The rest of my life, I’m going to be living a lie, so I’m writing now to tell what really happened.
No, even that is a lie. It isn’t what really happened. It’s what I made happen. If I don’t admit that here, now, then I’ll be lying to myself just as I’ll be lying to everyone else every day of my life.
We spent all day working, trying to move the mountain of rubble that was blocking the cellar door and keeping Lisa and Gabriel trapped. We can get Gabriel out through the window, but only Lisa can feed him, so there’s no point. She has food and water, and Mom cut up a couple of Matt’s flannel shirts, for diapers. Sometimes when he cries, we hear him, and it makes us smile, at least for a moment, at least on the inside.
We hardly talk. The only breaks we take are when we’re coughing so hard we have to stop. A few sips of boiled water, and we get back to the job. It’s better that we don’t talk. There’s nothing we could say that wouldn’t make us sadder or more afraid.
All the food Jon and Julie got is gone. All the food at Mrs. Nesbitt’s is gone. We don’t know for sure, but we can’t count on more food deliveries from town. We don’t know if there is still a town.
The electricity is out, but this time it will never return. Wires are down and there’s nobody to repair them. There are two big tree limbs on the front of our house, and part of the roof has caved in. A handful of the windows shattered as well. It’s funny. Matt used to worry about us losing the sunroom roof, but that made it through. It’s the rest of the house that’s collapsing around us.
Dad had put Julie on the sunroom mattress. We took turns going in, checking up on her, making sure the fire was still burning, and eating enough to keep ourselves going, grabbing what sleep we could by Julie’s side.
We didn’t talk about Julie except once. Mom said she’d taken a pin and stuck Julie’s hands and feet with it. She told Julie to close her eyes and let her know when she felt something. Six times Julie hadn’t felt anything. Three times she said she thought she felt the pin, but two out of those three times Mom hadn’t pricked her.
“I don’t understand,” Jon said. “What does that mean?”
“It means Julie wants to believe she still has feeling,” Syl said. “But believing it and having it are two different things.”
“But she’ll get well,” Jon said. “Won’t she?”
“No,” Mom said. “She won’t, Jon.”
“Is she going to die?” he cried.
“Not so loud,” Dad said. “We don’t want Lisa to hear.”
“I don’t care about Lisa!” Jon said. “What about Julie? Can’t we do something?”
“All we can do is make things as easy for her as possible,” Mom said. “You’re not a child anymore, Jon. You know what things are like.”
None of us had stopped working while we talked about Julie. It was early evening, and the pile was down to four feet, so we stood ground level, stooping to pick up the debris. Our backs and arms were screaming in pain. But we kept flinging shingles and siding and pieces of mangled furniture as far from the cellar door as possible.
“I don’t want her to die,” Jon said.
“None of us want her to,” Dad said. “But we don’t want her to suffer, either. At least Charlie died fast. Sometimes I think that’s the only thing we can hope for anymore.”
“No, Hal,” Mom said. “We can still hope for our children, for their future. That’s all that matters, their future.”
I thought about the future I’d imagined for myself two days before—Lisa, Gabriel, and Julie in a safe place; Dad and Alex and me near enough that we could see them sometimes, know they were being taken care of; having that future Mom wanted for all of us.
It was more than twenty-four hours since I’d seen Alex. A part of me was starting to think he’d never existed, that I’d made up a boy I’d given my heart to because he wouldn’t accept anything less from me.
But I knew he was real because I missed him so much, and because his sister was lying helpless in the sunroom and we were talking about her death.
Alex had thought about her death. He’d prepared for it. He’d accepted something I had never had to, that there might come a moment when death was preferable to life and that he bore the responsibility of recognizing that moment and acting on it out of love.
He’d been so concerned about leaving Julie in Dad and Lisa’s care because no matter how much they loved her, they weren’t family. But when I’d agreed to marry Alex, I’d become Julie’s family. That’s why Alex had told me to get his missal. He knew he was risking death, biking into the path of the tornado. But he trusted me with the only possessions of value he had, the passes and the pills.
All of that came to me while I worked, every one of those thoughts, those realizations. And once they were in my mind, I thought them over and over again, like the nightmares I’d had, endlessly looping through my mind until I finally accepted the truth. Alex was gone. Julie was my responsibility, no one else’s.
I don’t know what time it was when Mom told me to go home, to send Matt back, and to get some sleep. All I know is we were working by lamplight then, and the night was so clear you could make out the full moon through the ashen sky.
I stumbled to our house, the darkness and my exhaustion making it almost impossible to walk a straight line. Matt was sleeping and I hated waking him, but we needed every hand we had. He didn’t say anything when I shook him awake. All he did was nod and walk away.
I lifted the blankets off Julie to see if she needed changing, but she was dry. I’d hoped she was asleep, but when I saw her eyes were open, I asked if she needed anything.
“No,” she said. “Matt gave me some food and water. But I wish Alex was here.”
I stroked her face. “Alex loves you,” I said. “We love you, Julie. All of us love you.”
“I wish I could see Lisa and Gabriel,” Julie said. “And Charlie. Charlie always makes me laugh.”
“You’ll see him soon,” I said. “I promise you that.”
Julie began to cough, and when she did, her body shook.
I lifted her so she was in more of a sitting position and had her rest against my chest until the coughing stopped. There were three pillows on the mattress already, but I asked if she’d like another. She said no.
“You’re like the princess and the pea,” I said, knowing what was coming but postponing it for another hour, another minute. I remember hoping that Alex would somehow fly in and Julie would be miraculously cured.
But I’d been hoping for miracles for over a year now. Another hour, another minute, was never long enough.
“What’s the princess and the pea?” she asked.
“It’s a fairy tale,” I said. “About how the only way you can tell a true princess is if you put a pea under forty mattresses. If she can feel it, then she’s a true princess.”
“What a waste of a pea,” Julie said.
“When they wrote fairy tales, they didn’t know,” I said. “They had peas to spare in those days.”
Julie giggled.
“Did your mother tell you fairy tales?” I asked. “When you were little?”
“No,” Julie said. “But she liked it when we told her about the saints. We learned about them in school and we’d tell her what we’d learned. Joan of Arc was my favorite. I wrote a report about her once.”
“I didn’t know she was a saint,” I said. “I guess I never thought about her being one.”
“She was,” Julie said. “She’s the patron saint of soldiers.”
“She’s your brother Carlos’s patron saint, then,” I said.
“Maybe,” Julie said. “Maybe the Marines have a different one. Carlos says it’s better to be a Marine than a soldier. He’d probably rather have his own patron saint.”
“You believe in all that,” I said. “You and Alex. In spite of everything you still believe?”
It was dark in the sunroom, just the glow from the woodstove, but even so I could see the look of surprise on Julie’s face. “Of course,” she said. “I’ll see Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, when I’m in heaven.”
“What’s heaven like?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“No one’s hungry there,” Julie said. “Or cold or lonely. You can see millions of stars at night, like that painting. And there are gardens. Big vegetable gardens filled with everything. Tomatoes, radishes. String beans. They’re my favorites, the string bean plants.”
“No flowers?” I said.
“You can have flowers if you want,” Julie said. “It’s heaven.”
