Thirst (19 page)

“I’ll die,” he pleaded. “I was helping you.”

“You say another word, another fucking word, and I’ll pull the trigger. Answer my husband. I heard you. I heard what you said. Bullshit! Where were you yesterday? Where were you?”

Steve McCarthy bent down and touched the top of the jug; Patty took a step closer and stood at the edge of Eddie and Laura’s driveway.

“Can you do what I’m doing with this?” he said. He picked
up the jug and hugged it to his chest. “Can you keep this from happening at every house? Do you believe you can?”

Patty fired into the air. “Run,” she said, but Steve McCarthy froze. She fired again and his shoulder burst open. A flap of bloody fabric hung down. His hand went limp and the jug thumped onto the driveway. Eddie took two steps and fell on it like a fumble. He looked up to see Steve McCarthy running. It was freakish, the speed of his awkward stride; Eddie couldn’t imagine ever running like that again.

Patty put the gun against the side of her head and fired, collapsing to the ground as though her bones had disappeared.

“No!” Mike Sr. shouted. He lifted his forehead from the ground and bashed it against the pavement. “Baby!” he cried, bashing. “Baby, baby, baby.”

Eddie called for Laura. She pushed on the rail and stood, coming down the steps. Mike Sr. was bashing his head just below her, and she had to time her steps to make it over him.

She bent down and lifted Eddie by the arm. Eddie held on to the water.

“Oh, God,” she said.

They went inside their house and fell onto the carpet.

“I have it,” Eddie was saying. He was triumphant, stroking the plastic jug. “I have it, Laur. I got it for us.”

It was night, but they sat there by the door, leaning up against the side of the couch. Laura held the jug. Every hour or so, they took a little sip. It was like a tonic. Eddie felt bright and reflective. He felt that they would live. That they would leave here. There were maybe four cups of water left. It seemed enormous, but precious—the most precious thing.

“Just don’t think about her,” Eddie said. “Put it out of your mind.”

“I see her when I close my eyes.”

“Concentrate on something else. We need time to let this settle.”

“It was so fast,” she said. “I thought she was just going to walk back up her steps. I can see it with my eyes open, too. I was looking right at her when she did it.”

“We’ll leave,” Eddie said. “We’ll get away from here and come back when the power’s back.”

“Evacuate.”

“Yeah, but not with the neighbors. Not into the city.”

“We’ll go to my parents’ house,” Laura said.

“Your dad will know what to do,” Eddie agreed. “We can take the trail. That will keep us off the road for a few miles at least. We’ll walk over the bridge.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“We’ll leave tonight.” He gathered himself as if to stand, but didn’t.

“What about Mike Sr.?” she asked. “We’re leaving him here?”

Eddie was silent. Then he said, “What are we supposed to do? It’s up to him. We’re not leaving him anywhere.”

He watched Laura stand on shaky legs. She went into the kitchen and came back with an empty plastic water bottle. When she bent to take the jug from Eddie, he held on to it tightly.

“What are you doing?” he said.

She pressed down on the jug, locking her arms. She stared at him. “Don’t be cruel,” she said.

Eddie stared back. “There’s no such thing as cruel right now. It’s just us. The only people you can be cruel to is us.”

“He won’t make it.”

“It’s thirty miles to your parents’ house. If we don’t take all the water, we won’t make it.”

She nodded. “When the fire department comes, they’ll help him.”

“Right.” Eddie looked at the black window. He couldn’t imagine anything good coming from out there anymore.

“How fast can you walk right now?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll get the tent, then. We’ll need to camp out.”

Downstairs, he found the tent in the furnace room, and stuffed it into his backpack.

“You’re packing?” she said.

There was dry ramen in its plastic bricks in the back of the cupboard and Eddie took those, too. He packed the flashlight and a tarp and rolled a kitchen knife in newspaper so that it wouldn’t cut the fabric. He took a raincoat. The pack was as tight as a beach ball when he zipped it, and the two canisters of wasp spray bulged from the side pockets.

“Let’s go,” he said. “It’ll better to walk at night. We won’t need as much water in the cooler air.”

They stood there in the middle of the living room. The starlight didn’t make it down to the ground outside their windows.

“We could stay till morning,” she suggested, “and then go.”

“The sooner we get there, the better.”

“We’ll go twice as fast in the morning,” she said. “We’ll get lost in the dark.”

“I have the flashlight.”

She sat down on the sofa and touched the spot beside her. “Rest,” she said.

“Come on,” he urged, but he sat down and she put her legs onto his lap. Eddie didn’t mind that they were hot. After a little while, he squeezed her thigh and woke her up.

“We’re going to be okay,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. He held the jug at his side. “This changes things.”

“Yes.”

Eddie looked at her. She’d lost the pleasant firmness in her features. Instead, her face was soft with daydream.

“When this is over,” he said, “it won’t even feel like part of our lives. It’ll feel like a dream. Or a story we heard about someone somewhere else. What happened yesterday and the day before … I can barely remember it now. It’s like I didn’t do any of it, not me.”

Laura remained silent.

“I’ve been in a fog,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “But don’t keep talking about it.”

“None of this counts against us. Whatever you did when you were walking home from your car, whatever you saw …”

“It happened if you keep talking about it.”

“Whatever happened to your little girl …”

She swung her legs out of his lap and sat up straight. He could barely see her face in the dark but he could tell something had changed inside her.

“It all happened,” she insisted. “All of it. You can’t turn it off. You can’t start over. Can’t you see that?”

“We’ll get out of here. All that matters is right now.”

“That’s a lie,” she said. “Don’t fool yourself. I’ve been fooling myself for years. It all happened. Everything that happened happened. I’m different now.”

“Just try. Just try to do this with me.”

“I know what it feels like—like you’re in a cloud, like your brain isn’t working. I’ve felt that way for a long time. Like nothing I did mattered. But it does. I’ve felt that way since Philadelphia, but I wouldn’t
let
myself feel it.”

“You met me after Philadelphia,” he said. “That’s when we fell in love.”

She looked at him, as if only then had he discovered the heart of it.

“Do you regret that?” he asked. “That you were like that when we met?”

“That part of me was clear.”

“How can you know that for sure?”

“It’s all so terrible, but I don’t regret it. It’s just my past. It all happened, but sometimes I can’t believe it happened.”

“Like us. We happened.”

“You didn’t know me when I was different. You didn’t know who I was when I was young. This is who you fell in love with.”

“But who will you be after all of this is over?”

“Who will you be?”

He thought about that question. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “It’s impossible to tell.”

“Just let it happen,” she said. “Then we’ll go from there.”

She was staring out the kitchen window. Somehow, it was dawn. They’d fallen asleep. He looked at Laura—the set of her jaw, the way she pinched her eyebrows. He felt sure she was watching Bill Peters walking up the driveway. A panic leapt inside his stomach.

“Mike Sr.’s out there digging,” she said.

The jug was on the kitchen table. There was a glorious amount of it left. Eddie could see the pale waterline.

“Digging?”

“Graves, I think.”

Eddie stood next to her. The panic was subsiding. Outside, the grass threw up a golden light. The sun seemed to be burning from below the horizon. Mike Sr. was pressed against a shovel. Digging wasn’t the word for it. He was leaning. If the shovel wasn’t there, he would have fallen.

“Did you look in the driveway?” Eddie asked.

“No.”

“Don’t,” he told her.

They were quiet for a while, watching Mike Sr. lean on his shovel.

“It’s not very big,” Eddie said.

“What isn’t very big?”

“The hole.”

“It’s not a hole. He’s only scratching the ground a little.”

“He has to decide how many holes to dig.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

Mike Sr. lifted the shovel tip from the ground. When he placed it back, he put his hand to his forehead.

“We could still help him,” Laura said. “We’re still here.”

“We’re going to your parents’.”

“We could give him water.”

“Look,” Eddie said. He poked the jug so that the water rocked. “We talked about this last night. We need it. We’re leaving.”

“How do you feel now, though? You feel good, right? I feel pretty good. Not normal, but not as bad as yesterday.”

“And how long will that last? Not long. Not in this heat. Maybe we can go ten miles today. That’s three days it will take us. Look at this.” He tapped the jug again. “That’s not enough for three days.”

“But right now we’re feeling fresh.”

“The fire department will be back soon,” he said. “Remember? They’ll help him. Like you said.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They’ll bring a water truck.”

“Then where are they?”

“They’re in the city now.”

Laura looked back at Mike Sr. in the yard. “I’ll help him, then,” she said. “I’m feeling okay.”

“No.” He reached out and held her wrist. “We’re going. Mike can take care of himself.”

“You can’t stop me from trying.”

Anger squeezed through him like water through a crack in a dam—a dam he hadn’t known existed, nor what it held at bay inside of him. His hand was in a fist.

“Stay here,” he said. He made himself relax. “I’ll do it if you stay.”

The sofa was still buttressed against the back door, and the bean-can alarm balanced precariously on the knob. Eddie used the front door so as not to disturb it. The heat outside was ovenish and thick. The leaves on the azalea bush were gone. Blood from Patty’s head had dried in a potato-shaped puddle. Eddie tried not to look as he passed her, but he looked. She’d already bloated a little.

“Mike,” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. didn’t turn around. He continued leaning on his shovel.

“Let me help,” Eddie said.

He walked around to the patch of dirt that would become the grave for the Davis family. The earth wasn’t broken; not even the pattern in the grass was broken. There was no strength in Mike Sr. to even scrape it away. The grass was yellow and dry. The shovel tip barely stuck in.

“Can you bring her back to life?”

The heat was already getting to Eddie. He was sweating. Mike Sr. wheezed.

“Why did she do it?” Mike Sr. said. He leaned more heavily
into the shovel, and his stomach hung. “We could have started over.”

He pulled the shovel back, as if to rake the dirt away, but only combed the dead grass toward him. Eddie watched. Even burnt, the grass was elastic, erasing the path of the shovel tip. He looked at the creamy sky, the dead trees.

The shovel fell and struck the ground. Mike Sr. lunged, grabbing Eddie by the back of his neck, but there was no strength in his fingers. They peeled off when Eddie stepped away.

“Jesus, Mike,” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. sat down on the grass. A wheezing persisted in his chest. Eddie rubbed his neck where he’d been touched.

“You have it,” Mike Sr. said, looking at the parched ground.

“Have what?” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. ran his fingers through the grass. “The water,” he said.

“No. He took it away.”

“Don’t lie.” When he looked up, the skin around his eyes was iridescent with veins. “I saw you pick it up.”

“I wasn’t near it,” Eddie said.

“You were there. You could have stopped her.”

“I tried …”

“I’ll go to the cops,” he warned.

“I’m trying to help you, Mike.”

“We’ll see what they think,” Mike Sr. said. “We’ll see what happens when they investigate.”

Eddie picked up the shovel and stuck it in the ground.

Mike Sr. said, “You give it to me, and I’ll forget it. I won’t tell them anything.”

“There’s nothing to tell.” Eddie put his foot on the edge of the shovel and leaned on it. A little wedge of soil came up. Mike Sr. didn’t move. He sat there looking in the other direction. Eddie dug a few more wedges out. He wasn’t feeling well, and didn’t hear Laura come out until she was right behind him, handing Mike Sr. a cup of water.

Mike Sr. was babbling. “Why did she?” he said. “Why’d she?”

Laura said, “It’s what you do now that counts.”

“Why did she do it?” The more he said it, the more it didn’t sound like anything. “Why’d she doot. Wideshee.”

Eddie walked past Patty in the driveway and tried again not to look. If he looked at her, he felt she might start talking—she might provide an answer for her husband.

Inside, he could see that the waterline in the jug was lower from when Laura had poured it for Mike Sr. He poured himself one, too. It was too much, maybe a third of a cup. He held it, and then put it on the table and looked out the window. Laura was standing over Mike Sr., who had his head between his arms, his fingers grabbing at his ears. Eddie picked up the glass and tried to take a sip, but couldn’t stop himself from gulping it. When he was through, he poured another, and sipped from that one slowly. The first glass bubbled in his stomach. Outside, Laura was trying to dig. She was putting her back into it. Eddie was too tired even to call to her from the window. He could see her shoulder blades move beneath her shirt, but couldn’t see the ground—whether it was becoming a hole or just a collection of more divots. After a few minutes, she came back inside, too.