Odds Against Tomorrow (25 page)

At rest stops, fast-food chains donated value meals. The bus passengers, blandly dipping their french fries into ketchup splats, didn’t speak very much. For Jane, revived by three cups of coffee, the long silences were maddening, a source of stress. She filled the vacuum with talk about her mother in Winnetka, a fastidious woman who forbade Jane from playing in the sandbox.

“Fear of germs,” she said. “When I came home from school I had to scrub my hands twice with soap and hot water. My little washerwoman hands, raw and red.”

“You didn’t get sick, though, did you?”

“That wasn’t the end of it—after the soap and hot water she sprayed me with disinfectant. Of course it didn’t really matter if my hands were dirty because everything was covered in vinyl. Slips over the furniture. But I did get sick. Often.”

“Because you cheated. You told her you’d washed your hands when you hadn’t.”

“No—because I
didn’t
cheat. That was the problem. I never built up a proper immune system. When I was given the chicken pox vaccine, I actually contracted full-blown chicken pox. The infectious disease specialist at Skokie Hospital said mine was the first case in Chicagoland in a decade.”

The shoulders on I-95 were plugged with cars. Many people had run out of gas; others had given up and, in some cases, pitched tents in the median, waiting for the traffic to subside. The exhaust was so dense on the road that it seeped into the bus’s air circulation system. It thickened into a large pillow, and the pillow pressed into Mitchell’s face, stopping his breath. He felt like he was being asphyxiated and he was only surprised that nobody else seemed affected by the recirculating exhaust—nobody was passing out or keeling over in the aisles. Nobody on the bus, in fact, was doing much of anything. The traffic, or traumatic shock, or just pure exhaustion had left the refugees in a narcotized stupor. They leaned against each other to sleep, or stared out the windows with expressions of horror and wonderment, preparing, perhaps, for the next crisis.

At the New Hampshire border, Jane began calling FutureWorld clients to introduce them to Future Days. The clients had heard Mitchell’s voice on television and radio, had seen the
Wall Street Journal
piece. Charnoble’s messages and e-mails, frantic coming on enraged, went unreturned.

But Jane’s constant phone chatter, her interviews and her repeated pitch to the FutureWorld clients she was busily poaching, finally became too much. Mitchell took the phone from her hand and turned it off.

“Why’d you do that?” She looked wounded.

“Let’s take a break.”

Jane sighed. “I suppose I was getting a little carried away. It’s just … incredible. How things can turn.”

“What do you mean?”

“A year ago today I was at Lippincott Library doing research for my thesis.”

“A day ago you were an analyst. Now you’re a mogul.”

“It’s been a long day.”

She needed to talk, needed chatter. It was almost a compulsion with her. The phone calls to clients were as much a manifestation of nervous energy as shrewd business planning. He couldn’t fault her. Set adrift, in a bus headed into unknown territory, it helped to grasp onto something familiar. Besides, he was responsible, after all, for the mess they were in.

That was the one thing unspoken between them. He should have told her to leave the city as soon as the storm came. But he had said no such thing. He did the opposite, in fact: when she asked him to wait for her, he had agreed. Very well, but—let’s be honest now—he wasn’t just being timid, or thoughtless, or kind. He was succumbing to a different voice, a whispering voice inside his own head. It was a reasonable, patient voice. It said, if he had to be trapped in this hurricane, wouldn’t it be nice to be trapped with Jane Eppler?

“And a year from now?” he said.

“Future Days signs its one hundredth client? Two hundredth?”

The bus passed over Memorial Bridge. A sign showing a church steeple in front of brown mountains announced
LEAVING NEW HAMPSHIRE: LIVE FREE OR DIE.
They passed beneath a sad, crooked pine tree, its crown bent like the head of a man whose neck has been snapped. Another sign said
WELCOME TO MAINE: VACATIONLAND.

The traffic slowed to a stop. A hundred yards distant, the interstate passed over what had been, at normal water levels, a marina. The flood had receded, but the boats were stuck on the shore, in trees. A motorboat sat jackknifed across the shoulder, blocking two lanes.

And then he couldn’t think any longer—not a
single second longer
—about Jane or her business plan for Future Days or the horrors they had left behind. For up ahead, on the horizon, loomed Elsa Bruner. And if she were hurtling ever farther into outer space—past constellations and galaxies, pulled by some dark energy, flying faster and faster to the outer reaches of the universe—then she was also becoming larger, vaster, boundless even, drawing into herself all his fears but reflecting nothing.

*   *   *

Portland, though structurally sound, was still damp; the streets shone like black ice. The government booked them into the Eastland Park, a towering 1930s-era redbrick hotel with a grand lobby lit by dim electric candlesticks. The bellhops wore pillbox caps and blazers with brass buttons. Nobody appeared to be staying there besides the bussed-in flood refugees, whose numbers had depleted with every stop after Lowell, Massachusetts. Even Portlanders had fled the storm, headed farther north, into the woods—to Aroostook County, Quebec, Prince Edward Island.

The double room granted to Jane and Mitchell was trying badly to be something it was not. There was a divan upholstered in apricot plush, a crimson-and-yellow-checkered marble table, an oval mirror squatting on curved cane legs. The sense of disorientation was extreme. It wasn’t only that they were in an unfamiliar place; it was another era, an alternate universe. There was a television, but it didn’t work. They had to lie in separate beds, as in a black-and-white movie. Perhaps it was better this way. No missed signals, no ambiguity. Safe.

After the lights went out, just as Mitchell was falling asleep, Jane rose. She stepped over to his bed and lifted his blanket.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

3.

This time, to his surprise, he actually got a ringtone. Then the machine answered. Billy’s voice had a distant, befuddled quality, as if he had been awakened in the middle of a dream.

“I’m afraid … I’m sorry. This is Billy, from Camp Ticonderoga. I’m afraid that we are not able to offer positions—bunks, or, I mean, shelter and food or … water to any more refugees from Tammy. I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re out of space. We ask you please. We have heard that other camps have been set up in Augusta and Bangor and the north country. But we’re overwhelmed. I—I’m sorry.”

An automated voice interrupted to tell Mitchell he could not leave a message because the mailbox was full.

The bus departed Portland at eight in the morning, destination Montreal. It was suddenly full summer again, indigo sky, the windows hot to the touch and fogging from the refrigerated air. Mitchell and Jane were the only passengers to debark at Augusta State Airport, which doubled as the Augusta bus station. There were no airplanes in sight. The terminal was closed. The only vehicle on the runway was a brown station wagon. Its side was crosshatched with scrape marks.

The door to the station wagon opened and a freckled, large-limbed woman clumped out. She wore a baseball hat that struggled to stay perched above her cloud—a feathery, cumulonimbus cloud—of bottle-brown hair. Her face was abnormally tall and creased, a billowing sail of a face. Across her T-shirt was written, in shaky letters,
GENUIS.

“You need a ride?”

“Are you a livery driver?” asked Jane.

“I’m Judy. From two ten Winthrop Street.” She pointed at a row of houses several hundred yards away. “But I’m afraid that will have to do.”

“Can you take us to Starling?”

“Let me guess: Camp Ticonderoga.”

“You know it?”

She chuckled, shaking her head. “I’ve been running people the last two days. Desperate people.”

Mitchell pretended not to notice Jane’s death stare.

“I can take you as far as Kents Hill,” said Judy. “That’s under two miles from the camp. Then you’ll be on your own. I’m not going any deeper.”

What else could they do? They got into the station wagon. It had a warm smell, burnt wood and burnt cigarettes. The interior paneling was simulated wood grain. Judy removed a copy of that morning’s
Kennebec Journal
from the passenger seat to make room for Mitchell. He caught the headline:
TAMMY WAVE CRASHES ON CENTRAL MAINE.
There was a photograph of flood refugees lined up in a tent city that had been erected in downtown Augusta by the local chapter of the Elks Lodge.

“Going rate’s fifty bucks,” said Judy. “Can you pull it?”

“Yes,” said Mitchell, glancing at his Go Bag. After paying for snacks at the vending machine in the Eastland Park lobby, his cash supply was down to $51,996.50. “I can pull it.”

Judy sped off the runway and turned onto Winthrop. They passed graveyards.

“Why won’t you go any farther than Kents Hill?” asked Jane.

Judy caught Jane’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “You never know what happens when you throw a bunch of city people into the woods. They can lose their bearing.” Judy was withholding information—there was a dark suggestion on her face as she turned back to the road. Mitchell was relieved that Jane, in the backseat, didn’t catch it. Otherwise she would have asked Judy to elaborate. And that would have only created more problems. They had already escaped from Hell. It was difficult to imagine that whatever awaited them in Starling could compare with the floating children’s books, cats, corpses. Besides, if Elsa was in some sort of danger, he owed it—to himself, if not to her—to help. And what secrets would be revealed in her letter to him?

“I have nothing against the hippies,” Judy continued. “Heck, I’ll admit it, I even went in eighty-eight to see the Grateful Dead play at Oxford Plains Speedway. But there’s a hundred miles between talking about the land and living on it.”

Augusta gave way to apple orchards and blueberry fields, which yielded to forest. After twenty minutes they reached a fork in the road. Judy stopped the car.

“You have second thoughts,” she said, “call me.”

She tore off the front page of the
Kennebec Journal
and scrawled her phone number.

“I’ll take that.” Jane reached over the seat to snatch the paper from Judy’s fingers. She folded it carefully into her wallet. When she looked up, Mitchell was staring at her.

“I just don’t want it to get lost,” said Jane. She hiccuped.

Judy drove right at the fork. Mitchell and Jane went left onto a dirt road, where they were greeted by a porcupine.

*   *   *

Jane gasped when she saw it, the clumsy black beast with little swords protruding from its swaying haunch.

“After all we’ve been through,” said Mitchell, “this scares you?”

She started laughing. Then, in the space of another hiccup, she was crying.

“Jane?”

She looked down, her hand over her eyes, and the sob passed. After a brisk shake of her head she looked up. Her smile was bright, if insincere. She wiped her eyes.

“Sorry.” She cleared her throat. “That happens sometimes.”

Who was this woman? Had they met?

“Anyway. I’m not
scared
of him.” She indicated the porcupine, who watched from behind a bush. “But why isn’t he scared of us? Aren’t animals supposed to run away when they see people? It’s like he owns the place.”

“By rights he does. You can tell from the way he’s marked the turf.”

His hand on her shoulder, Mitchell guided Jane around a sturdy stack of porcupine feces.

“That’s why I moved to New York,” she said.

“To avoid porcupines.”

“I like my nature domesticated, housebroken, manicured, neutered, fearful. I take that back. I don’t like nature at all. I like buildings and cement and electrical wires.
Love
them. I’d kill for a nice flat stretch of pavement right now. A stoplight. Those little green gates they put around every single tree on the sidewalk.” Jane sniffled one more time and wiped away the last of her tears.

So this was Maine. The air actually did smell like taxicab pine fresheners. Only it was fuller, deeper, rich with wet dirt.

“Listen, Mitchell.” She gave him a sharp look. “I wasn’t very sensitive back in Fort Lee. I’m sorry. I know this matters.”

“I was going to drag you along with me one way or another. I just didn’t realize I’d have to go so far as create a new business.”

“No, that’s not enough. Your sense of loyalty to this girl is impressive. Crazy, definitely. But I respect it. And I’m not just saying that as your new deputy at Future Days. Or because you saved my behind in the storm. I’m saying it as a friend.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“I mean it.”

The road became muddier, sucking at their sneakers. The forest on both sides became thicker. It was choked with gigantic floppy ferns the size of elephant ears, black spruce, and tall firs, their needles shivering with insects.

“I’m not sure what exactly you’re after here,” said Jane, and Mitchell could sense in her voice a coy sexual insinuation that made him uneasy. Because hadn’t he considered it himself—that there was a scenario, not necessarily a best-case scenario but not a worst-case scenario either, in which Mitchell might just stay there with Elsa, at Ticonderoga? That Elsa would come out of her trance and cure him of Fear once and for all, and that she might find comfort in his presence too, and then she might, perhaps, offer herself to him? Right there in the middle of the softball field, surrounded by heirloom tomatoes and zucchini and whatever the hell else they planted there, and she’d want it quickly,
quickly
, before Brugada could strike again—

“I’m not sure what you’re after,” Jane was saying, “but if it all goes bad, I want you to know that you’ve still got me. I may not know how to hunt a moose or grow carrots, but I know how to listen. And I know what you’re worth.”