I feel my way back along the short hall. With my eyes still adjusted to the light of Kinz’s phone, I can’t see. At least I remember where the boxes and furniture pieces are in this part of the basement. If I hold to the wall on my right, I’ll get to the stairs without smacking into anything.
I round the corner toward the stairs and crash into someone, grabbing at them fast so neither of us goes down. They grab me too and our opposite momentums keep us standing, though we tip sideways and bump into the wall.
Braids brush the fingers of my right hand. I smell vanilla and coconut. “Cam?”
“Synclair? Thank God. Where—?”
“Kinz is in the bathroom freaking out but otherwise okay. Duke’s in the bedroom, I think he’s okay for now. Jay is stuck way across the big part of the basement and Avery is trying to help her.”
Camden keeps her hands on my arms. I keep hold of her too. My eyes have adjusted and I still can’t see anything because this windowless part of the basement is dark as midnight.
“Where’s your phone?” I ask her. “My battery’s out.”
“I met Avery on the stairs, coming up. She couldn’t get Jay out and was going to see if she could call for help, so I gave her mine too. We have different carriers. Maybe she can get a signal on mine if hers isn’t connecting. All the cell towers can’t be down, can they?”
She sounds afraid that this is the end of the world. Feels like it with thunder booming outside.
“Is Mac here?” I ask.
“I think they’re stuck in the woods. It’s started hailing. Safer under the trees than trying to run across the lawn.”
“But not that safe,” I say. “I found a tarp upstairs. Do you think we could get it to them?”
“I don’t know how to triage this. How bad is Kinz? Who needs help first?”
“The skeletons were sitting in the bathroom and she’s losing it, about the devil and how she’s going to hell for loving girls. Er, a girl. Her dad…Cam, we need to talk about her dad after this, okay? I have to tell you about how he talks to her when you’re not there.”
Camden tugs on me and I move forward until we’re holding each other again, tightly. Her body quivers in my arms. She’s sobbing silently into my shoulder.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I say, but I hear the doubt in my voice. We both know Kinz isn’t okay and that she needs a lot more than her parents are going to give her and maybe more than either of us can.
“There isn’t a hell worse than the one her parents are putting her through,” Camden whispers. “But I don’t know how to save her. I’m trying. I can’t say the right things, I can’t find them, I can’t…I make her angry or hurt or more scared. She wants me to tell her I don’t believe, but I do.”
“I know,” I say. “I love that about you.”
I bite my tongue, hard, on purpose and take deep breaths while she’s crying on me. I like how she cries. And how she kisses. Which are not things I can be thinking right now when I need to not lose my own shit.
“I can’t just be for her,” she whispers. “Not all the time. Not with all of this. I’m trying so hard but hearing all that over and over, I can’t.”
I hug her tighter because although I don’t get all of it, I get a lot of it. Camden loves her religion and is up for fighting to make it inclusive, but a version of that same religion is being used to break Kinz. Her choices seem a lot harder than mine.
Hail smacks against the distant windows like rifle shots. It’s getting worse. Weeks ago we had a storm with hail the size of golf balls and this sounds as bad.
“We have got to move,” I say. “I’ll talk about this as much as you want later. You can tell me anything and I’ll listen, but right now what would queer Jesus do?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
“Then find the best possibility and remember that God has no hands but ours.”
She sighs, relaxes against me. “Yes. God’s calling. We need to help the others. Who first?”
I want to pull her down the hall to Kinz and see if we can help her together, but I’m worried that we can’t. What if what she needs right now is someone to tell her that religion isn’t real? Neither of us can pull that off convincingly.
I trail my hand down Camden’s arm and wrap my fingers around the warm, soft strength of hers. Disentangling from our hug, I pull her toward the hall and the far bedroom door.
“Duke, I really need your help,” I say through the door. “Are you able to help?”
“Leave me alone,” he growls.
“He fell,” I tell Camden. “And got hurt, but not badly, I think. It’s a lot for him if we need him to take care of us too. But he knows how to talk to Kinz.”
“Duke, where’s God right now?” Camden asks through the door.
In the moments when the rain lets up, I hear him crying.
“That didn’t help,” I whisper to Camden.
“Give him a minute,” she whispers back.
Thunder booms over the house and Duke is still crying, but he says, “Here.” And then, louder, but not to us, “Here I am.” After another minute he asks, “What do you need me to do?”
I tell him, “Kinz is losing it and we need someone to talk her down, or up, not sure.”
His laugh is short and hard. “Why me?”
“Because you can do it without saying ‘God.’”
His next laugh is looser. A small light goes on behind the door. He shuffles away from the far side. I push the door open. He’s sitting on the floor, cradling his right hand to his chest.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Dislocated my thumb but it’s back in, just aches. Probably sprained my wrist and I’m pissed that it’s my right hand. If you’ll use my phone and light the way, we’ll see how I do.”
“You want a hand up?” Camden asks.
“I really don’t.”
He drops his phone and slides it toward me, then goes back to holding his hand against his chest. I shine the phone in front of him. It takes him a minute to stand without using his hands because he’s got to keep the one holding the other, but he climbs to his feet.
We progress down the short hall with me walking sideways so I can light the path for Duke and Camden. I open the bathroom door all the way and step inside. Kinz remains sitting against the wall, her arms wrapped around her legs. She stares in front of her, not looking at anything I can see.
Duke brushes past me and lowers down to sit against the side of the tub. Kinz’s eyes slowly focus on him and she points at his cradled hand.
“Dislocated it saving my pretty face,” he says. “You look dislocated too.”
She nods and inches closer to him. He stretches out his legs and pats his thigh. Kinz rolls onto her side and lies down, resting her head there. He tucks his swelling hand against his belly and uses the other to stroke her hair.
“There’s no hell, sweetie,” he says. “It’s a metaphor and you know that because there’s no place to fit a hell in a universe that’s evolving, emerging into greater amazingness. A hundred years from now when you die, someone’s going to put you in the ground and plant trees in you, a whole bunch of trees and they’re going to get huge and drop leaves in the backyards of Camden’s and Synclair’s grandkids.”
“We’re having grandkids?” Camden asks.
“Not together,” Duke tells her. “You and Synclair are, like, neighbors.”
“I want to be trees,” Kinz says. “But how can people be so sure about hell?”
Duke says, “Same way they’re sure about anything made up. The sun used to circle the Earth, right? Now, pick a topic: ice cream or pie.”
“Yes,” she answers.
“Okay, I’ll name a pie, you tell me which flavor goes with it.”
“Chocolate chocolate chip,” Kinz says.
Duke chuckles. “With strawberry rhubarb? No way.”
“Yes way.”
“I suppose the tartness of the fruit would deepen the flavor of the chocolate. We could make a coulis. But what about blueberry?”
“Chocolate chocolate chip,” Kinz insists.
“Only if there’s ganache. Is there a ganache?”
“There’s always a ganache when you need one,” Kinz tells him. Her eyes have closed and her shoulders look less wooden.
I glance at Camden, who’s starting to smile. She nods and tips her head toward the door. I wave Duke’s phone at him, but he shakes his head. Kinz’s phone shines brightly from the floor. We back out of the bathroom with his phone flashlight.
As we get back into the big room, I hear a shifting crash from the far side.
“Jay!”
I dart along an aisle between boxes, turn right at the wall and jump back as one box slides off another. Camden grabs my belt and pulls me back another step. The box hits the floor at my feet, spilling out books.
“You guys okay?” Jay yells over the box wall.
“Yeah, you?”
“My legs are cramping and I’m still stuck under an armchair and starting to panic. More like in the middle of panic.”
“We can handle two of those problems,” Camden tells her. “You need to handle the third. What’s that breathing thing you told me about?”
“Box breathing?” Jay asks. “You want me to do box breathing under a pile of boxes? Hah, yeah. Fucking get me out of here!”
“How does it go?” Camden insists. “You know I’m stubborn, so tell me or we’ll be here all night.”
“Four counts of four,” Jay says, her voice ragged. “In, hold, out, hold.”
Camden starts counting to four, over and over. I’m worrying about Mac in the woods and the hail, about Avery not coming back—what if she went after him and got hurt? By lightning or hail or both?
Camden is still counting so I match her count with my breath: in, hold, out, hold. My heart stops speeding up.
“Jay, can you shine your phone up?” I ask.
With Jay’s phone and Duke’s we survey the problem. The massive armchair that my dad loves slipped sideways off a pile of boxes, must’ve knocked Jay over and then settled with its back and seat on either side of her torso. She’s got one arm trapped at her side and her legs are bent up because of more boxes, so she can’t get leverage any way other than pushing against the floor. But other boxes and part of a table are on the legs and seat of the armchair, so her last attempt at pushing up shifted a box into another stack of boxes. Lucky for her they fell toward us and not on top of her.
“We can get that box off, but then we’ve got to deal with this big table,” Camden points. “The leg is pinning the armchair down. If we move those boxes…”
“I can go around and pull the table back,” I finish the thought for her.
“But I’ll have to hold it up on this side, otherwise it’ll hook on the edge of the chair and wedge in more.”
No wonder Avery couldn’t get Jay out on her own. Where is she? Did she reach help or go to help Mac herself? What if they’re all trapped in the woods?
What if I got all this wrong and I was supposed to make a choice about running into the woods to get Mac? If he were here, he’d get under the heavy table, Atlas-style, and heave it up so Jay could scramble out from under the chair. I take as slow a breath as I can manage and feel the energy in my body. Keep moving, keep doing until everyone is okay, not frantically, just steadily; life itself is an answer.
I take Duke’s phone and retreat up the aisle to the next one over, where I can grab the back legs of the dining room table. It’s super heavy because of the extra leaves underneath the top. I count to three and pull. Camden lifts and pushes. I stagger back and nearly get slammed into the wall by the weight of the table, but Camden has a hold on the other side. I hear her grunt with the effort of holding the sliding weight.
“Move,” she says.
“Can’t let go or it’ll pin me,” I tell her. I should’ve grabbed it from the edge, not the middle, but it’s too late now.
There’s a crash, a series of small thumps, and the weight of the table lessens. Camden is laughing, so I’m not as worried as I could be.
I slide out from behind the table and yell, “I’m clear.”
It crashes into the wall. Jay yells back, “I’m out! From under the chair. Not any other kind!”
“I’m going for Mac!” I tell them and run for the stairs, the way lighted by Duke’s phone. I feel like I’ve been in the basement for an age, but it can’t have been that long because the storm is still overhead.
On the first floor I turn off the phone. There’s enough light from the lightning and the last bit of sunlight behind the heavy clouds. Hail pelts the windows—not little pings, but hard hits, like a hundred stones fired from slingshots.
I grab the tarp from the bedroom doorway and put Duke’s phone on the kitchen counter. I’m not going to risk getting it wet and ruining it. Unfolding the tarp to cover my head and shoulders, leaving it almost an inch thick, I wrap myself and shove out the back door. I have to pause on the patio and brace against the high wind whipping around me. That’s why the hail is hitting so hard. If it weren’t raining, I’d fear tornadoes. Wait, can you have a tornado in the rain? Maybe I should be afraid of them anyway.
But not right now. I’m making choices. If I can get this tarp to Mac and his friends, they can hold it over all of us as we run back. I sprint for the trees, thick raindrops and biting hail smacking against my knees and shins. One piece of hail makes it under the edge of the tarp and pings off my glasses frame. I squint my eyes as closed as I can while running, bend forward and run harder.