The Way We Fall (11 page)

Mom came over while I was making lunch today and gave me a hug, out of nowhere. I hadn’t realized how wound up I’d been until I let myself relax into her.

“You’ve been doing a really good job looking after Meredith,” she said.

I thought about the trouble I almost got us into yesterday, and my chest went tight.

“I don’t really know what to do,” I said. “Do you think she’s okay?”

“I hope so,” she said. “I think Emmett would be really pleased to see how you’ve been there for her.” She paused for a moment, blinking hard, and swallowed audibly. Then she said, “I just wanted you to know how proud I am of you.”

They were only words, but I’ve felt lighter all afternoon.

I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe if I write it down I can get it out of my head.

Tessa called this afternoon and said some of Dad’s seeds had sprouted, so maybe she should bring a couple by and then we could check out more of the summer houses. I said sure. After seeing Quentin the other day, I had trouble feeling any guilt about taking medications from rich people who aren’t even living here and giving them to the hospital. At least we were stealing to help.

The plants she brought were just little tufts of leaves, but they’re a start. We left them on the porch and headed out.

It was kind of calming, going into those “cottages” with their gauzy curtains and shiny appliances, everything clean and tidy. Like no one had ever been sick there. They felt safe.

The third house we pulled up to had a satellite dish mounted on the front lawn. As soon as I saw it, I didn’t care so much what medicine we might find. I was hoping I could get on the internet, to finally write to Mackenzie and find out what’s been happening in L.A. She must be wondering why I haven’t e-mailed her for so long.

If I hadn’t been so focused on that, maybe I’d have noticed something was off right away. There were a few dishes sitting on the kitchen counter. Someone had left a sweater slung over the banister. But I assumed these owners just weren’t as tidy as the others.

Tessa headed for the downstairs bathroom while I hurried upstairs. I opened one door and found the master bedroom, which was about the size of our entire second floor and had a big flat-screen TV, but no computer. There was a crumpled tissue on the floor. If nothing else, that should have warned me. I should have gotten Tessa and left.

But I didn’t. I opened the next door.

The first thing I saw was the blood.

It had seeped across the carpet almost all the way to the hall from where the woman was lying. She was curled on the floor by the foot of the bed, facing toward me. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was pulled back in this grimace like she’d been snarling when she died. Her arms were wrapped around a toddler, who was staring at nothing, his face pale and blue. His pajamas were soaked red. It looked like she’d sliced herself open from wrists to elbows and held him while she bled out.

It couldn’t have happened that long ago. There wasn’t even any smell yet.

All I could do was turn around, and then I was throwing up all over the polished hardwood. My legs gave out. I crouched there for a minute or two, heaving. Then somehow I made it to the top of the stairs. Tessa was there. She must have heard me.

“Are you okay?” she said.

I blinked and blinked to keep the tears from leaking out. My throat was burning. Tessa looked at me and then down the hall, and started to go to see, but I grabbed her arm. I don’t know if I managed to say anything intelligible. I remember shaking my head a lot.

But she went anyway. Then she came back and sat beside me, close enough that our sides touched, and waited until I got a hold of myself.

“Let’s go,” she said. I thought she meant go home. It wasn’t until we’d been back in the car for a minute that I realized she was heading for another cottage.

“Can you take me back?” I asked. “To my house?” I can’t remember what she said, but she did. I thanked her when I got out. Then I went upstairs and lay down and pulled the blanket over me, and hoped Meredith wouldn’t come in and ask how I was.

I’ve tried to tell myself that what happened is obvious. The little boy got sick and died, and the mom killed herself out of grief. But if he was that sick, why wouldn’t she have taken him to the hospital?

What if she was the one who got sick, with no one there to tell her to see a doctor, no one nearby to hear her if she went crazy? It could have happened like that. The hallucinations taking over, her imagining someone or something was after her, the kid started crying and making a fuss, and she hit him or grabbed him around the neck, and

But it doesn’t matter how it happened. I don’t care why she did it. I just want this to be over. I want the stores to be open and people to be able to talk to each other without masks over their faces and no one to ever die again.

We were supposed to have Thanksgiving dinner today. Mom surprised us by showing us the turkey she started thawing in secret yesterday. She must have bought it before Gav’s group ransacked the grocery store.

“We’ve got a lot to be thankful for,” she said. “The five of us are still healthy, and your father’s making progress with the vaccine.”

Honestly, we have way more to complain about than to celebrate, but it was a relief to see her smiling. So I said I’d help with the cooking, and Meredith volunteered too. Drew begged off, claiming he was busy with something on the computer, but I caught a glimpse of him slipping out the back door a few minutes later.

We started getting dinner ready a little after lunchtime, even though Dad said the earliest he’d be home was six. Mom was preparing the turkey over by the oven. I was peeling potatoes by the sink. Meredith was setting the table.

I was telling her to just use the regular knives and forks, that we didn’t have anything fancy for holidays, when Mom suddenly went still.

Before I had a chance to ask her what was up, she walked right out of the kitchen. The turkey was sitting there on the cutting board, with half the stuffing still in the bowl. I figured she must have needed to go to the bathroom. But when I’d finished with the potatoes and washed the slimy feeling off my hands, she still hadn’t come back. Meredith wanted to know what she could do now that the table was set.

“Why don’t you take a break?” I said. “You can play Nintendo if you want.”

Mom wasn’t anywhere downstairs, and the bathroom was empty. Her bedroom door was closed. I knocked.

“Don’t come in,” she said right away.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Do you need anything?”

“No,” she said. “I’m just feeling a bit off. I need a little time by myself, okay?”

She hadn’t sneezed or coughed, but all of a sudden I understood. She was afraid she had the virus. My whole body tensed up.

Mom must have sensed I was still standing there. “Don’t worry, hon,” she said firmly. “Go downstairs. I’m sure you and Meredith can get the rest of dinner together. I’m going to take a rest.”

I turned and started down the stairs, my heart pounding so loud I could hardly hear anything else. I have to tell Dad, I thought. It was all I could think. Over and over,
Get Dad, get Dad
. He’d know what to do.

Telling Meredith would just have scared her, so I said I was going out for a bit and she should keep playing her game. It wouldn’t take more than half an hour, I thought. Drive to the hospital, grab Dad, drive back. I took the keys off the hook and went to the car.

The whole way there, my heartbeat chased my thoughts through my head. Mom couldn’t really be sick. She didn’t have any symptoms. She was just nervous and being extra careful. Dad would see that. He’d tell her she was fine, and she’d calm down, and we’d have a normal Thanksgiving dinner. But then I’d remember the way she’d stiffened up and walked out without a word, and my pulse would thump even louder, and I had to tell myself the story all over again.

I figure it’s a miracle I managed not to drive into a telephone pole or a fire hydrant. But I reached the hospital in one piece. The parking lot was jammed. I wove back and forth along the rows twice, searching for a space. I’ve never seen the lot even halfway full before. Some of the cars had a fine layer of dirt all over them, like they’d been there a month without being used.

Which maybe they had. Maybe the people who had driven them there to get help had never come back out.

I had to park a block away. I ran from there to the hospital doors.

I hadn’t been inside the hospital since those couple of days during our summer visit last year, when I got that bad fever. Usually there’s a nurse or an orderly at the desk in the reception room, and a mom or a dad with a crying kid, or one of the elderly islanders who’s come in for a checkup. Never more than a couple of people. It’s quiet, almost peaceful, in a disinfected, artificial-light sort of way.

Today it was crazy.

The reception room was so packed I couldn’t make out the desk, only a crowd of people shifting restlessly. Voices were echoing off the walls. I hadn’t made it two steps from the front door when Mrs. Stanfeld from fourth grade came in behind me with a little girl who was skipping and chattering between her sneezes. They rushed past me into the room.

“My daughter needs help!” Mrs. Stanfeld shouted, and someone yelled back, “Everyone needs help! Wait your turn!” And someone else started sobbing. All around, people were coughing and sneezing and rasping their fingers over their clothes to get at some itch they couldn’t quite scratch away. The disinfectant smell was still there, but overwhelmed by sweat and something sour that made my stomach turn.

I’d been in such a panic when I left the house that I’d forgotten my face mask. I felt like I’d walked in there naked. But no way was I turning back and going home and starting over. So I held my sleeve up to my nose and squeezed into the room.

A nurse with a mask, a plastic gown like a thin raincoat, and long plastic gloves was drawing a blood sample from an older woman who couldn’t stop rubbing her chin. The nurse had a cart of labeled samples behind her—probably for testing to see who really had the virus. They all have it, I thought. For a second, I couldn’t breathe. It felt like the virus had to be all around me, clouds of it in the air.

Dad wasn’t in that room, and obviously the nurse was too busy to help, so I pressed my arm to my face as tightly as I could and pushed through the crowd to the hall at the other end.

Another nurse hustled by. She ducked into one of the exam rooms, which I saw held six patients crammed in on cots and a couple on mats on the floor. “They’re coming, they’re coming!” one of them started to whisper in a hoarse voice.

“No one’s coming,” the nurse said. She injected something into his arm, and his eyes went glassy. She stood watching him for a moment, looking like she might be blinking back tears.

“Excuse me,” I started to say as she came out.

“Back to the reception room,” she said briskly. “Blood test, then you’re admitted.”

Before I could explain, she’d hurried on to the next room.

Maybe Dad was upstairs, but there was a bunch of people already standing around the elevator, and I didn’t know where the stairwell was. As I walked on, an orderly marched past me with a bunch of feverish, coughing people from the reception room in tow.

“Where are the new ones going?” he asked a nurse in an anxious voice. I couldn’t hear the answer.

Around the corner, mats lay on the floor along the wall, some occupied, some vacant. The orderly gestured to them.

“What?” a woman said. “You’re leaving us in the hall? Where are the doctors? We need proper treatment!”

I turned the other way, searching for the stairs, but there was only a short hall lined with patients, and a dead end. In one of the rooms nearby, someone started shrieking.

I stepped back against the wall and sank down, my sleeve still pressed against my nose, trying to take deep breaths through the fabric. I just needed a moment, I told myself. Just a minute or two, to pull myself together. But with each breath I felt like I was shaking more, not less.

I’m not sure how long I was there. It was a blur of voices and people rushing by, until I felt someone stop in front of me.

“Kaelyn?” she said. It was Dad’s friend Nell. She looked like she’d been on her feet since the night before. Her hair was frizzing out of her bun, and brown and yellow stains spotted the plastic gown she was wearing over her lab coat. Her smile was hardly more than a flat line. But it was something. I stood up.

“I need to find my dad,” I said. “My mom thinks she’s got it. He needs to come home.”

Her trace of a smile disappeared. “Oh, Kaelyn,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. He’s been going back and forth between here and the research center.”

I must have looked totally helpless then, because she touched my arm with her gloved hand and said, “Is she bad?”

I shook my head. “I don’t even know if she’s really sick,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Then you don’t want to bring her here. She’ll be better off at home, where she’s comfortable. I’ll give you a couple of drugs we’ve found help with the symptoms. Stay right here.”

She pulled her mask back up over her face and hurried off. A few minutes later she came back with a couple boxes of sample pills, and a mask for me. I slid it on gratefully. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more—we’re running low again,” she said. “If she takes one of each, it should help at least a little. You get out of here now, okay? As soon as I see your dad, I’ll let him know.”

“Thank you,” I said. A few pills didn’t seem like a very good trade for Dad, but that wasn’t Nell’s fault.

She walked me out the front door, even though she must have had a million other more important things to be doing. When we got there, I blurted out, “Does anyone get better?”

Her jaw tightened, and she looked outside. “We have a few cases that look promising,” she said.

A few cases. How many people have already died?

When I got home, Meredith was still jabbing away at the controller. I went upstairs and stood outside Mom’s room, but I didn’t hear any coughing or sneezing. So maybe she really is okay. I showered and changed and threw my old clothes into the wash. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen, to figure out if I could do anything with all the food. That was where Drew found me.

“Where’ve you been?” he said the second he walked into the room. “I wanted to talk to you, and Mom said she didn’t know where you were, and all Meredith knew was you’d gone out. You can’t just wander off without telling anyone!”

My nerves were way too frayed already. How could he seriously think
he
had any right to complain about me? “What are you talking about?” I said. “You sneak off all the time!”

“I have good reasons,” he said. “I’ve never—” He cut himself off and shook his head. “Look, I don’t want to argue right now. You’re back, that’s what’s important. We’d better get started.”

“Get started on what?” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I found a way to leave,” he said.

Which was so not what I was expecting to hear that I just stared at him and said, “Leave where?”

“The island, of course,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ve figured some things out—I’d have gotten a plan together faster if the internet hadn’t gone down. I know Dad won’t go, but I bet we could convince Mom if she thought it’d protect us and Meredith. We’re all still okay, so it shouldn’t be—Kae, what’s the matter?”

I wiped at my eyes before any more tears could leak out. “Mom thinks she’s sick, Drew,” I said. “That’s why I went out. I went to the hospital to try to find Dad.”

“She’s sick?” he said. “She sounded fine when I talked to her—she just wanted to take a nap.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I could tell she’s worried. She wouldn’t even open the door to talk to you, right? I guess Dad will do a blood test or something to find out. When he gets here.”

Drew frowned. “She can’t be sick,” he said, sounding like he was talking to himself more than to me. “She hardly ever goes out. How could she have caught the virus? She’s just on edge, like the rest of us. Dad’ll say she’s fine. Then we’ll talk about leaving, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

I should feel relieved he thought the same thing I did. That Mom isn’t really sick, just nervous. But Mom isn’t normally the kind of person who lets her worries get the better of her. And we still don’t know for sure all the ways the virus might be passed on. We’ve all been out of the house. Any one of us could have brought it home.