MARTians (4 page)

I wrap myself in the old towel that we hide away in case someone will be viewing the house. The towels on the racks, like the little soaps by the sink, never get used. They are props. I’ve smelled the soaps shaped like roses, and I’m convinced that using them would give a person a rash, so I don’t feel deprived. And as for this towel, it has been to the pool and had a lot of other adventures the perfect towels never will. Right now, this adventure towel gets to be what I wear instead of clothes.

I hang the suit in my closet. At least there it won’t look as abandoned as it would stranded in AnnaMom’s empty walk-in. She used to laugh about how the bedroom she had when she was a kid was smaller than the closet she had now. But now she doesn’t have a bedroom or a closet; she is in some place, driving down the highway. If she sleeps in a bed, it will be a strange bed. She is between homes, homeless.

I have been in that place too, but I don’t remember it. I was a baby back then, when Anna Meric left that other home where I had grown from a bean into a significant burden.

I think maybe Anna Meric always had more confidence in the future than I have. She’s invented a new life for herself, found a new home, a couple of times. But I was always just along for the ride. I never had to decide what happened next. Even now, all I have to do is put some clothes on, go downstairs to the kitchen, and pull last night’s Yummy Bunny leftovers out of the fridge, but I’m just standing here wrapped in an old towel, wishing I would hear the rattle of the garage door as it opened. And then AnnaMom would come in and say,
Zoë, baby, I’m home.

“Whoever was knocking at the door didn’t want to stop.”

I am reading the book Ms. Brody gave me. It is a story about a brave spaceman who has traveled by rocket ship to Mars. That’s who is knocking on the door, the spaceman. The pages are brittle and brownish. It was written so long ago that people thought people might use a rocket to fly to Mars, knock on a door, and expect an answer.

Talk about rude. The guy shows up uninvited, acts all-important, and calls the woman inside a Martian even though that word means nothing to her; it isn’t what she calls herself. After the woman slams the door in his face, he starts knocking again. I can hear him knocking. Really, I can. Someone is knocking on
my
front door.

AnnaMom would not need to knock. She knows the combination to the door. The real estate agent would not need to knock either. She knows the combination too. She can get in here whenever she wants — that’s why it’s important for the house to be show-ready every second. It is hard, though, to imagine anyone who would want to see the house now. Houses show better in the morning light. All the drapes and blinds should be open and strategic lamps should be on . . . that’s what sells, sells, sells. But now it is dark and I’ve closed the blinds and I have only one lamp on to spill a puddle of light on the page I’m reading.

“Whoever was knocking at the door didn’t want to stop.”
I read the sentence again, and the knocking goes on,
PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK . . . PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK
. . . I pull my towel around me tighter and go to stand by the door. I peek at the security vid display. It is too dark out there to see. If I switch the porch light on, whoever is there will know . . . what? I don’t know, but it frightens me, the thought of them, whoever they are, knowing.

“Hey, you, it’s me!” says a voice on the other side of the door.

That clears things up. That means nothing. That could be said by anyone to anyone. It could be said by a coyote to a cat, by a spaceman to a Martian, by . . .

“Hey, do you got water? I need a shower. The water’s gone at my house. I see you got electric, so, if you got water, can I, please?”

“Mort?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Timmer.”

I turn and push the buttons on the alarm system and open the locks, one, two, three, then I pull my towel around me tighter once more before I open the door.

“Hello, Mort.”

“Hello, Last Girl. Hey, you do got water, I guess, because look at you, in a towel — and your hair still wet.”

“I have water. And you can come in for a shower, because, thank you for the ride.” And then he steps in the door, and when it shuts, I’m not alone anymore. Although I’m not sure this is better.

“I’ll show you the shower,” I say, and I lead the way upstairs. Then I go into my room, lock the door, and get dressed. I should have done that sooner. If I had, I could have given him this towel, the old adventure towel, and it would have had the new adventure of wiping water off the skin of a new and different body. That’s not going to happen. He’s going to grab one of the perfect prop towels to dry off. It will never be the same after that. It will never be so plush and full of promise. It will never be a virgin towel again.

I wonder if the smart thing to do is to stay in my room with the door locked. It seems a little safer, but the door is just a hollow shell of wood around some air, and the lock, well, it’s enough to keep someone out if they want to respect your privacy, but it isn’t meant for security. It is the sort of security that only exists when you are already secure.

I go downstairs. AnnaMom’s shoes are still where I kicked them off my sore feet. I walk over and pick them up. I should put them away, out of sight. Who is going to see them? Me? MORTimmer when he finishes his shower? The imaginary family looking for the perfect home? I carry the shoes with me into the kitchen, open the trash bin, and drop them into the bottom.

I open the fridge and stare at the takeaway containers. AnnaMom planned ahead when she got so much. Even though she isn’t here, she is still feeding me, making certain that I eat — at least until the leftovers run out.

“Thanks.” He’s standing in the kitchen doorway. His polo shirt is wet, and water is dripping from his hair onto his shoulders.

“I have food,” I say. “There’s enough if you want some.”

“I ate at work,” he says.

“So you’re not hungry?”

“Didn’t say that. Thank you, yes, if you have more than you need.”

“It’s just leftovers.” I pull the containers out of the fridge and notice there is a little bottle of plum wine in there too. I’m not sure why we didn’t drink that last night. Maybe if we had shared plum wine it would have felt less like the end of the world.

I divide the food between two plates and warm them, one at a time, in the microwave. Then I carry mine in to sit on the couch. It’s not really a thing we do anymore, eating on the couch, but the way we do things doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, now that AnnaMom is gone, now that there isn’t a we.

Now there is only me, Zoë, and this other person, MORTimmer, sitting on a couch with plates balanced on our knees.

“What’s that?” he asks, pointing with his chopsticks at the book hovering on the nearly invisible table.

“It’s a graduation present from my homeroom technician.”

“Nobody gave me anything,” he says.

He leans forward and puts his plate on the table. Then he picks up the book and ruffles the pages slowly. He turns to the beginning of the first story and says, “It’s about history, huh? Way back in 1999?”

“I don’t think so. I think when they made it, 1999 was far in the future. They thought we were going to go to Mars.”

“‘When the town people found the rocket at sunset they wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal,’” reads MORTimmer. “The future — or past or whatever it is — it sounds like now.” He sets the book back on the table.

“There is no light at my house, you know; the electric, it’s gone.”

“How long before that happens?” I ask. “How long before they shut off the power when you don’t pay the bill?”

“A month, two, but that doesn’t matter. I can show you how to hook it back up, or I can do it for you.”

“Well, why don’t you just hook yours back up?”

“Because it’s gone. Somebody came and stripped the wires out of the walls. They took some of the plumbing too. You know, to sell. So, no water and no electric. It’s pretty much that way in all these houses now.”

“They steal wires?”

“Yes.”

“And they will steal that way from my house?”

“After a while. I think they wait until nobody is home most of the time.”

“Who would buy a house that had been ruined like that?”

“The same people who wanted the houses here before they were ruined: nobody. Nobody is going to live in these houses ever again. When you give up and move on, it’s over. Actually, it doesn’t matter if you give up or not. It’s over. Last Girl, you are the last person in the last living house in Terra Incognita.”

“This is good,” says MORTimmer. “I get tired of eating nothing but cereal and the food from the AllMART Eateria. It tastes the same every time, you know? So, yeah, there’s variety to choose from, but it never changes. When my Grammalita made soup, it was different every time. Sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was the best soup ever, but it was always a surprise. There are no surprises at the Eateria. Every burrito is exactly like every other burrito. That’s the AllMART way.”

“My mom never made soup. She was too tired after work for cooking. And there were only the two of us.”

“There were seven of us.”

“Big family.”

“Not anymore. My family is the same size as yours, now. Only one.”

I think my family is still two of us, even if AnnaMom isn’t here. She is . . . somewhere. She exists.

His plate is clean.

“I’ll take that,” I say. When I get to the kitchen, I think I’m going to scrape the plates and put them in the dishwasher, but I don’t. I just drop them into the garbage on top of the shoes.

“You figure things out fast.” MORTimmer has followed me.

“Do you want some plum wine? It’s cold.”

“Is it good?”

“I think it’s good.”

“I’ll trust you.”

One of the kitchen lights is focused on the wineglasses hanging from slender stems. When the imaginary family sees them, they will be enchanted by their party sparkle. I open the little bottle and pour it into two glasses so we each have half.

When I hand his glass to him, he holds it out in an expectant way, so I clink my rim against his. I think we are supposed to say something too, but what?

“I’m glad you trusted me,” says MORTimmer. “I’m glad you aren’t still sitting in that bus shelter. I was worried about you. It’s hard, I know, at first. I’m glad you let me help you.”

I’m not sure I trust him. I got in his car. I opened my front door when I was dressed in nothing but my adventure towel. Those things are true, but those things are not equal to trust.

Soon, the plum wine is gone. I hold out my hand and MORTimmer surrenders his empty glass. Then I throw both glasses, hard, into the sink, where they shatter into an entirely new sort of sparkle party under the lights. I take down two more glasses and throw them too. Very pretty. Very satisfying.

“I need to go now,” says MORTimmer. “Graveyard shift.”

I follow him to the door, tap on the security pad. 1-2-2-6 A-2-Z, Anna to Zoë.

“I’ll come back in the morning,” he says. “They might call you tomorrow about the job, but if they don’t, don’t worry. They might take until Monday.” Then he walks away across the cul-de-sac to his car where it is parked in front of the bone-white house where he lived with his big family, even a grandmother who made soup. I never noticed when they were there. Now they are gone. There is nothing to see. I shut the door. I pick up my dead butterfly of a book.

The daylilies that bloomed today are wadding themselves into little damp wads. The ones that want to bloom tomorrow are waiting for the sun.

I climb the stairs, and while I do, I imagine hard as I can that this is just a night when AnnaMom needs to work late. She called. Yes, she called like she always called, to tell me
Just go to bed, Zoë, baby. I’ll be there in the morning.
But I can’t quite remember it enough to believe it.
You know I love you, Zoëkins,
whispers imaginary AnnaMom.

“How much do you love me, AnnaMom?”

I love you 37 pink socks and a bowl of cereal. I love you 12 stair steps, 9 long months plus 15 years, 5 months, and 25 days,
whispers imaginary AnnaMom. Her math is exactly right. That was how much she loved me.

I stand beside my bedroom window and look out. What I see is dark. There are no lights in the windows of the houses of Terra Incognita. Even the streetlights have gone dark because there is no one on the street to pay to keep them shining.

In the canyon between my house and the house next door, dark shapes are moving through the shadows. Animals. Not pets. There aren’t any pets in Terra Incognita anymore. There used to be. But then the time for moving came, and pets were a complication. So the animals got left behind. Maybe it was supposed to be temporary, but it wasn’t. The ones that waited died, and the ones that lived went wild. Cats did better than dogs. There were dogs next door, which barked for a while in the garage and then, I guess, died. AnnaMom said it was wrong to leave those animals behind. She tried calling to get animal police to come and collect them, but we didn’t have the extra money. I thought maybe we should just open the garage door, but AnnaMom said we couldn’t take the chance. Those were guard dogs trained to bite, maybe. And now they were hungry. We couldn’t take the chance. We just had to wait. It only took a few days, and then the barking stopped.

Far away, over the horizon, there is a glow of lights from the parking lots of AllMART. There are still people there. But here? I am the last girl in the last living house. I am Zoë Zindleman. I’m used to being the last one. It gives me time to think, but right now, I don’t know what to think, so I pick up the book and start reading again.

On imaginary Mars, butterflies made of fire drink nectar from crystal blossoms. Here in the last living house in Terra Incognita, there are broken wineglasses in the sink.