CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tonight, I think about Maeve, in an attempt to dull the piercing pain that radiates through my arm. I think about her cart and her knife and about New York City. I think about how even though she broke into my home, I feel a bit safer when she’s around.
I sit on the edge of my mattress, the glow of the moon casting a pale white light on everything around me. I kicked all my blankets off in an attempt to get even a wink of sleep, and they sit, crumpled into a ball, in the corner. At this point, I’ve given up on the idea of sleep entirely. It’s not going to come. Not with this heat, not with this agony, not with the number of things flooding my too-small brain.
I look at Maeve, who is sleeping on the floor a few feet away. I wonder about who she was, before The Storm. Where did she come from? When she first arrived at the bookstore, she said she had nowhere else to go. Almost like she was running from something. Hiding something. I’m not sure what.
As I ponder, I stare out the window at the night sky. A million stars blink in the dark. I once heard that they only do that on Earth. Like, if you were up in space, up and away and out of the atmosphere, the stars would just be there. Dots of light that are so immovable and don’t blink or twinkle at all. They do that only for us, as if we wouldn’t be able to handle the full magnitude of them if they didn’t.
I’ve always wanted to go to space, live in some sort of floating city. Do something cool with my life, something worthwhile. You can’t have any dead weight hanging around in space. I used to tell my friends that. I’d say, No offense, but if they offered me a place in the first civilian space community, I would take it and leave you all behind. I think I romanticized the idea of new beginnings. I think I romanticized the idea of being alone.
“Stop!”
I’m jolted away from my thoughts by a shriek. It’s Maeve, over in her corner, thrashing under her covers. She twists from one side to the other, her brows knit together.
“Please, don’t.”
Her voice is breathless, strained. I watch an entire universe flash across her face as she convulses in her sleep, caught in a nightmare, desperate to escape.
“It’s not my fault! Please!” She’s whimpering now, terrified. Whatever she’s dreaming about must be terrible.
As I watch her, I don’t know what to do. The Maeve I know, or at least think I know, is tough, with an ironclad exterior. This…this looks like fear. Pain. This is violent. This is torture. I don’t know if she wants me to see her like this. But if I wake her up, I have to tell her why. And who knows how she’ll react? Will she play it off? Lash out? Leave? I think of the knife on the kitchen table and remember that I don’t know what Maeve is capable of.
Luckily, I don’t have to make a decision. Maeve jolts awake, eyes wide, staring straight at me. Her body is drenched in sweat. As soon as she realizes what she’s doing, she tries to play it off. She fakes a yawn, rubs her eyes gently. She’s just about to roll over to face the wall when I stop her with a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” The question slips out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“Hm?” She raises her eyebrows like she doesn’t have the foggiest idea what I could possibly be talking about. She’s a horrible actress.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything at all. “Never mind.”
A second of silence passes before Maeve shimmies out from under her blanket and leans back against the wall, drawing her knees to her chest. “I’m fine.”
We both know that’s not true, and even if I didn’t know, I’d be able to tell from the way she refuses to look at me. “Are you sure?”
Now it’s Maeve’s turn to laugh, her head falling back so that she’s staring at the makeshift tarp ceiling. “It’s not important, right? In the grand scheme of things. Like, all the shit that we’ve been through, it doesn’t matter in the long run.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look around us. Everything is crap, and it always will be. What we do is pretty insignificant, when you think about it. We have to do what we can to survive. The rest will be lost over time.”
I can’t help but think of the stars. About how small they look, about how big they really are. “I don’t know. Like, what about space? The stars and stuff.” Maeve raises her eyebrow as if to say, You absolutely have no idea what you’re talking about. I clear my throat and try to ignore her. “They’re so small, right, but you could actually fit whole worlds inside them. Looking at stars makes us feel so insignificant. But we’re not. Even though we might look so tiny.”
Maeve laughs a small, sharp laugh. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“If you look at the grand scheme of things, sure, it doesn’t seem like right now matters that much. That right now matters at all. But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck.”
“Like stars,” Maeve says, disbelieving.
“The metaphor sounded better in my head.” I pause. Then a ridiculous question makes its way out of my mouth. “Do you ever wish you could go to space?”
Maeve laughs, before realizing that I’m serious. “What? No. Why?”
“I don’t know. The peacefulness of it all. The unknown.”
“I think I’ve had enough peace and unknown to last me a lifetime,” Maeve retorts. “Maybe even two lifetimes.”
“Fine, then what about some sort of space vacation?” I ask, the corners of my mouth tugging upward.
“A space vacation? And risk getting burned up in the atmosphere for ten thousand dollars? No thank you.”
“Okay, then what about if some eccentric billionaire paid for it?”
“Boo, billionaires,” Maeve says, clicking her tongue. “Where are they now, to get us out of this mess?” I can tell she’s slightly delirious from lack of sleep, but I think I am too.
“Oh! Neil DeGrasse Tyson! The space guy!” She perks up at this, and I have to admit I’m thrilled to have found in her a willing and somewhat eager conversation partner. “What if he invited you on an all-expenses-paid space vacation? Like Cosmos but on steroids!”
“Fine!” Maeve mutters, raising her hands in defeat. “You win; I’ll go on the space vacation!”
A couple of seconds pass as I soak up my victory. I decide to keep going, pushing my luck to put off going to sleep and the nightmares that await Maeve when she does.
“Who’d you take, if you could take three celebrities with you?”
She groans and rolls her eyes at me. “Not this, Liz. It’s too late to be bombarded with icebreakers.”
“It’s either that, or you go back to sleep.”
The smile melts off Maeve’s face as she looks down at her lap. I look down at my Peanuts pajama bottoms.
“I shouldn’t have gone on my own. I shouldn’t have left home after The Storm, with no one else who I knew. Who knew me,” Maeve says. “I thought it would be easier to start fresh, you know? Explore what else was out there for me.”
“I understand.”
That’s a lie. A white lie, but still a lie. To me, the pain of a fresh start was unimaginable. It was like having your entire support system ripped away from you. Losing the people you love is hard enough, but leaving everything behind wasn’t something I was willing to try. The bookstore is all I have left.
Eva was different. Eva welcomed the unknown and that fresh start, and that was why she left. She couldn’t bear the feeling of half-baked memories that surrounded her for so long. She couldn’t bear the image of the ghosts that were never quite gone. The ghosts that stayed in these streets, and in these buildings, and the smells that came when each season rolled around. For her, all she longed for was something completely and utterly foreign.
I was not foreign enough for her. I was old. I held memories. I hold memories. Memories I can’t give up. Memories of better times and opportunities that she no longer had. I couldn’t replace the home she had lost, even though she had become home to me. Feelings aren’t reciprocal like that.
Maeve seems to take my lie for the truth and nods. “It wasn’t easier, though, you know?”
“I don’t think things can be easy anymore. I’m not sure that word even exists at this point.” I wish I could capture Maeve’s story before she leaves. “I wish I had my notebook.” At first, I don’t even realize that I’ve said it out loud.
“What?”
“It’s downstairs,” I explain, looking at Maeve. To my surprise, I have her full attention. “A few months after The Storm, I got into the habit of taking down people’s stories. How they made it this far, you know?” She nods slowly, not breaking eye contact. “It started as a bit of a vanity thing, I think. I didn’t want to be forgotten. No one who came through wanted their lives to be in vain. But you don’t have to give your story until you’re ready. Until you have a version of it that you want to be remembered.”
“Go get it.”
“Really?”
Maeve hesitates for a moment before nodding. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
• • •
I’m back in what feels like seconds, chest still heaving from bounding up the rickety steps as I tried to ignore the shocks of pain jolting up my arm. The leather-bound cover of my notebook sticks to my sweaty palm as I lay it in front of me.
“It’s a work in progress, really. I’ve barely got half of it filled,” I explain as Maeve reaches forward and flips through the pages, careful not to tear the thin paper. “But it’s a good project to have. Something to keep me busy during the slower days.”
Maeve doesn’t say anything in response as she leans in close, reading my scrawling handwriting on the page in front of her.
Caroline Ransom
34 years old
Westcliffe, Colorado
I was working when it happened. Yellowstone, actually. I didn’t even know how widespread it was for a couple of days, because I was off camping. No cell service.
People always start from different points in their lives. Some from the very beginning. Some from their high school graduation. Some from their wedding. But more often than not, it starts from the day everything ended. Only an ending can make way for a new beginning.
When The Storm came I had been staying in a tent, riding a mountain bike every day, and taking pictures of the wildlife. My tent didn’t last long in the acid, and so I stayed in a cave, night after night after night, doing whatever I could to stay alive. Doing everything I could to avoid the water and the burning feeling it left behind. Hunting, foraging. I even carved myself some weapons.
“Badass,” Maeve mutters as she finishes the entry and selects a new one.
“What, more interesting than some dusty old bookstore?”
“Hardly.” Maeve looks up at me, her eyes meeting mine. “It’s just, imagine having the chance to actually live before everything went to shit? Imagine doing something important.”
I laugh, the sound scraping up my throat, slightly shocking in the stillness of the night. “High school wasn’t incredibly important?”
“Oh yeah, my barely passing grades were doing a whole lot for the world….” She trails off, now focusing on the new page in front of her, her head flicking back and forth slightly as she scans the page.
Evelyn Sargent
20 years old
Cornwall, Connecticut
I got married two days after my eighteenth birthday, which my mom probably wasn’t the biggest fan of, but she kept her mouth shut. And he was a tattoo apprentice, while I went to a local college. I was happy. ’Cause each day I’d go back to my apartment instead of a dorm room, and Mason would be cooking something, making the whole place smell like it burst out of Bon Appétit. I had my favorites, of course….
It takes too long for Maeve to remove her gaze from the entry, as if she’s savoring it. I understand why. We never made it that far. We never made it to the “normal” that we were promised.
She inches back from the journal, slowly retreating toward her bed, and I shut the cover, sliding it closer to me. “It’s really just a project,” I murmur. “It’s not that important. It’s not something earth shattering.”
“It matters, Liz,” Maeve whispers, so quietly that I almost can’t hear it. “If you think it matters, it matters. It matters to the people who have given you their stories so far, and it matters to all the people who will read them in the future.” She pauses.
I laugh at this and the melodrama of it all. I can’t help it, but Maeve isn’t finished.
“I don’t think I can give you my story yet,” she says, searching for approval somewhere inside my eyes. “I don’t think my story is over, at least not how I want it to be. If this is the end of my story, then it’s a bad one.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Maeve answers, gesturing loosely into the air. “I just…I’m not sure I’m ready. Retelling it makes it real. Do you understand?”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I haven’t even written my story yet, either,” I offer. “Kind of hypocritical, you know? To have so many but not have mine.” Still, I pause. “But I wouldn’t mind having yours, when you’re willing.”
“How about I tell you the beginning. Just a taste of what’s to come?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” Maeve smiles at me, her teeth still sparkling in the dark. “Where do I start?”
“Wherever you want.” I’ve learned not to set any sort of structure for these things. It’s better to wait. It’s better to let them define themselves. The stories are more honest that way. Raw.
“I’m originally from the city.” She’s said this before, but I’ll let her say it again if it gets her to tell me something true.
“New York?”
I’ve learned to ask that question whenever anyone calls a place the city. To me, it means New York City. To others, it means Chicago, or Miami, or Atlanta. Asking now saves me a lot of confusion in the future.
“I grew up there. We lived in an apartment down in Greenwich Village, over on West Ninth. Bottom floor, and we had this mudroom that my mom decided to paint mint green one day, just for the hell of it. But then we all hated that, so it ended up hot pink. Nothing in our house was ever a normal color, like gray or something. My mom said it was too boring. The worst insult you could ever give her was that something wasn’t interesting enough. It was, like, a criminal offense.”
She pauses, getting this far-off look in her eyes. Her mom sounds so different from mine. So spontaneous and full of life. But I don’t say anything, trying to commit the story to memory so that I can write it down when I’m able. I just let her continue when she’s ready.
“This one time, in middle school, we had this ugly-sweater day for school spirit. I went and told my mom, who swore she’d figure something out, like she always did. Every Halloween costume, every birthday party, my parents pulled out all the stops. Both of them. So when the sweater arrives, my mom brings it to my room and lays it out for me, and my stomach just drops. ’Cause the whole ugly-sweater thing? They’re cute in an ugly sort of way. Like, made by your grandma with love. But this was ugly, with tinsel and ornaments and a stocking glued right onto the front. And it lit up and sang songs when you pressed a button.
“My mother loved it. My dad too. And I smiled and thanked my mom, but when I got to school, I was too embarrassed to take my coat off. Just walked around with a winter jacket zipped up to my neck all day. It was too much for me. I guess I just wasn’t like them in that regard. Out loud and proud, or whatever. But as I got older, I tried to learn to be a bit bolder.” Maeve bites her lip. Does she think she was successful, or is she mourning the person she could have been if she’d had just a little more time? “Of course, when all hell broke loose, I couldn’t just stay there.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Maeve says. “Too many people, just crawling all over the place. All of them had their own ideas about what to do. All of them had their own feelings to process, and most of them didn’t want to do that processing alone. I needed peace. I had to get away from them. It was suffocating.” She pauses, smiling a small, distant smile. “I was better off on my own than with all of them. The weight of it all, all their problems and fears and anger and danger, it was exhausting.
“So I left the city. I left it all behind. I couldn’t stay there. I’d die. Either someone would kill me, or I’d die from hunger, or I’d go completely insane.”
“So what, you walked?”
Maeve scoffs. “New Yorkers are good walkers.” I roll my eyes, and she pretends not to notice. “I don’t think I’ve stayed anywhere for longer than a week or two. It’s like I won’t allow myself to get too comfortable. If I never stay anywhere for too long, I never have anything to lose.”
“Hence the tent?”
“Hence the tent,” Maeve says, her eyes suddenly distant. “I guess the rest is history.”
I have to admit that I’m disappointed by the vagueness of what happened to her after The Storm. And I’m not sure I believe her story, but she also has no reason to tell me the truth. Most people can go on for a couple of notebook pages at least, but Maeve seems far off when she reaches the end. Some people go on and on about what happened after. The fear, the destruction, the new beginnings that they found, but Maeve falls silent. I understand. To tell the story is to admit that it’s true. To tell your story is to come to terms with what it actually means. What it did to you. How you changed.
I have secrets too. It’s only fair that I allow her to have hers in return.
The moon hangs high in the sky outside my window, too-dead trees casting shadows onto the sidewalk. I hear Maeve move underneath her sheets. When I look at her, she’s tucked herself back in, her blanket pulled up to her chin.
I decide to gather mine from the corner, making a poor attempt at spreading it over my body with one hand. It’s too hot on my skin, but I leave it on anyway. It feels nice. It feels safe.
“Good night,” Maeve whispers from across the room.
“Are you sure you don’t want the mattress?” I ask. She doesn’t answer, and so I roll over, facing away from the window, looking instead at my shadow on the bedroom floor. “Good night.”