Thirst (2 page)

He wanted to run hard again, to sprint past them and make it back to Laura—to grab her and press his lips to the side of her face at the relief of being home. He could already smell the skin along the edge of her ear, could feel the cold nick of her earring. But he couldn’t run—not now after this group of neighbors had spotted him.

He’d seen some of them before, but he didn’t know their names. He hadn’t learned their names in the five years he’d lived there.

“There’s an accident on Twenty-nine,” he said as if he’d heard it on the radio. He wasn’t breathing as hard as he had been before.

“Yeah? Power’s out here. All the cell service is down, too.” The man speaking to him wore a wide-brimmed hat with mesh ventilation above the band, the kind a scientist might wear in the field. Both his shirt and shorts were made of the same
quick-drying material and had many pockets. He carried a two-million-candle flashlight the size of a car battery.

Next to him was an older woman whom Eddie had seen posting signs about community street sweeping. He’d seen her, in fact, pushing a broom, raising dust along the sidewalks. “I tried to check the power company’s site, but my Internet’s down,” she said.

“Mine, too,” said someone else.

“You’ll get used to it,” said one of them, a pretty, short-haired brunette. “My husband and I do this once a month. A technology fast, they call it. We don’t check our e-mail all day.”

“So we walk around like cavemen? My husband would like that, too.”

“No, really,” the woman said. “It’s therapeutic.”

“Where’s the accident?” someone asked.

Eddie stood there dazed in the swirl of their conversation.

A silence descended over them.

They were looking at him, and Eddie’s voice jumped up in his throat. “Just past Briggs Road,” he said. “On the bridge. There was a pile-up.”

“You were there?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it bad?”

The trees in the neighborhood were fine, but he could still picture the ones near the spillway, the powder of ash that his feet had kicked up. Though the boy had seemed unreal, the memory of him came back clearly—as if Eddie had looked at his reflection in the water and been told he had it in reverse: that what he’d thought was an illusion was in fact the truth.

“Just a wreck,” he said.

The dry stream, the burnt trees, the dog, the boy—those pieces of information would have given his neighbors new variables to work with, but Eddie didn’t offer them up. They were panic variables, the kind that would demonstrate that all other variables were moot, and he felt the delicate wealth of their being only his.

“And you ran all the way here?”

“We were waiting for hours and no one came,” Eddie said. “But they must be clearing it up by now.”

“I saw smoke,” said another, “over by the park. There are power lines over there.”

“The spillway’s dry,” Eddie said, allowing it to slip through. He held his breath and waited for someone to clear up this confusion—for some know-it-all to say,
Of course the spillway’s dry. The spillway is always dry this time of year,
but they said nothing about it, as if they hadn’t heard him, and so Eddie stood there quietly and said nothing about the burned-up trees.

“You left your car?” the woman who’d endorsed technology-fasting asked.

Eddie recognized her then. She had a walking route that went right in front of his house. How many Sunday mornings had he stood at his picture window and watched her pass, knowing she couldn’t see him through the reflection off the glass?

“I had to leave it,” he said. “I would’ve sat there all night.”

“What do you think will happen to it?” she asked. “I’m just thinking about my John—he takes Twenty-nine home, too.”

The man in the science getup said, “It’ll be towed. Just
one more thing for them to clean up.” He said this without looking at Eddie, and Eddie again felt the shame of having left it there.

“The Beltway’s jammed up for miles, too,” continued the man. “I walked down to the ramp and saw. If there was an accident where you’re coming from, there must be a pile-up down there, too.
All
the traffic lights are out.”

Eddie tried to dam up the thought that Laura was stuck out on the Beltway, that her car was sitting motionless amid the horn blasts of the coming night.

“It’s gotta be something directly at the power plant,” said another man. This one had a beard. He wore jean shorts that were out of style for anything but organic gardening. “This wide a range, it makes no sense. If it were localized, then a tree could have taken out a line.”

The man in the science getup clicked on his flashlight. “Has everyone gotten home?” he said. “I mean, who else are we still waiting on to get home from work?”

“The Lawrences’ cars aren’t here. They’re usually home by now.”

“My husband’s in Cincinnati,” said a woman. She looked at the man in the science getup as if to apologize for her husband’s work trip. “I was talking to him when the phones died.”

“My wife,” said another, “is stuck in it.”

The technology-faster had been studying an imperfection in the road’s resurfacing. When she looked up, she said, “Alex is missing.”

The woman beside her reached over to rub her shoulder and mouthed
Her dog
to the others.

Fear beat in Eddie’s chest.

“Do you have a son?” he asked.

The technology-faster looked at him, her eyes beginning to well up. “Why would you say that?” she said.

“I saw a boy—” he started.

“Jonathan’s upstairs,” she snapped. “Why would you say that to me?”

Eddie shrank into the silence that followed. He found no comfort in these neighbors—these likewise inconvenienced people.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He turned and started running again, listening for them to call after him, but none of them did.

The cars parked along the street were only half as many as there should have been, and maybe less than that. No lights were on in any houses, though some people were in their yards. They stood at the edges and talked to one another and somebody shouted at Eddie to ask him why he was running.

Laura’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He felt himself saying “Come on come on come on come on” before he realized he was saying it aloud. He stood at the front door and prodded his empty pockets. His insides didn’t know what to tell his outsides to do. His house key was attached to the ring of his car key, and he didn’t know where his car key was. It could still be in the ignition. It could be on the side of the highway.

He pulled on the knob and threw his shoulder into the door. He did the same at the back of the house and at the basement. At the basement door, he kicked with the heel of his shoe and felt a twinge in his knee.

There was a pile of smooth stones the size of softballs beneath the back porch stairs, and he palmed one and hit at a glass pane in the back door, but the pane didn’t break. He hit it again and again, and on the fourth time, it shattered. He used the stone to punch out the shards, and reached through to unlock the door.

“Laura!” he called.

The inside of the house was already too dark to see. The switch was dead. He knocked through the kitchen drawer where they kept the flashlights.

The beam darted over the walls, past the sink, and into the empty living room. She wasn’t in the bedroom, either.

He called her name again and let the flashlight drop. Neither of them had made the bed that morning, and, in a panic, he dropped down into it.

When he stood, his knee buckled. It was like one ligament had twisted around another. He limped into the kitchen and put a glass under the faucet. When he lifted the metal arm, nothing happened. He wrenched it up and down, and a clunking sound arose from the plumbing. He tried in the bathroom, too, turning the knobs.

The house was dry.

Once, when they’d been visiting Laura’s parents during a hurricane, Eddie had watched her father fill their tub as a precaution. When he’d finished, Eddie had stood there with him in the silence of the small guest bathroom, watching him look sternly at the water as though an important task had been completed. Eddie hadn’t known what to say to Laura’s father—he was not his son and couldn’t ask the questions a son could ask. It seemed to him he’d met Laura’s father too late in life.
Eddie was a man by then and felt her father would have liked him better had he still been a boy or at least a younger version of himself—and so he’d kept a stern expression on his face and watched the tub with him for a long moment before Laura’s mother called to ask what they were doing.

Now Eddie went to the basement door and gripped the wooden handrail, stepping lightly down the stairs. There were two plastic water bottles down there with the camping gear, and he went to the utility bathroom and dipped each of them into the toilet tank. As an experiment, he flushed, and the water went down but didn’t refill. He screwed the caps on top of the water bottles and put them in the bottom of the closet.

He didn’t want to call the water company only to have them ask if he’d checked the water main, and it took him a moment to remember where it was. There was an old
TV
stand against the wall, and as he bent and moved it, a few old issues of
Sports Illustrated
slid off. Behind it was a wooden panel. He spun a metal latch to take it out. Inside, he tried to turn the valve, but the valve was all the way open, and so he put the panel back in place.

Above him was a shelf where they kept his five-thousand-meters trophy from high school and Laura’s silver pom-pom. She’d been a cheerleader for a year after a guidance counselor had suggested extracurriculars. In spite of herself, she’d made friends in the pyramid, though where they were now, she didn’t know. When she got into one of her cleaning moods, Eddie would sometimes surprise her with the pom-pom to cheer her on as she scrubbed the grout above the bathtub. He brought it down to his face and inhaled it the way he might her shirt, though the plastic strands were odorless.

Back upstairs, he thought to fill more bottles from the toilet in the bathroom, but he was being ridiculous. There was a container of apple juice in the fridge, and he lifted it and drank in big, greedy gulps. It overflowed his mouth and ran onto his chin. He stopped only when he had to gasp for breath and could feel the liquid sloshing in his stomach.

There was beer left in the fridge, too, and he took one out and opened it. Then he went outside and sat on the stoop. He felt silly for breaking the window. He could have sat out here and waited for Laura to come home and let him in.

She would ask him if he’d checked in on any of the neighbors. Her own family took care of people that way. When she’d first brought Eddie home, they’d all walked down the block to deliver a plate of dinner to a ninety-year-old woman who still lived by herself. Laura’s father had cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and covered it all in plastic. After they’d rung the bell about a dozen times, the woman had opened up in curlers, and mumbled something of recognition and gratitude.

Laura wanted
them
to be like that, taking trays of food to people. To care about the neighborhood. Who were their friends now? Sometimes it felt like it was just the two of them on their own, but Eddie didn’t mind that.

A retired couple in their seventies lived across the street from them. Mr. Mathias was a religious man—he’d been a preacher or minister or something. His wife had been a nurse.

Eddie walked across the street and knocked, the beer still in his hand.

There was no answer. Both of their cars were parked on the curb, and he knocked again.

This time, he heard shuffling inside, and Mr. Mathias opened the door. He had on a red baseball cap with the curly
W
of the Nationals, and a thick cloth neck brace.

“I’m your neighbor,” Eddie said, and felt the falsity of the gesture: the truth was he didn’t want to be standing there. He wanted to be waiting for Laura—to watch her drive up the road so he could walk from his stoop to her car to greet her. “Ed Gardner. I’m right over there,” he said, pointing across the street.

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Mathias had an accent that might have been Caribbean. His head was cocked to the side in an uncomfortable-looking way.

“I’m just checking in. With the power out and all. You folks all right?”

“Oh, we okay. We okay, yes,” Mr. Mathias said. “We got the candles going. Thank you.”

“You holler if you need anything. I’m right over there.” Eddie pointed again. Mr. Mathias closed the door before Eddie turned to leave. There were old-timers all over this neighborhood. Old-timers and young couples like him and Laura. Many of them had children.

The house next to his was the Davises’. Patty Davis had wobbled out onto her deck and Eddie could smell cigarette smoke. In the dark, he couldn’t see her face, only the shape of her body. She was overweight by a hundred pounds, at least, and had a short pageboy haircut. When she walked, she looked to be wading through deep water.

He started to call to her, but his voice had no strength and died before it left his mouth. Laura would find all this amusing—how worried he’d become.

When he was close enough that he didn’t have to shout, he said, “Mike Sr. home yet?”

“Nah.” Her voice was big and round in the night air. “He’s stuck with the rest of ’em.”

“You get any calls out?”

“Nah.”

“Lines must be down everywhere,” he said.

“I got put on hold at about four o’clock, when it first went out. Then I got cut off in about two seconds.”

“The power company?”

“Yeah. They must know. In two thousand eight we were out six days.”

“The water company, too, huh?”

“Couldn’t get through.”

“Your phone’s working? I’m trying to call Laura.”

“She’s stuck out there, too?”

“I guess. But if your phone is working, I can try her again.”

“No, I don’t have any service.”

Eddie walked up to her side of the lawn. A chain-link fence divided the properties halfway up the driveway, and he leaned against it. When his hands touched the metal, he felt that they were shaking.