When I kneel down to lace up the sneakers, another pang goes through me. I’ve done this so many times—before cross-country meets, in the locker rooms, sitting next to Hana, surrounded by a blur of bodies, joking with each other about who’s a better runner—and yet somehow I always took it for granted.
For the first time the thought comes to me—I wish I hadn’t crossed—and I push it away instantly, try to bury it. It’s done now, and Alex died for it. There’s no point in looking back. I can’t look back.
“Are you ready to see the rest of the homestead?” Sarah asks.
Even the act of undressing and redressing has exhausted me. But I’m desperate for air, and space.
“Show me,” I say.
We go back through the kitchen and up the narrow stone stairs beyond the stove. Sarah darts ahead of me, disappearing as the stairs make a sharp turn. “Almost there!” she calls back.
A final serpentine twist, and suddenly the stairs are no more: I step into a blazing brightness, and soft ground underneath my shoes. I stumble, confused and temporarily blinded. For a second I feel as though I’ve walked into a dream and I stand, blinking, struggling to make sense of this otherworld.
Sarah is standing a few feet away from me, laughing. She lifts her arms, which are bathed in sunshine. “Welcome to the homestead,” she says, and performs a little skipping dance in the grass.
The place where I’ve been sleeping is underground—that I could have guessed from the lack of windows and the quality of dampness—and the stairs have led upward, aboveground, and then released us abruptly. Where there should be a house, an over-structure, there is just a large expanse of grass covered in charred wood and enormous fragments of stone.
I was not prepared for the feeling of the sunshine, or the smell of growth and life. All around us are enormous trees, leaves just tinged with yellow as though they are catching fire slowly from the outside, patterning the ground with alternating spots of light and shadow. For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.
Sarah explains, “This used to be a church.” She points behind me, to the splintered stones and the blackened wood. “The bombs didn’t reach the cellar, though. There are plenty of underground places in the Wilds where the bombs didn’t touch. You’ll see.”
“A church?” This surprises me. In Portland, our churches are made of steel and glass and clean white plaster walls. They are sanitized spaces, places where the miracle of life, and God’s science, is celebrated and demonstrated with microscopes and centrifuges.
“One of the old churches,” Sarah says. “There are lots of those, too. On the west side of Rochester there’s a whole one, still standing. I’ll show you someday, if you want.” Then she reaches forward and grabs the bottom of my T-shirt, tugging at me. “Come on. Lots to see.”
The only other time I’ve been to the Wilds was with Alex. We snuck across the border once so that he could show me where he lived. That settlement, like this one, was situated in a large clearing, a place once inhabited, an area the trees and growth had not yet reclaimed. But this clearing is massive, and filled with half-tumbled-down stone archways and walls that are partially standing, and—in one place—a series of concrete stairs that spiral up from the ground and end in nothing. On the last step, several different birds have made their nests.
I can barely breathe as Sarah and I make our way slowly through the grass, which is damp and almost knee-high in places. It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place. Doors that open nowhere; a rusted truck, wheel-less, sitting in the middle of a stretch of pale green grass, with a tree growing straight through its center; bits of glittering, twisted metal everywhere, melted and bent into unrecognizable shapes.
Sarah walks next to me, practically skipping, excitement bubbling out of her now that we’re outside. She easily dodges the stones and the metal detritus littering the grass, while I have to keep my eyes constantly on the ground. It is slow going, and tiring.
“This used to be a town,” Sarah says. “This was probably the main street. The trees are still young in a lot of places around here, but there aren’t hardly any buildings left at all. That’s how you know where the houses were. Wood burns a lot easier. Obviously.” She drops her voice to a hush, eyes growing wide. “It wasn’t even the bombs that did the worst damage, you know. It was the fires that came after.”
I manage to nod.
“This was a school.” She gestures to another enormous area of low growth, roughly the shape of a rectangle. The trees around its perimeter are marked from the fire: seared white, and practically leafless, they remind me of tall, spindly ghosts. “Some of the lockers were just sitting there, hanging open. Some of them had clothes in them and stuff.” She looks momentarily guilty, and then it hits me—the clothing in the storage room, the pants and shirt I am wearing—all of those clothes must have come from somewhere, must have been scavenged.
“Stop for a second.” I’m feeling out of breath, and so we stand for a moment in front of the old school while I rest. We’re in a patch of sunshine, and I’m grateful for the warmth. Birds twitter and zip overhead, small, quick shadows against the sky. Distantly I can make out sounds of good-natured shouting and laughter, Invalids tromping through the woods. The air is full of whirling, floating golden-green leaves.
A squirrel sits back on its haunches, working a nut quickly between its paws, on the top step of what must have been an entrance to the school. Now the stairs run aground, into soft earth and a covering of wildflowers. I think of all the feet that must have stepped right there, where the squirrel is. I think of all the small, warm hands spinning out locker combinations, all the voices, the rush and patter of movement. I think of what it must have been like during the blitz—the panic, the screaming, the running, the fire.
In school we always learned that the blitz, the cleansing, was quick. We saw footage of pilots waving from their cockpits as bombs dropped on a distant carpet of green, trees so small they looked like toys, narrow plumes of smoke rising, featherlike, from the growth. No mess, no pain, no sounds of screaming. Just a whole population—the people who had resisted and stayed, who refused to move into the approved and bordered places, the nonbelievers and the contaminated—deleted all at once, quick as the stroke of a keyboard, turned into a dream.
But of course it wouldn’t really have been like that. It couldn’t have been. The lockers were still full: of course. The children wouldn’t have had time to do anything but fight and claw for the exits.
Some of them—very few—may have escaped and made their home in the Wilds, but most of them died. Our teachers told us the truth, at least, about that. I close my eyes, feel myself swaying on my feet.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asks. She puts her hand on my back. “We can turn around.”
“I’m okay.” I open my eyes. We’ve only gone a few hundred feet. Most of the old main street still stretches in front of us, and I’m determined to see all of it.
We walk even slower now, as Sarah points out the empty spaces and broken foundations where buildings must once have existed: a restaurant (“a pizza restaurant—that’s where we got the stove”); a deli (“you can still see the sign—see? Kind of buried over there? ‘Sandwiches made to order’”); a grocery store.