Hitchers

stupid hat with the Velcro flap, about to start a climb. We had such a ball on that trip.

I closed the album. I shouldn’t have let a month go by without calling Dave. Now it was too late.

It wasn’t fair. I’d already suffered my losses.

I pressed my palm to the photo album, got up and wandered into my studio. The thought of working made me want to scream. Five or six more days and we would be at code red—the syndicate would be out of strips. Typically they liked to have an eight-week cushion; I was trying their patience, to say the least.

When I first got control of the strip Cathy Guisewite warned me that coming up with a strip each and every day was more difficult than I thought. Add to that the prospect of creating something funny while thousands of bodies were being bulldozed into mass graves in Central Park, and you had the perfect storm. Steve said Toy Shop was more popular than ever, that the new look was catching on in a big way. It would be a shame to start printing reruns.

I threw on a coat, went downstairs, through the empty drive-in snack bar, and pushed through the big swinging doors that led outside.

There was a layer of thin snow on the benches surrounding the empty bumper boats lagoon. I swept a spot and sat for a moment, hands in my pockets. Washed-out images of Tina and Little Joe in maritime outfits covered the fence that surrounded the lagoon. A tiny lighthouse sat on a concrete island in the center, the base dented and scratched, evidence that once motorized rubber boats had careened madly off of it.

I’d put my share of dings in that lighthouse during the eighteen months that Toy Shop Village was open. So had Kayleigh. We rode for free, the grandchildren of the owner, wide-eyed eleven-year-olds astonished by their luck. Hard to believe that had only been nineteen years ago—Toy Shop Village looked fifty years old.

What had my grandfather been thinking when he let Dad talk him into this? We couldn’t even sell the property now, out in the middle of this industrial purgatory. Anyone who bought it would have to demolish and haul away tons of metal and concrete before it would be usable for anything. How had they thought people would drive all the way out here to play miniature golf? Cheap real estate is cheap for a reason. That hadn’t even been their biggest mistake, thinking people would haul their asses out to the middle of this depressing area, across the highway from a junk yard. Their biggest mistake had been their choice of businesses, which was thirty years behind the times.

I tossed a piece of windblown Styrofoam into the concrete pond. Maybe it was time to brave the Wal-Mart. I’d spent the past week living off canned goods from the pantry and forgotten frozen entrees from the back of the freezer, all of the crap that had looked good in the supermarket but sat uneaten year after year.

My butt still felt strange on the Avalon’s leather seat. I rolled down the windows, sniffed the cold air as I sped down Johnson Road.

I coughed, tried to relax my aching throat. The twitching just kept getting worse. It felt like there was a gerbil in there.

I hung a quick right on West Marietta and picked up speed. The near-empty roads looked so strange. I’d always hated the congestion of Atlanta, the intersections perpetually clogged with vehicles, but now I missed it. I wanted things to return to normal, or as close to normal as it was likely to get.

There was a lot of talk on TV about the long-term effects the attack would have on Atlanta. The city had literally been decimated, having lost around ten percent of its population. That was the theoretical cutoff point for when irreparable damage is done to the psyche of a community.

There was a tank in the Wal-Mart parking lot. The place was packed; I had to park across the highway in a strip-mall, on the lawn. In the parking lot I passed two people, both wearing white medical masks, who looked at me the way my eighth grade English teacher used to when I forgot my homework. I wasn’t wearing a mask, I realized. That was a no-no. Most people didn’t seem to grasp that I wasn’t endangering them by not wearing a mask, only myself. Anthrax wasn’t contagious, you could only inhale the spores if they were around, and they weren’t likely to be in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart ten miles from ground zero this late in the game.

At the entrance two National Guard troops stopped me.

“Mask,” one of them said, pointing at her face.

“I know, I forgot.”

She jerked her thumb at the doorway. “On your left. Put one on right away.”

A mountainous display of pale blue medical masks met me just inside the door. I grabbed two boxes, opened one and retrieved a mask. It smelled like rubbing alcohol.

Half of the shelves were empty in the grocery area. Most of the basics were there—milk, water, cereal, ramen noodles—but non-essentials like olives and Snickers bars were pretty much nonexistent. Signs beside each item listed the maximum number you could buy. Mostly that number was one. Troops patrolled the aisles, evidently making sure no one took more than their share.

When I finished grocery shopping I didn’t feel like going home. After a week in solitary I wanted to be around people a while longer. I pushed my cart around the store, feeling punchy as I wandered past laundry detergent, between walls of pink girls’ toys. My Little Princess. Barbie Snip ’n Style Salon. A dozen big-screen TVs flashed identical Dentyne ads. In the pharmacy area I discovered licorice toothpaste. That was a new one. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it before. I picked up a tube, then sought out the candy aisle, suddenly craving real licorice.

They had licorice, both black and red. I chose the black, opened it with my teeth and pulled out a fat stick. I felt like a rebel, the way I was opening packages before I’d paid for them.

I hadn’t eaten licorice since I was a kid. Kayleigh and I used to each take an end and pull, stretching the stick until it snapped. We’d compare our stretched pieces to see who got the longer.

I’d been thinking about Kayleigh a lot lately, I realized. She was never far from my mind, even now, eighteen years after her death, but usually her presence was just an untethered ache of guilt. Lately I was getting more concrete flashes, like Mom taking the call from Grandma, dropping the phone when Grandma told her Kayleigh had drowned. Or the moment I realized it was my fault. Kayleigh agreed to jump off the thirty-foot pier if I did first, but she hadn’t really expected me to do it, and she’d chickened out. Kayleigh didn’t like to chicken out—she was the fearless one, the athlete, the doer. I told everyone about my courageous feat, rubbing it in, so she stayed behind when we went out to eat.

And she jumped, and she died.

Kayleigh, who was beautiful and outgoing, who always watched out for me. When she died I escaped into comic strips. Not even comic books—the cool nerds went for Spider-Man and The X-Men, I went for Peanuts and For Better or For Worse.

As I dropped my purchases on the conveyor belt and nodded a greeting to the exhausted-looking cashier, I realized that despite all of the awfulness of the past week, despite the recurring thoughts of Kayleigh, I felt okay. Maybe I was simply feeling grateful to be alive. Everyone around me had lost someone now. Some had lost whole families. In the face of that, my own losses didn’t seem as staggering as they used to.

“You look tired. You near the end of your shift?” I asked the cashier.

She shook her head mournfully. “I’m on till four a.m.”

I winced in sympathy. “That’s got to be rough.”

“Mm hm,” she nodded, working her gum as she jiggled the licorice across the scanner, trying to get the price to register. It must be maddening to spend eight hours waving packages in front of that scanner, trying to get it to beep so you can move on to the next package.

“I never said I was perfect,” I said. The words burst out in a deep, horrible croak that raked my throat.

The cashier looked stunned.

“Sorry,” I said, my voice returned to normal. I had no idea why I’d just said that. It had just come out. I rubbed my twitching throat, swallowed.

I got out of there as quickly as I could.

“Jesus Christ,” I said as I launched the Avalon out of the lot. “I never said I was perfect”? Why would I say that to a stranger? I felt like an idiot. I closed my hand over my throat, felt my racing pulse through my fingertips. Maybe it was a one-time fluke. Massive fatigue; a post-traumatic hiccup.