| |
When I took Zeke to the roof in the morning, the sun was shining brightly and had started to melt the snow. The roof was covered in a slushy mess, annoying Zeke— he loved the snow but hated water. When it rained, it was like pulling teeth to get him to go to the bathroom. The slush after a big snowstorm was his biggest source of irritation. He reacted as if we’d just turned his favorite pastime into a chore. If the sunny weather held, I hoped most of the slush would be gone in a day or two.
After I finished my coffee, I sorted all the food I’d found in the other apartments and realized that there was only enough for about another month. And maybe less because I’d have to start sending some of it over to the girls. Julia told me they didn’t have much left. In Kelly’s apartment, I’d found a bag of green apples in a basket on her counter. The skin had started to pucker slightly, telling me they would go bad soon. My mom had dried her own fruit whenever it hadn’t been eaten in good time. I called my mom and got her method for drying apple slices. After peeling, slicing and sprinkling them with cinnamon and sugar, I placed the apple slices in the oven on a low setting and let them bake slowly. I checked them after five hours and kept testing them for moisture. Finally, after seven hours of baking, the apples were ready. I separated them into two baggies to keep them fresh and sent one over to the girls along with some cans of soup. It would help, but it wouldn’t be enough.
I’d had an idea when talking to my mom. When I was little, every Sunday, my mom and I would make a large batch of flour tortillas for the week. She would let me knead the dough, and then she would stand behind me and help me roll them out. All I needed was flour, salt, water and lard. I’d kept the fat from any pork I’d cooked in the last few months in the freezer to use for stock and stews. I spent the next two hours rendering the fat in my Crockpot. When it was done, I had three cups of melted fat that I put in the refrigerator to solidify, and a good portion of pork cracklings at the bottom. I could eat those too. I had Julia send me over all the flour she had in her cupboards, and I gathered the flour from the other apartments. I guessed I had enough for about four dozen full-sized tortillas, which would be a big addition to my dwindling food supply. I made the dough, using all of my flour, and rolled it into plum-sized balls. I set twelve aside and put the rest into a bag, which I placed in the freezer for future use.
I made my first batch, rolling out the dough and cooking each one on a skillet. I could ration to only one tortilla a day by breaking it into three parts, one for each meal. I sent half of them over to the girls. I also had a bag of cornmeal, and I remembered my mom making corn cakes for breakfast, but she’d used flour in hers. I figured they could be made without the flour. I mixed together cornmeal, hot water, baking powder, lard, and sugar, adding more of each along the way for consistency. I didn’t want to use more of my lard to fry them as my mom had, so I decided to try baking them. Fifteen minutes later, the cakes had puffed up slightly and were browned at the edges. After letting them cool down, I took a bite. I made a face at the bland flavor, but I couldn’t be picky. They were edible and would help keep me going. I decided that next time, I would try adding cumin and a little coriander for more flavor.
Feeling better about my food supply, I returned to finding a way out. From all my online research, I’d only found one other person from New York who’d posted about trying to make the trip. It seemed promising—a woman who had a small car was looking for others to join her. The post was from a day ago, and as I scrolled down, I saw she’d posted an update. She said that she had a wristband but was bringing her mother, who did not. Her mother was showing no signs of the sickness, but the CDC had found irregularities in her blood work. It sounded fishy to me, so I moved on.
A link was posted in the comments to a story on the What’s Really Going On page about a group of infected people who’d tried to sneak across the border. Witnesses said the military spotted them and told them to turn around and go back, but the group moved forward anyway, trying to squeeze through a hole they’d created in the fence. When they didn’t stop, the military shot them. I touched my fingers to my lips, my eyes glued to the screen while I searched for any news articles to corroborate the story. I didn’t find any. Is the government covering it up, or are these people making up a story? What would be the point in that?
An alert came up saying a new video had been posted on Salvation Railroad by a woman named Anna Clement. I clicked the play button, and she began talking frantically. Her eyes were opened too wide, her hair wildly sticking out in different places. She stopped several times in the video, and her eyes went to the side as if she’d heard something. She spoke of military trucks driving down her street and soldiers threatening to shoot anyone who came out of their houses. She turned her phone toward the window, and I heard a loud voice but couldn’t make out what it was saying. I didn’t see a truck but heard a pop and a scream. She turned her phone back to herself and said her test results had been negative for the virus, but they still wouldn’t give her a wristband. They’d told her that even though she’d tested negative, there were irregularities in her blood work, so they needed a second sample. After the second test, they told her they couldn’t clear her. She’d argued with them but was left without a wristband. She was convinced that instead of simply taking her blood the second time, the CDC had injected her with the virus because she was sick. She started crying, and the video ended, her crying face frozen on my screen.
There were numerous responses below her post, accusing the government of starting the epidemic and speculating about population control. A few others posted that they’d had a similar experience with the CDC, but only one of them was sick. I considered everything I’d read. There were similar conspiracy theories about AIDS and other infectious diseases. Even if I took everything posted as truth, I had to wonder why so many tested negative and had been evacuated. How did they choose who to infect and who to save? What else had they tested when they’d drawn our blood? And why had they saved me? I shook my head and sighed heavily. I didn’t know if I could trust the post or the people responding, but I also wasn’t sure that I could trust the government. I just didn’t know.
As I continued to read, I heard a light, scattered tapping on the window down the hall. I ran down and pulled the window open.
Julia was in her window, sobbing uncontrollably. “My mom, she won’t wake up. She’s barely breathing. I don’t know what to do!”
“Where’s Emma?”
“She’s in bed with her. I can’t get her to leave.”
“Does her bedframe have wheels? Is there any way it would fit through the doorway so you can push the bed into the living room near this window?”
She stopped crying for a second while she thought about it. “I think so. Her room has double doors. It’s not a big bed, but let me go check if it has wheels.”
The hall window was very narrow, and I could barely squeeze onto the sill. About five minutes later, I saw a bed with a woman lying on it slowly edging around the corner. I could only see the top half of her from my angle, but she didn’t look alive. Then I saw both Julia and Emma behind the bed, pushing as hard as they could, their faces red with exertion. They got the bed right next to the window then climbed onto it. They were both crying loudly.
“Is she still breathing?” I asked.
Julia put a finger under her mother’s nose and nodded. “She is, but just barely.”
“Girls, look at me. This is the bad part.”
They both looked frightened and cried even harder.
“I want you to sit on the bed, hold your mom’s hands, then hold each other’s hands. Does your mom have a favorite song? Or a favorite type of music?”
Julia looked up and said, “Yes! She loves Joan Baez. She makes us listen to her all the time. She says she has the voice of an angel.”
I ran over to my iPod and plugged it into my computer. I quickly downloaded Joan Baez’s greatest hits. Back at the window, I pulled up the screen. I sat down, straddling the sill with one leg dangling outside and the other in my hallway. I put the iPod and speaker on the sill in front of me. “Do you know the words to the songs?”
“Yeah, we’ve heard them a thousand times,” Julia sniffled.
“I’m gonna press Play, and we’re all going to sing to your mom. She doesn’t have long. I’m sorry, but the best we can do is be here with her, okay?”
They were crying so hard that they could barely nod.
When I pushed Play, “Diamonds and Rust” came on. I didn’t know a lot of the words, but I could fake it. The girls looked at me, and I started singing along. They followed suit while watching their mother. We sang for an hour. Emma fell asleep on the bed next to her mom. Finally, the playlist was over, and I looked at Julia resting her head on the window frame, still clutching her mother’s hand.
“Julia, you need to check to see if your mom is breathing.”
She looked at me, and a fresh batch of tears poured out of her eyes as she shook her head. “No,” she said over and over.
I gave her a second to come to grips. “Julia, listen to me.”
She looked back at me.
“I need you to be strong right now. I know this is hard, but I need you to check your mom’s breathing.”
She looked at her mom and reluctantly placed a finger under her nose. Slowly she shook her head and cried.
“Put your head on her chest and tell me if you can hear her heartbeat.”
She put her ear to her breast and a few seconds later pulled up. Her face was completely distorted with grief. “She’s dead! Oh my god, she’s dead!”
I put my head down for a second when my throat constricted. Even though I was trying to be strong for the girls, a sob escaped loudly. I pulled my head back up. “I’m so sorry.”
Emma woke up and saw us both crying. She looked at her mom then back at Julia. “Is she dead?”
Julia nodded and pulled her into a hug. They cried together, locked in each other’s arms for a good twenty minutes before they pulled apart. All I could do was sit with them.
Julia looked over at me, her face red and splotchy. “What should we do now?”
I took a deep breath and let it out. “I think you should cover her up in the top sheet. Do you think you and Emma could carry her?”
Julia looked scared by that prospect but nodded. “Yeah, I think so. She’s not very heavy.”
They worked together to wrap their mom like a burrito in the sheet. They stopped when they got to her face and looked at her for a few seconds. They took turns kissing her on the forehead. Then Julia slowly pulled the sheet over her face and tucked the corner in. They hadn’t stopped crying the whole time.
Julia looked at me and asked, “What now?”
“Do you have a room you could put her in? A room you aren’t using?”
“We could put her in her bedroom.”
“Okay, after you have her in the room, close the doors, and roll up a towel lengthwise. Put the towel at the bottom of the doorway to cover the gap between the doors and the floor. Go slowly. Julia, see the fitted sheet underneath her? Pull it away from the bed and use that to carry her.”
Julia pulled the sheet out from under the mattress on all four corners. She picked up the two top corners of the fitted sheet, and Emma did the same with the bottom. They lifted her off the bed and slowly carried her to the bedroom. Once they were back, I could see they weren’t sobbing anymore, but tears continued to spill down their faces. They sat on the bed next to the window.
Emma broke the silence. “Is that going to happen to me?”
How can I tell her yes? “Honey, I don’t know, but it might. I went into the other apartments and found all kinds of medicines. The painkillers will help, so if it does happen, you won’t feel it. I promise.”
She nodded, surprisingly calm. “When that happens to me, I don’t want music. I just want to watch The Little Mermaid. When I was little, my mom used to put that movie on for me when I couldn’t sleep. It always worked.”
Julia responded, “We’ll be together. We’ll watch it together.”
Emma smiled. “I know.”
We sat in silence until it grew dark. Emma fell asleep, so Julia grabbed a comforter off their bed to drape over her. I told Julia to leave the bed there in case we needed it again. She knew what I meant and nodded sadly. We said goodnight, and I saw her turn on the TV and crawl under the covers with Emma.
I watched them, completely envious. I knew I shouldn’t have been—their mom had just died, and they were both sick. But their closeness, the fact that they had each other to hold and count on, was something I couldn’t deny I wanted.