Black River Falls (4 page)

“Hey! You all right?”

A woman's voice tugged me back toward the alley. I didn't open my eyes, didn't look up. Whoever she was, I hoped she'd just go away. I wanted to be left alone, wanted to stay where I was, with you, but she didn't leave.

“Kid?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“Funny. You don't look fine, hon.”

That voice. I lifted my head and opened my eyes. Sunlight poured around the silhouette of a woman standing at the mouth of the alley. She took a step forward.

It was Mom.

I 
SAT UP SLOWLY
and flattened my back against the wall. My mask was sitting beside me, but something stopped me from putting it on.

“I'm okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

I'd spent three days after the outbreak searching for her, but this was the first time I'd actually seen her since that night. She was thinner than she used to be, and her skin was a deeper brown, as if she'd been spending a lot of time outside. I looked at her left hand and saw that her wedding band was gone. I tried to remember if she'd already stopped wearing it before the sixteenth.

The biggest change was her hair. Remember how when we were kids she'd always talk about ditching the chemicals and going natural? Well, she'd finally done it. It looked like she'd chopped it down to her scalp before letting it grow back. Since she was a quarantine away from any relaxer, it was coming in as a half-inch halo of tiny curls. It suited her, highlighting her big eyes and the sharp angles of her face.

“Well, if you're sure you're okay . . .”

Mom turned toward the wave of people heading for the park.

I scrambled to my feet, resisting the urge to close the distance between us. “Maybe I'm just hungry.”

I glanced at a big straw bag hanging from her shoulder. When we were kids, she never left the house without a snack in her purse. Apples. Rice cakes slathered with peanut butter. Remember how she said low blood sugar turned us into monsters? Mom dipped one hand into her bag. My heart leaped a little when she drew out a granola bar and tossed it to me. I rechecked the distance between us and then moved into the sunlight near the mouth of the alley.

“My name's Cardinal,” I said. “Cardinal Cassidy.”

Once the Guard got the town under control, their first order of business had been to try to put everything back the way it was. Tell people their names. Reintroduce them to their families. But when I said my name, there wasn't so much as a wrinkled eyebrow to suggest that Mom recognized it. Had they missed her?

There was a shout from somewhere in the crowd. She turned toward it.

“Nice to meet you, Cardinal. But I better get going.”

“No, wait a second. Please. I have to—”

The sound of engines cut me off. Three Guard trucks rumbled by. Mom mixed in with the few infected still on the street as the rest ran out ahead of the trucks. I called out to her again, but if she heard me, she didn't turn around. The last thing I saw was a flash of her short dark hair as she melted into the crowd.

The next thing I remember is sitting on the hill overlooking Monument Park. My mask was strapped on tight and my hands were sweating inside my gloves.

By then a few thousand infected were pressed shoulder to shoulder behind the National Guard trucks. They moved in swells, surging forward and then just as suddenly pulling back. I dropped my head onto my bent knees and squeezed my eyes shut.

As soon as I did, I was right back in our living room in Brooklyn before we'd moved to Black River. It was a typical Saturday morning. You and I on the floor mashing buttons on the controllers of a beat‑up old Xbox. Dad behind us, hunching his giant frame over that tiny desk in the corner he called his office. He'd be sketching furiously and bouncing his head to The Clash so hard that his mane of blond hair danced over his shoulders.

Mom was sprawled out on our worn-out blue couch, exhausted from a night of dance rehearsals followed by a late shift at that hipster bar with the fifteen-dollar hamburgers. She had a book tented on her chest, but like always, she was watching us play and enthusiastically yelling out useless bits of advice.

“Go over there! Now kill that guy! No! Not that guy,
that
guy! Tennant, come on.
Just kill. All. The. Guys!
”

“Shut
up,
Mom!”

My eyes popped open at a series of shouts down in the park. An old man with white hair and a tattered black overcoat was elbowing his way through the crowd, picking up speed as he moved away from the trucks. He turned to look behind him and slammed into the postal table, sending stacks of letters flying into the air like confetti. Everyone reared back in anger as he righted himself, but he ignored them and ran on. I looked closer. The black coat and filthy clothes. The scraggly beard. It had to be Freeman Wayne, Black River's self-proclaimed town librarian. I'd never seen the guy before, but he matched Greer's description exactly. What was he doing?

Whatever it was, it had attracted the attention of the Guard. They started moving toward him but stopped suddenly when they saw five of the men in the blue hazmat suits approaching him as well. A few words were exchanged and the guardsmen backed off, allowing the strangers in blue to take hold of Freeman. Why would the Guard do that? As Freeman was led away, the crowd pulsed and squirmed like a nest of bees that'd just been poked.

I couldn't stand it another minute, so I went down the opposite side of the hill, ending up on an empty two-lane road. Even with a barrier between me and the park, the air still pulsed with the energy of the crowd. I passed a rusty playground and the old ice-cream shop and then crossed over into a warren of boarded-up houses.

The yards were overrun, choked with weeds and wildflowers in red and yellow and blue. Honeysuckle spilled out onto sidewalks, filling the air with a sweetness so syrupy it smelled like rot. I pictured Mom in her sun hat and gloves, gardening manual in hand, ordering the two of us around that first year in Black River.
Cut this! Water that! Ferti­lize over here!
She'd spent weeks making fun of our yard-obsessed neighbors, but there we were, beating back the sprawl of weeds to make room for roses and lavender and that yellow spidery thing that nearly took over the entire lawn. After years of living in Brooklyn, it seemed that having soil under our feet instead of grease-shellacked concrete had made Mom deranged. What would she think if she knew how useless all of it had been?

I turned down streets at random, following some internal compass with a needle that spun and spun. Soon the sounds of the park were gone, replaced by wind blowing through untended grass and down empty streets. I passed our high school and the library and the now abandoned vintage store where Mom used to go.

I knew I couldn't blame the infected for not remembering. But how many times had I seen lightning flashes of the person Greer used to be? Like when some random guardsman was giving him a hassle and he'd clench his fists and grit his teeth. For a second he was that kid from the bus stop all over again. Didn't there have to be places like that within all the infected? Like knots in a length of wood that could be sanded down but never erased completely. And if there were, how was it possible that
I
wasn't one of those places for Mom?

As I came around a corner, a crow shot out of a tree with a shriek. Startled, I jumped back. That's when I realized I was standing on our front lawn.

I hadn't been back to the house since the sixteenth. It had almost entirely escaped the chaos that raged through town that night. A few soot marks marred the white porch columns, and the attic window was broken, but other than that, it was unchanged.

A bank of clouds passed over the sun, sending a pins-and-needles chill up my spine. I scanned the yards around me and peered down the gaps between the houses across the street. They were empty. I was alone.

A voice in the back of my head, yours, told me to turn around and leave, but I didn't—couldn't, it felt like. It was as if I'd wandered into a stream and the current was dragging me along. I placed one foot on the bottom step and took hold of the railing, then climbed up to the porch. The floor seemed like it was moving beneath me in rounded swells. I steadied myself by staring at the end of a single brass nail hammered into the door, the one Mom used to hang Christmas wreaths and Halloween skeletons. I heard her singing “The Little Drummer Boy.”

I staggered backward. Something brushed against my leg. I looked down and was surprised to see that I was clutching the hunting knife. I didn't remember pulling it out of its sheath, but there was something about that slab of metal in my hand, with its jagged rat's teeth and cutting edge, that made the pitching feel of the floor beneath me go still. I moved down to the kitchen windows. I told myself not to look inside, but even as the thought went through my head, I was lifting my hand to wipe the dust away from the glass.

I could make out the edge of the coffeemaker sitting beside the sink, and the turquoise tops of the chairs that surrounded the marble kitchen island. I remembered Mom spending an entire weekend with those chairs after she brought them home from some secondhand store. Cleaning them, sanding them, coating them with layer after layer of spray paint, and then polishing them until they glowed.

I leaned my forehead against the window and yanked my mask down so I could breathe. Sometimes it seems that all the good things and all the bad things are like vines growing up the side of the same house. There are so many of them, and they're all so tangled up that it's impossible to tell one from the other. It's easy to think you've been saved when really you've been doomed all along.

I should have left right then. I should have turned around and run, but I didn't. I peered inside again. Light from the windows filled that wide-open first floor Mom and Dad loved so much. I could see from the kitchen to the dining room table and beyond, to the stairs at the edge of the living room that went up to the second floor.

I turned and pressed my cheek against the glass. The wall by the front door was marked by streaks of shadow that gleamed thickly as they ran down to the floor and spread out in dark pools. I stared at them for a long time, long enough to realize that they weren't really shadows at all.

I heard bells ringing somewhere out in the neighborhood. No, not bells. Wind chimes.

The inside of the house swirled into streaks of turquoise and white. My knife hit the ground and the next thing I knew my knees crumpled and my stomach seized, folding me in half. I vomited acid onto the porch and then fell onto my side and buried my head in my hands. I grasped for the hush of the snowfall and the rustle of pages as they went from your hand to mine, but every time I thought I had it, my fingers slipped and the memory went hurtling away. The last thing I saw before darkness rushed in was the silver blade of a knife.

“D
UDE! CARDINAL!
Slow down!”

“Leave me
alone!
”

I was running down Water Street toward Brooklyn Bridge Park, and you were struggling to catch up. I hadn't stopped or slowed down since Mom and Dad announced our impending move to Black River.

“You totally freaked out Mom and Dad!”

“Good!”

“Cardinal!”

“They freaked
me
out, Tennant! Didn't they freak you out?”

“No!”

I stopped and turned around. You tried to hold on to the lie, but it took only a couple seconds of being stared at by a pissed-off thirteen-year-old before you threw up your hands.

“All right! Fine! So maybe it was a little abrupt.”

“A
little?
They looked like crazy people!”

You laughed. “They aren't crazy. They're just excited. This is
huge
for them. Dad's wanted to quit that stupid advertising job for years. Selling the Brotherhood to Marvel means he can!”

“But what about Mom?”

“What has she wanted to do ever since she had to stop dancing? Open her own studio. She can do that up there.”

I crossed my arms and scowled at the sidewalk. We were just a couple blocks from the park. I could hear kids screaming and the ice-cream truck's jingle.

“Look,” you said with a sigh. “You're freaked. I get it. How about you let me buy you an ice-cream cone—”

“I'm not
nine,
Tennant.”

“I know you're not nine, Card.
I
want a cone. Okay? Let's get a couple, then we'll sit down and figure this out.”

I looked over my shoulder to where the East River appeared and disappeared between the buildings at the edge of the park. What choice did I have? If I started running again, pretty soon we'd both be swimming.

Minutes later we were sitting on a bench watching the skateboarders whiz by while tourists snapped pictures of the bridge. I worked on my soft serve while you ticked off the pros.