After the Apocalypse

handle all the shit the world was handing her. Some people just couldn’t. And it was a lot of fucking shit. “We don’t have to stay long,” she said.

Natalie had a house, a little ranch that must have cost a fucking mint. Eva said her parents had money, and they had made a whopping down payment. Lonny hadn’t picked his parents quite so well. “Pull in the driveway,” Eva said. “You can’t park on the street. It’s residents only.”

“What the fuck?”

“You got to have a permit to park on the street,” Eva said. “You can only get one if you live here. See the tags hanging off the rearview mirrors?”

“That’s assholian,” Lonny said.

“Don’t give me a hard time!” she said. “I can’t take it right now.” She was all tense and rigid. She had done something with her hair a few weeks before, something that made it reddish, and it didn’t do her any favors. Eva was getting hard to take. But there wasn’t a whole lot he could say. What was the point? They were all going to die of APD anyway. Jesus, he’d eaten enough chicken from fast-food joints to start growing feathers. Eva was sure as shit that she had it. She was always worried she had the shakes, but that was just ’cause she was cranked half the time. He wanted to say it was okay, slow down, relax, but it wasn’t okay, and it sounded like a lie when he said it. They just did what everyone else was doing, which was to pretend everything was normal.

“I didn’t mean anything,” he said. “I don’t care. It’s just stupid, you know? No skin off my back, though.”

“We don’t have to stay long,” she said, again. Maybe she did have it. Maybe she was forgetting.

Maybe he was just freaking himself out.

Alice met them at the door. Alice was what, in her thirties, and not what he expected. She didn’t look dykey or anything. Eva wasn’t dyke-looking. Alice looked boring. She had blond hair out of a bottle and big hips and no makeup. Eva was so intense, so alive, he’d just assumed that Natalie would have picked someone more there. She looked normal, though. Irene talked about her like she was a freak, but mostly she looked like a bank teller or something.

The inside of the house was un-fucking-believable. Shit piled everywhere. Irene was right about that. The couch pulled out from the wall, and stuff and clothes piled behind it up halfway to the ceiling.

“Thanks for letting me come by,” Eva said. “We won’t stay long. I know it’s weird, having me here and stuff. Nat’s probably told you some crazy stuff. God, that birdcage is so cute, where did you find it? I’ve got to do something with our place; it’s all Lonny’s stuff, and it looks like a bachelor pad. Is Irene here?” Eva seemed unable to stop talking, and she was staring at everything. There were a ton of books. Eva had read magazines and stuff when they first met, but now she couldn’t even sit still for the TV. There were stacks of books beside the chair and the couch, and the couch was covered with more clothes and bags. There were bags from Target with stuff still in them—he could see running shoes with the tags still on them. Alice didn’t look like she was the kind of person who went running, and neither did Irene.

“I was going to straighten up,” Alice said. “It’s just hard. You know, with everything that’s going on.”

“Totally,” Eva said. “I mean, I understand completely.”

“The Home Health Aide was here earlier. She comes three times a week. But the rest of the time it’s just me.”

“And Irene,” Eva said. “But I know you’re doing the lion’s share and all that.”

Irene came out of her room. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi, baby,” Eva said.

Irene was Natalie’s biological daughter. There had been some thing about Eva’s brother being the sperm donor, but Eva said he had freaked out about it, and they had ended up using an anonymous donor. Irene looked a lot like Natalie. Not fat, but short-legged with thick ankles and wrists. She had longish light brown hair and brown eyes. She wasn’t pretty. Mostly, when Lonny saw her, she was like this. Monosyllabic. Eva said she was smart, and ever so often she said something sharp and sarcastic, and he’d see what she might be like with her friends. She didn’t like him, but that was okay; he’d never been too excited about the guy his mom lived with in Tennessee. He wondered if she was gay. Not that it was genetic or anything, but still, growing up with two moms and all that. Eva hadn’t turned out to be exactly gay. I was confused, Eva said once, but honestly, he suspected that she really was gay but that it didn’t really matter that much to her who she had sex with, exactly. Which sounded fucked up, but he didn’t know any other way to think about it.

Eva headed for the bedroom and he trailed along behind, not sure if he was supposed to wait in the living room or what. There wasn’t any place to sit down in the living room anyway, and the kitchen table and chairs were piled up, too.

The bedroom was crowded. One whole wall was stacked with those plastic storage containers with more piles of clothes on top of them. The other side was like a miniature hospital. He saw a package of adult diapers and averted his eyes. It smelled like a hospital, too. He wouldn’t have known Natalie. She was emaciated, dressed in an old-fashioned white nightgown. Her head looked too big for her neck. Her eyes were huge.

“Hey, look who’s here to see you,” Alice said.

Natalie’s eyes rolled toward them. She had a cast on one wrist. She tried to say something but her voice was a smear.

“She’s hard to understand,” Alice said. “Sometimes she’s better, but she’s had her antianxiety meds, and they make her slur more.”

Eva was stricken. Lonny didn’t blame her. This was it, the future. This was what they were all going to be. Holy fucking Christ. By the time he got it, with his luck, so many people would be sick, there wouldn’t be enough people to take care of them. He figured if he got sick he would go to the VA, but really, if he got like this, he was going to OD. Take so much stuff his heart shredded.

He went back out to the living room and then, since there was no place there, out the front door to sit on the front step.

Irene came out and sat down beside him.

“Sorry,” he said. The house across the street had bougainvillea blooming and a lemon tree in the side yard. California. It was unreal.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s fucked up.”

“It sure is,” he said.

At least he’d gotten to grow up in normal times. They’d been convinced that the US was going down, that China would run the world, and there’d been 9/11 and all that, but they hadn’t thought everyone was going to die except the vegetarians. Sometimes he still thought everything was going to be okay. Some people would get sick, like AIDS, but people would still go to work and stop and buy gas at $5.49 a gallon and whine about inflation, and it would be normal fucked-upedness.

“She can’t eat anymore without choking,” Irene said, matter-of-fact as a heart attack.

“Yeah?” he said, because what else do you say?

“They want to put a feeding tube in. But Alice and I talked about it. We don’t think they should.”

She sounded like a grown-up. Well, that’s probably what watching your mom die horribly did to you.

“Why not?” he asked. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know, but she seemed to want to talk, and she never talked to him.

“What for?” she said. “We’re going to get hospice in.”

“Hospice,” he said. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

“I want to ask you something,” Irene said.

“Sure,” he said.

“You saw the house, right? I mean, that’s crazy.”

He wasn’t sure what they were talking about—the stuff, the hospital room? He nodded as noncommittally as he could.

“Can I come live with you and Momms when Mom dies?”

We moved a lot. I went to seven different schools in twelve years. I wasn’t an army brat. My dad went back to finish a college degree when I was five, and then he went to grad school for two years. Then they moved three times in two years because they lived with my mom’s parents, then dad found a job with a nonprofit that went bust and then got work through a grant. He was a chemist working with companies that did environmental studies.