The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (27 page)

David dumped the logs on the hearth. One of them rolled onto the carpet and stopped at Mom’s feet. Neither of them bent over to pick it up.

“Shall I read it out loud?” I said, looking at Mrs. Talbot. I was still holding her magazine. I opened up the envelope and took out the letter.

“‘Dear Janice and Todd and everybody,’” I read. “‘How are things in the glorious
west? We’re raring to come out and see you, though we may not make it quite as soon as we hoped. How are Carla and David and the baby? I can’t wait to see little David. Is he walking yet? I bet Grandma Janice is so proud she’s busting her britches. Is that right? Do you westerners wear britches or have you all gone to designer jeans?’”

David was standing by
the fireplace. He put his head down
across his arms on the mantelpiece.

“‘I’m sorry I haven’t written, but we were very busy with Rick’s graduation and anyway I thought we would beat the letter out to Colorado, but now it looks like there’s going to be a slight change in plans. Rick has definitely decided to join the Army. Richard and I have talked ourselves blue in the face, but I guess we’ve just made matters worse. We can’t
even get him to wait to join until after the trip to Colorado. He says we’d spend the whole trip trying to talk him out of it, which is true, I guess. I’m just so worried about him. The Army! Rick says I worry too much, which is true too, I guess, but what if there was a war?’”

Mom bent over and picked up the log that David had dropped and laid it on the couch beside her.

“‘If it’s okay with
you out there in the Golden West, we’ll wait until Rick is done with basic the first week in July and then all come out. Please write and let us know if this is okay. I’m sorry to switch plans on you like this at the last minute, but look at it this way: you have a whole extra month to get into shape for hiking up Pike’s Peak. I don’t know about you, but I sure can use it.’”

Mrs. Talbot had dropped
her end of the plastic. It didn’t land on the stove this time, but it was so close to it it was curling from the heat. Dad just stood there watching it. He didn’t even try to pick it up.

“‘How are the girls? Sonja is growing like a weed. She’s out for track this year and bringing home lots of medals and dirty sweat socks. And you should see her knees! They’re so banged up I almost took her to
the doctor. She says she scrapes them on the hurdles, and her coach says there’s nothing to worry about, but it does worry me a little. They just don’t seem to heal. Do you ever have problems like that with Lynn and Melissa?

“‘I know, I know. I worry too much. Sonja’s fine. Rick’s fine. Nothing awful’s going to happen between now and the first week in July, and we’ll see you then. Love, the Clearys.
P.S. Has anybody ever fallen off Pikes Peak?’”

Nobody said anything. I folded up the letter and put it back in the envelope.

“I should have written them,” Mom said. “I should have told them, ‘Come now.’ Then they would have been here.”

“And we would
probably have climbed up Pike’s Peak that day and gotten to see it all go blooie and us with it,” David said, lifting his head up. He laughed and
his voice caught on the laugh and kind of cracked. “I guess we should be glad they didn’t come.”

“Glad?” Mom said. She was rubbing her hands on the legs of her jeans. “I suppose we should be glad Carla took Melissa and the baby to Colorado Springs that day so we didn’t have so many mouths to feed.” She was rubbing her jeans so hard she was going to rub a hole right through them. “I suppose we
should be glad those looters shot Mr. Talbot.”

“No,” Dad said. “But we should be glad the looters didn’t shoot the rest of us. We should be glad they only took the canned goods and not the seeds. We should be glad the fires didn’t get this far. We should be glad—”

“That we still have mail delivery?” David said. “Should we be glad about that too, Dad?” He went outside and shut the door behind
him.

“When I didn’t hear from them I should have called or something,” Mom said.

Dad was still looking at the ruined plastic. I took the letter over to him. “Do you want to keep it or what?” I said.

“I think it’s served its purpose,” he said. He wadded it up, tossed it in the stove, and slammed the door shut. He didn’t even get burned. “Come help me on the greenhouse, Lynn,” he said.

It was
pitch-dark outside and really getting cold. My sneakers were starting to get stiff. Dad held the flashlight and pulled the plastic tight over the wooden slats. I stapled the plastic every two inches all the way around the frame and my finger about every other time. After we finished one frame I asked Dad if I could go back in and put on my boots.

“Did you get the seeds for the tomatoes?” he said,
like he hadn’t even heard me. “Or were you too busy looking for the letter?”

“I didn’t look for it,” I said. “I found it. I thought you’d be glad to get the letter and know what happened to the Clearys.”

Dad was pulling the plastic across the next frame, so hard it was getting little puckers in it. “We already knew,” he said.

He handed me the flashlight and took the staple gun out of my hand.
“You want me to say it?” he said. “You want me to tell you exactly what happened to them? All right. I would imagine they were close enough to Chicago to have been vaporized when the bombs hit. If they were, they were lucky. Because there aren’t any mountains like ours around Chicago. So they got caught in the fire storm or they died of flash burns or radiation sickness or else some looter shot
them.”

“Or their own family,” I said.

“Or their own family.” He put the staple gun against the wood and pulled the trigger. “I have a theory about what happened the summer before last,” he said. He moved the gun down and shot another staple into the wood. “I don’t think the Russians started it or the United States either. I think it was some little terrorist group somewhere or maybe just one
person. I don’t think they had any idea what would happen when they dropped their bomb. I think they were just so hurt and angry and frightened by the way things were that they just lashed out. With a bomb.” He stapled the frame clear to the bottom and straightened up to start on the other side. “What do you think of that theory, Lynn?”

“I told you,” I said. “I found the letter while I was looking
for Mrs. Talbot’s magazine.”

He turned and pointed the staple gun at me. “But whatever reason they did it for, they brought the whole world crashing down on their heads. Whether they meant it or not, they had to live with the consequences.”

“If they lived,” I said. “If somebody didn’t shoot them.”

“I can’t let you go to the post office anymore,” he said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“What about Mrs.
Talbot’s magazines?”

“Go check on the fire,” he said.

I went back inside. David had come back and was standing by the fireplace again, looking at the wall. Mom had set up the card table and the folding chairs in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Talbot was in the kitchen cutting up potatoes, only it looked like it was onions the way she was crying.

The fire had practically gone out. I stuck a couple
of wadded-up magazine pages in to get it going again. The fire flared up with a brilliant blue and green. I tossed a couple of pine cones and some sticks onto the burning paper. One of the pine cones rolled off to the side and lay there in the ashes. I grabbed for it and hit my hand on the door of the stove.

Right in the same
place. Great. The blister would pull the old scab off and we could
start all over again. And of course Mom was standing right there, holding the pan of potato soup. She put it on the top of the stove and grabbed up my hand like it was evidence in a crime or something. She didn’t say anything, she just stood there holding it and blinking.

“I burned it,” I said. “I just burned it.”

She touched the edges of the old scab, like she was afraid of catching something.

“It’s a burn!” I shouted, snatching my hand back and cramming David’s stupid logs into the stove. “It isn’t radiation sickness. It’s a burn.”

“Do you know where your father is, Lynn?” she said as if she hadn’t even heard me.

“He’s out on the back porch,” I said, “building his fucking greenhouse.”

“He’s gone,” she said. “He took Stitch with him.”

“He can’t have taken Stitch,” I said. “He’s
afraid of the dark.” She didn’t say anything. “Do you
know
how dark it is out there?’

“Yes,” she said, and went and looked out the window. “I know how dark it is.”

I got my parka off the hook by the fireplace and started out the door.

David grabbed my arm. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

I wrenched away from him. “To find Stitch. He’s afraid of the dark.”

“It’s too dark,” he said.
“You’ll get lost.”

“So what? It’s safer than hanging around this place,” I said and slammed the door shut on his hand.

I made it halfway to the woodpile before he grabbed me again, this time with his other hand. I should have gotten them both with the door.

“Let me go,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m going to go find some other people to live with.”

“There aren’t any other people! For Christ’s
sake, we went all the way to South Park last winter. There wasn’t anybody. We didn’t even see those looters. And what if you run into them, the looters that shot Mr. Talbot?”

“What if I do? The worst they could do is shoot me. I’ve been shot at before.”

“You’re acting crazy, you know that, don’t you?” he said. “Comin’ in here out of the clear blue, taking potshots at everybody with that crazy
letter!”

“Potshots!” I said, so mad I was afraid I was going to start crying. “Potshots! What about last summer? Who was taking potshots then?”

“You didn’t have any business taking the shortcut,” David said. “Dad told you never to come that way.”

“Was that any reason to try and
shoot
me? Was that any reason to
kill
Rusty?”

David was squeezing
my arm so hard I thought he was going to snap it
right in two. “The looters had a dog with them. We found its tracks all around Mr. Talbot. When you took the shortcut and we heard Rusty barking, we thought you were the looters.” He looked at me. “Mom’s right. Paranoia’s the number one killer. We were all a little crazy last summer. We’re all a little crazy all the time, I guess, and then you pull a stunt like bringing that letter home, reminding
everybody of everything that’s happened, of everybody we’ve lost…” He let go of my arm and looked down at his hand like he didn’t even know he’d practically broken my arm.

“I told you,” I said. “I found it while I was looking for a magazine. I thought you’d all be glad I found it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll bet.”

He went inside and I stayed out a long time, waiting for Dad and Stitch. When I came
in, nobody even looked up. Mom was still standing at the window. I could see a star over her head. Mrs. Talbot had stopped crying and was setting the table. Mom dished up the soup and we all sat down. While we were eating, Dad came in.

He had Stitch with him. And all the magazines. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Talbot,” he said. “If you’d like, I’ll put them under the house and you can send Lynn for them
one at a time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t feel like reading them anymore.”

Dad put the magazines on
the couch and sat down at the card table. Mom dished him up a bowl of soup. “I got the seeds,” he said. “The tomato seeds had gotten watersoaked, but the corn and squash were okay.” He looked at me. “I had to board up the post office, Lynn,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you,
that I can’t let you go there anymore? It’s just too dangerous.”

“I told you,” I said. “I found it. While I was looking for a magazine.”

“The fire’s going out,” he said.

After they shot Rusty I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere for a month for fear they’d shoot me when I came home, not even when I promised to take the long way around. But then Stitch showed up and nothing happened and they let
me start going again. I went every day till the end of summer and after that whenever they’d let me. I must have looked through every pile of mail a hundred times before I found the letter from the Clearys. Mrs. Talbot was right about the post office. The letter was in somebody else’s box.

Later examination of weather
reports and newspapers showed that it may have started as early as October nineteenth, but the first indication I had that something unusual was going on was at Thanksgiving.

I went to Mom’s for dinner (as usual), and was feeding cranberries and cut-up oranges into Mom’s old-fashioned meat grinder for the cranberry relish and listening to my sister-in-law
Allison talk about her Christmas newsletter (also as usual).

“Which of Cheyenne’s accomplishments
do you think I should write about first, Nan?” she said, spreading cheese on celery sticks. “Her playing lead snowflake in
The Nutcracker
or her hitting a home run in Peewee Soccer?”

“I’d list the Nobel Peace Prize first,” I murmured, under cover of the crunch of an apple being put through the grinder.

“There just isn’t room to put in all the girls’ accomplishments,” she said, oblivious. “Mitch insists I keep it to one page.”

“That’s because of Aunt Lydia’s newsletters,” I said. “Eight pages single-spaced.”

“I know,” she said. “And in that tiny print you can barely read.” She waved a celery stick thoughtfully. “That’s an idea.”

“Eight pages single-spaced?”

“No. I could get the computer to
do a smaller font. That way I’d have room for Dakota’s Sunshine Scout merit badges. I got the cutest paper for my newsletters this year. Little angels holding bunches of mistletoe.”

Christmas newsletters are
very
big in my family, in case you couldn’t tell. Everybody—uncles, grandparents, second cousins, my sister Sueann—sends the Xeroxed monstrosities to family, coworkers, old friends from high
school, and people they met on their cruise to the Caribbean (which they wrote about at length in their newsletter the year before). Even my Aunt Irene, who writes a handwritten letter on every one of her Christmas cards, sticks a newsletter in with it.