Year's Best SF 17

Kaylee is intrigued. “Why don’t you have goats? You’ve got plenty of room.”

Jane sighs. “I always meant to have some. Tennessee fainting goats—they’re a cashmere type. But before I could get that far I broke my wrist, and that’s when I found out that you can’t have livestock if you live by yourself. Somebody has to be able to take over if you get injured or sick. Orrin had Hannah, you see, that’s why it worked for them—plus Orrin was tough as nails. But even he got snakebit once, and Hannah had to go for help.”

Their names were Hubbell, Orrin and Hannah Hubbell. Orrin was a landscape painter. He had built the house they were living in, on the Ohio River, and all the furniture. Hannah cooked and put up food on a wood-burning cookstove, Orrin fished and gardened and milked. Jane was nineteen when she met them, five years older than Kaylee, and she had fallen utterly in love with their homestead on the river. “I thought their place was magical, and the life they were living there was magical. I could see it was a lot of work, but the work seemed to keep them, well, you said it yourself: in touch with fundamental things, things they got enormous satisfaction out of. They were old by then, and got tired and cranky sometimes, but underneath there was always this—this deep serenity. It was like—well, as if what they did all day every day was a religious calling, as if they were monks or something, living every moment in the consciousness of a higher purpose.”

And that was why Jane had chosen to live as she did. “Oh, I compromise in ways they never would have. I’ve got electricity, though I make as much of it as I can myself, and conserve what I make. I’ve got gadgets: a washer, a TV, a computer, a landline phone. Had gadgets,” she corrected herself, and paused again. But then she went on without Kaylee having to prompt her. “The purity of their life came at the cost of ignoring society—though society didn’t ignore them, people heard about them and were always dropping by. I didn’t aspire to go as far as they did— they paid no attention to current events, never voted, they basically chose not to be citizens of the world. But if there had been another person or two who wanted the life I wanted, we would have been able to come much closer to the Hubbell’s self-sufficiency than I have. Sustainability, that’s the word for that.”

“But nobody did.”

“Nobody did. Not really. Not after they’d tried it for a while, experimentally.”

“So you finally just went ahead and did it by yourself.”

“Mm-hm. Compromises and all.”

“Are you glad?”

Jane thinks a bit. “On the whole,” she says finally, “Yes, very glad.”

By the third day Jane and Kaylee have developed a routine. They’ve run out of bottled water for washing and cooking, so Kaylee hauls it a bucket at a time from the cistern—the pump house is gone but the cistern is below grade and is still there, still full—and Jane purifies it with tablets from the first-aid box. They take turns feeding and changing the hatchlings, all six of whom are eating and pooping up a storm, and have grown amazingly on bites of low-fat kibble; they’re all-over gray fuzz now, with open eyes and big yellow mouths. Jane and Kaylee don’t bother with a fire except at night, when they wash up all the dishes and then themselves with minimal amounts of water from the kettle. (Kaylee washes out her underwear, the only pair she’s got, and dries it by the embers.) They take naps after lunch. Kaylee’s period starts: no big deal, she’s got pads and cramp pills. Kaylee changes the bandage on Jane’s arm, which doesn’t seem infected and has started to heal, though if it doesn’t get stitched up soon she’ll have one humongous scar. They’ve shoved all the loose junk in the basement against the walls, so they have more room in there, and a clear path from the shelter to the window.

On the third afternoon it rains. Their ceiling, which is the upstairs floor, leaks in a few places, so they retreat to the shelter with their bedding and Jane’s chair, and bring the dogs back inside. “No fire tonight,” Jane prophesies, though they’ve anticipated rain, and brought some firewood inside to keep it dry. “We’ll have one in the morning if it’s still raining at dinnertime.” Jane breaks out an old board game, Clue, which they play by solar lantern light.

In the middle of the second game the dogs leap up and dash to the open window, barking wildly. A moment later they can both hear it: the deep nasal roar of a helicopter, flying low. Kaylee skins out of shelter, basement, and window in a flash, and jumps up and down in the rain, waving a blanket, yelling, “We’re here! We’re down here!” They couldn’t have actually heard her over the racket, but an amplified voice from heaven thunders, “We see you! Stand by!”

Jane comes carefully through the window too now, wearing a rain jacket, and waves too, and tells the dogs to be quiet. The chopper hovers, then gradually settles in the hayfield next to the garden, and a guy in a yellow rain slicker jumps out and hurries toward them. “Jane Goodman? Kaylee Perry? You ladies all right—any injuries?”

“Jane’s got a bad cut,” Kaylee says, dancing around in the rain, excited by the suddenness of rescue, “but I’m fine! Are my mom and dad okay?”

“They’re just dandy, and they sure do want to see you!” To Jane he says, “The tornado passed west of Lawrenceburg but Frankfort got clobbered. An EF3, they’re saying. We been busy.” He looks Jane over critically, sees she’s not too badly hurt. “Okay, let’s get going then,” the guy says, turning to head back to the chopper.

Kaylee starts to hurry after him, but stops abruptly. “The hatchlings! Wait, I have to get …” she doubles back and pops through the window.

While she’s stuffing a few things into her backpack, and putting the bowl of tree swallows into a rainproof plastic bag, she can hear them talking. “Baby birds,” Jane’s explaining. She’ll just be a second. But I’ve got two dogs here, I can’t leave them. I’ll stay till we can all be lifted out together. Or till the road’s open.” Kaylee’s mouth falls open; Jane’s not coming?

“What about the cut?” says the guy in the slicker, and Jane’s voice says, “It’ll keep.”

“Supplies?”

“Running low, but enough for another day or so.”

“We’ll drop you a bag of stuff on the next trip out. Should be able to pick you all up tomorrow.”

Jane’s not coming! Kaylee pops through the window between the dogs, who are barking again because of all the commotion, without the bowl of hatchlings or her backpack. “Jane, listen, if you’re not leaving, I’m not either. You need me to change your bandage.”

She’s the only one not wearing rain gear and she’s standing in the rain getting soaked. The adults look at her with surprise and consternation. “Honey, your parents need to see you, I’ll be fine here for another day or so.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow to pick up this lady and the dogs,” says the EMS guy. “You need to get on home.”

“No,” Kaylee says. She backs away from them. “I won’t go so don’t try to make me. Not till Jane does. As long as my parents know I’m fine, I’m staying here with her.”

“I appreciate it, hon, I really do,” Jane starts to say, “but—”

“No!” She stamps her foot; why won’t they take her seriously? “I’m not leaving you here by yourself!”

The rain stops after all in time for them to have a hot supper, consisting of some of the food the chopper dropped off an hour before. Hot soup. Bacon and cheese sandwiches on fresh bread, mm. Apples. Bananas. Even Ding Dongs. Kaylee got the fire going herself, though not with one match. More like fifteen. “How long do you think it’ll take to get your new house built?” she asks now, licking Ding Dong off her lips. She feeds each dog a piece of banana.

Jane is staring into Kaylee’s fire. She looks up. “Hm?”

“To replace this one,” Kaylee says. “How long?”

“Oh—” Jane sighs heavily. “I don’t think … it doesn’t make much sense, does it? Everybody says I’m nuts anyway, living out here alone in the middle of nowhere. I’m almost seventy, Kaylee. I’d been hoping to hang on a while longer, but maybe the tornado just forced a decision I’ve been putting off.”

Kaylee sits up straight on the log. Her heart starts pounding. “What do you mean?”

“There’s a retirement community in Indiana I’ve been looking at. Maybe it’s time.”

Stricken, Kaylee says, “But—you have to build a new house here! What about the birds, what are they supposed to do if you’re not here? What would the hatchlings have done?”

Jane smiles. “The birds got along without me before I came. They’ll be okay. I gave them a nice boost for a while, that’s worth something; and as for the hatchlings, they have you to thank more than me.”

Abruptly Kaylee bursts into tears, startling herself and making Jane jump. “What about me then? How am I gonna learn everything if you go away? What if the Hubbells went somewhere, just when you found out you wanted to live like