“Yeah, that’s it. Exactly.”
Someone had gone through and smashed a lot of the mirrors in the Hall of Mirrors. Outside, the facade was painted with huge clown faces. One had a long, pointed head, another, a fat round one.
We went on talking—about our fears, about the pain we felt for the things we’d done. It felt good to have someone listen without judging.
We didn’t realize how late it was getting until the light began to wane. Phoebe raised her arms over head and stretched. As she did so one of her nipples was just barely visible through her shirt. It was like glimpsing a rare bird, obscured by thick foliage and then gone as she dropped her arms. She was a beautiful woman. I wondered if my capacity to love wasn’t as far from the surface as I thought. Maybe I was afraid of those feelings, or embarrassed by them, or felt guilty about having them. Or all of the above.
“I can’t handle any more emotion in my life,” Phoebe said, as if reading my thoughts. “My tank is empty. I can’t handle any more love, no more tearful breakups.”
“Me neither,” I said.
She looked at me with those turtle green eyes. I leaned over and kissed her, lightly, almost not at all. I didn’t intend to do it—I just did, without thinking. To my surprise, Phoebe didn’t protest. To my further surprise, a light spring breeze blew through me, lifting me just high enough to see beyond the despair I’d felt for so long I could barely remember ever feeling anything else.
Neither of us said anything. We headed back as if it hadn’t happened.
On the walk back I realized that in my entire life I’d never had a conversation like the one I’d just had with Phoebe. I hadn’t even been able to talk like that with Ange.
I was staring at a wall of thick kudzu and suddenly realized that there was an entire house hidden in that tangle of green. A wren squeezed into a crack between the slats just below the roofline. Looking further off, I spotted another house.
“Did anyone notice that there are houses right there?” I asked, pointing.
Everyone turned and looked. Phoebe laughed. “I hadn’t noticed.”
We’d spent the night sleeping outside, thirty feet from shelter. I finished rolling up my bedding, stuffed it into the duffel bag I’d salvaged at one house or another.
Phoebe was putting away her knickknacks. Each night we seemed to lay out our bedding a little closer together.
“How did your parents die?” Phoebe asked.
“In the water riots in ’21,” I said. “I don’t know the specifics, just that they were alive before the riots and weren’t after.” I plucked a bamboo shoot off a stalk, twisted it between two fingers. “How did your father die?”
“My mother said he choked on a chicken bone.”
“Wow.” It seemed an anachronistic death. But even with all the awful ways to die these days, I guess some people still choked on chicken bones.
“We should get moving,” Cortez called out.
“Whatever you say, boss,” Colin called back. Cortez gave him a “don’t make me kick your ass” look.
I shrugged on my pack. It felt a little heavier each day we continued on our survivalist diet.
Two men ambled out of the brush. One was dressed head to toe in camouflage, the other in a crisp, white Atlanta Braves baseball uniform. Each cradled an assault rifle in one hand.
“What have we got here?” the guy in camouflage asked. His close-set eyes were nearly hidden by a wiry black beard.
“We’re just passing through,” Cortez said.
“Yeah? To where?” the one in the baseball uniform asked. It reminded me of a Jumpy-Jump outfit. Had the Jumpy-Jumps made it this far out of the city? Anything was possible. He went over and pulled the corner off the tarp we’d tied over one of the big packs that held our community property. He had a meaty bully’s face, the kind of guy who was a second string linebacker on his podunk high school’s football team and never got the girl.
“Savannah,” Cortez replied.
He turned back toward us. “Tell you what—why don’t you all drop those packs?” He looked Phoebe up and down.
I knew this script, I knew where it went even though it had only begun to play out.
With a calmness I never would have imagined I was capable of, I reached back and pulled a pistol out of my belt, aimed it, and started firing.
I just kept pulling the trigger; I hit one man square in the mouth, then shot the other high on the chest, then in the side. They were blown backward like extras in an action movie, their eyes wide with surprise.
The gunshots subsided. There was a moment of stunned silence, then Joel started to cry. My heart was pounding so hard that I could feel blood pulsing in my neck. “Jesus,” Colin said.
The big one, who I’d shot in the chest, was taking ragged, hitching breaths. The other guy had stopped breathing the moment I shot him.
For a change my heart wasn’t pounding from fear—it was pounding with rage. The emotion was pointing outward instead of inward, and that felt good.
“What did you do?” Sophia said, her eyes wide. “We don’t know if they were going to hurt us.” She squatted next to the guy who was still alive.
“They were going to hurt us. You know it and I know it,” I said.
“They may have been soldiers of some sort, or police. They only asked us to drop our packs. You can’t shoot people for that.”
“I’m not letting any more of my friends die,” I said, my voice trembling. “If that means shooting strangers before they let on whether they’re killers or just assholes, fine.”
The guy I’d shot coughed a spray of blood, then made a choking sound.
“Somebody help him!” Sophia said.
“We can’t,” I said, not taking my eyes off the man. “He’s dying.”
“What’s happened to you?” Sophia said, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her eyes spoke volumes.
“I haven’t been fortunate enough to spend the last ten years behind a gate, guarded by mercenaries. That’s what happened to me.” Jeannie tried to interrupt, to defuse the situation, but I talked over her. “I’ve been terrorized by men like these every day of my life. I had to watch someone I loved be tortured by men like these. That’s what happened to me. Go figure.”
I’d like to think it just came out, that I’m not so eager to win an argument that I would pull out the truth of Ange’s death and thump Sophia with it. But Sophia had just called me a murderer.
“Okay J, calm down,” Cortez said. “Why don’t you give me your gun, okay?” He held out his hand.
I put the gun back in my belt.
I felt a hand on my back. It was Phoebe.
“Come on,” Phoebe said, leading me by the elbow, “let’s take a walk.” I saw Cortez look at Phoebe and nod, telling her that’s what they needed to do to handle the guy who’d clearly lost it, the guy who’d gone all shell- shocked on them. I let her lead me away, down a deer trail, to a wide pond that was mostly dried mud.
There were fissures in the dried mud, long jagged cracks in the parched earth that reminded me of the bark on the Live Oaks that lined the streets in Savannah. I stared at them, feeling like there was some significance there, some symbolic importance that my emotionally exhausted mind couldn’t reach.
“Here,” Phoebe said. I felt her hands slathering insecticide on the back of my neck. I hadn’t noticed any mosquitoes.
“Thank you,” I said.
The receding water had revealed a cornucopia of debris that had been thrown into the pond over the decades: rotted soda cans, bald tires, fishing line, two bicycles, a license plate.
“You okay?” Phoebe asked.
“Yeah,” I said. I walked out onto the dried pond, pulled up one of the bicycles with my toe. It made a sucking sound as it came loose. The brand was still etched in the crossbar: Hard Rock. “Was I wrong? Were they going to walk away in another minute?”
