May 22

Matt and Syl came back from town, and Matt was in a much better mood. It couldn’t have been easy biking through the snow, but he didn’t care.

“The mayor was in, and he performed the ceremony,” Matt said, waving a marriage certificate. “Syl and I are now married in the eyes of the great state of Pennsylvania.”

“You should have come with us,” Syl said. “All of you.”

“Maybe next time,” Mom said.

“And look,” Matt said. “Five bags of food!”

I did look. I looked even harder as Mom and I put the food away. There were a few cans more than last week, but I think what Mr. Danworth did was give us our standard amount and put it in five bags instead of four.

Mom decided, since the fish has been cleaned and salted and is already stinking up the garage, that we should only have it a couple of days a week and then just two shad for the five of us. I’m glad, even though I know she’s doing it because she’s scared of what’s going to happen when we run out and when we no longer get any cans from town.

What will become of us then? Where will we go? Will Matt and Syl leave by themselves and I’ll never see him again?

I know I should be happy for him, but with everything I’m scared of, I think I’m scared most of losing Matt forever.

 

May 23

“Did Horton eat last week?” Jon asked me. “When I was away?”

“A little,” I said.

“He isn’t eating very much,” Jon said.

“Cats eat less in the spring,” I said. “Horton always loses his winter weight.”

“Yeah, but he’s really getting thin,” Jon said.

I know he’s right, but there’s nothing we can do about it. When Horton feels like eating, he’ll eat.

 

May 24

We spent the day drying the cellar out, pail by pail. The electricity came back on for the first time in weeks, and Matt got the sump pump running.

Mom acted like this was Christmas and New Year’s. I’m surprised she didn’t burst out singing.

 

May 25

Matt and Jon are back chopping firewood. As far as I’m concerned, that means the official end of the school year.

Nothing good happened to Romeo or Juliet.

 

May 26

The third day in a row with electricity. All three days the electricity’s been on for hours, and last night it came back on for a few hours as well.

We don’t get any TV reception, and the news on the radio remains bad, but Mom announced that we should spring clean. So that’s how she and Syl and I spent the day. The menfolk chopped wood. Us women vacuumed and scrubbed.

Matt came home exhausted, but when he saw how clean things were, his mood brightened. “Syl, you’re fantastic,” he said.

Syl worked every bit as hard as Mom and me but no harder.

Sometimes I’d like to kill him.

 

May 27

I can’t remember the last time I was in a good mood. It feels like all I do is crab and mope and feel sorry for myself.

Since the house is as close to spotless as it’s ever going to get and Romeo and Juliet are totally dead, I told Mom I was going house hunting. I think she was glad to get me out of here, so she didn’t put up a battle.

“I’ll go, too,” Syl said, which wasn’t my idea at all. “Laura, do you want to come with us?”

Thank goodness Mom said no. “See if you can find any more books for me,” she said instead.

I didn’t want to go house hunting with Syl. I wanted to spend time by myself. I was looking for a tactful way of explaining that to Syl, but before I could, she said, “Let’s split up. We can meet here at noon.”

“How will you find your way back?” I asked. Matt would kill me if I let Syl out of my sight and she wandered off, never to be seen again.

“I never get lost,” Syl said. “I’ll be back here. Don’t worry.”

I thought about how lost I’d gotten and I’ve lived here practically my whole life. But Syl’s an old married woman and I’m just the kid sister-in-law. And I really did want some alone time. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you, then.”

We biked together until Schiller Road, and she turned to the left. I kept biking down Howell Bridge Road until the right onto Penn Avenue. Lots of nice houses there. A very literate neighborhood.

I really do love breaking and entering, and I got positively cheery seeing how the wealthier people in Howell used to live. Not that I found that much we could use, since everybody else must have realized Penn Ave. would have good pickings.

But there were books for Mom, and one space heater, and best of all, two pairs of blue jeans, price tags still attached, in a size I never could have fit in before. I tried on one pair, and it was a little loose (I guess shad doesn’t have that many calories) but definitely wearable. Syl weighs even less than I do, but I figured the second pair could stay up with a belt, and I was sure she’d appreciate having something new to wear.

I also took a can of ocean breeze room freshener. Now that the temperature’s up to 50, Mom’s been opening the windows to air the house out, but everything smells like fish anyway. That and a travel-sized bottle of aspirin were my best finds.

I balanced the handlebars with one trash bag on one side and one on the other and began biking to the rendezvous spot. My mood was much better than it has been in ages. I pictured how pleased Syl would be with my gift of blue jeans, and how Matt would appreciate my generosity, and how Mom would love the books I’d found, and how Jon . . . Well, how Jon would turn out to be a secret ocean breeze air freshener freak. Okay, I couldn’t think of why anything I brought home would make Jon happy, except maybe the aspirin, for when his muscles ache from chopping wood.

Jon’s never been easy to shop for.

Even with nobody to hear me for miles, I didn’t burst into song, but I did whistle as I biked. I liked the splashy way the bike rode through puddles on the road. And I had this great realization: I don’t have to be happy all the time. With everything that’s happened, no one should expect to be happy. But moments of happiness can sneak up on you, like pairs of unworn blue jeans, and you need to cherish them because they’re so rare and so unpredictable.

I even understood why Matt married Syl ten minutes after meeting her. Finding her was rare and unpredictable.

Of course it hadn’t hurt that she had long hair at the time.

I was whistling “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” a song I learned in third grade and haven’t heard since, when I rode my bike straight into a pothole and went flying off.

I landed face down in a puddle, and for an instant I was in a state of total panic. I remembered Mom in the cellar, and I swear I thought I was going to drown.

What shocked me to my senses was how much I hurt. When you’re in that kind of pain, you almost wish you were going to drown in a half inch of water.

I rolled out of the puddle and moved my fingers, my hands, my arms, my legs, until I was satisfied I hadn’t broken any bones. The palms of my hands were scraped and it felt like my knees were, too. My chin and jaw hurt horribly, but I wasn’t spitting any teeth out. I was going to be a total-body black-and-blue mark, but no one dies of bruises.

I crawled back to the bike. It was lying on its side, but the two trash bags were unbroken, and both tires looked okay.

That was when I realized how lucky I’d been the day I got lost. What if I’d had a flat tire? I’d been miles away from home, with no idea where I was, and I would have had to walk back.

Sometimes I think all I’ve done for the past month is cry, but that didn’t stop me. I sat by my bike, telling myself over and over again how lucky I was, and I sobbed.

I didn’t have to use my sweatshirt to blow my nose this time, though. I’d found a tissue packet at one of the houses, so when I was up to it, I dug through a trash bag and located it.

That’s progress.

I was just finishing the tissue packet when Syl rode over. We were south of our meeting spot, but she must have looked around for me, and since I was on Howell Bridge Road when I fell, I couldn’t have been too hard to locate.

“You’re a mess,” she said, helping me up.

“I rode into a pothole,” I said.

Syl nodded and straightened up my bike. “Which will be easier?” she asked. “Riding or walking?”

Either way, it was going to be a mile uphill. “How about letting me die here?” I asked.

“Laura would never forgive me,” Syl said. “Do you need a few more minutes?”

What I needed was a completely different life. “I’ll try walking,” I said. “I’m feeling too wobbly for the bike.”

“All right,” Syl said. She grabbed the handlebars of her bike with her right hand and the handlebars of mine with her left, and began pulling them behind her, while I hobbled by her side.

“You’ll be all right,” she said after a few of the most agonizing yards I’ve ever walked. “You couldn’t make it this far if anything was broken.”

Just because I knew it was true didn’t make me any happier to hear it.

“I remember once, months ago,” Syl said. “Right after the air got bad. The band I was with—”

“You were with a band?” I asked.

“Not that kind of band,” Syl said. “When you’re on the road, you find bands of people to travel with. By foot, by bike, even by truck.”

“There are trucks?” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a truck.

“Of course there are,” Syl said. “How do you think food gets to Howell? And they’re always bringing supplies to the safe towns. They’re not supposed to give people lifts, but sometimes they do.”

“Were you with a band of people when you met Matt?” I asked.

“Just one other person,” Syl said. “We’d split off because he wanted to try fishing in the Delaware. Anyway, this happened last summer. We were in South Carolina, I think. There were a half dozen of us, and we saw a man lying on the side of the road. You could tell right away his leg was broken, and he was screaming in pain.”

“Did you do anything?” I asked.

“There was nothing we could do,” Syl said. “Even if we’d set his leg, we couldn’t carry him with us. If you can’t keep up with a band, you get left behind. People died all the time, but mostly when they were dying, they were quiet or moaning. This guy must have broken his leg right before we saw him. He was going to lie there on the side of the road for days before he died. He knew it. We all knew it. Eventually he’d pass out, but until then he was going to scream because he was in agony and because he knew he was going to die.”

“And you left him there?” I asked.

“One of the guys I was with said we should put him down,” Syl said. “Maybe someone else did. We didn’t stick around to find out.”

“Did you ever tell Matt that story?” I asked.

“No,” Syl said. “I haven’t thought about it in months. It was the way your bike was overturned that made me think of it. One of the guys I was with took the bike and rode off. If you had a bike, you didn’t stay with people who were walking.”

“Would I have gotten left behind?” I asked. “I mean, after a fall like I took just now. If I couldn’t keep up with everyone else?”

“Oh yeah,” Syl said. “Sure. But you would have found another group in a day or so. There were always groups of people to grab on to.”

I hated the story of the guy with the broken leg, but I kind of liked the image of all these groups wandering around together. When you’ve shared a room with the same three people for months, fresh faces sound appealing.

We walked in silence for a while, and I fantasized about a group of good-looking guys and me. It’s a good thing I have a permanently gray complexion or else Syl might have noticed how hard I was blushing.

Mom wasn’t too happy when she saw how I looked, but she found some peroxide and cleaned my palms and knees. Suddenly, I was six years old again and had fallen off my bike.

She was glad for the books, though, and Syl appreciated the blue jeans. Jon didn’t say anything about the air freshener, so maybe ocean breeze isn’t his favorite.

 

May 28

The worst night I can remember in ages.

I’ve been having nightmares for a couple of weeks now, ever since I got lost. Horrible dreams about the mound of bodies. A lot of times I see us in the mound, or I think I’m with Mom and then I look around and there’s the mound and I have to climb on top of it to find her.

Twice I had dreams that I was in Mrs. Nesbitt’s house after she died, and I’m looking around for things and wherever I turn, there she is. Both times I woke up thinking Mrs. Nesbitt was still alive, and I had to remind myself that she was dead and I had gone through her house, with her body lying on her bed, and that I had believed at the time it was okay to do that.

One dream I had was so much like a horror movie, it was almost funny. Mrs. Nesbitt and I were playing tennis (which is a funny thought right there), and I looked up at the stands and everyone watching the match was dead. Nobody I knew, though. They all looked like ghouls.

I don’t know if I’ve been in a bad mood because of the nightmares or if I’m having the nightmares because I’m in a bad mood. Probably both. I know I haven’t been sleeping well, and that hasn’t helped.

But last night I had nightmare after nightmare. I don’t know if I ever woke up. It felt like one dream led directly to another. In one I was going through someone’s house and I opened a closet door and piles of corpses fell out. Then I was in the same house and I opened a different door and the dead people were all people I knew. Then I saw Mom sitting in a rocking chair, and she said, “Don’t look at me like I’m dead,” only she was dead.

But then I had the worst dream—maybe the worst dream I’ve had in my life. I was walking to school and everything was normal, the way it had been. The sun was shining, and I remember how happy I felt seeing the sun again. I wasn’t sure if everything was back to normal or if none of the bad things had ever happened. It didn’t matter. The sun was shining, and I was walking to school. The closer I got to town, the more people I saw. Everybody was happy, so I realized the sun had returned. We were all celebrating because we could see the sun again.

Then I heard someone screaming, and I looked down at a man, his leg twisted horribly. I knew right away it was the man with the broken leg Syl had told me about. It was like I wasn’t asleep anymore because I thought, Oh, that’s the guy Syl mentioned. Then I thought the man was Dad, which was when the dream turned into a nightmare. But I realized it wasn’t anyone I knew, and I remember thinking, Okay, this isn’t going to be another nightmare after all.

I felt like I was awake and this was all truly happening.

Everyone who was walking stopped, and some of the people came back. There must have been ten or fifteen of us standing around the guy, who kept screaming. Someone said, “Shut up already,” and kicked the man in his leg.

Then other people started kicking him, and—this is the worst part—I started kicking him, too. I thought, If I don’t join in, they’ll kick me. But part of me enjoyed it, because I was okay and this guy, who somehow represented everything that had been awful for the past year, was lying there helpless.

The more we kicked, the louder he screamed, and the more excited I got.

In my sleep I thought, This dream is going to turn and I’m going to be the person lying on the ground, but that never happened. I guess I woke up before it could. I know I was shaking when I woke up. My body hurts all over from the fall, but I swear my leg hurt even more, like it ached from kicking.

A month ago I was dreaming about Baby Rachel. Dreams I thought were scary.

For the first time ever I hoped there was no Baby Rachel. I don’t know what happened to Dad and Lisa, if the baby was ever born. It must be so hard now to have a baby. Lisa could have miscarried or had a stillborn baby. Horrible though that is, it might be for the better.

I tiptoed out of the sunroom and through the kitchen to the bathroom. It smells of fish and bedpans and ocean breeze air freshener. I curled up on the cold tile floor, and I rocked back and forth, glad it made my body ache even more, like I deserved the punishment for what I’d been thinking.

I hate my dreams. I hate Matt for bringing Syl into our lives, and I hate Syl for giving me her nightmares.

I hate this world we live in.