I helped him load up. He didn’t want to take much: clothes, books, a backpack with a beat-up laptop. “I should tell you,” I said when I saw the laptop. “We don’t have internet out at the farm. My mama and her boyfriend—they’re old-fashioned. And paranoid. They like the wilderness. Peace and quiet. Being remote. Plus, they didn’t want to pay for it.”
“Do you have cable?”
“No.”
I knew how it sounded. In a town that included The Church, this absence marked my family as the strangest of all. Mostly, even the dirtiest double-wide, the smallest shack, windows streaked with soot from the last cooker blowout, had a flat-screen: giant and blaring. Appalachian halos, Lobo used to call the blue glow that came from all the households watching TV at night. It must have made him feel good—superior—to have resisted this one pull, this single wicked thing.
“It’s nice,” I said. “You notice things in nature. But we’ve kind of been sheltered.” I thought of one of Lisbeth’s old neighbors, near the bar. They had broken windows, no time or money or inclination to fix them, but they also had a hummingbird feeder on a hook, which they always kept full of red sugar. “You get used to it.”
“Wait a minute.” Grayson hobbled back into the house. Soon he came back, one last box in his arms. Wires poked out.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A ham radio. It was a project for Boy Scouts.”
“You were a Boy Scout?”
“Not a very good one.”
We drove away from the house. Grayson looked back only once. I felt a strange sort of sadness as he did. It was years ago, when I had lived there, before Lobo, before growing. I had collected cereal box tops for school; watched TV at night with my mama, wrapped in an afghan against her shoulder, listening to the neighbors’ fights through the walls. My own folks’ fights were over. My folks were over, stale as smoke.
But everyone fought in those hills.
We passed a decommissioned school bus on the side of the road. It had been spray-painted white, almost indistinguishable from the landscape, except for its blinkers flashing red. Someone knelt in the runoff next to the bus and fixed a flat tire. Inside, the bus was packed to the roof with blankets and boxes. They must have been running, fleeing somewhere. An orange cat stared at us out the back window, perched on an upside-down basket.
We had almost reached the farm before I spoke again. “Do you know where they went?” I asked Grayson.
He turned away from the window, looking at me.
“The Church. Your folks. Did they tell you where they were going?”
“No. Somewhere warm. That was all they said, all they were allowed to say, I guess. I wasn’t a member, so... They didn’t tell me much. But The Church had been planning this, sort of. Planning a move.”
“How were they planning it?”
“Well, they were preppers. They were stockpiling things. Guns and stuff. But they weren’t prepping for this. They were prepping for, you know—the end of the world. Brimstone. That’s a little different, I guess. They weren’t prepping for winter. Just a long, shitty winter. Winter forever.”
I stared back through the windshield. The road was a monochrome rainbow of white: new snow, gritty packed snow, and a slick salted tongue of ice. It was slow-going. I thought of Lisbeth around a campfire. I thought of her sleeping in her shoes because The Church had taught her that the world might end at any moment, and she needed to be ready to run.
Grayson said The Church had prepared with guns, believing the world would end with fire. When they left for California, Mama and Lobo had taken the one taped under the dining room table.
But there was still a gun buried in the yard.
4
I expected Mama and Lobo to be there, even after a year on my own. Every time I turned off the rural route onto the dirt and gravel driveway—more and more, mostly gravel and ice—my shoulders tightened. I braced for the anger and silence, my mama moving quickly from one drudgery job to the next, her fingers flying. No time for anything, even for me. No time for thinking about what kind of life this was, what we had gotten ourselves mired in. She never stopped, except when she didn’t move at all, when she collapsed, chemicals trickling through her blood, eyelids slammed shut like diurnal poppies.
I still thought I’d see Lobo near the house, mute and focused, chopping wood, the ax above his head like a lightning rod. Mama taking laundry from the line strung from the porch to the peach tree, shaking the dried clothes because they had stiffened in the cold. Some part of me was stunned not to hear the ring of the ax.
I pulled up close to the farmhouse. I could see it through Grayson’s eyes: gloomy and bare. When things broke, we didn’t really fix them. We wedged cardboard where the broken glass had been; we stuffed rags in the drafts from the door.
“Well, this is it,” I said.
Grayson didn’t say anything. I showed him inside and nodded at the woodstove. “I’ll get the fire going. That helps a lot.”
I found myself apologizing. Some of the rooms had been shut off this year, to avoid heating them. I told him not to open any closed doors. I told him that included the basement.
His eyes flashed immediately to the door. Small and peaked, under the stairs like a portal, the door to a kingdom.
“Just don’t,” I said.
He knew what my family did. He didn’t need to see it.
I put his stuff in Mama and Lobo’s old bedroom, slinging his duffel bag down on the bed, on the quilt they hadn’t taken. Get the memories out. Get it over with, I thought. I thought the room might as well be used. I opened up the curtains. A flourish of dust, like a flock of birds taking off. Had it only been a year?
In the yard below the window rusted an old bathtub, once used for watering cows. It was edged in ice. At the bottom of the tub was a puddle of darkness, frozen solid. Once I had seen a fawn bed down beneath the window. I had not wanted to open the curtains the rest of the way, not wanted to startle the deer into running.
It had been a year since I had seen a fawn alive.
Grayson wandered into the room behind me, cast thudding on the wood floors. He was a loud ghost. I left him to look around, and started a fire in the stove like I had promised. I waited until the kindling caught, then fed the first split logs in. When I heard the crackle and felt the warmth, I straightened.
“I’ve got to go back to my own place,” I called to him. “Unload a few things. Phones don’t work so great around here. If you need anything before I get back...” I paused.
“I’ll come down to your house,” Grayson said.
He couldn’t, not with that injury, but we left it at that. I drove home, wondering what I had gotten myself into.