Page 48 of Our Last Resort

My breath quickened. How would we keep track? What if we stayed out too long? Fuck, what if we got lost?

“Hey,” I said, trying to look calm in front of Gabriel. “How long do you think it’s been?”

He didn’t panic. Just paused and pulled something out of his pocket.

A stopwatch.

“Where did you get that?”

He shrugged. “P.E.”

Émile kept stopwatches for fitness classes. For drills, too. He trained us. One day, maybe, men in uniforms would descend upon us, he’d explained. If that happened, we’d all have jobs. Mothers had to shred documents. Fathers had to hide supplies.And the children—well, we mainly had to make sure our rooms and bodies were clean. We had to look healthy, well-fed. Stand close to the mothers. We were to be near them, as if they were a normal part of our lives. Like we had grown up close to them, loved by them.

Of course, the stopwatches were not for us to keep. They were expensive pieces of equipment, to be returned after each use, safely tucked away in a cardboard box.

“You took it?”

Gabriel clicked his tongue. He’d resumed walking, faster than before, and I had to jog to keep up with him.

“You have another idea?” he said.

Point taken. He had shouldered a risk for both of us, and here I was, making him feel bad about it.

“We’re here,” he said. “I think.”

There, in front of us, was something we’d never seen before. A small town center. Buildings for which we didn’t have words: a coffee shop, a convenience store, a bagel shop, a library.

We stood on a sidewalk, two kids in graying shirts that had been cream-colored once, Émile’s fraying bracelets dangling from our wrists.

The coffee shop was so small we could see inside of it from the sidewalk: baked goods on the counter, black-and-white tile on the floor, a lone table with two chairs. Inside, a woman—tall, long black hair, green leather purse hanging from her shoulder—lifted a paper cup from the counter. When she stepped out, a whiff of something hit us—coffee beans, and then sweet smells like when the mothers baked, and an array of flavors and aromas we had never experienced.

Outside-outside pulsed all around us.

Thisworld.We had no idea how to begin exploring it. We didn’t know these trees. These streets. These leaves. These patches of grass. These people didn’t know about Émile, or they chose not to live in his orbit.

Either way, we could not understand them.

“Now what?” I asked.

Gabriel took the stopwatch out of his pocket again.

“Now we go back,” he said.

The world, right there, and yet so remote. A flash of possibilities, green leaves and a new sky—blue, open. A few dizzying breaths, standing on a sidewalk next to my brother, the most anodyne situation, and also the biggest taboo.

“Come on,” Gabriel said.

He stuffed the stopwatch back in his pocket.

“How much time do we have left?”

“Let’s just go.”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me forward.

“Just tell me!”

Gabriel started jogging.

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