Thirst (8 page)

He walked back to the street and stretched his shoulders, looking up into the night sky. It was not hard to imagine that
he was lost between the reflection of the stars and the concrete beneath his feet—though whether he’d projected himself into space, or it had cast itself down on him, was not as clear. He stooped and rubbed his hands in the grass of one of the yards to get the ash from between his fingers.

It was not yet late when they went to bed, and Eddie touched the inside of Laura’s thigh.

“I feel too grimy,” she said, but she relented. He held on tightly to both of her shoulders, their backs to the window, and when he was done, she said, “If it’s all the way in Virginia, my parents’ power could be out, too.”

“That’s the other direction,” he said.

“We don’t know how far it goes.”

“There’s a bridge between us and them.”

“So what does that mean?” she said.

Through the window, they could hear people talking on the street. Eddie felt his heart quicken. He couldn’t make out the words and didn’t recognize the voices. He swung out of bed and pulled on some boxers. He moved quietly to the office, standing still in the middle of the room, listening for sounds in the backyard. But there were no sounds coming from there.

“What are you doing?” Laura called.

“Give me a second.”

If Bill Peters was in the yard, Eddie would be able to hear him. There wasn’t much insulation in the walls—in the daytime, he could hear the squirrels jumping branches.

“I’m going outside,” he said.

He had a wooden bat that he kept in the corner of the office that he’d joked with Laura was for “protection.”

“What are you going to do out there?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

He took the flashlight and went down the back steps very softly. He didn’t turn the flashlight on.

On the grass of the back lawn, he smelled the overripe honeysuckle on the Davises’ bush. The ground was soft enough beneath his flip-flops that his knee didn’t hurt. The yard was empty, though he could still hear the chatter down the street.

Something snapped behind him, and he knew it was a man.

He spun and fumbled with the flashlight and felt the nearness of the footfalls as they passed him, the heat of a body, and the wind it stirred up. Tools crashed at the side of the house, and the beam illuminated the fabric of a shirt.

“Hey!” Eddie shouted, but he stood planted where he was. His heart was doing something strange to the gravity in his chest.

He hurried inside and took Laura’s wrist to pull her out of bed. He didn’t want to leave her alone in there.

“What?” she said. “What?”

They walked down the street in their nightclothes, Laura in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. They could hear the voices before
they saw the group of people. It was just a block away. Patty was there. Eddie could see her outlines even in the dark.

“Someone was just in my yard,” he said. The words came out too loudly and stopped the neighbors’ chatter.

He was lucky Patty was there. “High school kids,” she said, in a way that made it clear she knew him, that he hadn’t been accusing
them
of being in his yard. “It happened in oh-eight, too. They ran a little wild. They broke into my car and took the change out of the console. I had
CD
s in there, but they didn’t touch those.”

“They didn’t like your music!” someone quipped.

Patty laughed until it turned into a smoker’s cough. “Ah, screw you,” she said.

“Any of you have water yet?” Eddie said.

“No,”one of them said.

“Did anyone try the police?”

The cluster of bodies was just a darker patch on the street.

“The power must have done something at the pumping station.”

“That didn’t happen before?” Laura’s shoulder was close enough to rub against him. Their hands brushed.

“No, and I been here twenty years,” said a man whose voice was pitched as if by nose plugs. “Anybody fill their bathtub?”

“Did
you
? Who saw this coming?”

In the darkness, their conversation floated untethered around Eddie.

“I’m just worried about Mrs. Kasolos. She’s eighty-five now.”

“I’ll check on her,” one of them said.

“My husband already did,” Laura said. “She’s okay.”

“She has a watercooler,” Eddie said. “It’s almost full.”

There was a silence as they contemplated Mrs. Kasolos’s cooler.

“You know what the cops told me after those robberies on Keswick?” Patty said. “Don’t do anything stupid like leave your doors unlocked. Well, duh.”

“But the cops aren’t around now,” Eddie said.

“I’ve been here twenty years and I’ve never called the cops once,” the nasal voice said. “So what’s your point? This is a good neighborhood. Go to sleep, and when you wake up everything’ll be back to normal. They got crews for this sorta thing. They learned their lessons in oh-eight.”

“I just think we should protect ourselves, is all,” Eddie said. “People act differently when they’re desperate.”

“Who’s desperate? You’ve got a roof over your head. Trust me. This is not desperate.”

Patty turned her shadow to address Eddie and Laura for the benefit of the others. Even in the dark, he could tell that she was smiling. “You two can bunk with me and the Mikes if you want.”

Someone said, “Oh, now it’s an open invitation?”

“I didn’t say
you
, Paul,” Patty said, and the mood was light again.

Back in their yard, Eddie took Laura around and waved the flashlight over the grass. Having her with him settled his nerves. When the beam passed over the side of the house, he saw that his shovel and rake had been toppled. He didn’t say anything, and she hadn’t asked him what he’d meant when he told the group that someone had been in their yard.

“The guy was right,” she said. “Let’s just go to bed. We’re exhausted.
I’m
exhausted. Let them do their work.”

“Who?”

“The electric people. The water people.”

He walked ahead of her up the stairs. “What did you see after you left your car?” he asked.

“What?” she said, and then added, “Nothing. People walking. Why? What did
you
see?”

“That’s all you saw? People walking?”

She gripped the rail, and he saw the strength in her arm.
She
was built like a track star. “Why?” she said. “If you saw something, you can tell me.”

“I didn’t see anything. You said you saw a fight.”

“Just the one lady who got mad at that kid.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess a lot of people were walking into the city,” he said. “Their tempers got the best of them.”

“Yeah,” she said.

They went inside and got back into bed.

Laura said, “It’s okay to leave the window open. I’m hot already.”

“We
usually
leave the window open.”

“I just mean … if you’re nervous about anything.”

“I’m not nervous. It’d be hard to break in through that window. We’re right here.”

“I know.”

But it made him think about the window in the back door, the one he’d broken with the rock. He’d never patched it up. Whoever had been in the yard could have doubled back.

“Hold on,” he said to Laura. He took the flashlight and walked into the basement, poking the beam around where they stored their boxes. He kicked at the base of one to see if anything made a sound, but it was just the sound of a box being kicked. They kept an old mattress leaned against the wall, and he lifted it away. There were some plastic bags behind it and some dust bunnies.

He tore a cardboard flap off one of the boxes and went back upstairs to the kitchen and ripped a length of duct tape. He pressed the piece of cardboard up against the busted pane.

When he went back into the bedroom, she’d lit a tea candle and placed it on the dresser. Eddie told her about the window. He was ashamed of himself for breaking it.

“I saw that it was broken,” she said. “I mean … I knew. When did you do it?”

Eddie thought about that. “When I first got back. When was that?”

“Yesterday.”

“You weren’t here and I left my keys in the car, I think.”

“It’s okay.”

“You didn’t say anything about it,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“What did Mike Sr. say to you? When he first got back?”

“He didn’t say anything to me.”

He thought about that. “How’s your head?” he said.

“My head is fine.”

“You don’t have a headache? Not even a dull one?”

“No.”

He went into the kitchen and took one of the juices in the plastic barrels off the counter.

“Here,” he said, peeling back the foil for her. “Drink this.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re dehydrated.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll have some, too.”

Eddie’s head was pounding.

Laura drank half of it down and handed it back to him. It left a red crescent on her upper lip. Eddie took a bottle of ibuprofen out of his nightstand and drank down three of the pills.

“Okay?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She blew out the candle and joined him lying down in bed. Eddie could still hear the neighbors talking in the street.

“A meeting of the minds down there,” he said.

“Don’t get mad.”

After a while, she said, “I remember when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. I was driving in the car with my dad, and we were listening to the forecast. They were saying how terrible it was going to be and my dad said, ‘There’s going to be a lot of destruction and people are going to die, but it’s also going to be a little exciting.’ He told me it was okay if I got excited.”

“They’re keeping everybody awake, though.”

“Everybody but us is out there.”

Eddie tried to hear past the side of the house into the backyard. But all he heard were the voices in the street. It wasn’t long before Laura was breathing deeply. He could feel the ash on his body where he hadn’t been able to wipe it away. When he ran a fingernail across his eyelid, it was filmy. He was falling asleep, too, and sleep came softly and soundlessly.
The ash had filled his ears. He was walking through it in the cold. Snow had piled up, and in the spreading landscape of it, he saw the flash of Bill Peters’s shirt. He swung a flashlight and it illuminated the white of Bill Peters’s face. It was Bill Peters rushing toward him.

He woke and couldn’t breathe, not knowing whether to suck in or push out. He sat up, coughing. Laura was silent next to him.

When he touched her side, his breath came back. “Hey,” he said, and she groaned a little.

He took the flashlight and quietly got out of bed. He went to the basement and looked behind the boxes again. Then he looked behind the mattress and shone the beam around the furnace, too. There were some old pieces of plywood in the furnace room, and he took a short piece and some screws and his drill. When he tested the drill, it whirred, but not convincingly. Upstairs, there was just enough juice to screw it over the broken pane, but the screws didn’t go all the way in. There was a space, too, where he could still see a strip of the cardboard taped beneath.

He found his phone on the table by the front door. If he could get the police, he’d tell them a man named Bill Peters had tried to force himself into his house. His phone was dead, though. He picked up Laura’s. It was alive, but the screen had an uninterrupted photo of the two of them at Broadkill Beach: no bars of service or the
AT
&T insignia cutting through them. He dialed 911 and hit
SEND
, but it never even went to
CALLING
.

He took another juice and swallowed a few more ibuprofen pills. There were ten juices left.

In the bedroom, he shook Laura’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “I’m lighting up the candle.”

He dragged his thumb over the lighter, and she sat up in the shadows that it made. She was frowning. Pieces of hair were plastered to her cheek.

“Drink the rest of this,” he said.

She closed her eyes and made a sour face.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve barely had anything.”

“I had one with dinner, too.”

“That’s not enough.”

“I’m going back to sleep.” She slid down and tucked her head beneath the pillow.

“Fine,” he said. “Make sure you have one in the morning.”

He tipped the juice to his mouth and drank the rest of it. It was sweet syrup, only a few big mouthfuls’ worth, meant for children’s picnics. It nauseated him a bit.

In the morning, he went to the shower and tried the handle for hot water. Then he set all his dumb hopes on cold.

“
Fuck
,” he said, hoping that she’d hear. He banged the sink handle up and down, up and down.

They ate dry cereal and each drank a juice.

“If I have another of these, I’m going to be sick,” Laura said. She opened and closed her mouth dramatically, letting her tongue make a sticking sound.

“What are our options? You’d rather have that lemon juice in the fridge? We’ve got a bottle of it.”

There was a knock at the door, and when Eddie flinched, his chair legs squeaked against the kitchen floor. He held up both his hands, palms facing the floor, as if to say,
Quiet. Stay put
.

Laura sat where she was, and Eddie went to the office for the bat, deciding how he’d hold it. He stood in front of the door, and then leaned the bat against the wall. He’d only have to bend down a little if he needed it.

Outside were two men. The one standing at the door had a face pink from shaving. Behind him, a second man was supporting the arms of a wheelbarrow. It had half a gallon of orange juice and a blue-tinted water bottle with liquid at the bottom. There were five or so bottles of water with the seals unbroken, too.

“Hello, there,” said the pink-faced man. Eddie could smell the bathroom chemicals on his gleaming cheeks. “We’re making the rounds, collecting whatever people can give for the elderly families on the block. The Cartwrights, for example.”

“The Cartwrights?”

“They were there last night. We had a conversation? I’m Paul?” the man said. “We met you on the street.”