Due Preparations for the Plague (32 page)

In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions.

Albert Camus,
The Plague

In the darkened room at the Saltmarsh Motel, Lowell and Sam sit in silence.

Lowell smells western Massachusetts in the fall. He smells pine resin. He smells the thirteenth of September, 1987. He remembers what he did the day the plane blew up on the national news. He remembers that he left the school’s common room blindly and drunkenly. Other boys made way for him, he vaguely remembers that, though he told no one his mother had been on the flight. He stumbled down the hall to the only pay telephone in his dorm.

He dialed Washington.

“Your father’s still away, Lowell,” the secretary said. “He hasn’t called in since the hijacking. What message should I give him when he calls?”

“I don’t know,” Lowell said. He hung up.

He walked out through the school grounds and found himself on the highway heading east. It was dark. He passed a green billboard that announced in phosphorescent letters:
BOSTON
90. He realized he must have walked for several hours. Cars passed him. Trucks passed. He decided to hitch a ride. It was only minutes before a pickup stopped.

“Where you headed, kid?” the driver asked. He wore a plaid shirt and a Red Sox baseball cap.

“I don’t know,” Lowell said.

“Are you from the school? You look like a prep school kid.”

Lowell felt he should know the answer to this question, but he could not think of it.

“You running away?” the driver asked.

“I don’t know,” Lowell said.

The driver frowned. “Are you
on
something? Like, are you …?”

“No,” Lowell said firmly.

“Rumor is that school’s a running river of drugs.”

“I’m not on anything,” Lowell said. This certainty felt like an anchor, like the one thing, for the time being, that he knew to be unquestionably true.

The driver scratched his head. “How about I buy you a hamburger?” he said. “There’s a pit stop about ten miles on. Hop in.”

Lowell climbed in. There was a tool kit on the passenger seat, the kind that carpenters wear like an apron. The driver pushed it onto the floor. “Put your feet on it,” he said cheerfully. “Nothing you can hurt.” A pine-scented air freshener in the shape of a Christmas tree dangled from the rearview mirror. The cabin smelled of dog. “Name’s Joel,” the driver said. “What’s yours?”

“Lowell.”

“You in trouble, Lowell?”

“I guess so,” Lowell said.

“Boy kind?” Joel asked. “Girlfriend left you? Got her knocked up?”

Lowell said nothing.

“Feels like the end of the world?” the driver asked sympathetically.

“Yes,” Lowell said.

“It ain’t,” the driver assured him cheerfully. “I know it feels like it, but it ain’t. Hell, I still remember the night I found out my high school sweetheart was cheating on me. I got blind stinking drunk and I borrowed my dad’s car and drove it about one hundred miles an hour. I actually thought about smashing myself into a tree. Make her sorry, you know? Talk about stupid. What I did was hit something on the shoulder, spun out of control, got the fright of my life. Boy, did I suddenly find out how much I wanted to stay alive!

“I was lucky. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but you just lost someone, right?”

“Yes,” Lowell said.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” Lowell said.

“Okay. That’s fine. You go with your gut, kid. You want to tell me her name?”

“My mother,” Lowell said.

“Your mother?”

“She just died.”

“Oh.” Joel had no contribution to make on this subject. “Shit. Well, shit. That’s heavy stuff.”

They drove in silence until the glow of a Shell station came over the highway like a sunrise. “Bathroom,” Joel said. “Meet you in the restaurant.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

But the pines of the state forest rose like a wall just fifty feet from the gas pumps and as soon as Joel disappeared into the men’s room, Lowell walked into the pines. He kept walking. It was cold and he wished he had a warmer jacket. He walked until he was too weary to walk any further, then he made a nest for himself in the spongy pine-straw and curled into it. He slept and dreamed that he was alone in a rowboat without any oars. There were rocks. There was a lighthouse somewhere. There was fog. He could see debris floating past his boat: lost luggage; his father’s books; the Dead Sea Scrolls; a birdcage with doves.

Shipwreck, he realized.

He realized other boats were drifting nearby in the dark.

He could hear his mother calling for help. “Lowell!” she called all night. “Lowell!”

But he had no oars and no light. He could not find her. There was nothing he could do.

He woke to find himself sobbing, his mouth full of spiky needles and earth.

When they found him, he was huddled at the base of a tree, numb with cold. He spent a week in the school infirmary with pneumonia.

All that night, he thinks now—thirteen years and four months later—all that night when she called and called, she was still alive in that black place, sending me doves.

Sam can hear the suck of sea-water through the marsh grasses, but she is not really thinking at all. She feels blank, she is floating, she is seeing hairline cracks and trapdoors in the ceiling of time, jigsaw pieces, images like cirrus clouds scudding across Charleston Harbor. They have no sequence or logic. Visual moments arrive entire, they hover, they shimmer, they go.

Daddy
, she thinks. The sensation of her hand in his is intense. She can feel the slight callus on his index finger. She wants to hang on to him and pull him back. She feels him resist. She feels obscurely angry with him. She is not sure why.

Here she is pulling him along the seafront wall in Charleston …

Here is the harbor and Battery Park … the screaming gulls, the live oaks, the trailing boas of Spanish moss. Here is the house of Grandpa and Grandma Raleigh with its wide verandas and silent black servants offering tea. Here are the sago palms in the courtyard where breakfast is served.

A conversation over toast and coffee comes back to Sam like a riddle she never quite worked out. It seems to have detached itself from her father’s flickering resurrection in the Saltmarsh Motel because he is buttering toast and Grandma Raleigh is saying: Out of the question, John. Samantha can’t visit there alone. Your sister-in-law’s out of the question.

Just for a week, her father says, and he is explaining something about Rosalie needing a break, and Grandma Raleigh is protesting that Rosalie’s loyalty she can understand but John is under no such obligation, and besides, that woman is
louche
, she is
louche
, and her father is laughing and conceding.

Okay, Mother, you win, he says. Lou
is
a bit disreputable. It’s true.

And then Arabella is bringing hot biscuits on a tray and saying, Now what mischief you gettin’ into, l’il miz Sam?

And Grandpa Raleigh says: What kind of a question is that, Arabella? No grandchild of mine …, and Arabella laughs her high Arabella-laugh and says, Yes, sir, that is the truth. No one strays from the straight and narrow when Mr. Raleigh in charge.

And Samantha’s daddy asks: And how is Penny doing these days, Arabella?

And Arabella says: She doing jus’ fine, Mr. Jonathan, jus’ fine.

Cirrus clouds … hurricane clouds … high winds …

Here are Grandpa and Grandma Hamilton in
their
Charleston house with lawns like velvet and a widow’s walk from which you can see Fort Sumter. You see? Grandpa Hamilton says, adjusting his telescope for Sam. First shots in the two great wars: Revolutionary War and the War between the States. They both began here. He hangs his yellow flag, his
DON’T TREAD ON ME
rattlesnake flag, from the live-oak tree by the gate. And on the veranda in the white wicker swing, Grandma Hamilton says to Sam’s mother, You’re such a blessing to us, Rosalie, especially since your sister broke our hearts.

And here is the gymnasium somewhere in Germany, here are the cots where the children are wetting their beds, where all the children are dreaming bad dreams by night, and playing with matches or crash-diving their camp cots by day, here are the relatives arriving, here is Lou—Aunt Lou—who holds Sam and smothers her and sobs until Sam kicks her because she can’t breathe, and here are Grandpa and Grandma Raleigh also, and here is Grandma Raleigh pulling Sam out of Lou’s arms … and here is the courtroom. and here are the custody battles … and here are the schools where Sam is always in trouble, and here is the boarding school where she is sent “to get straightened out,” and here she is running away to Lou and screaming at Lou and throwing things and here she is not knowing why, and running away again, and here are the police, and here is the courtroom, and here are the Hamiltons and the Raleighs who don’t speak to each other any more, and here is the boarding-school library and the teacher who shows Sam the newspaper articles,
terrorists … Flight 64 …
and here she is wolfing down history and getting obsessed with finding answers instead of getting into trouble … and here she is filing access-to-previously-classified-information briefs related to Operation Black Death …

And here she is …

Here she is in bigger trouble than ever before in her life.

“I have to call my children,” Lowell says urgently, reaching for the phone. “I have to tell them where I am.”

Sam stares at him. “Lowell, it’s nearly midnight.”

Lowell starts dialing. “They’ll know, the way I did. Kids know. They’ll know I’m in trouble.”

“But they’ll be asleep.”

“They’ll be having nightmares,” he says. “They need to know I’m okay.” He hangs up abruptly. “I’m
not
okay. My God, what am I thinking of? By now, Rowena’s phone’s probably tapped.”

Samantha goes to the VCR and pushes
EJECT
. She puts the videotape back into its plastic cassette and snaps it shut. She hands it to Lowell.

“What are we going to do with these?” he wants to know. “My God, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “I feel as though – –” She casts about for a metaphor equal to her state of numb disequilibrium. “I feel like a tornado survivor.”

“It’s still twisting,” Lowell says. “It got my father. It’s going to get us.”

“No,” Sam says. She makes a fist and thumps the top of the television set. “It won’t get us. It won’t. We have to get the tapes out of the country.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll think of something.”

Lowell goes nervously to the window that looks toward the main office. He parts the drapes a fraction of an inch and peers out. “Shit!” he says. “This is it, this is it. We’ve had it.”

“What? What is it?”

“There’s another car outside the office. That guy’s called someone.”

“Don’t panic. We need to stay calm.” Sam joins him at the narrow slit between the drapes. “Probably just someone else checking in—”

“It’s a
police
car!” Lowell says. “Oh shit. We’re not even going to get out of here alive.”

“There’s no movement,” Sam whispers. “No one’s coming this way.”

“What am I going to do with these?” Lowell is stuffing the tapes into the pillowcase of his childhood, then pushing the knights on chargers frantically into the backpack, prodding at boxy shapes that sprawl and slip. The zipper jams. A loop of pillowcase is caught in its metal teeth. Lowell is sweating. He slides his arms through the straps and holds the backpack like a fevered baby over his heart. He tugs at the zipper to no avail. He wraps his arms around the gaping lips of the bag like someone with a slashed abdomen trying to hold internal organs in place.

“They’re coming out of the office,” Sam whispers. “They’re standing under the floodlight. They’re looking in this direction. We have to get out the back way.”

“There’s no door that side. There’s only one way out.”

“There’s the window.”

“It doesn’t open.”

“The ventilators,” Sam says. A large fixed window of double-glazed glass faces the marsh, but beneath it are two sliding panes with removable screens. The sliders are small. Fully open, they leave a space measuring just eighteen inches high and two feet long. Sam unhooks the screen and lets it drop. She puts her right leg through and wriggles out. “Lucky we’re on ground level,” she says. “Give me the bag.”

Lowell hesitates. The bundle feels like an extension of his body.

“For heaven’s sake,” Sam hisses. “You want to save it or not?”

“You have to hold it closed,” he says, anxious. “Don’t let anything fall out.” He passes it over with some reluctance, and Sam slips her arms through the straps.

“Got it. Be quick.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“Yes, you can. Suck yourself in.”

Lowell gets stuck at the hips.

“Wriggle around,” Sam hisses. “Push yourself out.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

And he does catapult out like an overweight baby from a narrow birth canal.

“Let’s go.”

There’s enough moonlight to see their way to the dock.

“No time to stay dry,” Lowell says.

“You’re right.”

They wade into sucking mud and freezing water, pulling the boat as they go. As soon as it floats, they clamber in.

“Quick. Over there. Pull, pull,
pull
,” and the oars bring them mercifully to a clump of rushes standing five feet high above the tide line. They push their way in between the canes, using the oar like a pole.

“Just in time,” Lowell breathes.

From between the canes, they see the light in their motel room go on.

“Now we’re in for it,” Lowell says. “They’ll call for floodlights and dogs.”

“Maybe not. But we need to push further in. We’ll have to stay here. I wouldn’t dare try to find the boathouse in the dark.”

They are now so deep inside a clicking forest of canes that they can see no lights at all from the motel.

“To be rational about this,” Sam says, “the proprietor probably thought it was fishy that we didn’t have a car. Probably afraid of theft. That’s probably why he called the police.”

“I don’t believe you,” Lowell says. “If you’d seen my apartment—”

“There’s no way anyone could trace us to here. There’s just no way.”

“Even if that were true,” Lowell says, “once that officer calls in a report …”

“If they’re watching for you,” Sam says.

“We
know
they’re watching for me.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

“Once that cop calls in, they’ll have our ID. They’ll have our last known whereabouts. They’ll get your car registration and put out a trace. We won’t get past the first gas station.”

“I’m sure they already have my car registration and plates. I’m sure they’ve had that for months.”

“You
see
?” Lowell says. “So we could have been followed to the boathouse. We could have been traced to the motel.”

“I suppose.”

“We’ll never make it out of here,” Lowell says lugubriously. “We’ll be reported as a boating accident.”

“Okay.” Sam makes a decision. “That’s it. We’re going to try to get to the boathouse in the dark.”

“Give me the tapes,” Lowell says. He manages to get the zipper unstuck and then closed. He wears the tapes where he can feel his heartbeat against them.

“We’ve got to keep pushing,” Sam says, “till we get to a channel on the other side of this clump. You better hope and pray there
is
a channel.”

Exertion calms them. The canes click softly as they pass.

“Listen!” Lowell says.

They rest their oars.

“I thought I heard dogs.”

“Wouldn’t help them. They couldn’t follow our scent over water.”

“I think I see blackness ahead, instead of canes.”

“Good sign.”

“Channel!” Lowell says. “We made it.”

“Okay. The boathouse is in this general direction.” Sam points. “We have to hope the tide’s still high. We have to hope the channels take us there.”

The soft slap of the oars is comforting. The marsh is noisy with creatures and birds. Overhead is nothing but stars and the occasional slow flapping of black wings. In the dark, Sam almost misses the boathouse. It looms sudden as a great rock and she gives a small cry and then guides the boat between the rotting boards.

“Shh,” she warns, and they sit for some minutes rocking gently in the slip, but they hear no sounds from overhead.

Sam’s car is still where she left it.

“I’m going to drive without lights till we get to the highway,” she says. “Then it’s high speed straight back to Washington.”

“I don’t know,” Lowell says. “If a call is put out for your car … All it takes is one officer spotting you.”

“What do you suggest?”

“We should switch cars.” Sam stares at him. “Abandon this one,” he explains.

“I hope you’re not suggesting
steal
,” she says. “Just what we need. A felony on our records.”

“Greyhound,” he says. “I mean Greyhound. That’s what I had to do.”

“Okay,” she concedes. “But for that we’ve got to get to Washington first. There’s no Greyhound stop closer than that.” She is thinking fast as she drives. “I don’t want to leave my car in the Greyhound terminal like a public announcement.”

“Leave it in a supermarket lot.”

“A twenty-four-hour market, yes. Okay. They never tow at those, so it’ll take them longer to notice a car that never leaves.”

“And there’ll be an ATM. We can get more cash.”

“That’ll leave a trail that’s very easy to follow.”

“No choice,” Lowell says.

“I guess you’re right. We’ll leave the car, get cash, and take a cab to the Greyhound terminal. Brilliant thinking, Lowell.”

“Then what?”

“Good question,” Sam says. “Well, we could go Greyhound to Canada.”

“They’ll be watching the borders. We’d never get through.”

“You’re probably right. Think of something.”

“I’m thinking. I’m trying to think of something.”

They are slipping through darkness, the car like a soft-purring feline on the hunt. From time to time, the lights of a farmhouse wink and shimmer. There is a dusting of snow on the road, and trees lean toward them and toss in the chill January wind. The stars are like bits of ice.

“I know!” Sam says. “Lou! My aunt Lou. I’ll call her before we leave Washington.
She
can fly to Paris with the tapes, because no one will be watching her. Not yet, anyway.”

“You hope,” Lowell says.