The other two dogs bolted.
But the bulldog…
Goddamn that bulldog. Her eyes flooded with tears. The thing yelped in exquisite agony. It tried to crawl away, but it couldn’t move. She remembered a dog up the street from her childhood home in Kansas, and how friendly she had been with it…. She was really a dog person. But now she had to put this one down, and it was breaking her heart.
She walked across the churchyard and got it over with.
Once in the car, they headed up the mountain; and while she had gotten her tears under control, she still felt so blue about the dog that she wondered if she would ever feel unblue again. Jake reached forward and patted her shoulder.
Hanna, meanwhile, was wheezing and wheezing. “Mom, I’ve got to have some.”
“Sweetie, it’s not time yet. And it’s dangerous if you take too much. You know what Dr. Saleh says.”
“Mom, I’ve been taking a few extra hits every now and again, and it hasn’t killed me.”
“It’s only been making you high,” said Jake.
“Jake, you don’t know what you’re talking about, so just shut up.”
“Kids at my school use puffers to get high,” said Jake.
“That’s because kids at your school are stupid, just like you. Mom, can I have some?”
She didn’t want to fight it. She was too upset about the dog. “Does your heart feel funny at all?”
“No, not at all.”
“Jake… dig it out. One puff, Hanna. We’re running out.”
“I’m going to need at least three.”
“Three? Have you been taking three all along?”
“Mom, I know what I need. This nursing home stuff isn’t as good as the usual stuff.”
“Yes, but you’re supposed to take only two puffs.”
“I’m nearly seventeen. I think I can look after myself.”
Jake handed the puffer forward. Hanna lifted it to her mouth like an old pro. She pressed the mouthpiece between her lips, squeezed the plunger, and inhaled. Glenda heard a little burst, but it was weak, and she was indeed afraid that they were running out. Hanna squeezed again, and this time nothing
happened. Her daughter pulled the bronchodilator away and looked at it as if it were a criminal. Then she tried again, but again got nothing. She pulled it away from her lips a second time.
“It’s empty, Mom. These nursing home ones are no good.”
“But that’s the last one we have. It’s supposed to last us to Marblehill.”
Like the drama queen she sometimes was, Hanna flung the empty inhaler over her shoulder into the backseat with the carelessness of Henry VIII tossing away a chicken bone. “Great. What am I going to do now?”
Glenda could have argued with Hanna, underlining for her daughter the foolhardiness of what she had done, especially with the overdosing. But where would it get her? Instead, she simply contemplated their grim, drugless situation. They weren’t a quarter of the way to Marblehill, and Hanna was out of inhaler.
The wheezing would start. The coughing would start. And it wouldn’t let up. And her daughter would weaken. And to be weakened in the new Stone Age was more dangerous than overdosing with Alupent.
So she didn’t rant the way she might have in normal circumstances, but let it go, hoping that somehow, up the highway, they might find an abandoned pharmacy, and that in that pharmacy they might conceivably search out some medicine that Hanna could use.
She gripped the wheel and peered out the windshield, racking her brains for a solution, but the only fix she came up with was getting to Marblehill as soon as she could, where Neil was stockpiling medicine for the long haul.
She glanced up the hillside and saw that her brother-in-law was right: erosion had become a big problem. All the small plants on the forest floor had died a long time ago. Root systems had rotted in the ground, and that’s why the ground had that stinky smell so much of the time. But now the rain was washing everything away, and she saw that many of the dead trees had toppled one against the other, so that the forest looked like a crowd of drunks, all leaning trunk to trunk for support.
And what was this up here? She eased her foot on the brake. Damn. Part of the road had cracked away into the gully below. She stopped. Mud from the hill had washed over the road, but it wasn’t deep, and she could easily get through. What bothered her were the big cracks and how a giant slab of asphalt curved over the hill like a macadamized waterfall.
“I’m going to take the car across this section myself,” she said. “You guys get out and walk.”
They grumbled a bit—kids always grumbled about having to walk—but at last they left the car and trudged down the highway, getting drenched to their skin in the rain. She put the car in gear and proceeded, thinking to herself,
Hanna’s eyes had that glassy look they always had after a hit of Alupent. Glenda gave Jake a glance.
Jake was looking at Glenda as if he were curious about what she was going to do next. And she realized that they were all getting to know each other in an entirely unexpected way, and that they weren’t just a family anymore, but survivors, and that the issues were no longer those of getting to school on time or finishing homework or trying to get more hours at the nursing home, but of simply trying to stay alive.
Jake said, “Mom, I’m sorry about the note. I just thought…”
She continued along the highway. “What’s done is done. And maybe he didn’t even see the note.
Maybe he just guessed. He knows we go to Marblehill from time to time. And he knows we’re broke and can’t go anywhere else for a holiday. I mean… where else would we go? So… maybe it’s not your fault.”
“It’s just that I didn’t want Dad to die of a broken heart.” He could hardly get the words out because he was all choked up.
“It’s okay, Jake. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got the rifle. We’ve got the gun. We should be okay.”
They had gotten no more than another mile when she saw what she at first thought was some kind of optical trick sneaking in from her left field of vision, changing the monotonous look of the highway so that the road appeared to be bending in an odd way, out toward the valley. But then she had to ask herself, was it the movement of the car toward the trees, or of the trees toward the car? Because the trees really looked like they were shifting, and she suddenly remembered a line from grade ten English class, “Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,” because the forest honestly looked as if it were moving. The apparition was so strange, so unexpected, that she felt momentarily dizzy. Then all the bits of visual information collected into a coherent whole, and she realized she was seeing a landslide, like a freight train filled with upright trees rolling down the mountainside at fifteen miles per hour, not in a great rush, but indomitable and massive, the whole dead forest skiing downhill
“Holy shit!” said Jake. “A landslide!”
She slammed the brakes and the car jerked to a halt. Her body was now rigid and her heart pounded, and panic overcame her like a tsunami. She put the car in reverse and backed up, nearly swerving over the edge—God, she wasn’t good at driving in reverse. She slowed right down, because she thought that maybe her reverse driving might kill them. Yet she was desperately fearful that the landslide would spread. Would the mountain suddenly flatten like a mound of strawberry jam? No. This section held, and at last she brought the car to a stop, and they watched the landslide from a safe distance.
It wasn’t until the landslide petered out that she thought of practicalities. How were they going to get around it? Would they have to take a detour?
She took a nervous breath. “Hanna, let’s see the map.”
Hanna dug out the map. The thing was at least twenty-five years old, and falling apart. Glenda had a look. She studied the various highways and side roads. Yes, a considerable detour. How could they do that, and get all the way to Marblehill on their remaining charge without having to walk part of the way?
And how could they possibly walk when Hanna had run out of medicine and wouldn’t have the breath for it?
“If we don’t find a way around this,” she said, “we’ll have to go back to Dunstan and take 74 to Charlotte.”
