CHAPTER FIVE
I was dreaming about my family when I was awoken by the sound of the downstairs door creaking open. The dream wasn’t a new one. My mind has been a rather unimaginative place in recent months.
My eyes slowly adjust to the darkness. My to-do list sits on the table next to my mattress, collecting both metaphorical and literal dust. People used to say that it was bad to keep your cell phone next to your bed because you’d always know it was there, subconsciously, and that knowledge of your phone would keep you from getting a good night’s sleep. My to-do list has the same effect. I tell myself that it’s the reason for my recurring nightmare, even if I know that it’s not.
I pause, staring up at the blue tarp fluttering above my head, wondering if I imagined the sound of the door opening. It’s possible, for sure. With the tarp fluttering and the wind blowing outside, it’s easy to hear things that don’t exist. But then again, I know what the tarp sounds like. It’s one of those things you get used to, like our old neighbor’s hound dog that always howled at exactly six in the morning. I got used to that, eventually.
I close my eyes, willing myself to go back to sleep. I’m nearly there when the sound of hinges screeching downstairs jolts me awake.
And then I hear a crash.
I’m not making it up this time. The first time I could play it off as a hallucination, but I don’t think my mind is advanced enough to play the same prank twice.
I sit up in bed and get on my feet. I walk across the kitchen, carefully, before pausing by the door, listening. I don’t hear the door hinges, but I do hear something else. It sounds like rustling, footsteps shuffling. I think I hear voices. Or maybe just one voice. Maybe it’s some wacko muttering to themselves about how much they like murdering teenage girls. I’m not sure. I start down the stairs, using the banister to propel myself in the dark.
My insides toss and turn, doing somersaults. A part of me wants to say that I’m being ridiculous. There could be a million things happening in the bookstore, and only one of them is that someone is walking around in there. But a bigger part of me, the part of me that loves reading ghost stories even though they give me nightmares, knows better. I’ve seen enough horror films to know that a creaking floorboard in the night is usually cause for concern.
I exhale, open the door, and step into the bookstore.
The world is silent except for my footsteps. The whole thing is slightly unsettling, making me realize that I’ve never been down here in the dark before. By the time the sun sets, there are no customers to be watching for, and so I’m already upstairs, crawling into bed and dreaming about things I try hard to forget when I’m awake. Before everything ended, the bookstore kept lights on overnight—little LEDs, left over from the holidays, twinkling brightly above the shelves. It was never dark. It was never like this.
The room is completely empty, a fact that is both unsettling and relieving. Maybe I made the whole thing up. Maybe I didn’t hear anything at all. Maybe I’m going insane. Either that or tonight’s intruder is still somewhere inside, watching me creak through the room with no shoes on.
But then I look outside.
Resting by the front entrance, there’s a cart waiting in the open doorway, sitting out on the sidewalk in front of the store.
It could probably be more accurately described as a wagon, almost like a Radio Flyer with the sides replaced by wire mesh. The sort of mesh that makes up picnic tables at a playground, or the sides of a beaten-up lumber truck. It’s rusted; the holes in the mesh are warped and out of shape. The handle has been discarded on the ground, making its mark on the dusty sidewalk. The cart is full—filled with trinkets and bags and pots and pans and cans and cloth. The cans remind me of how hungry I am. The cans remind me of the lack of water and the lack of food in the kitchen cupboard. This isn’t the sort of thing someone would leave on the side of the road. This belongs to someone who wouldn’t just run off and leave it behind. This is valuable.
And so, the intruder must still be in the store.
I don’t see them yet, so I slowly make my way toward the Classics section to nab a hardcover copy of Anna Karenina for self-defense purposes. It’s the biggest book I see, and so I assume it will hurt the most if used to smack someone in the face. Not that I’ve tried that before. I grip it tightly, my knuckles turning white with strain, and tread lightly, letting one foot cross over the other like I saw in an episode of Criminal Minds, holding my hardcover edition firmly by my head so that I can swing it in front of me when necessary.
I begin my sweep of the bookstore. I tell myself that if someone were going to jump out at me, they’ve had plenty of opportunities to do so and have probably missed their window at this point. I keep moving forward until I reach the entrance to the Children’s section. The Children’s “room” is the only part of the store that isn’t a rectangle. Instead, it juts off to the left like a wonky Tetris piece. Maybe it was meant to give kids privacy as they read, far from the watchful eyes of their parents. Maybe it’s because the back of the building always gets the nicest lighting. Either way, I can’t see into the room until I enter it, making it the perfect hiding place for our intruder.
I rack my brain for the right warning to give before I enter. But the intruder beats me to it, a clear voice echoing through the empty bookstore. A girl’s voice.
“Leave now and I won’t hurt you,” she growls, her voice hoarse and worn.
That wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting an apology or a cry for help or something more like, Oh my goodness! You caught me! I’m so sorry! Please don’t hurt me with that clothbound deluxe copy of Anna Karenina that you have gripped in your hands!
“What?” is all I can say in response as I press myself against a bookshelf, making sure that my uninvited guest can’t see me.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Just go back upstairs and pretend I wasn’t here.” Although that sentence holds no real malice—in fact, it hints at desperation—it still sounds more like a threat than anything else.
While a small part of me feels scared, like the girl with the hoarse voice could tear me to shreds, the other part of me feels insulted. Who does she think she is, breaking into my home and giving me orders? Why should I be afraid? So I take a deep breath and decide to, for once in my life, grow a spine.
I move into the room, holding Anna Karenina a bit tighter in my sweaty fingers. “I’m sorry, I don’t think that you’re in the position to—”
Suddenly, I’m face to face with the intruder, slamming straight into her chest, her sternum colliding with mine. I quickly back away, tumbling backward toward a shelf of picture books, heat rising to my face. She follows me down toward the ground, her elbow against my chest, pinning me to the carpeted floor. She stares at me, nose mere inches from mine.
She’s shorter than I imagined, maybe five and a half feet tall. She’s young, too, probably a year younger than me, although that might just be her height. Her hair is a mess, shaved on one side, the other half a cascading tangle of dark brown waves. There are a few scrapes on her face, scabbed over but still red and puffy. And above her hard green eyes are two thin eyebrows, knitted into a scowl.
As I lie on the ground next to a display of Dr. Seuss books, I find myself almost wanting to apologize. But then, I shake the feeling and remind myself that I do, in fact, have a spine.
“Who the hell are you?” I ask, trying to mimic the gravelly quality of her voice.
The intruder eases her grip slightly, positioning her free hand on the floor next to my head. There’s a small tattoo on her forearm. It’s simple, just black lines etching an open eye into her skin, a full moon where the iris should be. For a second I think she might let me go, but then she places her knee on my torso, throwing all her weight onto me. I hold my breath.
“I said that I don’t want to hurt you.”
But the look on her face, and the way she’s reaching toward her back pocket, make me think that she does want to hurt me. These days, people will do almost anything to survive.
“I could say the same,” I reply, glancing at my now-discarded copy of Anna Karenina, which lies open on the ground a few feet away. I hope I don’t sound as pathetic as I feel.
“I doubt that you could.”
I want to strangle her, and the fact that I can’t is actively killing my brain cells. It’s one thing to break in; it’s another thing to insult my competence. I realize that I need to protect the one thing I have from this outsider. I use the only strength I have to push upward, forcing her knee off my torso. To my surprise, she eases her grip and removes her leg, moving backward a few inches. It’s not quite a victory for me, but it’ll do. I prop myself up on my elbows hesitantly, waiting for her reaction. When she doesn’t force me back down, I take it as permission to slowly stand.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, my energy store now depleted.
“I need you to leave me alone. Go upstairs. Pretend you didn’t see me. I’ll be gone in the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” I sputter. “That’s not how this works. I caught you. You’re supposed to give up now.”
The girl clears her throat, rolling her eyes. “I don’t think you understand. I’m not going anywhere until I get what I need.”
“You’re out of luck,” I reply, even though I realize that I don’t have any power at all in this situation. I’m scrawny, I have no upper body strength, and the most violent thing I’ve ever done is throw a book across the room when I’m upset with the ending. But she doesn’t know that. “There’s nothing here for you to take.”
The girl seems to shrink slightly, and she stands up straight, no longer looking like a wannabe superhero. Instead, she looks like a teenager. A teenager who has been through hell, sure, but who hasn’t?
“What?”
“Unless you’re looking for a book, of course,” I add.
But the girl grits her teeth in a way that says she hasn’t read a book that wasn’t assigned for school in a long time.
“I’m not in the mood,” she says. “Don’t quite have time for reading right now. Never did.”
“Then I don’t have anything to give you, even if you hadn’t pinned me to the ground. I have no food for you to take. No water either. There is absolutely nothing that you could take from me that hasn’t been taken already.” I’m on a roll. There’s nothing stopping me now. I watch as her face softens, the malice it holds slowly turning into something else. “I bet you came in here thinking that I must have it so much better than you—”
“I didn’t know that there was anyone here—” the girl starts, but I wave my hand, silencing her.
“But I have nothing. This place is falling apart. I’m tired. I’m hungry. You don’t see me going around and stealing from others.” I pause before adding, “You really are a lowlife, aren’t you? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I cringe, realizing how much I sound like my mother.
But the girl isn’t paying attention to my rant anymore. Her face is once again hard, her eyebrows pressed together. She’s deep in thought.
“I’m not looking to steal from you,” she says.
“Huh?”
“Well, I was. Take some supplies, maybe spend the night, and hit the road. But since you’re here now, what I really need is a place to crash.”
“Why?”
“My tent broke,” the girl says matter-of-factly. “Word is there’s another Storm coming, maybe a month if we’re lucky, and I’d rather not be outside when it does.”
I raise my eyebrows. “How do you know that’s true?” Am I the only person to have been left out of the meteorological loop?
The girl bites her lip, squinting slightly before she responds. Eventually she says, “I have my sources.”
What a wonderful and informative answer!
“You don’t know that it’s coming for sure,” I mutter before pausing. I bite the inside of my cheek. “And what’s in it for me?”
“You just said you need food. Water. Supplies,” she responds. “I can help you get them.”
“By stealing things?” I scoff. “I’m sorry, but unlike you I actually have a moral compass.”
I watch as a vein in the girl’s forehead throbs, watch as her jaw tenses. She stares at me with steely eyes. “I’m good at repairs,” she says, gesturing toward the cracked windowpanes and the insulation seeping out of the wall. “My dad was a super. I basically grew up with a screwdriver in my hand.”
I look at the girl. I stare at the cuts on her face, and her mess of hair.
“You could have killed me.”
“But I didn’t.”
My to-do list tells me that I am royally screwed. There’s not much keeping this place together besides a hope and a prayer. And now a second person tells me that another Storm is rolling through.
I don’t have to like her. We don’t have to be friends. I can keep her at arm’s length and keep myself safe. I need food. I need water. Although I hate to admit it, I need someone. This might be something that I can’t do alone.
“Fine” is all I say.
• • •
We sit in the kids’ room together in the dark. Even though I’m tired and I’d rather be upstairs sleeping, I stay awake the whole night, just in case. Just in case this was all a part of her plan and she wants to steal everything I have as soon as I close my eyes and let my guard down. But we don’t say a word to one another. We sit and glare.
My back is digging into a box set of Elephant & Piggie. She sits on the other side of the room, over by the graphic novels, a half-opened copy of Amulet in her hands.
Finally, the silence gets the better of me. “What’s your name?”
“Maeve,” she replies, raising her eyebrows nonchalantly.
“Oh.”
Maeve pauses, as if wondering whether she’s morally obligated to ask the question in return, before finally caving.
“Yours?”
“Elizabeth,” I reply. “Liz.”
“Like Elizabeth Swann. From Pirates of the Caribbean?”
I regret asking her anything at all.
“I guess.”
I’ve never seen Pirates of the Caribbean. I’m not sure if saying I’m like Elizabeth Swann is a compliment or a half-hearted attempt at a joke. I decide not to think of it as either.
“I’m from New York,” Maeve offers as she shuts her book and slides it back onto the shelf. I want to tell her that she’s putting it in the wrong place and that I worked hard to get everything in alphabetical order, but I bite my tongue.
“Cool” is what I say instead.
“What about you?”
“I’m from here,” I reply.
“Ah.”
We don’t say anything else for the rest of the night. Eventually, Maeve falls asleep, her head lolling backward until it’s wedged inside the Middle Readers’ shelf. I don’t sleep. I watch.
I watch the way she grimaces in her sleep. I watch the way she clenches her hands every once in a while. I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake.
CHAPTER SIX
We stand outside the front door the next morning, staring down into Maeve’s wagon, piled high with so many objects that I can’t even discern what all of them are. She begins riffling through them, picking up a can in one hand and a blanket in the other as if there’s some sort of method to her madness. I can tell that there absolutely isn’t, but I allow her to pretend. Whatever floats her boat. It makes so much noise, the clashing and clanging of each object.
“So you’ll leave after you fix the tent?” I ask, struggling to make my voice heard over all of the ruckus. Maeve doesn’t seem to hear me, or if she does, she ignores my question completely. I decide to try again.
“Can I help?” I gesture wildly at the cart. I’m not sure why I should help, but it seems like the right thing to do.
Maeve whips her head up, tendrils of brown hair extending in every single direction. She purses her lips, her brow furrowed in concentration. “We need to bring it all in.”
“Inside? All of it?”
Maeve nods.
I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself into as I look from Maeve to her cart back to Maeve. I’ve spent the past year expertly cultivating a rhythm to my life. After Eva left, I got so used to doing things alone. On my own schedule. Maeve could mess everything up. I want her out of here as soon as possible, and I’ll do absolutely anything to get her tent fixed in a timely manner. After, of course, she’s helped me check off a bit of my to-do list. Expedited the process.
I look at her cart and shake my head. The ridiculous cart that for some reason can’t fit through a perfectly reasonably sized doorway. The ridiculous cart that is going to force me to bring all the junk inside by hand, piece by piece.
“Here,” I say, reaching out toward a crate filled with blankets and candles and rope and scissors. “Let me take that one, and then you can follow me upstairs.”
“Why would we bring it upstairs?”
“Because that’s where we sleep?”
“You mean, that’s where you sleep.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t I just sleep down here?” Maeve asks, her voice dripping with judgment. “It was kind of weird, waking up to you watching me sleep.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m not going to cuddle with you, Liz, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
I scoff before realizing that Maeve is perfectly serious. “I don’t trust you. That’s why we sleep in the same room.”
“That’s not fair,” Maeve says matter-of-factly. “Our deal was that you let me stay here, and I make sure that you don’t die. There was nothing in our agreement about a shared living space.”
“I want to be able to keep an eye on you. Make sure you’re not trying to take advantage of me.”
“That’s actually really creepy,” Maeve mutters. “Plus, I wouldn’t do that.”
I laugh, for real this time. “You are the one who tried to rob me last night. I’m the one who doesn’t do that.”
“I don’t trust you either.”
I look from the cart, at the piles of food and supplies, to Maeve, with her arms crossed over her chest. If she’s as desperate for shelter as she says she is, she’ll cave. I know she will.
“Fine,” Maeve says finally.
Ha. I was right.
“Okay. Glad we got that settled.”
Maeve scoops a pair of pants and a six-pack of instant ramen into her arms. “Lead the way, Elizabeth Swann.”
“Liz is fine.”
I nudge the front door open with the tip of my sandal, sliding my way inside. I can hear a slight shuffle behind me as Maeve follows, banging her hip against the doorknob on her way through. Even the bookstore doesn’t want her here.
I lead her around the counter and through the dark hallway, up the creaky stairs, careful not to trip on the sagging parts in the middle. Once at the top, I fumble with the knob, twisting it two or three times before the door finally gives up and lets me in.
I plop her crate down on the kitchen counter and slide it over a bit to make room for her pants and ramen, which she tosses onto the surface haphazardly.
“Do you want to make your own corner for your stuff?”
Maeve shrugs her shoulders. “Whatever you think is best.”
I don’t know what’s best, and so I head back downstairs to take another load up from the cart. I’m rummaging through her crap, wondering how she accumulated so much, when I see it.
Sitting, only half-visible, on an old red T-shirt with Jackson Hole, Wyoming on it, is a knife. It’s sheathed in a triangle of worn leather, golden studs holding it together. A dark wooden handle juts out from the top. I have no choice but to stare at it. It commands my attention.
It’s not like I haven’t seen a knife before. Maybe because it’s a knife knife, and not just one of the run-of-the mill-kitchen ones, that it holds my gaze. I pick it up, gingerly, as if it might explode in my hands. Slowly I pull it out of the leather, careful not to nick myself. Judging from how easily I stapled my fingers together when I was seven and making paper chains in art class, it isn’t too far-fetched for me to chop a finger off, right here, right now, which is exactly what I need.
It’s one of those knives I used to see on Instagram, probably made by some man in the back of his camper van with giant chunks of reclaimed wood. It’s the type of knife that, in the old days, would set you back a couple hundred dollars and would be called “artisanal.” The blade isn’t clean; something’s caked on. Something deep and just slightly red.
It scares me.
I know nothing about Maeve. That fact hits me now as I’m standing, totally vulnerable, alone. I know absolutely nothing about this person whom I’ve allowed into my home. She could have killed me last night. Is this what she’d been reaching for in her pocket? Her knife? But then why didn’t she use it? It would have been much more convenient to end me and take the building for herself. And why is she taking so long? Why is she still up there, taking her sweet time?
I hear the back door creak from inside, and I turn to face Maeve, who is standing in the doorway. When her eyes meet mine, she freezes.
“Why do you have a knife?”
She takes a couple of tentative steps toward me, craning her neck to see what exactly it is that I have in my hands.
“What?” Even though she asks the question, she doesn’t seem confused at all. Her face remains perfectly composed.
I repeat myself, even though her grimace makes me uncomfortable. “Why do you have a knife?”
“Don’t you have a knife?”
“Sure I do. I have a kitchen knife that probably hasn’t been sharpened in years. It couldn’t even make a clean cut through Styrofoam.” And it has never once been caked in a mysterious red substance.
“Okay,” Maeve says, continuing to walk toward me. “And how do you eat?”
“With a spoon.”
She smirks. I can feel heat rising into my cheeks. I can’t tell if it’s from embarrassment or anger. Maybe a horrible mixture of both.
Maeve is practically a foot away from me now. She reaches her hand out for the knife that I’m holding. I grip it tighter.
“Don’t you ever have to hunt?” she asks.
“No.”
Her eyebrows shoot up when I say this, and I can’t understand why. I hate that I don’t understand why. “So you’ve been eating what, exactly?”
I swallow hard before answering. “Things that I don’t have to kill.”
Eva had already begun a stockpile when I arrived, driving from supermarket to supermarket in her Subaru, grabbing what she could. I added what I could from my own kitchen and from my dad’s vain attempts at doomsday prepping. We ate sparingly, filling in whatever gaps appeared with the trades we got from others. And when two became one, I suddenly didn’t have to worry about food for a while. But stores are low, and fall is fast approaching. Luck runs out, as it always does.
“And how do you defend yourself? All alone here?”
I look down at my feet, unsure if there’s a correct answer to this question. “I’ve never had to,” I say, before adding, “at least not until last night.”
Maeve laughs at this, the sound less grating than I expected. “Have you even left this building in the last six months?”
I repeat my response. “I’ve never had to.”
“Let me tell you something, Elizabeth Swann,” she says. “The world isn’t the same as how you last left it. It’s worse.”
“That doesn’t mean that you need a bloody knife.”
“Look, Liz,” Maeve spits as she plucks the knife from my hands. For some reason, I don’t even try to hold on to it. “Don’t judge me for what I’ve done to survive. I’ve had to get my hands a little dirty, because unlike you, I live in the real world. Some of us don’t have fancy bookstores to hide out in. Some of us have to look out for ourselves.” I watch as she brushes past me, gathering more of her belongings from the cart. I open my mouth to speak, but Maeve’s glare quiets me. I freeze as she points the tip of her knife toward me, my heart leaping up into my throat. “And don’t look through my stuff.”
Lynn Porter
56 years old
Northampton, Massachusetts
Dogs are smart. Smarter than we are, I can tell you that much. Because we were floundering about whether anything was going to happen. “Oh, are we sure that this will even affect us in the first place?” “Can we really be certain about that sort of thing?” But my dogs? They knew immediately, no doubt about it. I woke up that morning to them scratching at the bedroom door—both of them, even though Quint is basically blind and senile. And they’re well-behaved dogs, both of them. Once the sun set, they were barking. Basically taking turns like some sort of coordinated alarm system, so I sat on the floor with them trying to calm them down instead of going on our nightly walk. I swear to god that those dogs saved my life. Saved their own too.