If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  “Listen, kids, it’s time you started doing some school work. You don’t want to grow up uneducated, do you?”

  “What difference does it make?” Tasha said.

  “Oh, honey, I know things seem bad, but to think education isn’t important is a very cynical view of the world. It means you don’t have hope for the future.”

  “I don’t have any hope,” she said.

  In all the post-apocalyptic stories I’d ever read or watched, the thing they never showed was the grief of it all—the persistent, soul-crushing misery from the loss of people you loved and relied on. Then there was the loss of your way of life, the pointed fear of what else you might lose, the dangers you had to watch out for, the hard work you had to do day in and day out simply to stay alive.

  I used to think these flat characterizations of fictional denizens of after-the-catastrophe worlds were poorly rendered, were unrealistic and too cold. Now I realized that when your grief is too great, you grow numb. It’s the only way you can protect yourself and keep moving. It was a kind of gift from God, this numbness, but if you spent time considering it, the emptiness inside you could strip you of any will to carry on.

  Maybe I wasn’t physically ill; maybe I was sick at heart.

  On a few cold days, I taught the kids how to sew.

  “Being a boy doesn’t get you out of it,” I told Milo, who put up a stink about having to “sew like a girl.” “We’re not sexist here. Everyone has to learn to do as many things for themselves as possible.”

  We sewed buttons on clothing that needed buttons. Milo tried to be inept, refusing to pay enough attention to keep his thread from tangling and knotting. Threading a needle was hard for me to teach. My hands shook too much, my eyesight was too poor for the dim light, but I finally managed to get each of them to thread a needle.

  Once everyone had buttons down, we moved on to reconnecting seams and making hems.

  “Mazie, take that princess skirt off. The ruffles are coming loose. Let me sew them back on.” She watched me warily while I stitched up the skirt, afraid I wouldn’t return it.

  Finally, Milo got into sewing and managed to hem his pants faster than the rest of us. Then he pranced around, showing off his mini-muscles and making us laugh.

  We listened to Rick the Stick from “Afta-the-Disasta Radio,” as he was now calling it. I pretty much hated listening to Rick at this point, on account of the emotions he set off in me. In my mind, he was forever associated with the horrid wreck in Waco and my lost family.

  Rick had connected with neighbors who owned ham radios, and they’d scrounged up abandoned generators so they could contact other hams around the country. Someone in Clifton had died and left behind a stash of gasoline they were using for the generators.

  So, Rick had news from around the United States, if you could call it that anymore. The federal government still existed but had gone “underground”—not necessarily in the literal sense, more like the clandestine sense.

  The government still had a lot of power, firepower mainly, but also running vehicles and a few planes they’d slapped back together by replacing parts. But the feds weren’t doing relief work—the need was too great and widespread. Instead those in charge had grown more militaristic than ever, guarding the borders against intruders and marching around population centers to keep people in line.

  There were food and water riots and a lot of death in the biggest cities where people had no way to get to the country or to forage for themselves.

  It was sheer luck we hadn’t had riots around here. Every time Keno and his crew went to collect water, I waited for a band of armed marauders to follow them home and kill us all.

  Before it had grown so cold, the gardening had been going pretty well, so now we had a lot of planted territory to protect against a freeze. A few of us owned outdoor thermometers, so we knew when it came close to freezing. But we had no way to guess what the weather would do next—truly maddening when our crops were on the line. Sure, people had lived this way for millennia, but we weren’t accustomed to using our senses and reading signs from nature to predict what was coming. We covered our gardens with blankets and tarps and uncovered them when the sun came out, hoping for the best. Most crops survived the freezing rain this way, but it wouldn’t be enough for a hard freeze if it came.

  We had a kind of dump now, populated with rats and feral cats, on a scrubby vacant lot around the corner from our four-block perimeter. Compost piles were growing under trees in several yards—on land that couldn’t be gardened due to tree roots. And we had a few rain barrel systems welded together out of scrap metal, much of it taken from enamel-coated major appliances. A couple of above-ground outhouses had been built, and two community composting toilets were under construction. We were making progress.

  Keno and Phil had managed to get a low-water washing machine to turn ‘round and ‘round as long as someone rode the exercise bike they attached. They hadn’t figured out the water flow yet, but they had ideas related to gravity feeds off of rooftops.

  I should have felt better about the progress, but instead I felt breathless.

  One evening near dusk, I went to the side yard to cover the garden for the night. I’d only been out there a minute or two when I heard kids come out to the patio.

  “Come here,” Keno whispered, and Darla giggled. This was followed by a long, quiet interval, with smooching the only sound coming from the patio.

  Shoot. I needed to go inside but didn’t want to interrupt. Too embarrassing for all of us. I sat on a bench and rubbed my hands together to keep warm. The breaths coming from the patio grew faster and heavier. Damn it. It was cold out here.

  “Don’t!” Darla said, giggling.

  “Why not?” Keno said.

  She giggled more. “’Cause your Nana will see.”

  “She won’t see. All kinds of shit goes on around here that she doesn’t see.”

  Like what? I thought, alarmed, and feeling a little betrayed by my grandson.

  “Well, okay,” Darla said. The smooching and breathing got louder.

  “I love you,” Keno said.

  Are you kidding me? Did someone put aphrodisiacs in our water?

  Darla didn’t reply that I could hear, and Keno let out a loud sigh.

  “Don’t you love me?” he said.

  “Umm. . . . Maybe.”

  “But, Darla, I need you,” Keno pleaded.

  “No one never needed me before,” she said.

  “Well, I do. Don’t you like it?”

  “Maybe.” The kissing and loud breathing resumed.

  Crap. I was freezing, and now I was freaked out about Keno being crazy in love with this troubled girl—also at the thought of what I might be missing. I stood, picked up a hoe, and thwacked it at the ground, making sure to scrape the railroad tie bordering the garden.

  “Shit,” Keno said, trying to be quiet, but clearly surprised.

  “I told ya. That old lady sees everything,” Darla whispered. The back door opened and closed, followed by silence.

  I went through the house and called Keno and Tasha to the garage. They weren’t happy about being there.

  “You kids cannot have sex. Do you understand me? We don’t have condoms, or any other birth control.”

  A guilty look came over Keno, but Tasha huffed with exasperation.

  “Mom said you let her have sex when she was a teenager,” Tasha said.

  “She said you bought her condoms and birth-control pills,” Keno muttered. “She said she’d buy them for us.”

  I threw up my hands, staring back and forth between these kids, who were watching me with earnestness and more than a little anger.

  “I didn’t ‘let’ your mom have sex. I bought birth control for my kids because they were going to have sex whether I wanted them to or not.” I sighed and sat down on a storage bin.

  “Alright. I’m not making myself clear.” I ran my hand through my hair and chose my words carefully. “I’m not judging y
ou. It’s understandable for you to want sex. But for the first time in my life, we can’t control the consequences. We don’t have birth control, or medicine for venereal diseases. We have no doctors. There are diseases that can kill you without meds. And then, there’s pregnancy.”

  Keno gulped, but Tasha half-grinned, dismissively.

  “My mom says it’s not a disease to get pregnant. It’s natural.”

  “Tasha, there is so much you don’t know.” I took a deep breath. “Before we had modern medicine, women often died during childbirth. We’re almost back in the Dark Ages now, as far as medicine goes.

  “Back in the seventies, natural childbirth was all the rage. Some of us had trained midwives, and everything went fine. But I heard of a couple of deaths and some really close calls—babies and mothers in distress who almost didn’t get to the hospital in time. My friend nearly died from gangrene rotting her uterus.”

  “Nana, that’s gross!” Tasha said.

  “Real life without doctors is gross. You have to face up to that. . . . Those women were saved by fast transportation and modern hospitals, but we don’t have that anymore. No matter how old you are, it’s a terrible idea to get pregnant right now. I’m telling you possible consequences, hoping they’ll make you think.”

  “But what if I’m in love?” Tasha said. “My mom told me to save sex for my true love.”

  “You might think he’s your true love, but you don’t know that.” Tasha gaped at me with tears in her eyes. “Honey, these are not normal times. No matter how much you love him, sex is a bad idea. Understand?” She looked away from me.

  Keno said, “We can have sex without, you know . . .going all the way, right?”

  “Well, yes, but no penises anywhere near vaginas. Men leak semen without even knowing it, and it only takes one drop.”

  “Gaw!” Tasha said. Keno looked worried.

  I was glad he asked his question, but how did sex education end up being my job?

  Later, I was straightening the living room and picked up a book from the floor near Darla’s screened space. It was my book, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, with lots of dog-eared pages. Darla had messed up my book, but at least she was reading, which was more than I could say for most of these kids.

  A slip of paper was poking out from between pages. I shouldn’t have done it, but I looked at the paper and was stunned. “Poem by Darla Belding,” it said.

  “My daddy could not stop for Death

  He tried to speed right past it

  So Death whacked Daddy on the head

  ‘Cause Daddy was a bastard

  * * *

  “Death took my momma too

  Even Juan and Bucky

  But Death left me behind alone

  No Eternity for me”

  It broke my heart. I would never think of Darla as an ignorant girl again.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ONE WARM AFTERNOON, when the grandkids and Darla were out in the neighborhood, working on gardening and whatnot, Jack came to join me on the patio and helped me shell peas. We didn’t say much for a while, then Jack leaned forward and cleared his throat.

  “Bea?”

  “Yes?” I ran my thumbnail up the seam of a peapod to open it, dropping peas into one pot and the hull into another.

  “Whaddya think happened to Hank?”

  I hadn’t expected that question.

  “God only knows. I guess he’s either hurt really bad or dead. Otherwise he’d have come home by now.”

  “So . . . y’all were gettin’ along alright? Do you think he wants to come home?”

  “What?” I stopped working to stare at Jack while my heart pounded heavily under my ribcage. I narrowed my eyes at the old man before me. “Why would you ask that? He’s got my kids. He has to come home with my kids.”

  “Of course, your kids want to come home. I’m wondering what you think about Hank.”

  My thoughts screamed at Jack to run him off, but I guessed there was no point in doing that. I put down my peapods and straightened up in the chair.

  “Hank hasn’t loved me for years. I guess that’s been obvious to anyone paying attention. But he does love his family, and we have a kind of partnership in that regard. I think he would come back for the family if he could. It’s all he’s got, especially now.”

  “He never had another lover?”

  “Not that I know of, and not that I much care.”

  “So, you don’t love him either?”

  I fixed my attention in the distance and thought a minute. “I care about him. There are things I love about him. But, no, I haven’t been in love with Hank for a very long time.”

  “For about fifteen years?”

  I sighed. “Yes, for about fifteen years. . . . And you? Have you been in love since your divorce?”

  “I have been, but you know that.”

  “I guess I do, don’t I?” My hands quivered, so I clasped them in my lap.

  “So,” Jack said, “how long are you gonna keep waiting for Hank?”

  “I guess forever. I don’t have much choice. I can’t leave the man when he’s down.”

  “I believe you do have a choice.” He locked his eyes onto mine.

  “Not yet, I don’t.”

  He set his lips into a straight line, brushing his hands on his thighs. “Okay then,” he said, and went home.

  That affair I had fifteen years ago—it was with Jack. I’m pretty sure Hank never knew about Jack, but he may have suspected the affair. Now Jack was trying to reignite it. I can’t say that I minded, though I was scared shitless to release my grip on the invisible Hank.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DAY 66, and I was still holding my breath, waiting for a break from this misery.

  This boyfriend of Tasha’s, Chas Matheson, was turning out to be more trouble than I’d realized. He was sixteen and too old for this behavior, but he was a ringleader in the band of roving kids. He sent them on missions of vandalism and theft, and they brought the spoils back to Chas. After our patrollers caught the thieving kids, they stopped robbing us and branched out into new territory.

  As far as we could tell, our neighborhood was the only one getting organized for miles around. Abandoned homes were scattered all over town, and the ones near to us were getting defaced and robbed with some frequency. I understood taking useful stuff from empty homes, but what was the point of defacing them?

  I found out this news about Chas not from Tasha or Keno, but from Darla when we finally had our talk, days later than I’d intended. Time escaped me more than ever lately. It seemed like time would have dragged by without television or internet to suck it away, but the opposite was true, at least for me.

  I asked Darla how she was doing, and she shrugged. Her light hair looked cleaner than usual, her face a little plumper than before. I wanted to tell her how good her poem was, how well she’d evoked emotion. But since I saw the poem by snooping, I had to leave this unsaid.

  “Honey, I know you’re going through an awful lot, but you haven’t been doing your gardening work. Why not?”

  “I had other stuff to do,” she said. She still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Darla, I need you to try harder to keep busy. I don’t like nagging you about it, and I’m sure you don’t want to be nagged. But there’s a whole lot of work to be done if we’re going to survive, and you need to do your share. You don’t want other people doing your work for you, do you?”

  “No,” she said, as tears pooled atop her creamy cheeks.

  “Well, will you please do your garden work? And I mean all the hours, every day.”

  “Okay,” she muttered.

  “Good. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

  Darla didn’t hesitate. “Chas steals,” she said.

  “Chas? What does he steal?”

  Darla finally looked up to tell me about Chas strong-arming the smaller kids into doing his dirty work. Shrewd of Darla to change the subject from her negligence—and bad o
n me, because it worked.

  Alarm bells went off in my head—about my granddaughter’s boyfriend being a thief, yes, but also about Darla. Was she lying? Why would she betray a teenage code of silence to an old woman like me?

  “How do you know all this, Darla?”

  “Chas told me.”

  “And why are you telling me?” I narrowed my eyes at her.

  Darla looked confused. “Well, because he’s Tasha’s boyfriend, and she’s so young.”

  Darla was eighteen. Was she really concerned about Tasha, or was she trying to get Tasha in trouble?

  “And why did Chas tell you about stealing? Was he flirting with you? Trying to impress you?”

  Darla stuttered out her next words. “N-no. He j-just—he talks a lot.”

  She sat watching me with her mouth hanging open, so I said, “Thank you for telling me. You can go now.”

  She jumped up and lurched toward the stairs.

  “Wait, Darla. Are you and Keno having sex?”

  “What? No!” Flames flared in her cheeks. She stopped at the landing and peered at me sideways. “But Tasha—”

  “Tasha what?” I bolted to my feet.

  “Nothing. Never mind.” She took a step downward.

  “Darla, I asked you ‘What about Tasha?’”

  “Nothing! Forget it!”

  Darla ran down the stairs. I hollered, “Wait!” but in seconds she was out the back door. I would have chased after her, but I didn’t have the breath.

  Soon I heard her using the push lawn mower below my window. That lawn didn’t need to be mowed, but at least she was working.

  Apparently, Darla didn’t want to rat about Tasha having sex. I had not done enough to prevent this. Now I needed to confine Tasha to my house and yard, which I had no idea how to accomplish.

  Soon I caught Tasha alone upstairs. “I need to ask you something.”

  “K,” she said, gulping.