CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

That moment in the kitchen was the beginning of Jimmie’s final unraveling. I must have been the last thing standing between him and whatever darkness was trying to claim him, and what I’d done had broken his trust and left him alone. He mostly avoided me after that, intentionally moving to another room when I entered, sleeping on different shifts, finding any way he could to keep our paths from crossing. This couldn’t have been easy in such a small space.

But even though we didn’t speak, I could see the strings coming loose, one by one. During the next couple of days his restlessness increased until he was pacing the floors, his eyes darting back and forth and settling on nothing. It reminded me of Jay, just before he’d broken out of here, and that made me uneasy. I started watching him more closely while at the same time trying to keep him from noticing. I didn’t want to make him even more paranoid. I heard him muttering to himself more than once, cocking his head as if listening to something, and I caught him clutching what remained of his hair and moaning low and deep in his throat once in the kitchen before he slipped out and away. Tessa tried to look at his leg wound a couple of times, but he wouldn’t let her see it.

I should have known there was something terribly wrong then, I should have done something to stop it. But I didn’t. I let myself believe that he would come around again, if I left him alone. Looking back, that seems to be the story of my life—ignore the warning signs and pretend everything is okay, even when the walls are crumbling around you, even where your abusive father is lying close to death in a hospital room, even when the bombs drop and you’re one of the last left standing, even when your friends are peeled off from what’s left of the herd and taken down, one by one.

Pretend everything is right in the world, and eventually it will be. Some philosophy.

I wanted to talk about the voice I’d heard on the radio, and what it all meant for us. I wanted to weigh our options and not hold anything back; talk about fallout and the chances of our survival if we left this place. Dan had a pretty strong opinion that we should remain in the shelter, hoping we heard some clear instructions through the radio. We sat in the dining room late one night, just the two of us, maybe trying to heal the rift that had opened up between us after the incident with the radio. Dan got out the cards and we played a couple of hands. The pack was missing the ten of diamonds, so we had to make do with a piece of cardboard, which was pretty stupid since anyone with a pair of eyes could tell it from the rest of the pack with no problem. Jimmie had drawn a picture on it; he was pretty good at that, always doodling, drawing cartoons and other stuff.

Dan held that piece of cardboard with Jimmie’s picture in his hands, turning it over and over. We drank a few beers and smoked the remains of one of Jay’s joints Dan had found stashed under the sink in the bathroom. We talked about opening up the hatch to take a look. But that strange buzzing sound we had both heard when Jay left, combined with what Dan had read in Nuclear Winter, kept us from doing anything.

It seemed that the rest of the group was split, with Sue in favor of leaving now for Alaska, and Jimmie seeming to want to head to Colorado. I was paralyzed with indecision. If we left, we couldn’t be sure we were headed to the right place. Getting to the Gates of the Arctic Park seemed pretty damn near impossible, with the distance and the state of the roads up there. But the alternative meant we could drive for 2,000 miles and end up in an empty air force base, nothing but ghosts among the wreckage.

Alone for a moment in the bedroom while Dan and Tessa tried to get Sue to eat something and Jimmie locked himself in the bathroom doing God knows what, I flipped through Surviving Nuclear Winter. I could see what Dan meant; it was terrifying. Nearly every page was filled with diagrams, charts and lists, radiation levels, climate patterns and illustrations of the effect of different-size bomb blasts on structures and people. It was a dense technical read, and much of it centered on what the climate would be like after a nuclear war.

But the first section of the book dealt with the sheer destruction a major attack would bring. The detonation of a fraction of the number of warheads that existed in the world would kill an estimated one billion people, with another billion suffering extensive injuries and radiation poisoning. Fires would rage across cities and forests. Temperatures would drop, the sun would disappear for weeks or months, disease would overwhelm most of the survivors.

I read as much as I could take and then I closed the book. I felt an emptiness inside, a sense of time getting away from me with no clear direction on when it might end. I sat alone while the others’ voices drifted through the closed door, and thought about my mother in the middle of all that death and destruction. If she had survived, she would need medical assistance. She would need someone to help her get from her wheelchair to the bathroom, to help her fix meals, to get into bed at night. I thought about her locked away down in some school or church basement filled with dusty, broken pews and tables, sitting in the corner, calling for help and getting nothing in return, having to swallow her pride and crawl. Who was helping her now?

And, God help me, as much as I tried to block them out, memories came drifting back like dusty cobwebs: my father’s broken, twisted body at the foot of those stairs, the drive to the hospital behind the ambulance, the rush into emergency surgery to try to stop the bleeding and repair his collapsed lung, the sound of the life-support machines in the intensive-care unit like a call to action and his body looking so much smaller and more fragile lying in that bed and connected to so many tubes and needles.

I saw my mother sitting in the chair in the corner, her own arm in a sling, sobbing quietly, policemen waiting in the hall, and me standing there by the bed in my surgical mask, looking down at him and wondering whether she was crying for him or for the two of us left behind. Perhaps she was just relieved to have it all end. His hatred of her had grown worse over the years as his mind had continued to slip toward darkness. It had come to the point where he could not even look at her, and when she spoke he would cut her off with a wave of his hand and a grunt. Those were the good days.

Tessa was right; my anger back then swelled up and overwhelmed me, and I wished him dead.

The doctor came into the room and asked me to sit down too, and explained to us both in low, even tones that my father had suffered an intrace rebral hemorrhage and was clinically brain-dead. He could no longer hear us or understand anything or even breathe on his own. The machines were the only things keeping him alive.

My mother stopped crying. I remember that. “Can he recover?” she asked.

The doctor explained how the pool of blood had killed a large portion of his brain, and he would remain a vegetable for as long as we chose to keep him alive. There was no chance of him regaining consciousness. The parts that had made him human were gone.

She looked at me. “We’ll need to decide whether to take him off life support,” she said.

The doctor, a short Asian man with an accent, gave us some time alone to talk, but we didn’t need it. The choice was simple, really. After all, I’d wished he were dead, and now he would be. The fact that it would also end any suffering he might be going through was beside the point.

An hour later we were by his bedside when the doctor turned off the ventilator. As much as we’d been told it would be quick, my father did not go quietly into that good night. His body jerked upward, then slammed back onto the bed. He gave a deep, shuddering sigh, and then sucked air into his lungs once, twice, three times, the wait longer between each breath. His mouth opened and closed like a landed fish. I smelled shit as he soiled himself. And then his heart stopped, and he died.

We were left alone with the body, to pay our respects. After a while I went out into the hall and one of the policemen asked if he could talk to me. He wanted to know if I was the one who had found my father that night, and whether I knew if he’d been drinking. He asked me if I’d seen him fall, and I told him I had not. And then, more gently, he asked if my father was abusive to me and my mother. Maybe he had seen the bruises on my mother’s face, or her arm in that sling, or the way she did not come too close to my father’s bedside. Maybe he saw the bruises on me. Or maybe there were rumors floating around in the department. That day I’d soiled my bed and my mother fell down the stairs was not the last time the doctor had come to our house.

I shook my head as my mother came limping out into the hall to hold my hand. She tried to pull me away, but I resisted.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. He was a good man.”

I heard a knock on the door to the other room, and Dan stuck his head in. I’d drifted off there for a while, I wasn’t sure for how long, but the knocking had brought me sharply back into myself and away from thoughts I’d blocked out for years. I felt vaguely sick.

“You okay?” he said. “We’re going to play some poker, if you want to come out. Just try to blow off a little steam. Get Jimmie too.”

I got up and went to the bathroom door and knocked. I heard him shuffling around in there, but he didn’t answer. I put my ear to the door and thought I heard a sound like a low moan, but I wasn’t sure.

“We’re playing cards,” I said into the door. “Dan wants you to come join us.”

Something thumped inside the bathroom. “Everything all right?” I asked. “Jimmie?” I rattled the handle, but it was locked.

“I’m…okay,” he muttered. “Bandage. Be out…pretty soon.”

His voice sounded strange. I thought about trying to break the lock, but decided against it. If he still didn’t open the door in five minutes, I’d figure something else out.

In less than half an hour, he was gone.