Now I’m in this same kitchen, face-to-face with Emma, staring at the bare walls.
I suppose my mother would laugh at me for depending on a man who cheated first me, then our neighbors, out of everything we had. I know my old friend Sal Rubio is laughing, not at me, but with me.
Maybe at me, too, I think as I straighten out two scratchy blankets on the living room floor. I kiss Emma goodnight, wash out a few things for the morning, and get ready for another fitful sleep, mentally counting our remaining food and candles and rolls of toilet paper.
People are sheep. Nick predicted the first things to fly off the shelves would be paper products—select-a-size paper towels, Kleenex, toilet paper. “Gotta stock up on the Charmin, baby. It’ll be like gold.” He was right. Then they all raced for the milk and the ice cream, which require a working refrigerator and freezer; the flour, which requires a functional oven unless you want to mix it with water and eat paste; the pasta, which requires boiling water to make it edible. No one bothers to think of what really matters until it’s too late: protein with a long shelf life and a can opener that won’t break. When Nick took his literal dive off the cliff a couple of months ago, I loaded the car with tuna, beans, and Charmin. We’ve still got a full shelf of the squeezably soft stuff, so Nick would have approved.
I rather wish he were here so I could soak it in water and serve it to him in a soup bowl.
Seven
Emma wakes on the hardwood floor next to me. I feel the chill, too, as if it were a gray, midwinter morning instead of the beginning of another July scorcher. My throat feels like it’s been rubbed with sandpaper, and I automatically go to the kitchen sink to fill a glass.
Nothing comes out of the tap except a trickle.
“We’re out,” Emma says from behind me. “As of a few hours ago.”
So much for working toilets.
“We have to go, honey,” I tell her, throwing cans and bottles into my old backpack and the one I stole from the Schafers’ garage until they’re ready to burst. I climb up on the granite counter in the kitchen—Verde Butterfly, they called it at the interior design office—reach to the top cabinet over the built-in fridge, and take out Nick’s gun box. I’ll need to remove a day’s food supply to make room for the piece and the extra clip, but I tell myself it’s worth it. I counted two more bricks last night, and I know the world out there isn’t what it used to be.
Emma looks at me with wide, frightened eyes. “Where?”
“I don’t know yet. What I do know is that we’ll last three days without water. Three.” I check the sky outside. Sunny with no chance of rain. I can already feel the mercury climbing to its daily high, and it’s only eight o’clock in the morning.
Emma groans. “We could get some bottled water from Safeway, maybe.”
All I can do is stare, openmouthed. Even if Safeway still had water, trying to get it would be as successful as the Gallipoli campaign.
“Can’t we just stay until tomorrow, then?”
“No. No, we can’t just stay until tomorrow, then.”
“Why?”
“Because I fucking said so. Now, get dressed, get your shoes on, and get moving.” I hate myself for talking to her like this, but someone has to be the bad guy.
She gives me the silent treatment for the half hour it takes us to walk into town. Whatever. I’m in full survival mode now, doing what Nick should have stuck around to do. He had a way of doing the necessary without being overbearing. When Emma bucked, he reined her in, but gently.
“You know,” I say, “if your father were here, you wouldn’t be pouting.”
No response. So we walk on in silence until we reach the Safeway where the checkout guy told me we’ll all pull through.
This morning, we won’t be adding anything to our packs from Safeway. No one will. Shattered glass that used to be windows sparkles on the pavement like discarded jewels. The shelves, as far as I can see, are bare.
While we’ve been hiding out in our empty suburban mansion turned fortress, the city has drained itself of most of its life. A few skinny cats, seal-point Persians that must have cost a few thousand as kittens, scrounge among the piles of uncollected garbage. They come upon a carcass of another of their kind and hiss at one another, the larger male laying a proprietary paw on the find. I turn my head, but not before seeing the tom bury his own head into the dead cat’s flesh. When I risk a glance back, he’s eaten everything. Fur, skin, and the crawling white maggots that had nested there.
Emma sees it, too, and screams. She hides her face in the damp cotton of my shirt, and I think, Maybe I’m not the bad guy after all.
“Shh, baby girl. It’s okay,” I tell her, and we walk on, leaving the cats behind us.
Noise from the other side of the almost-empty parking lot sounds something like an outdoor cocktail party, but when I look, it’s only two rope-thin men with beards down to their chests arguing over who owes whom how much for the pack of cigarettes they’re splitting up and where the hell did the lighter go. What was that old saying? Smoke ’em if you got ’em. They’re the first two humans I’ve seen today.
I’d like a cigarette now, even with the heat, but I’m glad I quit sixteen years ago. Sixteen. Long years and short at the same time. At sixteen, Emma’s old enough to deal with the world falling to pieces around us, young enough that she shouldn’t have to. Even when she sleeps, that way she curls one hand under her cheek, she looks more like a newborn than a teenager. An innocent. Some dark place inside me hurts as I watch the rise and fall of her chest while she walks next to me, the trembling of a lock of blond hair as she exhales. It’s scary to think that I wasn’t much older than her when I found out I was pregnant.
“You’ll be fine, babe,” Nick said that morning over coffee. “We’ll be fine. What do you need another degree for when we’re already rolling in dough?”
“It’s not what I need, Nick. It’s what I wanted.”
“The ivory tower is dead. What counts now is the ability to manipulate money,” he said, tapping the phone on the kitchen island. It stayed with him, that phone, like it was attached by an umbilical cord made of high-tensile wire. Something was always going on, some new deal always ready to jump on. The next big thing.
According to Nick, people like me—or people like what I’d wanted to be—were obsolete. Dinosaurs. I prepped myself for the usual lecture on machine market analysis and automated commodity trading and all things money management.
Not that I had any reason to complain. Nick took care of me. While my college girlfriends met for a weekly cry-in about law school exams and med school debt and how much they spent on ramen noodles while they were banging out their doctoral theses on Chaucer, like it was some kind of contest to see who had the shittiest life, I did whatever I wanted.
My routine at twenty-three years old:
Manicures on Monday.
Watching Rita and Mary clean the house on Tuesday. (“Never trust a maid,” Nick warned.)
Ten loops in-line skating around Hains Point on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.
Shopping. Tons of shopping.
I still met them for coffee on Saturday mornings, but except for Sal, not much connective tissue held up in the first couple of years after I became Mrs. Nick Reynolds. Sal said I worried too much; we were all still friends, still looking out for one another like we did in college. “Just us girls,” she said. “Sticking together.”