Kodiak
Wooden posts strung with Christmas lights and solar lanterns were the makeshift fence line that he was absolutely prohibited to cross. The generator stopped working from time to time, but even in the winter months when the sun barely showed its face, solar panels provided enough energy to keep the barrier lit, even when it meant nothing else in the house would be powered.
That had been the first lesson Jake learned as a boy. Lights hurt their eyes, so if they ever made their way to his family’s hidden island, the lights would at least help keep them at a distance until they could escape. When Jake was wide awake at four in the morning, crying over growing pains or a fevered nightmare, the lights stayed on.
He could barely recall life before the island. Only a few memories floated to the surface, myopic and distorted by the same books he’d reread over the years. Jumping into a public swimming pool—the distant smell of chlorine permanently etched into his psyche. A highly theatrical school drop off, maybe kindergarten, with him sobbing and clinging to his mom’s calves. A brightly lit big-box store while he whined to his dad about how bored he was until his dad opened a carton of cookies and fed him one by one. He remembered that day because it was when a singular headline flooded every screen in the world.
What everyone had tried to deny was happening could no longer be ignored.
His dad had fished with some buddies up on Kodiak a few times before the sickness came. A luxury cabin on a small, nearly-deserted island far west in the chain, a way-stop for big game hunters and fishermen who had the cash to travel that far north. After things got bad, but before they became apocalyptic, Jake’s mom and dad packed up and made it there just days before planes stopped flying. His parents’ phones had service for a while, so they witnessed just how bad it got before their hotspots stopped working and the internet went down for good.
His first vivid memory at the cabin was a single, uneventful night. He was twelve years old then. The game in his mind was adventurous, and he ran from post to post making loud mouth-noises—whooshes and shoos. The set of strung Christmas lights that hung in front of him blinked out, only temporarily, but when he turned back toward the house his parents were both watching him, faces pressed against the glass, panicked. Nothing ever came of it.
It wasn’t until later that he considered how they both had frozen, a paralyzed duo, instead of running out to meet him.
They had never so much as spotted a single threat on the island, except for a few frigid nights when the power flickered out and they had to huddle together under blankets near the fire, wood getting lower and lower, his parents plotting the next firewood run, and the best ways to survive out there when even the ocean froze around them and fish couldn’t be caught.
But they made do. Two potatoes planted with sprouts turned into dozens, cut deep in the black soil. His mother had a green thumb and his father could catch anything with lungs or gills. They survived.
That was his childhood, tucked away on the island for ten years. As he got older, Jake came to wonder what life would be like when he was a man out there all alone, stuck with only a few shelves of well-worn paperbacks to keep him company for the rest of his natural life. He would reread Cujo for the fifth time, then the eleventh. Then Patriot Games for the ninth, then fifteenth. Then the second book in a Clive Cussler war time epic for the twelfth, never knowing exactly what had transpired in the first.
During his teen years, his parents fretted about the lack of ‘appropriate literature’ for a young man, but he found the books interesting enough. Still, they took great care in explaining how the world was filled with literature even more complicated and breathtaking than The Pelican Brief—Jake’s favorite.
As the years passed, Jake began to wander farther and farther from the house, at least on the brightest days, though his parents discouraged it. Near twenty, he was three inches taller than his dad and towered over his mom. Not a kid anymore, though that didn’t seem to matter out here. His parents saw him as they always had—the only thing in the world worth saving.
One day when the family was meant to be ‘spring cleaning,’ Jake attempted to repair the handle of the kitchen faucet by taking everything apart, staring at it on the countertop in front of him, and then divining how it might all fit back together. This approach usually worked out well enough.
His mom lifted a thick Turkish rug to sweep beneath it. It covered creaking wooden floorboards that no one in the family even heard anymore. That was when Jake noticed the trap door.
“What’s that?” he asked his mom.
“Mmm,” she murmured, busy sweeping. “The basement. Freezing cold. A few things down there from the early days that we couldn’t keep looking at.”
“Like what?”
She seemed annoyed with his questions as she attempted to push the couch back off the rug. “You going to help?”
“Things like what?”
“What? Down there? The old cell phones, for one. It was torture after the internet went down. I had a few old books downloaded, some music, but wasting the energy to charge them every night, just to reread a copy of a book that wasn’t very good or listen to music in headphones when we had the record player—it’s just—we needed to let them go.”
“Can I see?”
“See what?”
“I don’t even remember what phones looked like. I just want to see them.”
“It’s—” she faltered. “It’s not healthy. Every day for years I hoped for a signal, some sign.”
Jake shrugged. “I just want to see them. Maybe I can use the parts.”
“No, you just want to play Candy Crush. You might not remember how addicted you were, but I do.”
Jake didn’t remember. He tried to recall the name of the game or what it looked like on a screen but couldn’t. It was like that whole period of his life belonged to someone else, like it had never actually been his life at all.
“Fine.” His mom relented. “The chargers are down there, too, but I doubt they’ll take a charge after all these years. But hey, if they do, you might enjoy those steamy romance novels on my phone.”
“Mom,” he used the word as its own censure. He knew his parents worried about that sort of thing. They had each other, and he had no one but them.
Jake had worried about it every night for years on end but refused to commiserate with his parents on the topic. The more ‘adult’ books on the shelves had worked as a temporary bandaid. When he was twelve, they had offered enough to satiate a burgeoning curiosity, but by sixteen or so, they’d mutated from nourishment to mild torment.
He lifted the small metal handle and yanked up the cellar door. The basement smelled good, like the first cold day after a long, bright summer. It wasn’t much, just a small room lined with a couple wooden shelves for storage. It was too dark to see anything.
He felt along the walls until he heard his mom above him. “Here you go.” She tossed down a flashlight, which was barely bright enough to make a halo. He had to remember to set it outside to charge.
He heard his mom’s footsteps creak above him, and then the sound of his dad’s voice, more urgent than Jake was comfortable with. Urgent was never good, he’d learned that early on. A rusted trap, another snapped fishing line, a cut that wouldn’t seem to heal. He grabbed both phones, stacked on top of each other, and a single white charger behind them. Then he noticed an old-fashioned-looking radio in a corner, just a big rectangle with a large metal antenna. He grabbed it without thinking and climbed the steps back into the living room.
He couldn’t hear what his father was saying as he slammed the trap door shut, only the murmur of his voice. Jake set the phones and radio on the kitchen island, and eventually found his parents on the front porch, an expansive stone arch that had been built to impress wealthy visitors.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” He interrupted his father, who turned to him wide-eyed.
“A plane, Jake. I saw it.”
“But you’ve seen planes before, right?”
“A few, mostly off in the distance. But it’s been what—what has it been, Meg? A decade?” When they first came to the cabin, there was a five-year calendar that his parents had meticulously curated, but after it expired, they sort of let it all go. There had been a half-hearted effort to be aware when one month turned into another, but it wasn’t anyone’s priority. Jake was probably twenty, but whether they celebrated on the right day, no one could say for certain.
“Has it been that long?” His mom looked tired. “What does it mean? Someone waited ten years, found a plane that worked, gassed it up and now they’re flying across Alaska? Think they settled somewhere like we did but then got sick—I don’t mean sick like that—I don’t think those things could fly a plane. But people still get sick, right, like cancer? Maybe they’re desperate.” His mom was rambling now, wringing her hands. His dad was watching the sky.
“Should we put out the fire?” Jake asked.
Both his parents looked up now. It was a clear day, but even then, a thin stream of clear smoke played like a mirage from the chimney.
“I need to sit down,” his mother said.
“After all this time, I stopped imagining this scenario,” his dad responded.
Jake realized that his parents had no idea what to do.
“So–,” his dad sat down next to his mom. “Your mother is right. Those things couldn’t fly a plane, but someone who was infected could. It’s dangerous. On the other hand, it’s been so long. We stopped getting information when the internet went down. Maybe something has changed.”
“Let’s just put the fire out and lay low,” Jake argued.
“I just don’t know what it means,” his mother whispered. “After all this time.”
Jake walked back into the house when he realized his parents were ignoring him. His mom had never been one to look for signs or second-guess herself. Ten years out here trying to stay alive and now his parents faltered after a single airplane flew overhead. With the cast iron poker, he separated the few burning logs and put the fire out. His parents followed him in, still sighing and wringing their hands.
His dad pointed to the cell phones stacked on the kitchen island. “What’s this?”
“Jake asked what was in the cellar.”
“That radio never worked. It was here as a decoration. I spent a year tinkering with it until it made me crazy. Had to go into the basement with the phones.” Jake watched his dad’s eyes wander to the window; he was still watching the skies.
“Should we turn the generator off, just for the night?” Jake asked.
His parents both swiveled their heads in his direction, scolding in unison. “Are you crazy? They can’t approach the light,” his dad said.
“They’re blinded by light. We’ve never turned out the lights.” His mom reminded him for the one-thousandth time.
“The virus attacks the eyes first and does something to the cornea–” his dad was about to repeat the family sermon–the coveted litany of facts about the sick that had kept them safe all these years.
“I know,” Jake interrupted. “I know all that. It’s just—what if people, normal people, are low on resources? What if a generator broke down and they’re on the hunt for a new one? Humans are dangerous, too.” Jake had read enough Clive Cussler paperbacks to understand that fact about the world. His parents worried about that same thing in quiet murmurs they believed he hadn’t overheard through the years.
His mom rubbed her forehead. His dad rubbed his jaw. Jake was growing furious with their paralysis.
“No,” his dad finally answered. “Lights stay on. No biplane is going to fly out here at night. If they do, they’re too stupid to worry about, what with no GPS to guide them away from a mountain peak. We’ll be okay at night. Lights stay on.”
Jake was about to say something, arguing for more caution, when his dad held up his hand.
“They’re gone, Jacob. We haven’t seen a plane in ten years and likely won’t ever see one again. They got lucky finding gas and figured they’d scope out a new place to hide with better weather than here. Solar lasts thirty years, more or less. Maybe their solars quit on them. Wherever they’re going, they found it by now.” His dad sounded so unconvincing that no one even bothered to respond.
Jake didn’t sleep that night. He plugged in one of the phones, only slightly worried about the pull from the generator. Summer was coming and that meant sun all day. They knew solar panels had a shelf-life, but theirs were top of the line, and his dad was convinced they’d work much longer than standard. Of course, none of them had any idea when they’d been installed, but they would cross that bridge when they came to it, as his mother tended to repeat about any potential future cataclysm.
A few hours later, nothing had happened. No more airplanes, and the phone screens were still black. He didn’t know how long a phone took to charge, but he doubted it was hours.
The tubes and wires of the transistor radio sprawled before him on the bedroom floor. He realized he should have drawn a map of what it looked like before he dismantled it. Maybe he could fit it all back in there somehow, but he wasn’t so sure. He replaced the phone on the charger with the other one then spent another hour examining each part of the radio without much hope. Eventually, he fell asleep, barely cognizant of the unrelenting lights that filled every inch of their cabin.
According to his father’s calculations, even if super-efficient LED bulbs were lit every day all day, they should last forty-five years. He cursed this math in vain every time he replaced an old bulb with a new one, all while the replacement box grew emptier. Recently, his mother had taken to switching lights off on the brightest days of the year. Something they’d never done before. Jake heard his parents arguing about this when he woke up in the morning.
His father was adamant—forty-five years. His mother, her voice low, reminded him that Jake was only twenty. “The lights are our only defense,” he argued back. “I need to save the bullets and arrows for hunting. Besides, we don’t even know if those would work against—” His father stopped short and he heard his mother murmur something softly in return.
Jake got out of bed, pushed the door closed, and examined the radio parts spread across the floor–if only there was a manual hidden somewhere. He would check the bookshelves again, as if he hadn’t touched every single book on every single case more than once, more than twice or three times.
The charging phone was still black. No luck. No Candy Crush or whatever games his mom swore he had once loved. She couldn’t recall if any of the games would work without the internet anyway. No steamy romance novels that he would admit to no one he was desperate to read.
Jake scanned the downstairs bookshelves but found nothing. Up in the loft sat a giant flatscreen and its half-a-dozen remotes, all useless. Black like the phone. When they’d first moved in, Jake would beg his parents to watch a movie. This he doesn’t remember, but they’ve told him enough times that he feels he does.
His dad had explained that even when the internet still worked, the Wi-Fi had been slow and faulty. “If only we had a DVD player and a few classics,” his dad used to say. But that was years ago. His parents told him that if they had chosen a less-fancy cabin, there would probably be a wall of DVDs and much better books.
Whatever that meant, he wasn’t quite sure, but he no longer missed movies—he simply didn’t remember them.
From up in the loft, Jake heard a noise he didn’t recognize. A high-pitched ping that rang out of nowhere. He leaned over the balcony and looked down at his parents, both frozen, their eyes locked.
“What? What was that?” he called down to them.
Slowly, his mother asked, “Jake, did the phone take a charge?”
“No. It was black when I got up.”
Jake ran down the steps of the loft and met his parents, who were moving toward his bedroom. “I looked at the screen this morning. It was still black.”
“Yeah,” was all his dad said as he reached for the phone. “They stay black unless you touch the screen. Or look at it.” His mom reached down, and the phone lit up out of nowhere, unlocking at the sight of her face.
“Whoa.” Jake’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t know—I figured it would light up or something.”
His mom stared at the screen, unblinking.
“What is it, Megan? What does it say? Does it work? What bank account was it even—what service—” His dad trailed off.
“Look.” She held the phone up. “Luke, look at this.” Jake tried to see the screen before his dad grabbed it out of her hands. His parents stared at each other for a long time. No one said anything until Jake couldn’t take it anymore.
“What the fuck is going on? What does it say?”
“Language!” his parents responded in unison.
And then everything changed. When Jake finally got a hold of the phone, he read the alert.
NEWS UPDATE: DOMESTIC AIR TRAVEL RETURNS. UNRESTRICTED DOMESTIC FLIGHTS OPEN FOR PUBLIC. NATIONAL BORDER CROSSINGS LIMITED TO EMERGENCY OPERATIONS.
As he was reading, the phone vibrated in his hands. A series of messages unfolded before his eyes. His mom and dad both tried to grab the phone at once.
“I don’t understand,” his mom said.
“Cell service?” his dad asked, stunned.
“It says ‘Mom.’” Jake said, trying to read each message as it popped up on the screen.
His mom shook her head. His dad stood for a minute, his shoulder propping him up against a wall of the cabin while he rubbed his forehead until it was bright red. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Megan. Try calling. Call your mom.”
She pushed a number, and they heard ringing. She shook her head. “It’s spotty. I can tell it’s cutting out. I don’t even know—”
They all heard the voice on the other end of the line.
“Megan? Meg, is it you? Luke? Jacob? Are you all right?”
“Mom?”
“Megan? Can you hear me? Where are you? Tell me where you are.”
“Mom? Mom, is that you?”
“I can’t hear you. Please. Tell me where you are.”
“Hang up,” Luke said.
Jake looked at his dad like he was crazy, like he’d truly lost his mind. “Dad, what are you talking about? It’s Grandma.” Both Jake and his dad reached for the phone at the same time.
His mom turned her back to them and pushed the red button to end the call. Jake was trying to get his hands on the phone. “What’s going on? Why would you hang up?”
“Quiet!” both his parents yelled at once.
“Send a text. Right now,” his dad urged.
“I am. I am. I’m sending the name of the cabin, the island, that we’re all alive.” They all stared at the screen, waiting. The phone dinged again. Jake’s heart was pounding so hard, traveling from his chest into his ear canals, that he could barely hear his parents’ conversation.
“She got it. She knows we’re here, but what does that mean? That she’s safe? Where? A military base? How did she get out of New York?” His parents simply looked at each other, speechless.
It was the same plane his dad had seen the day before. It landed a quarter mile from the house in a snow-patched field that served as an expansive garden in warmer months.
Jake felt a pulse of anger thinking about his mom’s strawberries before he remembered they were leaving, maybe forever. A few texts got through from his grandmother.
“Safe to return.”
“I will arrange.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Hoped for this day.”
“Are you sure you’re alive?”
The last one was redundant, but they were all too shocked to notice.
The pilot was a small, scrawny man who introduced himself as Cardinal. “Been running frontier survivors all week now that airspaces are opened again. Government’s been sending up new satellites, so folks in remote areas don’t have to rely on radios no more. All kinds of people coming out of the woodwork. I’ve had worse jobs. A lot of relieved folks.”
“We—we didn’t even know.”
“Hell, they’ve been talking about it for years. Supposed to open in ’28, but they kept pushing it back. Worried about an outbreak, refugees, and other diseases spreading. How’d you miss that?”
His parents looked at each other.
“What?” was all Jake could muster. “What about the—the things? You know, the sickness?”
The man ignored his question but turned toward his dad, his eyes tight. He took another long look at the house, the lights strung and running mid-day. “You telling me you didn’t have a radio? No phones? How’d you call that old gal then, the one who hired me?”
Jake was trying to make sense of what the man had told them so far. “Wait,” he said, but his dad interrupted.
“Is the sickness gone? Eradicated?”
The man scratched his head. “You folks missed a lot. Think you might need a drink.”
“Please,” his mother said. “We thought—we came here because we thought it was over. Like end times, like over over. Not religiously or anything. You know what I mean. Like the world was ending. Human life was ending—” she stopped herself and looked to Cardinal for answers.
The man turned and offered her a weak smile, then looked down at his watch. “You have a lot to catch up on. But I got another pickup in three hours. Explain what I can on the way. Earmuffs on, folks.”
Jake could hear the pilot clearly through the headset as he told them what happened to the rest of the world while they were on Kodiak. Years of chaos. His family had left before things got really bad. Two billion souls lost, the pilot told them.
“Only two billion?” his mother asked through the headset.
The pilot shifted in his seat. Jake’s father coughed.
“I mean, that’s a lot of people—” she added.
“A quarter of the world’s population,” the pilot responded.
“Yes. That’s right…” His mother faltered.
“Everybody lost someone. We all did.” The pilot grew quiet. For a long time, no one spoke.
His father ventured another question. “How long–how many years–before things returned to normal?”
The pilot shook his head. “Never did do that. Three years or so, it took for the armies and governments to coordinate. I served back in the day and never thought I’d see all the different folks—religions, nationalities—didn’t matter anymore. Eventually, after about three years of crazy, they had isolated—” he stopped for a minute, “mostly destroyed the sick. The few they isolated—well, that didn’t go well.”
“Destroyed?” his mother repeated the word.
“Right,” the pilot said this quietly. “There wasn’t much choice in the matter. Protesters argued for a cure to reverse it. Other protesters protested those protesters, arguing the sick needed to be destroyed.”
“When you say destroyed?” his dad asked.
“I mean corralled and shot, is what I mean.”
No one spoke for several minutes.
“Right,” Cardinal’s voice cracked into the microphone. His voice in Jake’s ear was too-loud, too-foreign. A new voice after ten years of nothing but his mom and dad’s particular articulation was disorienting, like hearing a song you’d memorized sung in a language you’d never heard before. He removed the muffs, but the noise of the plane was so staggering that he immediately regretted it. Jake might have used his own palms to drown out all the noise, but his mom swatted his thigh, signaling him to put them back on.
Cardinal was still talking when he did. “That went on for another year or two, then sort of faded away. Scientists did make a vaccine–offered some immunity. At first everyone was too afraid of the exposure, but eventually most people took it. What happened to all the sick, the dead? Well, we don’t know, and we don’t ask. The loudest voices, those demanding a reversal or a magic cure—well, I’m of the opinion they never saw someone they cared about change. There was no coming back, in my opinion. Sorry if that offends you—well, anyway. I won’t get into that.”
His mom looked out the window, tapping her forehead with her middle finger repeatedly until Jake couldn’t stop himself from reaching out and grabbing her hand.
Eventually, Cardinal continued on. “So, after about four or five years, people came outside again. They say two billion dead from the sick, millions starved, no medical care or any of that, either. But each year got better after that. Internet came back eventually and once countries started fighting each other again—things were pretty much back to normal.”
His parents didn’t speak; his mom was tapping her forehead again.
“When was that? How long ago?” Jake asked.
“Mmm, maybe three or four years ago.” He shrugged. “Took a lot longer to open airspaces though. Still going to have trouble flying over Canada, I’m guessing. But maybe not. What do I know?”
Jake tried to make eye contact with his parents. Had they even attempted to charge their phones four years ago, three years ago, two, even one? They promised him that the world ended—that everyone had died except for them. Except here they were in an airplane with a loose-lipped pilot with a brand new gospel to spread. Two billion was a hell of a lot of people, but it wasn’t all of them. They refused to meet his eye, though, and kept their gazes resolutely forward, or on their own hands, then their feet, then forward again—nothing but open ocean below them.
No one spoke again until the plane landed in Anchorage.
“Where do we go now?” his mother asked quietly. Jake couldn’t tell if she whispered it or if his ears were still thrumming from the noise of the biplane.
Cardinal shrugged. “Might be the lady who hired me got you tickets to the mainland. Might not be open yet, though. I just fly Alaska.” Then he was gone.
“Your phone, mom.” Jake nodded to her coat pocket where she had slipped her phone before they left. One of the only things they took from the house. They no longer needed the worn paperbacks or the yards and yards of Christmas lights strung along the wooden posts that had made up the spaces of Jake’s adolescence.
Everything was different now.
Months passed in Anchorage.
They spoke with Jake’s grandmothers almost every day. Both grandfathers died during the sickness in efforts to find food and clean water. Talking to his grandmothers was like talking to ghosts he had long since made peace with.
And the stupidity of it all. One phone still worked, for fuck’s sake. He could almost be finished with college. He could have a girlfriend. Maybe more than one. Anything was possible.
He never confronted his parents though, even when the resentments about their paralysis became so loud that they drowned out everything else. He just left.
After a month or so, he got a job packing cans of non-perishables in a factory at the edge of town. He lived with his parents until he saved enough for a room above a garage near the Army base. That first night on his own, he ventured into a bar down the street that was half-full of men in uniform and not nearly enough women.
Jake walked in and asked for a beer.
“What kind?” the bartender asked.
Jake lifted his shoulders, his eyes blank.
The bartender stood with his chest puffed, a handlebar mustache slipping into the edges of his wet mouth, and asked for Jake’s I.D.
“Never had one,” Jake replied, trying to understand how, of all the laws that were forgotten over the years, this one had stuck.
“How old are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You trying to get me fired?” the bartender asked, eyeing him.
A girl sitting a few seats down sidled up to Jake. “Is it true, then? You don’t know how old you are?”
When Jake walked in, the girl had been sitting next to a man in uniform. Women his own age were still a novelty, so he had a keen eye for them wherever he went. The grocery store, at work on the line, while walking down the street. He’d never really gone so far as to strike up a conversation, but he did notice them. He’d learned something from the books he’d read on Kodiak though, and knew better than to cause any trouble with a man in uniform, especially while he was still trying to make sense of—well—women.
She must have noticed his hesitation, the way he stared at the seat where she’d just been sitting.
“Him? No, that’s an old friend. I’m here alone.”
Jake nodded. She had short hair, a greasy blonde, dyed orange with something impermanent that was fading in splotches.
“Yeah,” he told her. “Well, it was true that we lost track of days, but it turns out I’m twenty.”
“One.” She corrected him. “You’re twenty-one, or maybe twenty-two. I think you could pull off twenty-two.”
She handed him a pint of beer she’d only taken a few sips from. The bartender watched them while leaning against shelves stocked with a handful of half-empty bottles of vodka.
“Another one.” The woman lifted a finger. The bartender only stared. “Oh hell, Clem,” she argued, “nothing matters anymore, does it?”
Eventually, he did as she asked. She eyed the bartender until he finally began to pour her beer. “Crazy to think that ten years ago, this bar would have been lined with all kinds of booze. They had beer from Thailand and Jamaica. Now all they have is this local shit.”
“Better than nothing,” Jake said. He didn’t mention that his parents had drunk their way through a two-hundred-bottle wine pantry at the cabin.
The woman only nodded. “I’m Erin.”
“Jake.” He attempted conversation. “How was your apocalypse?”
Erin was lifting the beer to her mouth and almost dropped it. She shifted toward him and raised her eyebrows. “Yeah. Right. Well, you’ll have to earn that. I don’t just go around telling my story to any old barfly.”
Jake downed his beer and was feeling light-headed. He had never heard the term barfly. “But you do go around buying beers for minors?”
“What’s your name again?”
“Jake.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Jake. You are the one buying the beers.” She lifted her hand to the bartender. “Two more, Clem. And to be clear, you’re actually older than me. He just doesn’t know you, is all.”
Five beers later, Jake had told Erin all about life on Kodiak. She still hadn’t shared her story, and he wanted, more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life, to get this woman back to his tiny garage apartment with nothing but a mattress on the floor.
In the end, he was too afraid to ask. He was unsure of how to invite her over without scaring her or offending her, and might have been more scared that she’d agree. All options were overwhelming.
As she walked out of the bar, she slipped him a phone number written on a napkin. “Great,” he said, trying not to slur, “I’ll call you.”
The problem was he did not have a phone. They were expensive and hard to come by. Most people who had phones were still using old models from before the Sickness. After a full night’s sleep and a hot shower, he tried to convince himself that there were plenty more Erins in the world. Or maybe he could borrow someone’s phone at work, or call her from the bar, or save paychecks for the next six months and barter what he could to get a phone and finally call her then. Whatever it took, nothing was worth groveling to his parents and begging phone favors.
He was doing what he could to avoid them. His mom regularly knocked on his door, trying at all hours–night and day, weekday and weekend–so he never knew when she’d show up.
So, two weeks later, on a sunny Saturday in June when he heard a knock on his door, he ignored it like he always did.
“Listen, kid, I know you’re in there.” Jake put his ear to the door. “I can see the shadow of your feet right now.” He pulled open the door and found Erin holding a six pack of beer. “There aren’t that many garage apartments in this neighborhood. I’ve knocked three times, you know, that’s pretty desperate of me. Last time I saw the landlord, he confirmed that Jake from Kodiak was hiding up here, otherwise I might have given up.”
“You found me.” Jake didn’t know what to say, so he attempted a smile.
“Okay.” Erin pushed out a breath. “Awkward. Well, you don’t seem happy to see me. I guess I read things the wrong way last time—what with you sending many, many hints that you wanted me to come back to your place.”
“No.” Jake shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t—”
“Have a lot of experience with women, was that what you were going to say?”
He had no experience with women, unless mildly pornographic scenes in best-selling paperbacks counted, or the last few months catching up on all the R-rated DVDs he could get his hands on, lying on the floor in his living room watching a 15” flatscreen that was older than he was. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Come on in. I thought you were my mom.”
Erin pressed her lips together. Jake said nothing, holding the top of the door open for Erin to slide in under his arm. “God,” she said, “you’ve grown like two inches since I saw you. Did you know it’s rude not to call a girl after two weeks? Very rude. You have a lot to learn about dating.”
He blushed, then coughed, then turned away.
“Don’t get shy with me. We’re not actually dating. How could we be if you won’t call me back?”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Ah, right.” This seemed to placate her. “Fine, but then why didn’t you tell me that night?”
“Honestly, I thought you were coming home with me.” He blushed a deeper red, not intending to blurt that out. “But then you left, and I—"
“You were wasted. Would have been sloppy.” She scrunched her nose at him, then started pulling drawers open. “Got a bottle opener?”
He shook his head.
“Hm,” she responded, holding a bottle, and cracking the top hard against the laminate counter. It fizzed open. She did the same trick with a second bottle and handed one to him. “Are you happy I’m here or what?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, taking a sip of his beer. “Sure.”
She didn’t stay that night either. Three beers weren’t enough to loosen Jake’s self-consciousness, even if he couldn’t take his eyes off the necklace that slipped below the collar of her shirt into the oblivion between her breasts. He asked again about her experiences during the Sickness, and she once again refused to answer his questions.
“That’s my story,” was all she would say.
As she was getting up to leave—they had watched the film version of A Time to Kill—he reached for her hand impulsively. She started, pulled her hand away quickly and sucked in a breath before she appeared to catch herself. “Jake, don’t do that. Don’t grab at people like that. I know you’ve had it easy, but you have to—just don’t do that.” Then she left.
It was already late, but he decided to walk to the bar for another drink. When he sat down, Clem eyed him, shaking his head slowly, until Jake pulled out his I.D. and pointed to the date.
“Twenty-one two weeks ago.”
Clem poured him a beer, no less begrudgingly than he had when Jake was underage. “You know Erin, right?”
Clem only nodded. He didn’t seem that much older than Jake, maybe late twenties, but something about him made Jake feel like a child.
“Did she have a hard time, you know, during the Sickness?”
Clem tilted his head down toward his chest and opened his eyes wide, as if Jake had just asked the dumbest question he’d ever heard.
“I heard about you. Rich parents carting you off to a resort in Kodiak to live unscathed while the rest of us fought off Wild Ones.”
Jake shook his head. He’d never heard them called that before. “My parents kept us there for years after things got better. I was practically a prisoner—a dumb kid who believed the world had ended.”
Something like amusement shimmered in Clem’s eyes. He snorted, a quiet laugh. “Ah, poor baby. Well, the world did end. It actually did, for most of us, at least. Erin lost her entire family. Every single one of them, including her cat, who was probably eaten by a neighbor. Her little sister got sick from the parents, who were forced to keep working until the minute they went fucking crazy. Erin noticed the signs and hid in some shed out in the woods. Wasn’t old enough to know how to save her sister, even if she’d been able to get her out in time.”
Clem looked up and cleared his throat. Jake turned around and found Erin standing in the doorway of the bar, watching them.
“Not your story to tell, Clem.” She glared at him, then at Jake, then left.
As she walked past the bar’s broad front windows, he watched her through the narrow slits of dusty blinds, silhouetted by streetlights. When he lifted the beer to his mouth, Clem was staring. “No. Get on. Get out,” Clem said, too loud, so that the few people left in the bar all stopped to look their way.
When Jake stepped out onto the sidewalk, he half-heartedly looked for Erin, but had no idea what he would say to her if he found her. Should he apologize for hearing her story if someone else shared it? Should he apologize that he was carted off to an island to live alone with his parents for ten years while she suffered through the worst of it? He didn’t know any answers, so he went home.
A week passed with no knocks on his door. He considered going to see his parents. His anger toward them had become complicated by the brief summary of Erin’s story delivered by Clem. He’d heard horror stories from co-workers, from men huddled on street corners, from clerks and cashiers and on the radio. Each one collected like a penny in a jar full of gathered coins. Each harrowing account and tragic tale he’d heard over the course of the last few months was beginning to weigh on him, forcing him to acknowledge subtleties that he would prefer to ignore.
It was easier to be angry.
Finally, late on a Saturday night, there was a pounding on his door. He swung it open, hoping to make things right with Erin, when he found himself face to face with his father.
“Jacob, finally.”
“Dad,” was all he could say.
“Where have you been?”
“Working.”
“Mom and I have stopped by a dozen times. More. You must work a lot.”
Jake lifted a shoulder.
His dad moved past him into the apartment. “Listen, bud, we got three tickets to San Francisco. It all finally went through. They say we can go home next month.”
“I’m going to stay here,” Jake said without thinking it through.
“What?” his dad asked, distracted by nothing in particular—a stain on the wall or the smell of mildew.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Of course you are. There’s a life for us back in San Francisco. There’s college or—”
“I never graduated high school.”
“That doesn’t matter,” his dad said, confused. “Why would that matter? You think they had high school while we were gone? The point is there's life in California, waiting for us.”
“I can’t— I’m not—” Jake struggled to find the words.
“Are you mad? Is that it? I can tell, you know. We can tell. But let me tell you, we did the best we could. We did everything we could to give you a life, and that’s what these tickets—”
“I appreciate that. You did what you thought was best; you did what you thought was right. And here we are–still alive. But I’m not going to follow you anymore; I gotta figure out the rest on my own.”
The conversation dragged on until, eventually, Jake convinced his dad to leave. He had no doubt that his mom would pound on the door the following morning but was surprised when there was a knock just a minute later.
As he pulled the door open, he pleaded with his dad, “Look, it’s almost midnight, and I don’t want to do this right now. ”
Except there stood Erin, shivering in the chill with only a hoodie and a six-pack of beer.
“Oh my god, that man would not leave. Is that your dad?”
Jake stared at her for a second. The light shining from behind him shone on Erin’s hair, now clean and white blond, a phosphorescent halo cast by the shadow of his own face. “I’ve been waiting for you,” was all he could think to say.
“That was my story to tell. Not yours to steal.”
“Sorry. I just wanted to know more about you.”
“You know, Jacob, an apocalypse isn’t like a paperback novel. And girls won’t always just show up on your doorstep. You’re just lucky, is all.”
Jake looked up at the night sky, half hidden by low gray clouds. He didn’t know what to say. No, real life didn’t play out like the paperbacks, with the problems all resolved by the last page. But none of that mattered right now, not with Erin standing in front of him.
“Come in,” he said, reaching for the case of beer. “I rented ThePelican Brief.”
Released: May 15, 2023
Misha Vaagen Lazzara is the author of the novel Manmade Constellations and the forthcoming Skipped a Generation. Full Bio