Orla put on one of their favorite Putumayo Playground CDs. It filled the living room with the buoyant rhythms of steel drums and cowbells.
“Each rug can be an island, and—”
“The chair can be Australia!” shouted Tycho.
Orla, unaware of her little boy’s retained knowledge of Australia, nodded at him, suitably impressed. “Good thinking.”
“The bookcase can be a mountain—”
“That no one can climb.” Though she’d interrupted her daughter, Orla directed the words toward her son. “But you can make up new animals for the oceans and friendly creatures you might meet on the land.”
Once she had them settled in their game of reimagining the living room, Orla planned to carry through with some necessary tasks, alone. She needed to inventory the food. Check the cell phone reception. It felt later in the day than it should have. Time was passing in wonky ways. Orla wouldn’t have been surprised to crack the curtain and find the sun was setting. Maybe grief had ruptured something inside her, an intrinsic mechanism that kept her rooted to the real world, the Earth’s rotation, the rising moon. She’d become a broken toy, a spinning top launched into crooked motion. It didn’t help that the house seemed empty without Shaw. They’d grown accustomed to him being behind his closed door, working, a call or knock away. His absence was everywhere. The children felt it too.
“What about Papa?” Tycho asked as he leapt from one island to another, following his sister.
Eleanor Queen squatted and pulled Tycho down beside her, gazing at her mother in an intense, unnerving way. Orla sensed it was a test—how much did she know of the wrongness, and what would she admit to? She would never lie to her son, but he was still young enough that she wanted to protect him from the gorier aspects of the truth.
Orla knelt in front of them. “Your papa…” She pressed her lips together to stop the quivering. “There was a terrible accident…”
“I know,” Tycho drawled impatiently. “But he’s going to freeze out there, he should come in.”
Orla pressed her cheeks between her hands. Maybe she’d awaken in a hospital and a concerned nurse would say, You had a massive head injury, we almost lost you. And Shaw would be there, smiling. And the kids, holding up homemade cards. And she would tell them, What a horrible dream I had. I thought I’d never wake up.
She’d had nightmares like that before. Once, she thought she was awake, but as she threw off the sheet to get up and go to the bathroom, she saw a human figure hovering on the ceiling above her. A man in a fetal position, like he was sleeping. A scream ricocheted inside her and she tried to clutch Shaw to wake him, warn him. But when she couldn’t move, couldn’t vocalize her terror, she realized she was asleep and had never flung back the sheet to rise from the bed. At that point she awakened a second time and shuffled into the bathroom rubbing her eyes, trying to dispel the image of the man on the ceiling. But in the dark bathroom, she almost leapt off the toilet when she sensed in her peripheral vision a form curled up in the bathtub.
It could be like that, a nightmare within a nightmare. And maybe somewhere she lay paralyzed, perhaps in a coma, and no one was really waiting for her to explain to her children the practicality of leaving their father’s body outside in the cold.
She tried to take Tycho’s hand, but he clutched his sister’s instead. They sat there with expectant faces, a united front. Orla still couldn’t read Eleanor Queen’s focused look and was afraid that Tycho didn’t even have a basic understanding of death. She didn’t want to explain it—not here, not now, not without Shaw. And not with an enemy hovering outside their door.
“You understand your father died?” she asked, nearly pleading. “There was an accident with…the shotgun.”
“It made a big boom.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Mama,” Eleanor Queen said, eyes still riveted on her.
“So Papa’s…he’s with the universe now, swirling with the stars.”
In spite of her misguided spiritual efforts, she could still believe that—and believe that Shaw wouldn’t object to such an explanation. For the sake of the happier you-will-not-get-us mood she hoped to create, Orla wouldn’t let herself cry. For Eleanor Queen’s stoic forgiveness. For Tycho’s tender confusion. She’d do it later, and praise a thousand nameless goddesses for her daughter’s understanding and her son’s innocence. But the tears flooded the hollow places in her face, pressing, pressing, threatening to shatter her delicate bones.
“So, since Papa…his spirit is free, and if we leave him—his body—the cold will preserve him. So that’s why we can’t bring him in.” She had no expectation that Tycho would fully grasp this. But he needed answers, so she gave him spare but honest words. “Do you understand?” she asked Eleanor Queen.
“Nothing else can happen to him. The real Papa isn’t here anymore.” She elbowed her brother. “That’s what I told you before.”
“Later, we’ll be able to…” Have a funeral? Her hands sought her son and daughter, the reassurance of their solidity. Her children weren’t illusions, and this wasn’t a dream. Her fingertips touched their warmth, and she hoped she’d explained enough. It was an unbearable thought, that she’d abruptly become a single parent and bore full responsibility for whatever befell them, now and forever. It would have been hard enough in the city. But here? She needed survival skills more practical than determination or instincts.
The music bopped and swayed, tippa-tippa-tippa and cooing harmonies, as Orla headed upstairs. She raised her cell phone high in the air, looking for a signal, and went from room to room. The beats from below made her shoulders bounce; her head kept time, her free hand floated with a swell of instruments. Tycho and Eleanor Queen sounded normal as they chattered, describing the magical winged animals in their new world. Was it working? With the outside view forgotten, the inside mood shifted to something more upbeat.
Back downstairs, she held the phone out to the windows. Still nothing. She slipped into the kitchen to make a quick mental inventory. Boxes of cereal. Canned stuff—soup, tuna, fruit. One and a half jars of pasta sauce. A loaf of bread in the freezer with a few bags of veggies. Dry goods—rice, capellini, lentils. A few potatoes, onions, carrots, apples. How many meals would it all make? If they lost electricity and the generator, she could cook on the wood-burning stove. Endless snow to melt for fresh water if the pipes froze or the well stopped pumping. They’d eat well for a week, maybe more. After that they’d start to get hungry. Then what?
It was December. When would Julie and Walker start to worry? Would they try to call when they got back from their vacation? Had other people been e-mailing, texting, calling, wondering why they got no response? Maybe her own parents would miss having them all in Pittsburgh for the holidays and drive north for a surprise visit. It would be the best Christmas present ever. She prayed on it without realizing she was doing it: Come see us, come see us, please help us.
Fucking Christmas. Shaw had hidden presents in the basement in what looked like unpacked moving boxes. They had planned to let the children pick a small live tree, which they’d attempt to unearth and bring into the house. She couldn’t imagine celebrating the upcoming holiday (or any other) without Shaw. But maybe it was good timing; would her friends think it weird when they didn’t get their usual holiday card from the Moreau-Bennetts? Would it be enough to make them worry? And worry enough to act? Or would they shrug it all off—The Moreau-Bennetts have gone off the grid.
At some point, she’d have to try escaping again. Maybe she’d go alone and leave the children within the safety of the house. Could that be what It wanted? Their company? Had Orla been looking at it all wrong; was It just lonely? But what if something happened to her out there and she couldn’t come back? She couldn’t leave the children to starve alone.
She made supper out of the ingredients that would go bad first—the things in the refrigerator. She heated up the leftover chicken in a skillet filled with the half jar of pasta sauce and served it on a spare bed of capellini. It was a small meal, but the children didn’t complain. The necessity of rationing food reminded Orla of her early days in New York City, when she had barely enough money to live on and was taking classes and auditioning and trying to figure out where she fit in. But back then, she’d been able to call her parents in an emergency, financial or emotional. And she could always pop out for some cheap ramen.
We’ll pretend it’s all normal. They’d go about their days as carefree as possible. Orla would have to be deliberate about what she did and didn’t say (did and didn’t think) and not fret about the weather. We can outlast It. It was an optimistic plan, even if it didn’t feel…she muffled the doubt. It had to work. Her left fist tightened, crushing an invisible stone. She watched her children quietly eat the last forkfuls of their dinner.
Tycho wanted to sleep in her bed, so she read him a story as he bounced Moose on the nubby blanket. She and Eleanor Queen would join him later and it would almost be like home—their real home, without all the rooms and doors—though Orla doubted she’d be able to sleep. How could she, with Shaw weighing on her chest—a tomb of guilt—and the fear of what another morning might bring?
Eleanor Queen hovered in the doorway. Since they’d come back to the house, she appeared to be in a constant state of alertness, always listening for something, her attention elsewhere. Orla’s heart skipped a beat, then sped up as Tycho’s story ended happily-ever-after; it was almost time to sit down and talk with Eleanor Queen, ask her directly if she knew more than she’d yet revealed. She dreaded what her daughter might say, but she had to ask.
“We’ll be up again soon. Sleep tight.” She kissed Tycho and shut off the lamp, but left the door wide open and the hallway light on. Both hands clutched imaginary stones, worrying, as she trailed her daughter down the stairs. At least when she’d had to do this with Shaw, there’d been the American Honey to help with the rough spots. It was wrong in so many ways to want alcohol to make it easier to talk with a nine-year-old. But there’d already been too many harrowing conversations in this house, and Orla feared the worst was yet to come.