There had been no one upstairs, but there was a big bedroom there with two small beds, one against the east wall and one against the south, three windows, and two dressers. Her brother had wanted a room of his own; but she, terrified at the thought of lying alone in the dark, promised that the room would be his room and she would have no room—that she would sweep and dust his room for him every day, and make his bed for him.
Reluctantly, he consented.
They ate canned chili the first night, and oatmeal the next morning. The house, they found, had three floors and fourteen rooms fifteen counting the pantry. The TV, which Jill had turned off when she had left the room to heat their supper, was on again, still on mute.
There was an attached garage, with two cars. Her brother spent all afternoon hunting for the keys to one or the other without finding them. Indeed, without finding any keys at all.
In the living room, the man who had been (silently) talking talked silently still, on and on. Jill spent most of her time watching him, and eventually concluded that he was on tape. His last remark (at which he looked down at the polished top of his desk) being followed by his first.
That evening, as she prepared Vienna sausages and canned potato salad, she heard her brother shout, “Dad!” The shout was followed by the banging of a door and the sound of her brother’s running feet.
She ran too, and caught up with him as he was looking through a narrow doorway in the back hall. “I saw him!” he said. “He was standing there looking right at me.”
The narrow doorway opened upon darkness and equally narrow wooden steps.
“Then I heard this slam. I know it was this one. It had to be!”
Jill looked down, troubled by a draft from the doorway that was surely cold, dank, and foul. “It looks like the basement,” she said.
“It is the basement. I’ve been down here a couple times, only I never could find the light. I kept thinking I’d find a flashlight and come down again.” Her brother started down the steps, and turned in surprise when a single dim bulb suspended from a wire came on. “How’d you do that, Jelly?”
“The switch is here in the hall, on the wall behind the door.”
“Well, come on! Aren’t you coming?”
She did. “I wish we were back at that place.”
Her brother did not hear her. Or if he heard her, chose to ignore her. “He’s down here somewhere, Jelly—he’s got to be. With two of us, he can’t hide very long.”
“Isn’t there any other way out?”
“I don’t think so. Only I didn’t stay long. It was really dark, and it smelled bad.”
They found the source of that smell in back of a bank of freestanding shelves heaped with tools and paint cans. It was rotting and had stained its clothing. In places its flesh had fallen in, and in others had fallen away. Her brother cleared scrap wood, a garden sprayer, and half a dozen bottles and jugs from the shelves so that the light might better reach the dead thing on the floor; after a minute or two, Jill helped him.
When they had done all they could, he said, “Who was it?” and she whispered,
“Dad.”
After that, she turned away and went back up the stairs, washed her hands and arms at the kitchen sink, and sat at the table until she heard the basement door close and her brother came in. “Wash,” she told him. “We ought to take baths, really. Both of us.”
“Then let’s do it.”
There were two bathrooms upstairs. Jill used the one nearest their room, her brother the other. When she had bathed and dried herself, she put on a robe that had perhaps been her mother’s once, hitching it up and knotting the sash tight to keep the hem off the floor. So attired, she carried their clothes downstairs and into the laundry room, and put them in the machine.
In the living room, the man whose lips she had tried to read was gone. The screen was gray and empty now save for the single word MUTE in glowing yellow. She found the panel her brother had shown her. Other channels she tried were equally empty, equally gray, equally muted.
Her brother came in, in undershorts and shoes. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Later,” Jill said. “I don’t feel like it.”
“You mind if I do?”
She shrugged.
“You think that was Dad, don’t you? What we found in the basement.”
“Yes,” she said, “I didn’t know being dead was like that.”
“I saw him. I didn’t believe you did, that time. But I did. and he closed the basement door. I heard it.” She said nothing.
“You think we’ll see him anymore?”
“No.”
“Just like that? He wanted us to find him, and we did, and that was all he wanted?”
“He was telling us that he was dead.” Her voice was flat, expressionless. “He wanted us to know he wouldn’t be around to help us. Now we do. You’re going to eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait just a minute and I’ll eat with you. Did you know there isn’t any more TV?”
“There wasn’t any before,” her brother said.
“I guess. Tomorrow I’m going out. You remember that gate we passed on the bus?”
He nodded. “Poplar Hill.”
“That’s it. I’m going to walk there. Maybe it will be unlocked to let cars in. If it isn’t, I can probably get over the wall some way. There were a lot of trees, and it wasn’t very high. I’d like it if you came with me, but if you won’t I’m going to anyhow.”
“We’ll both go,” he said. “Come on, let’s eat.”
They set out next morning, shutting the kitchen door but making very certain that it was unlocked, and walking down the long, curving drive the bus had climbed. When the house was almost out of sight, Jill stopped to look back at it. “It’s sort of like we were running away from home,” she said.
“We’re not,” her brother told her.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do. Listen, that’s our house. Dad’s dead, so it belongs to you and me.”
“I don’t want it,” Jill said; and then, when the house was out of sight, “but it’s the only home we’ve got.”
The drive was long, but not impossibly so, and the highway—if it could be called a highway—stretched away to right and left at the end of it. Stretched silent and empty. “I was thinking if there were some cars, we could flag one down,” her brother said. “Or maybe the bus will come by.”
“There’s grass in the cracks.”
“Yeah, I know. This way, Jelly.” He set out, looking as serious as always, and very, very determined.
She trotted behind. “Are you going into Poplar Hill with me?”
“If we can flag down a car first, or a truck or anything, I’m going with them if they’ll take me. So are you.”
She shook her head.
“But if we can’t, I’m going to Poplar Hill like you say. Maybe there’s somebody—”
“I’ll bet somebody is.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt. “There’s no picture on the TV. I tried all the channels.” He was three paces ahead of her, and did not look back. “So did I.” It was a lie, but she had tried several.
“It means there’s nobody in the TV stations. Not in any of them.” He cleared his throat, and his voice suddenly deepened, as the voices of adolescent boys will. “Nobody alive, anyhow.”
“Maybe there’s somebody alive who doesn’t know how to work it,” she suggested. After a moment’s thought she added, “Maybe they don’t have any electricity where they are.”
He stopped and looked around at her. “We do.”
“So people are still alive. That’s what I said.”
