“It’s my stuff,” she said, smiling sheepishly. “It calms me. Everywhere I stay, I arrange these things in the same way to make it feel more like a home.”
“What about if you’re sleeping outside?”
She gave an embarrassed shrug. “I still do it.”
I pictured her sleeping on a bed of leaves, her curios arranged on a cleared rectangle of ground beside her, a talisman against the icy blasts of loss and uncertainty.
“Familiar things help me cope with the anxiety. Even before things went bad I was anxious.” She squeezed her eyes shut to the pain. “Ouch. Sometimes it’s like I’m drowning—like there’s no air to breathe.” She blew a puff of air that brushed back a lock of her insanely curly hair. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you. I’ve been alone for a long time and I think it’s making me weird.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Just keep talking. I’m almost done.”
I glanced at her curio table. There was a photo of a girl and an elderly woman. The girl was in a numbered jersey, and they were at a sporting event of some sort. “Is that you?”
Phoebe looked over my shoulder. “Mm hm. With my nana, at a track meet.”
“There,” I said, leaning back and letting my aching shoulders relax. The needle dangled against her leg on the end of an inch of thread. I cut it with a pocket knife Cortez had left beside me, and taped some gauze over the wound. We didn’t have any bandages.
“Thanks, Doctor,” she said. “I don’t have my checkbook with me, but you can bill me to this address.”
“Have you been here long?” I asked.
“A couple of days.”
I picked up a little stuffed pig from the night stand.
“Sir Francis Bacon,” Phoebe said.
I tapped the postcard with my fingernail. “I’m touched that you kept my gift in your memento collection.”
Phoebe laughed. “Yes, it’s almost like having it on display in a museum.”
Memories of those days washed over me—the music playing in the camp, the first Polio-X victims, the cops chasing us out of town. I’d been so conflicted about that date, because of my “relationship” with Sophia. Ironic that the woman I’d been so hung up on back then was right outside. I didn’t feel like I was old enough to be nostalgic for an earlier time, and those certainly weren’t good times, but I still felt an indescribable longing.
“I can’t believe we didn’t even recognize each other,” Phoebe said.
“It was, what? Ten or eleven years ago?” I said.
“It feels like such a long, long time,” she said. “Can I really be only thirty-five years old?”
“My mom once told me that I’d be shocked by how fast life flew by,” I said. “I don’t think that happens when you’re scared most of the time.”
Phoebe stood. “Shall we join the others?” We went outside.
We all lounged in the parking lot talking for a long time. Phoebe told us about Stephan, her husband of sorts who’d ditched her in the middle of nowhere, trading her in for a relationship that bordered on pedophilia. We told her about Jeannie’s delivery, and Ange, though not everything about Ange.
Finally, Jeannie stood, and the rest of us followed suit and went off to sleep. I went to my dark, empty room and sat on scraps of carpet, among the components of a smashed TV. Right before bed was the worst time. The first few months after Ange’s death had been filled with flashbacks of the killing—images I kept from everyone else. The flashbacks had grown less frequent, but I still missed her terribly. I missed talking to her, having her there. I had never really loved her, nor she me, but that didn’t diminish the incredibly strong friendship we’d had.
Colin knocked on the door frame. “So, what do you think?”
“I think we should invite her to join us, if it’s okay with the others. She has nobody, and she’s a good person.”
He nodded. “I’ll ask them.” I’m sure he could hear the depression in my voice. “Nothing else, though?”
He didn’t need to lay it out for me. I knew what he was getting at. “You know, you never see love stories set in concentration camps, and I think there’s a reason for that.”
He nodded. “You might feel different in a few months. You never know.”
I shrugged. “I doubt it.”
Colin left me alone. I stared at the wall. Laughter drifted in from a few stragglers leaving the parking lot. There was a thrumming in my eardrums, a pressure. I wanted to sleep, but I wasn’t tired.
The morning was hot and smoky, the aphids buzzing in the wild grass out past the parking lot.
Cortez leaned in my window. “We took a vote. We want Phoebe to join us. You want to ask her?” I took a big, sleepy breath and nodded.
When I stepped into Colin and Jeannie’s room, Phoebe was telling them what she’d heard about Athens. It sounded like the Doctor Happy crowd had lured thousands to join them. Maybe they could establish a beachhead to get things stabilized in the region, who knew? As long as they didn’t come my way with their needles, that was fine with me.
“I’m going to get some air,” Phoebe said after a while. She grabbed her sweater and headed for the parking lot.
“She’s such a sweetheart,” Sophia said. “I came in to check on her last night, and we talked for a long time. I told Jean Paul if we didn’t take her with us, I was staying with her.” Jean Paul smiled sardonically.
“I’ll go ask her,” I said.
Phoebe was sitting on a concrete step, her knees pressed together, her feet pigeon-toed, reading an old waterlogged book:
“You don’t see many people reading these days, except the newspaper,” I said.
“They don’t know what they’re missing,” she said. It had to be in the 80s, but she was still wearing her sweater.
“You read a lot?”
“I read all the time. I always have.”
“What are you reading?”
She looked down at her lap, marked her spot with a finger, held the book up so I could see the cover. “It’s about Savannah, back in the nineteen nineties.”
“Really? Is it good?”
She wobbled her head. “It’s okay. I’ve read it before—I like that I know most of the places he writes about.”
“Hm. Maybe I could borrow it when you’re done.”
Phoebe knotted her eyebrows at that.
“We’d like you to join us, if you’re interested.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “That’s really kind of you.” She looked directly at me, something she didn’t do very often. “Thanks,” she said. “I was hoping you might ask. It’s difficult being alone out here.”
We ate a hellish mix of bitter grass, wild onions, and mint leaves I’d harvested since we got clear of the bamboo and there was more biodiversity. Afterward we relaxed in the parking lot. Cortez settled on the tailgate of a truck, plugged our energy pack into the radio
and took his daily stroll up and down the dial.
We all bolted upright when a voice leapt out of the static.
“The Wasteman was having a bubble, I tell ya.” The speaker had a Jumpy-Jump accent mixed with a southern twang. “Told her he was issuing a batybwoy warning on Paddy.”
A second adolescent voice laughed raucously. “Paddy’s always using a toe to do a thumb’s job.”
They rambled on, gossiping in their incoherent slang about the Wasteman and Paddy, about who better watch out, and who should represent themselves physically at the radio station.
“Come on, say something helpful,” Jean Paul growled.
More crap. Termite was working for the firemen, so he needed to be drenched.
“At least it tells us there’s something left of Savannah,” Colin said.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “I’m tired of this.”
“It could be worse there than here,” Cortez said.
“The last I heard when I was still in Twin City was that Savannah was a very bad place to be. We were in
