We have one.”
I huff out a laugh. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed such a miracle machine at some point in the last seventeen years that I’ve lived here. So, all I mockingly say is, “Really?”
The scowl is back on her face. “Día! You have become cynical and disrespectful! I asked you to trust me. I think the eighty-two years of life I’ve lived has earned me that.”
My eyes drop in shame. She’s right, I have become jaded to life in the last month of managing things myself. She doesn’t deserve this attitude from me.
“Abuela, I am sorry for my behavior. There is no excuse other than I am scared of what’s to come.”
She reaches out and grasps my hand. “I understand, it looks bleak but I believe in what I’m telling you. Please, Día, believe in me.” At my tearful nod, she continues. “There is a hover sled hidden in the old workshop at the back of the property. It was your grandfather’s. The only reason they found his body was because the sled was there beside the chasm he fell into. They used it to bring his body back to me for burial. It will need to be brought out and placed in the sun to charge so it’s ready to go tonight. We will load it with the supplies you will need for the trip and to get started in the valley once you arrive.”
Inside, I don’t believe any of it but I will play along out of respect.
“So we will float on this machine to the secret valley?”
She pulls her hands from mine and pulls a tattered paper from her apron pocket.
“No, it doesn’t work like that. Gloria may be able to travel on it for brief periods but the weight placement will need to be balanced.”
I have no idea what these words mean so I just nod and lean forward to look at the delicate paper she’s unfolding onto the table. I’m surprised to see that it’s a faded map. A dim splash of blue and green in the corner shows what I assume is the location of this paradise.
“This will show you the way once you get close enough. It is very far from here, hundreds of miles, but there is a way to make such a journey manageable. First, you must stay far away from any road. You would be a bright blinking target if anyone saw you with supplies and such coveted working technology. Instead, you will travel as Abuelito did, on the old train tracks! He was always so paranoid that someone would follow him to one of his claims that he never traveled by road. The tracks haven’t been used by ground trains since I was a young woman. They retired them when the sky trains were invented but the tracks are still in place. Abuelito used them to get closer to his claims and then hiked in the rest of the way. That’s why he chose this location to build our home. The tracks run behind our property. He would always leave either late at night or very early in the morning.”
My mouth drops open in disbelief. “Are you saying we have a train too?”
She snorts a laugh at me and shakes her head like I’m a foolish child. “No, that would be ridiculous. It would be too big to conceal, too loud to go unnoticed and it would need fuel to run.”
I nod my head in serious agreement. Of course, that makes no sense. It’s nothing like a magical machine that floats on air!
“So we will walk on the tracks with the floating machine following behind us, then?”
A slow smile spreads across her face. “No, you will be taking Abuelito’s favorite toy, his Mathilda. He called it his workhorse. It is a very special rail handcart that he had shipped from Japan!”
I just have to shake my head. I’ve lived here since I was one-year old. All these magical things she’s talking about don’t exist. I would have seen them at some point in my life. My poor Abuela’s mind has slipped back into some distant past. I felt drained of all hope. I wouldn’t be able to count on her help now for what to do next.
She must see it in my expression because her face turns sad and she pulls me to my feet.
“Come, there is so much to do and we will need to collect your sister first.”
I follow her out the back door and take a few steps to the right to go around the house and out to the street to fetch Gloria but she heads deeper into the back yard. I let out a sigh and follow after her. The sun has reached high noon and it’s not safe for us to be out for long without protection. As she reaches the back of our property, she angles toward a section of the fence and starts pulling away the dry and brittle branches of what used to be a six-foot privacy hedge. I catch up to her and even though I feel we are wasting time, help her snap off the branches. I’m mildly surprised when a gate appears as more branches are removed. She frees a strange padlock from the final stems and pushes raised buttons that release the lock. I’ve never seen such a lock that didn’t require a key before and I want to take a closer look but she’s pulled the gate open and hurried through it. There’s ten feet of level land before it dips into a drainage ditch that hasn’t seen water in decades.
I marvel at how quickly she is moving for a woman of her age as she plows ahead, down and then back up the ditch. On the other side, I see an old building with no windows that looks like it will fall down at any moment. I follow her around to the front where there are two huge doors and end up on my knees when I trip on a rock. On my hands and knees, my face only a foot from the dusty ground I see a line in the sand. My hand moves forward and brushes the sand away revealing a dull metal bar. I slowly turn my head following the line in the sand and see it runs right under the doors of the building. I turn my head to look the other way and see the lines connect with a slightly elevated set of train tracks. I stare at those tracks as something starts to stir in my chest.
When I hear the sound of boards falling to the ground I push back up onto my feet and turn to help Abuela remove the long boards that have been stacked up against the doors. Once the last board topples to the side it reveals another of those weird locks. She pushes the buttons again and I find myself holding my breath as she swings one of the huge doors open so the light shines in and seems to spotlight what has been hidden inside. Everything is covered in dust and sand that has seeped in over the long years but it’s clear what I’m looking at. My breath whooshes out as I step forward and past Abuela, who’s smiling in triumph, towards our ticket out of here.