Instructions for the End of the World (7 page)

I have never been good at getting inside my mother's head. Some things about her are so familiar—her warm jasmine scent, her voice, her wide cheekbones—and some are as foreign to me as if she is an alien being. My mother is not the type to talk about her feelings, or her past, or anything about herself, really. She issues orders, asks us about our day, explains how to do things. But she herself is a closed book, I realize.

But now I have to wonder about this other side of my mother, the one willing to pick up and leave without saying good-bye, the one who is, unlike me, brave enough to stand up to my father. Maly is my mother's name, and for the first time in my life, I see that she is a whole separate person who is not just a mother. The side of her we've been oblivious to all this time, the side with hopes and dreams and interests that have nothing to do with our family, is the side I'm starting to wish I knew.

Maly, I think, is possibly a more complicated person than any of us noticed.

When I realize I'm still clutching Dad's household binder, I fling it to the ground and go inside.

 

PART TWO

You're on Your Own

Every prepper fantasizes about being put to the test. There is no point in prepping if you don't really believe the world is going to end, right? There is always the fantasy of the heroic deeds, the adventure, the feeling of living on the edge. I see this in all the prepping magazines my dad leaves lying around the house, the websites and message boards he leaves open on the computer.

But I've always wondered about this fantasy and its potential for disappointment. After all, if we really want to live like that, why not pack up and move to the far reaches of Alaska right now? Why wait?

And I see, this is exactly what my dad finally did. He's saying to us, and to the rest of the world, why wait? Why not start surviving the apocalypse now?

 

Five

WOLF

I have been dreaming of the girl from the woods, Nicole. Although I don't normally remember my dreams, I remember this one clearly because I've had some version of it every night since I met her. She is stalking me in the woods, and after she shoots me in the leg and bends over me to see if I'm still alive, I kiss her.

It's not a complicated dream, but it is a vivid one, and it makes me want to see her again for reasons I'd rather not explain to myself. I wake up from it sweating, dry-mouthed, heart racing, weirdly aroused, and fearful at the same time.

I tell myself it's the recurring dream that keeps her in my thoughts, because I don't want to think about that strange girl with the gun. I don't want my mind to be full of nothing but her, the way it threatens to become. It goes against my Thoreaulike aspirations of simplicity and solitude. Henry never mentioned having girl crushes during his time at Walden Pond.

I am doing afternoon kitchen duty—and enjoying the rhythm of it—when Laurel finds me chopping vegetables for dinner. I like to chop, and even though my current task is dicing onions, my eyes are unaffected by them. Light slants in through the windows over the counter, and it glints off the chef's knife as it moves.

“You,” she says, leaning against the butcher-block counter next to me and crossing her arms over her chest. “Where have you been?”

“For the last hour, here.”

“I mean, like, all the time. You're on another planet.” I look up at her for a moment, catch the pout in her eyes that she's kept out of her voice.

Laurel is a high-maintenance friend. She always wants more than I can give. I used to try to please her, used to like the way she seemed to need me, but I've learned the hard way not to.

“I've been here and there.”

An irritated silence follows as she watches me chop. I'm good at it, and the white flesh of the onion quickly dissembles into a pile of quarter-inch cubes. Then I grab another and start the process again.

“I had a talk with Annika,” she says.

I say nothing. I don't want to talk about my mother or anything else. I come early to kitchen duty so that I can work alone, without the noise of other people's chatter.

“She says she's worried about you.”

“Hmm” is the sound I make.

I mean it to sound bored, to discourage her from further comment, but she interprets it as an invitation to say more, I guess.

“She thinks you're suicidal, like your dad.”

If I didn't know Laurel so well, I might interpret this comment as some attempt at helpfulness. Or kindness.

But we have grown up together like trees intertwined at the trunk.

Siamese twins of parental neglect.

“She shouldn't worry,” I say to the pile of onions.

“I worry too. You're acting depressed.”

“I'm not.”

She places a cold hand on my arm that's doing the chopping. I pause and look at her. Her blond hair is caught in a green batik cloth and hangs over one shoulder almost to her waist, and her gray-blue eyes reveal nothing. In her left nostril glints an ever-present silver ring.

“She told me she wants you to go with her to an AA meeting.”

“I don't drink.”

“She means as her family support person, or whatever.”

It's not like Laurel to play intermediary between my mother and me, but then, nothing is normal about Annika since she came back. Maybe she really did instigate this.

“Why don't
you
go for me?” I offer, and go back to my chopping.

“She wants you, not me.”

“Then why isn't she asking me herself?”

“She thought you might be more willing if I asked you. She thinks you're mad at her for being gone so long.”

I say nothing.

“She made me
pray
with her,” Laurel says, as if this is some kind of scandal.

“We live at a spiritual retreat center, in case you haven't noticed.”

“No, this was like … praying to
Jesus.
”

I am trying to decide what to say to that when the subject of our conversation walks through the kitchen door, which jingles every time someone opens it.

Beside me, Laurel goes deathly pale, probably worried my mother overheard her last comment.

“My two favorite people!” Annika says, seemingly oblivious. “Just the ones I was looking for.”

I focus again on my chopping, as if it will deliver me from this place, but Annika sweeps in close and I can smell her beeswax scent.

“Did you ask him already?” she says to Laurel.

“Yes. He's being noncommittal.”

“I was afraid of that. I realized it's really my job to convince him, isn't it?”

Laurel stares daggers at me, but I have no idea why.

“Darling,” Annika says. “It's family night at my recovery group tonight at six. I need you there.”

I drop the knife onto the counter, pick up the heavy oak cutting board, and brush the huge pile of onions into a bowl for the cooks who will be here shortly.

But this kitchen is already way too crowded.

I stalk to the back door without saying a word and leave, not taking the time to wash the onion scent off my hands, banking on the hope that my mother is too proud to follow after me, begging. That's why she sent Laurel in the first place, probably. But I have misjudged her, and she does follow, running to catch up with me. At least she is alone now when she stops me in front of the yoga center entrance.

“Wolf, just hear me out.”

“I'm busy,” I say. “What do you want?”

She tilts her head to the side, squinting her eyes at me. “What are you up to these days that has you so busy?”

I shrug, not willing to tell anyone here, and especially not her, about the new tree house.

“You are almost grown up,” she says. “I want to spend time with you before you've gone off living your own life.”

Now she wants to spend time with me. I choose not to point out that, for most of the past seventeen years, spending time with her son has been the last thing on her mind.

It's a little late for that,
is what I feel like saying, but I don't. Silence is often the best strategy. It's hard to argue with.

“What? You think you can stonewall me?” she says.

“No,” I say, edging my way toward the barn, where my bike and its trailer full of roofing material is parked. I've managed to convince anyone who ever asks that I have been hauling discarded wood and stuff that I find on our property to a guy in town who builds chicken coops with recycled materials.

But she reaches out and grabs my arm as I try to slip past.

“Wolfie, please.”

“Please what?”

“I don't ask you for many things. Go with me, just tonight, okay? I need you there.”

The thing I hate most about myself is that I want to feel needed. I especially want to feel needed by my mother. I don't want it with my brain, not with the part of myself that understands logic and reason. I want it with some primitive, lizard part of myself, deep down where logic and reason don't count for shit.

My chest gets this crushed-in feeling, and at the same time that I want to wrench my arm free and run, I stay there. I don't say yes, but she knows she has me.

“Meet me in the parking lot around five thirty, okay?”

She gives my arm a motherly squeeze, and she looks, for once, vulnerable. I nod and finally break free.

Giving up the idea of escape on my bike, I cross the grounds toward the woods, and soon I am in the shade and protection of the trees, where I know my way better than probably anyone else. I follow trails so faint only the deer know they exist, and I go deeper and deeper into the woods.

My mother will say she is a recovering addict. She will say she is sober (she loves to use the word
sober,
like it's a ticket to forgiveness for all past sins). But the only relevant thing is that she is an addict.

I can't remember a time before this was the most important fact about her.

I have the misfortune of being her only child, so whenever she decides she's going to get back on the motherhood bandwagon she directs all her misguided energy at me. This has led to a lifetime of unfortunate childhood memories. Like the time when I was twelve and she baked weed-laced brownies for my birthday party, and all my friends got either really high or really sick.

Or when I was nine and she drove me and Laurel and Pauly to the movies in town, but then she forgot about us and we spent half the night looking for her car, only to find it sometime after midnight parked outside a bar, her in the back seat making out with some guy.

My least favorite memory, though, is from the time right after my dad left us. I was six and Annika was alternating between depressive, drunken benders and periods of remorse when she felt the need to make sure I was okay. I was attending a Waldorf school at the time, since it was before the village school got started, and she showed up at school early to pick me up, for some reason I can't recall now. But she was drunk or high or something, and after she'd come stumbling into the classroom to get me, the teacher refused to let us leave, with her so clearly unfit to drive. So Annika threw a raging tantrum right there in front of all the other kids who'd been in the middle of doing finger painting, and I was standing there with my blue-stained fingers, watching my mother fall apart, until the police came and we had to ride in the back of the police car back to the village.

Every time I see a police car, I think of my mother, that horrible day, and my half-finished finger painting of a sunflower against a royal blue sky. I wish I still had that painting, so I could burn it.

Since returning from rehab, though, she is different in some way I find more disturbing than reassuring. She has a higher power, and she is taking things one day at a time, and she has given herself over to God-with-a-capital-G. Even Mahesh doesn't dare to question her on this.

Being a woman like Annika, who was raised by her university professor parents in Heidelberg to believe in science and literature, to be skeptical of everything, to value learning above all else, I guess this is the kind of rebellion she is drawn to, first with her commitment to Sadhana Village and now with this—the rebellion into that which cannot be proven or disproven.

Faith.

I wish I could have some kind of faith in her, but I don't.

I don't know how much time has passed, since the following of deer trails has become a meditation, but I realize with a start that I've led myself back to the edge of the woods that look out on the house where Nicole is living. There are no cars parked there now, but I can see her outside, dragging a piece of lumber across the yard toward the old garden and orchard.

I squat against a tree trunk, amid the faint, musty smell of decaying leaves, and I watch.

I don't know why I watch, but the bad feelings from the dream that's been dogging me begin to fade and she takes shape as a real person again, her hands in work gloves as she pauses to brush sweat from her brow with a forearm. She moves again with that same unconscious grace I first noticed about her.

I see that, at least in this way, as she stacks one piece of lumber on top of another—building a raised bed, maybe—she is like me. We are both building something. She is not afraid of toil and sweat and dirt.

It would be wrong to stay here watching like a predator, when she is alone and going about her day. I should either go to her and offer to help with whatever it is she's doing or leave.

So I turn and head back into the woods, resisting the magnetic pull of her presence.

Choosing solitude, because it's safer.

*   *   *

We take the old Mercedes to town, its leather seats one of the more vivid memories of my childhood. My mother has always been a sketchy driver, so I insist on driving. Since it was my car during her absence, it should be a comfortable position—me in the driver's seat—but I mostly kept it parked because I prefer my bike, and I feel as if I have a dangerous animal in the seat next to me. This is the first time I've been really alone with Annika for any length of time since she came back.