When he saw the dump his Cassie was living in, Tom suffered an even bigger setback. Because it had never occurred to him that his little girl, despite the benefit of not living under his influence, would grow up to be just like him.
He spent the night in an apartment building across the street from her trailer park. Someone had broken all the windows in the ground-floor apartment, and the occupants had fled, but the bedroom still had some furniture in it and Tom slept on the sagging box spring with a knife under his pillow. The next day, while he waited for courage to find him, he boarded up the windows and took stock of the place. Maybe it would do for a few days while he figured things out. Meanwhile he could keep an eye on his daughter’s comings and goings.
Except she never went anywhere.
Tom grew bold, squeezing between her trailer and the thick oleander hedge that separated it from the next one, and peering through the windows. The oleander was dying, its leaves curling and turning that baked-red shade that signaled death by the biological agent drifting in from its rural targets. The government said the stuff didn’t pose a threat to livestock or humans, but Tom figured once it got in the groundwater, they were all fucked. Still, he had bigger things to worry about.
Cassie sat on her couch a lot. She also cried a lot. Sometimes, she lay on the floor and cried.
Also-even worse-there were children’s things in the trailer. A crib, toys on the floor, one of those things you stick them in to keep them still, with all the bobbly devices attached to it to entertain a baby. But there was no baby.
Tom puzzled over what it all meant. He supposed he could knock on the door and ask her, tell her who he was and why he’d come, but all his instincts told him that she would not receive that news well. And who could blame her?
It tore him up more than he could have ever imagined: his daughter, all grown-up and heartrendingly beautiful even in dirty clothes and no makeup, had clearly arrived at her own rock bottom. As one day turned into two, and then three, Tom began to understand that it was now his life’s purpose to help her back up. Maybe-he sometimes thought, during those yearning days-that had been his purpose all along and every set in every nightclub had just been the sound track leading up to this moment.
He was determined not to screw it up.
He considered and abandoned dozens of ideas. All around him, the town was going to the dogs. Before long the apartment house in which he was squatting emptied out, except for a few of the freaky fever people who moved into the other ground-floor apartment. Red talked to people in the streets who urged him to find a shelter. That’s what everyone was doing, moving into movie theaters and city hall and grocery stores, big open places where they could pool their resources and keep the scary fuckers out-the rumor was that they were starting to attack people and infect them, too. Rabies, they’d called it. If only. And frankly Tom thought everyone was right, that until someone got a handle on this epidemic, holing up like scared little girls was exactly the right thing to do. The fevered were terrifying as shit.
But he wasn’t about to leave until his daughter did. By then he’d evolved a sort of plan-when Cassie moved into a shelter, he’d just follow along and see if he could get into the same one. When they were safe, and maybe fed- Tom was getting damn tired of eating out of cans, and he wasn’t keen on eating the K7-whatever-the-hell the government was calling it, like a damn horse-then he’d test the waters and figure out how to tell her who he was.
He almost missed it. One morning she walked out the door carrying a duffel bag, and Tom only saw it because the plumbing had stopped a few days earlier and he’d gone out to take a morning whiz against the side of his building.
He followed her, not even bothering to go back for his few toiletries, afraid to lose her.
When she went to her mother’s house, Tom was surprised. He’d sort of thought they were estranged.
When she came out a little later carrying a little girl, he was stunned.
He followed them to the library, but when she went inside, he stayed out.
He wanted to come in. Meant to. Planned to. But this was truly the end of the line. If she said no to him now, if she didn’t want to see him here, where else could he go?
Across the street, that was where. From the upper floor of the municipal center, in a big room still decorated with crepe paper from a bat mitzvah-Mazel Tov, Jessica!-he watched the sun go down on the library and wondered if this was to be his lot until the end of time, stalking his daughter, too afraid to come close, too desperate to make amends to ever truly walk away from her.
She came outside the next day looking like his little girl again. The grown-up version, anyway. The smile was back on her face. Her clothes were clean and she’d pulled back her shiny hair. Her necklace glinted gold in the sun. She walked tall, cradling her own little girl in her arms, pointing out the clouds and the mountains to her. When they got to the curved drive, Cassie set the baby down to play, and she toddled around the dried-out lawn. The little girl had the pale fine hair and big round eyes that Cassie had had at that age, and Tom’s throat closed up with emotion and for a moment he felt like he was looking through a lens that erased time, almost three decades, and he wanted to run and swing her into the air and make her a promise that he’d never leave her, but just when he was thinking that this time he might actually take the first step someone screamed and Tom had the terrible premonition that he had waited too long, that Fate waited to snatch away the daughter he did not deserve.
“You were there?” Cass asked softly.
“I was there. Cassie…I always wanted to be there. With you. I just-well, I fucked it up. I was a fuckup. I admit it. And I know admitting it’s not enough, really, I do. I’d have to live nine lives like a cat to make it all up to you, but all I’ve got is this one.”
Red-her dad-reached for a corner of the blanket that had fallen from Cass’s shoulder and tucked it up around her again, and she saw that he was shivering.
“Here, we can share,” she said, and shook the fleece out and let it drift down over both of them, scooching closer. As the soft fabric settled she leaned against him, lightly. It was probably wrong. It was definitely stupid to trust him like this, when he’d been in her life for what-a couple of months, if he could even be believed-and out of it for decades.
But Aftertime had a funny way of jiggering the math, of coming up with conclusions that weren’t supported by the facts. Because the
“Tell me the rest.”
Tom was paralyzed, leaning on the second-story window frame and looking down at the scene across the street, hearing the screams coming from the library’s little entrance area where a few people had been smoking and getting some air.
The entrance area would have been a good place to play, because you could get back inside and slam the door shut in mere seconds. But Cassie hadn’t stayed there. She had wandered out to the circle drive with her daughter, and they were bent down looking for bugs or something, oblivious to what was going on around them. When the screaming started Cassie lifted her head and looked for the source of the trouble, already scrambling for her daughter, but the little girl pranced out of the way, focused on whatever caught her eye on the ground.
And then Tom saw the things. Four of them, bursting around the corner, running like a bunch of drunks on wobbly legs, grabbing at the air and making gobbling sounds-headed straight for Cassie.
Then he ran, too. Down the hall, the stairs, stumbling and slamming into the wall of the stairwell but he didn’t care. He got to the bottom and-unbelievably-the door jammed.
Tom heaved and kicked and when he realized there was no way he was getting through he ran back up to the second floor and down the hall to the front apartment. He yanked up the window roughly and crawled out onto the ledge and dropped, aiming for a hedge, feeling the dead branches scrape his flesh as he landed and rolled, and then he was on his feet and running and just in time to see the things dragging his beautiful girl away, holding on to her legs and arms.
Tom didn’t hesitate for a second but he knew he had to be careful, had to be craftier than they were because he’d heard tales of what they could do, and he would be outnumbered and outmuscled if they turned on him. He didn’t much care if they ripped him to shreds, but he had to get to Cassie first, had to get her away from them
