Page 30 of The Midnight Hour
“Do you remember?” Sam continues. “I think I was about eight. We put up a tent in the backyard. Well, you did.” He smiles, a little shamefacedly. “I just watched.”
“Oh…” A vague memory, sepia-tinted, filters through Daniel’s mind. The dutiful effort of putting up the tent. Mattie watching, five years old, her thumb stuck in her mouth. Ruby on Alex’s hip. All of it makes him ache. “Yes…”
“It was because I missed the Cub Scouts’ campout, because I had tonsilitis. You did it all—the tent, the campfire, ghost stories with a flashlight.” He smiles reminiscently, while Daniel struggles to find the memories, hold on to them. “About halfway through the night,” Sam continues, “I got tired of being outside and went in, to my own bed. You stayed out, though, in case I changed my mind. And in the morning you made pancakes. Blueberry.”
Daniel can’t believe Sam remembers all this. He can’t believe hedidall this. “Yeah,” he says, smiling. “I remember.”
“Well…” Sam pauses, looking a little shamefaced again. “Isn’t that a little, I mean averylittle, like this?”
The question seems to hover in the air. Daniel stares at his son and the realization filters through him that Sam needsto believe that their squatting in the house of someone who is most likely dead—has been murdered—after a nuclear holocaust is,somehow, a little bit like a Cub Scouts-style campout in the backyard.
And maybe it is. At least, maybe they both need to act like it is, to get through it all…or at least to get through this moment.
“Yeah,” he says again, and his smile, improbably, widens. “Yeah, it is.”
They go to bed a little while later, when it’s dark but still early, because they’re both exhausted and there’s nothing else to do. Daniel locks the doors. He knows how ineffectual such a precaution is, but it seems as if this house has been forgotten; at least he hopes it has.
Daniel sleeps in the master bedroom with its handmade patchwork quilt, the sheets smelling of other people—a faint hint of unfamiliar soap and sweat. Sam takes Noah’s room, its wallpaper with vintage airplanes starting to peel off the walls and another home-made quilt on the narrow bed.
Daniel doesn’t think he will sleep, with all the dangers and worries clamoring in his mind, but he is so exhausted he falls into a deep, dreamless slumber almost the moment his head hits the pillow, waking only to the wintry sunlight streaming through the windows and the smell of something cooking in the air.
He gets out of bed slowly, all his muscles aching, and moves to the window. Under a deep blue sky, a field of winter wheat sparkles, every single blade and sheaf rimed with a glittering frost. He realizes he doesn’t know what day it is, but it must be close to Christmas. Itfeelslike Christmas, with the frost and the homely smell of cooking in the air. He dresses quickly and heads downstairs.
Sam is in the kitchen, making pancakes. Daniel stands in the doorway and stares at him, dumbfounded, as his son nonchalantly flips a perfectly round pancake onto the pan on top of the stove.
“I found flour and oil and stuff,” heexplains, “and some dried egg powder, and UHT milk. No blueberries, though.” He grins. “These people were pretty well prepared, though, huh?”
“Yes,” Daniel agrees. “They were.”Were. Past tense. Where are Tom and his family now? Are they dead? He will never know. “Thanks for making breakfast.” He suppresses the spike of frustration he feels that his son is frittering away supplies on a pancake breakfast they don’t really need. He gets why Sam is doing it; they’re camping, after all.
“There’s even maple syrup,” Sam says, and brandishes a bottle he must have found in the pantry. “Home-made.”
“Wow.” Daniel decides to go with it. They can enjoy this moment, this morning; he can let it be what Sam wants, and even needs, it to be. “Smells really good, Sam,” he says, and his son shoots him a shyly pleased grin.
“So I was thinking,” Sam says, once they’re both seated at the table with plates of pancakes, crisp at their edges and soft in the center, drowning in sweet maple syrup. “I think we should go and get Granny.”
Daniel, a fluffy forkful halfway to his mouth, stops and stares. “Get Granny,” he repeats in a neutral tone, not wanting to reveal the scathing, knee-jerk incredulity. Does Sam not realize what it’s like out there? Hasn’t he seen enough?
“Yeah.” Sam leans forward, earnest now, his pancakes momentarily forgotten. “How far is her nursing home from here? A hundred miles, maybe?”
“Closer to two hundred, and in the wrong direction.” Alex’s mother’s nursing home is between Worcester and Springfield, a mere eighty miles or so from Boston, one of the blast sites, and nearly five hundred from the cottage. It will nearly quadruple their mileage, and bring them closer to any potential radiation or other danger.
“But we’ve got the gas,” Sam presses, insistent now, as well as eager. “The truck has a full tank, and there were a couple of gallons in the barn. I checked. We could do it, Dad.”
They’ll need all that gas—and more—to get back to the cottage. “Sam…” Daniel doesn’t know how to say this any other way. “Granny might already be dead.”
Sam’s lower lip juts out, like a child’s. “But she might not be. It’s only been—what? Three weeks?”
“Yes, but…” Three weeks for a dementia-suffering woman in a locked memory care unit with little food or water? Daniel doubts whether Alex’s mother could last threedays.
“I think we should, Dad,” Sam says, staunch now, a little sanctimonious. “I know there are a lot of people we can’t get to. Grandma and Grandpa are too far away…” His voice wavers and Daniel rubs a hand over his face. His own parents, he knows, down at their condo in Florida, are almost certainly dead, probably in the first blasts. He has tried not to think of them, except to hope that it was quick. “And Aunt Sarah…Uncle Chase…we can’t get them, but Granny…” He trails off before he lifts his chin. “We couldtry.”
Daniel starts to shake his head, then stops. Something about Sam’s willingness, naive as it might be, calls to the better part of himself that he thought he’d already lost. “It’s dangerous out there, Sam,” he says quietly. “You saw yourself.”
“But we’ve got a truck now,” his son persists, excited now. “And we can stay away from the cities. You can take Route90 the whole way, and the highways don’t seem too dangerous, right?”
“We don’t know that.” Route90 might be blocked off, barricaded by either the military or lawless thugs. He doesn’t say it out loud, but he imagines Sam’s instantaneous response.But it might not be.
Canthey try to get Alex’s mother? For a second, Daniel pictures the indomitable Jenny, only five foot two with a carefully kept perm of snow-white hair, blue eyes snapping with fire even as her mind sank into the swirling mists of dementia. She hadn’t lost any of her spirit, even in a nursing home, kickingagainst everything, shooting back with asperity when someone dared to suggest she was in any way feeble or past it. Maybe shewouldsurvive.
