Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (11 page)

COMMENTS

Isaac says:

October 3, 2009 at 9:08 pm

Any word from your mom yet?

Allison says:

October 3, 2009 at 9:29 pm

Nothing yet. I’m trying not to panic but it shouldn’t take her long. On a normal day you could get here from her house in forty-five minutes. I guess that distance doesn’t mean much anymore.

Brooklyn Girl says:

October 3, 2009 at 10:09 pm

Hey, if we’re still here hanging on then she could definitely make it. Don’t give up hope, Allison.

October 4, 2009—Sense and Sensibility

“Anything?”

“Nothing. Not a peep. There are some Floaters milling around outside but no sign of her.”

Ted puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. I don’t know what to do. If I cry it’s like I’ve accepted she’s not coming. I won’t cry, I won’t. I need to focus, focus and lead.

And so the meeting goes about how I expected.

No one in particular is jumping at the idea of leaving the apartments quite yet. Phil brings up the possibility of finding lost family members among those assembled in the university gymnasium. Janette finds his idea promising and exciting. Matt points out that a single mother carrying a child and traveling ten miles through dangerous country was an anomaly, not something to be expected. This, of course, is his way of saying that it was highly unlikely that Phil’s chubby, well-meaning wife (or their two kids) had made it the more than ten miles from their tan rambler to the university. Phil throws a bit of a tantrum, but something tells me he felt Matt was right.

Ted, who has spent most of the meeting glowering at me from the corner of the living room with his glasses still skewed slightly to the right, corners me after the others have left to start on dinner. We stand alone in the living room, the low, glass surface of the coffee table between us. I can see he’s gunning for a fight but that he’s hesitating to start in with too much heat.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You can just say it. Go ahead. I know what you’re thinking.”

Ted refuses to speak, his lips pursed so tightly they look like a starfish all folded up and suffocating. I can see the thoughts flickering in his eyes, the decisions, the careful weighing of the options. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and tosses his hair around like an impatient stallion.

“I don’t want to fight,” he says.

“Yes you do, and that’s okay. Just start now before I get too hungry.”

“Fine,” he snorts. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we had … I know you’re fucked up worrying over your mom, but I thought there was an understanding, you know? We hash things out and then take it to the group. What happened to that?”

I kinda knew this was coming, but knowing doesn’t make it any less obnoxious.

“It’s not a decision I can make, or we can make, get it? It’s a group decision, everyone is involved.”

“Everyone?” he says. He’s lowered his voice to his serious register. When he starts to get angry his accent becomes thicker and his shoulders hunch over as if he’s readying for a fistfight. I don’t think it will come to blows, but he still looks like a warthog kicking at the dirt, coiled up, tensed, a ball of fire seething right in front of the gold-framed Thomas Kinkade print.

“Right. Everyone. Everyone meaning you and Zack, right?”

I didn’t
know
this would happen, but I thought it might. I cross my arms, puffing out my chest to mimic his ridiculous, dominant posturing. I keep silently insisting there’s no drama here. I keep telling myself this is about a power dynamic, not about Ted being a jealous, whiny little prick.

“Does Zack know?” he asks, much more to the point.

“Yeah, I guess so, yeah. But, come on, in my defense he wheedled it out of me.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

“You know that saying, how does it go—I hurt you because I love you? Well, that saying doesn’t apply here.”

“Is that one of your kinky sex games?”

“Look, asshole,” I mutter, taking a big step toward him, “I’ll slap you again if I have to. Don’t make it seem so appealing.”

I can feel it surging, that clash of the titans—hot, angry, boiling temper that’s just dying to rip right out of my throat and through the palm of my hand. I still don’t know where this is coming from. Best guess? Ted’s goddamn fucking attitude and the fact that my mom, the most beautiful woman in the entire world, is missing and maybe, just maybe, dead.

“Fuck it,” I say, deflating. “This is a waste of time.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think we should leave? I mean, when my mom gets here, do you think we should go?”

It takes Ted a moment to answer. In the meantime, we both take a seat on the big, calico couch. It’s covered in handmade afghans that take up so much space that the couch itself is barely visible beneath all the crafts. Everything in this place smells like cinnamon. Cinnamon tinged with sweat and shit, the smell we seem to carry with us everywhere. We can’t get rid of it—no matter how careful we are about cleaning the bathroom we always seem to reek just a little.

Ted rests his right ankle on his knee and shoves his hands deep in his pockets. I’m tempted to interrupt the silence with a bit of a heart-to-heart about Holly but I keep my mouth shut. I think I like Holly’s new allegiance, the way she grins at me like we’re twins separated at birth. I can’t read her mind but I can take a pretty accurate guess.

“My gut says yes,” Ted replies at last. “But that’s a big change. Who knows if it will be that much better. Still, to see people, new people, hell, lots of people…”

“I know. That’s how I feel too.”

“It could be a madhouse,” Ted says, smiling crookedly. His foot bounces rhythmically in the air. “And super-unsanitary with all those people in one spot.”

“I think we should stay,” I tell him. The tension melts away, leaving behind the same old easy friendship that existed before. It’s as if the radio, Zack, our disagreements never even existed.

“Really?”

“Really. What’s the point? Searching, searching, never happy with anything … When does it end? It exhausts me just thinking about it. Buddha taught that desire never learns, it never wakes up to its own foolishness, it drives us on endlessly—and for what?”

“Hmm, well, Confucius say: ‘White girls who sit on tack get point.’ ”

“Right, never quote Buddha to a Chinaman, I forgot.”

“Cracker.”

“Infidel.”

“Honky.”

“
Oriental.
”

“Forsooth! That stings!”

“If you think we should go then I’ll think about; if not then I think the case is closed,” I say, brushing the jokes aside for the moment. Ted looks at me. He really needs a haircut.

“I just can’t help but think about Phil and his kids, and Janette … and, you know—please don’t hit me—maybe even your mom. If she doesn’t make it here then there’s a chance they made it to the university.”

“I’m trying to get over that. I don’t want to cling to hope for too long. She said three days and that should be long enough but … We have to give her longer,” I tell him, forcing a smile. “After all: woman who fart in church sits in her own pew.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. What is wrong with you?”

I reach across and punch him in the shoulder. It’s better than a slap; it makes him fall over, groaning theatrically and clutching his arm. Outside, through the curtains, through the glass, I can hear the undead making their slow, determined march down the street. I know what direction they’re going. West. West toward the campus. I wonder if they can sense the bodies there, the feast to come … Or maybe they’re mustering outside our door, coming for us instead.

Or maybe they’ve found my mom and her fate is already sealed.

We stay. For now we stay in here, safe, uncertain, huddled for warmth.

Tomorrow is Phil’s birthday. Holly and I are going to try and make a cake somehow. Zack has asked if we can listen to the radio together again. I can’t for the life of me think of a good reason to turn him down.

COMMENTS

Brooklyn Girl says:

October 4, 2009 at 8:36 pm

Lost one of our own today, my cousin. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill him so we locked him outside. He’s scratching to get in, to … It doesn’t matter. He’s not himself anymore.

Allison says:

October 4, 2009 at 8:55 pm

Condolences, that’s the worst. You can’t help him now but that doesn’t make it any easier. Are your supplies holding up? Did the bodega deliver?

Brooklyn Girl says:

October 4, 2009 at 9:10 pm

Rations are fine, especially now that we’re down a man. I’m worried we didn’t check the apartment stairwells thoroughly enough. We’ll tackle that tomorrow. Hopefully by then Gary will have stopped trying to get back in.

     
Isaac says:

     
October 4, 2009 at 10:23 pm

     Put Gary out of his misery. He can’t thank you but he would if he could.

Isaac says:

October 6, 2009 at 7:26 am

Allison? Everything still okay?

Brooklyn Girl says:

October 6, 2009 at 10:23 am

Damn. Losing Gary was bad enough. Please tell me you guys are still going strong!

October 6, 2009—Things Fall Apart

Sorry, guys. My long silence wasn’t intentional. When the shit hits the fan I can’t exactly dash off an entry. It’s hard to be coherent when you’re chopping at a zombie with one hand and typing with the other. So I’ll try to catch you up. Please forgive any omissions or foggy bits; my mind is still reeling.

*   *   *

“Any sign of her yet?” Ted asked. This was yesterday.

“Jesus, no, okay? Don’t you think when I see her I’ll say something?”

“Sorry. I just thought … I don’t know.”

“She’ll make it. She has to. Maybe I’ve jinxed it. I have to stop watching the street.”

I appreciated Ted’s concern but it was getting exhausting. I know that soon I might have to confront the possibility that my mom is gone, that she’s never coming to find me. I’m not ready for that yet. I know my mom and she’s a fighter and if I’m the prize at the end of the rainbow then she won’t give up without a struggle. She wouldn’t want me to dwell on the possibility of death, not when there’s so little life left to embrace.

And it’s not that I’m morbid, really—I just have a healthy outlook on death. Even as a child I didn’t see what the big deal was. I had confronted death early on. My dad and older brother died in a car crash when I was three and a half. It was then that I learned the phrase “They didn’t suffer” meant something, but the phrase “They’ve gone to a better place” did not. I didn’t for a moment, even at a very young age, believe that wherever they had gone was better than being alive and with us. It seemed insulting to me that people could say that, that strangers, even well-meaning ones, could smile and pat my head and imply that my dad and brother would rather be in heaven than with Mom and me.

And so I learned an important lesson: things were and then they simply stopped being. I didn’t agree with the popular opinion that death was something to get bent out of shape about. But I’ve reversed that stance on death. I no longer think that it’s okay, that it’s not something to get worked up about.

We lost one of our own, one for sure and maybe more.

Holly and I started in on Phil’s birthday cake bright and early that day. We weren’t sure how many attempts we would need so we decided that it would be best to leave the entire morning and afternoon open for trial and error. Don’t ever attempt to make a cake on a hibachi. Just don’t. Anyway, we did. The batter part of it was easy, really, since Ms. Weathers was apparently a proficient baker. Flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, vegetable oil—all of that was easy to find. Eggs and milk were trickier, but they magically appeared at midmorning.

Zack came into the kitchen breathless, his arms full to overflowing with cans of Parmalat and a broken off carton of eggs.

“Where the hell did you find that?” I asked, watching him carefully drop the milk and eggs down onto the counter. He wiped the back of his head with his sleeve. I remember he was sweating despite the intense cold that persisted everywhere—outside, inside, in your bones. His green eyes flashed with mischief as he nodded vaguely toward the window.

“Out there.”

“
Out there?
You’re telling me you went out to get this shit for a birthday cake? Are you insane?”

“You needed them, right? You can’t make a cake without eggs and milk.”

“Well …
yeah
, but … Christ…”

“Come on,” he says, touching my shoulder, “don’t be like that. I’m fine, see?” He turned a cheeky little pirouette, the afghan bundled around his shoulders swinging out like a cape. Holly stared wide-eyed at him and I can’t say I blamed her. To be out there, alone, among the undead … But if Zack could go out and come back then my mom could too.

“Are you sure you’re okay? You didn’t get scratched? Bitten?”

“I’m fine,” he repeated, his smile fading. “A thank-you would be nice.”

“Thank you,” I blurted out, shaking my head at his stunt. “But don’t do that again.”

He leaned in and kissed my cheek. His beard rasped and it made me go cold all over. Holly moved closer; I didn’t notice it until she was practically breathing down my neck. Zack disappeared down the hall and we were left standing there, straining to breathe, to say something. I still can’t imagine him darting between the overturned cars, the fallen lampposts, the broken mailboxes … It seems absurd, impossible, and all of it for a cake.

I think that’s when I felt my first premonition of danger.

“Are there any clean bowls left?” I asked Holly, turning away from the hall. I didn’t want her to see how shaken I was but it was too late.

“We can take a break,” she told me gently, rubbing my back.

“No way. Third time’s the charm, right?” I said, trying to brighten up. We dumped one of our failed experiments into a plastic bag and measured out the sugar, flour and salt again. I could see her hands shaking as she cracked two eggs into a bowl and whisked in a few cups of milk. I made frosting out of milk and powdered sugar and set it by the window to keep it cool. From the bedroom I could hear the radio. Ted kept it on all morning, fascinated, obsessed with listening. They’d started playing music intermittently, mostly cheerful, inoffensive oldies. No one needs the Cure right now.