If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  Sonja smiled, too. “Thank you.” She kissed me on the cheek as she stood up. “I will just have to find other ways to be happy.” She headed toward the kitchen.

  When she was almost there, she turned back.

  “Bea, at least Mr. Jeffers is only asking you for love. Nothing else, am I right?”

  I sighed. “You’re right, but love is a very tall order.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, and she went back to work.

  A couple of days later, Sonja asked me if Pete had ever been married.

  “No, he hasn’t. I don’t know why.”

  I’d given up long ago trying to make sense of my kids’ love-lives. Pete had always had a steady stream of lovers, but it had been ages since I’d seen him show real romantic interest in anyone, until Sonja.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  LATE APRIL, six and a half months since the solar pulse.

  Eddie and Pete still hadn’t returned from their search for the rest of the family. They’d promised to be home in two months, but it had been thirteen weeks. I wished I could’ve talked them out of going. That damnable town, Waco, Texas—Wacko as I liked to call it—was a big, stinking sinkhole, sucking my family members away from me.

  There were still far too many gunshots at night, and last week our patrollers had been forced to kill another man. He’d stolen water from the Carlisles, and when the patrollers tried to get it back, the guy took shots at them. The intruders were getting bolder.

  The trips to the water well were growing more fraught with too many men watching them drive down the street. Any minute someone could find our folks at the well, and God knows what horrid things would happen.

  We had another bout of allergic illness, this time from live oak pollen. Thick green pollen powder and strings of spent tree flowers covered everything—roofs, sidewalks, dead cars, plants in the garden that we had to put our faces near to do our work. Cesar went back to struggling for air.

  Then we got two solid days of hard rain, and the air was rinsed clean of pollen. Green rivulets of rainwater washed down from our rooftops and spattered into puddles covered with neon green pollen scum. The air was breathable again, and cleaner than it had been in decades. The rain barrels were full of pollen water. I wasn’t sure if it was okay to drink as it was, but we could filter it.

  But Cesar got better much more slowly this time. These allergy bouts were wearing him down. He worried me, he really did. I loaned Sonja my medical books and told her she could use whatever medications I had on hand for the quiet little boy. It may have helped some; I don’t know.

  The crops loved the rain and were bounteous. We’d been eating lettuce, broccoli, and kale for a couple of weeks, and soon we should have more tomatoes and peppers than we’d be able to eat fresh. I read up on canning, and organized volunteers to mount a canning operation for the weeks ahead.

  But I couldn’t escape a feeling of futility, a foreboding that our hard work would end up being useless in the face of unknowable threats that almost certainly awaited us.

  “Nana,” Keno said one day from the blue. “You should’ve let me bring your nurse friends to our neighborhood to live.”

  “You’re right. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.”

  “Tell that to Tasha,” he said.

  Christ, that hurt like hell. I could think of only one way to atone, and it was feeble compared to the cost of my callous decision.

  We moved the wood and kerosene cookstoves into the garage of the empty house next door to mine. Keno, Phil, and Silas cut holes in the side wall of that garage and ran vent pipes from the stoves. The men installed tables, counters, and chopping blocks. They hauled canning supplies from the Mint and set up shelves for the jars. Sonja and Kathy brought in huge pots, pressure cookers, and a big supply of sharpened knives and cleavers. We had a little celebration in our spanking new canning kitchen with glasses of wine for all.

  I conferred with Keno and Sonja, and the next day they left at dawn with Silas and Phil—Keno riding his bike with the cart, Sonja riding Tasha’s bike, and Silas and Phil pushing empty wheelbarrows and carrying guns. It took two days, but they moved June and Charlotte into the house next door and put them in charge of canning.

  My friends were bubbling over with thanks for me, but I could hardly bear to be near them on account of my guilt. These women had once been my closest friends, though I hadn’t spent much time with them in recent years. They annoyed me, like church ladies— overly proper and full of gossip. I had no time for it.

  “We’re so sorry about Tasha, Bea,” June chirruped with her most winning smile of compassion.

  “Thank you,” I said, uncomfortable with the sympathy and the subject matter.

  “You know, honey, God doesn’t give us burdens we can’t carry,” Charlotte weighed in, stroking my arm. “There are lessons to learn from this. There’s a reason for everything that happens.”

  “Bullshit!” I glared back and forth between the two old women. “God doesn’t give us burdens we can’t carry? Are you fucking serious?” I had no time for empty platitudes either.

  “Calm down, Bea,” June said. “We know you’re upset—”

  “Don’t you dare patronize me, June. Don’t you dare! You think God wanted a beautiful teenager to be without her mother, to get pregnant and die? What kind of grand divine plan is that?”

  “It’s normal to be angry with God when things don’t go our way,” Charlotte said.

  “Yeah? Whose way is this? Who designed a world where God’s children destroy their own home, their own planet, and have to work like dogs—only to die of starvation and thirst and malnutrition and horrible accidents? Because whoever designed that world is an evil son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Bea, you don’t mean that!” June said.

  “The hell I don’t!” I glowered at June and Charlotte, spun around, and headed home. They were wary of me afterward and didn’t talk to me much, which was fine with me.

  Everything happens for a reason? Like the Holocaust, or child rape? Such unthinking tripe.

  God may have taken away our ability to further destroy the planet, but all this tragedy and heartache was our own doing. Unless God was a sadist, which was a distinct possibility. Regardless, there was absolutely no evidence of a divine plan that gave everything a logical and positive reason.

  In fact, the opposite seemed more likely to me—random chaos, which on rare occasions was tamed by love, our one and only saving grace.

  I studied up on how to grow grains. The rice was gone, and we only had enough wheat flour to last another year if we were lucky and careful. We needed a plan to grow more. Rice would take entirely too much water, so we’d have to live without it. Maybe, maybe, we could grow wheat in the fall, although we’d need a bigger patch of land to grow enough for all of us. I looked into alternative grains, like oats and barley and quinoa. I had seed, but I didn’t know a thing about how to grow any of them.

  Corn we could do, and I had lots of seed corn—the kind of corn we could make into cornmeal, grits, and masa. Corn could handle the Texas heat, too, as long as it had some water. Yet it also needed more space—as in acreage. But how could we till whole acres, and how could we protect a crop that wasn’t close to home?

  At the next neighborhood meeting, we decided to plow up our front yards for corn fields, and to use the park to plant wheat and other grains. At least for now, we still had rototillers and gasoline to run them. Silas planted his whole backyard in lentils, and Jack planted his with pinto beans. Phil was trying black beans along the road median on Dittmar.

  Melba Carlisle’s brother, his wife, and teenage son came to live with them. Some folks grumbled, but I welcomed the help. To me, we’d replaced the Matheson family with nicer people. Mr. Bellows’ grown son walked up from Corpus Christi to join us as well.

  Spring brought the Zizzos a new crop of bunny rabbits, which, unsurprisingly, were adorable and fluffy. I begged Kathy not to let Mazie see the bunnies or we’d never be able to eat
another rabbit at our house.

  One bright June day in the middle of this bustling activity, Mazie let out a scream that damned near stopped my heart. I hurried to open the back door just as Mazie reached the patio, still screeching.

  “The ugly men! They’re over by the Mint!”

  “What ugly men? Where are they?” I couldn’t see anyone. Mazie dragged me to the side fence in time to see the ruby red GTO peel out from in front of the Mint. Inside the car were the same three creepy men as before, but now there was a fourth man.

  As they turned the corner to speed away, the fourth man swung his head around to grin at me, devilishly, toothlessly. Chas Matheson. Shit! He’d shown them where we stored the food.

  “Jack!” I screamed. “Jack! Silas! Phil! Come quick!”

  With great urgency and a good deal of hand-wringing, we beefed up our security at the Mint beginning that very afternoon. We stationed at least two armed guards there around the clock, day in and day out. Since we only had about twelve fully grown men who weren’t old or in ill health, we had to expand our guard force. Jack and Mr. Bellows joined as the group’s most elderly members; Keno and Alma joined as its youngest. Kathy and Doris also signed on to work as guards on shifts when their husbands could watch their children.

  Doris was elated to have the Ibanez kids living with her now. She called them, “my kids.”

  The secret well down past Manchaca was drying up. The questers had an increasingly hard time filling water jugs, and we didn’t have gasoline to spare for Sam’s truck anyway. We hadn’t had much rain for the duration of the spring, not since the rain that cleared the air of oak pollen. It was now late June, and it rarely rained here in July or August. We would have to open the cistern soon for our water supply. I kept this to myself, though. I still wanted people to be extremely careful with the water they had.

  But I was secretly excited about the ten thousand gallons of cistern water—a life-saving treasure trove in a world such as ours.

  FORTY-NINE

  I’D HAD one of those mini heart attacks a few years back, an ischemic event where my heart was deprived of oxygen and got damaged. Hank had always planned to keep his job until he turned seventy, but when I had my heart event, he retired right away. At first, I thought it was sweet of him—uncharacteristically and unsustainably sweet, as it turned out. It took him mere weeks to get so cranky that I wanted to scream.

  He harangued me daily about my so-called “heart-damaging lifestyle.” What heart-damaging lifestyle? I ate well. I didn’t smoke. I exercised. Yes, I was fat, but so was he, and I wasn’t that fat.

  But according to Hank, I was the author of my own diseased fate. And though he never quite said it, he regularly implied that my illness was due to some sort of moral failing of mine. Since I didn’t have the fortitude to stay healthy for eternity, it was up to Hank to keep me in line. Never mind that heart disease ran in my family. By Hank’s way of thinking, my family members had their own moral failings, and they’d passed this weakness on to me. I can’t describe how maddening this was—to be treated like a reprobate for getting old and ill.

  At first, I tried to persuade Hank that he was looking at this all wrong. We had several loud arguments about it. After that, I tuned him out and closed my heart to him once and for all. Oh, I’d been in denial about it until recently, and I’d kept trying, out of habit, to love him. But deep in my heart, hidden even from myself, I knew we were done.

  Now I realized that the internal dialogue I continually ran through my head was full of the same sorts of reprimands I got from Hank. No wonder I felt responsible for everything and everyone. Hank had trained me well.

  One afternoon, when my grandkids, Cesar, and Sonja were out harvesting green beans, I went looking for Jack. I didn’t see him on the streets, and it wasn’t his turn for Mint guard duty, so I knocked nervously on his front door.

  “Bea! I wondered if you’d ever come see me again.” Jack ushered me inside, yapping about his plans to expand his chicken coop.

  “Want a warm beer?” he said, grinning.

  “No thanks.” I looked out his glass doors to his backyard, which used to be beautifully landscaped with flowers, and now was filled with rows of pinto beans and poles for them to climb.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Jack?” I picked at a splotch of dried food on the hem on my shirt.

  “Bea?” He chuckled.

  I gazed into his kind and gentle eyes. “Do you think it’s my fault that I’m sick, you know, with my heart?”

  “Of course not. Why would I think it’s your fault?”

  “Hank thinks it’s my fault, that it’s due to some sort of character flaw.”

  “I see.” Jack frowned. “Seems like that old man of yours has something permanently stuck up his ass.”

  I laughed. “I know, right? And what pisses me off most is that he’s still scolding me in my head, even though I haven’t seen him in nine months.”

  “That must be infuriating.”

  “It is. I’ve had all of Hank I can take. I’m done with him, Jack. I really am.”

  Jack put a hand on each of my shoulders, running his blue eyes over every square inch of my face.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying, Jack Jeffers, that I have been in love with you for years. I tried not to be, because I was married, but I never quit.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You are a warm and caring man, nothing the least bit like Hank Crenshaw, and, if you’ll allow me to, I have a big backlog of love I’d like to give you.”

  “You mean that?” He searched my eyes. “I never quit loving you either.” He turned his face away for a moment. Then he looked back and read my eyes more deeply than they’d ever been read—my near-sighted eyes, which were filling with tears.

  “Bea, you won’t change your mind? What if Hank comes back? It hurt me bad when you cut me off before. I don’t know if I could live through it again.”

  “Jack, I’m so sorry. Hank has hurt us both quite enough. I won’t let him do it anymore. I love you, and I won’t hurt you again. I’m all yours, if you want me.”

  “God, Bea. You know I do.” He hugged me to him perfectly—strongly, protectively, tenderly. “Can I have you now?” he whispered in my ear as he snuggled his whiskery face into my neck.

  “Yes, Jack, you can have me always.”

  I visited Jack every day after lunch, when it was acceptable in our community to take a break from the heat. I didn’t try to hide my visits from the kids. In fact, I told them I was in love with Mr. Jeffers and was giving myself a divorce from their grandfather.

  “How can you get divorced?” Mazie said. “Grandpa’s not even here!”

  “I snapped my fingers three times and said, ‘I’m divorced. I’m divorced. I’m divorced.’”

  “Don’t you have to go to court?” Milo asked.

  “Not anymore, honey. There’s no court to go to.”

  Milo and Mazie looked aghast, while Keno shook his head.

  “I’m sorry if you don’t like this. But I deserve to be happy, and I haven’t been happy with your grandfather for years.”

  “Well, why not?” Milo threw his hands in the air.

  “You said it yourself, kiddo. He can be mean, and he was meanest of all to me. He stayed mad at me all the time.”

  “Is that true?” Mazie asked.

  “It’s true,” Keno said, bowling me over. “My mom said so.”

  “She did?” I was shocked.

  “Yep.” Keno curled his mouth into an embarrassed smirk.

  “Well, why didn’t Erin say something to me?”

  “She said she tried to, but you didn’t listen.”

  “Maybe she did. I don’t remember. But I know I didn’t want to face it for years.”

  “Not easy to face, I guess,” Keno said so maturely that it blew my mind. Then he sneezed into his hand and wiped it on his jeans.

 
Teenagers.

  FIFTY

  WHAT WAS Murphy’s Law again? If something can go wrong, it will?

  I was on the back patio shelling peas and trying to keep Mazie on task to help me. Sonja was starting beans on the grill, and Cesar was rocking in the glider, reading and wheezing. I stopped shelling peas for a moment to fuss with the wind-up radio so I could listen to Rick the Stick. I hoped to get clues about why Eddie and Pete hadn’t returned.

  “Some of my neighbors walked to Waco last week to check on family, and the National Guard turned them away. Don’t know what’s up with that.

  “Anyone ever hear this song, Sinner Man? I’ve been thinking a lot about the coming of the Lord lately, praying for it to happen before we get more miserable. Got me to thinkin’ about this song.”

  A beat of silence was followed by a haunting tune:

  “Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to. . . .

  You gonna run to the rocks, but the rocks will be meltin’. . . .

  You gonna run to the sea, but the sea will be boilin’. . . .

  You gonna run to the Lord, beggin’ him to hide you—"

  The song suddenly changed tempo. No, wait, that was a car engine—a loud one. I looked up as the ruby GTO peeled around a corner and onto the street behind us, skidding and squealing toward the front of the Mint. Sonja gasped. The kids and I jumped to our feet.

  The GTO braked hard and slid out of sight, but it was idling out front of the Mint, probably in its driveway. Within seconds, an early 1960s Chevy truck roared around the same corner and screeched its brakes, also stopping on the frontside of the Mint.

  “Keno!” I called to my grandson, who was on Mint guard duty. He leapt up from its back porch, rifle in hand.

  “Stay back, Keno!” I yelled, then the motors died. Car and truck doors opened and slammed. Phil hollered, “Halt!” from the Mint front yard.

  “No, you halt, Hendrix!” shouted a voice that had to be Chas, followed by gunshots. Phil!