Karen Walker - The Age of Miracles

When we reached Seth’s driveway, my father called my name. “I’m not going to tell your mother that you lied about going to Hanna’s.” He paused. The engine fan began to whir. “Okay?”

“You’re the one who’s lying,” I said.

“Julia,” he said again, but I didn’t answer. I did not know when I would see my father again.

Seth and I walked hand in hand across the dirt where the lawn used to be. We climbed the steps to the front door and crept inside, so we wouldn’t wake his father.

Inside, we sat for a while on the living room couches. The light was low from the blackout curtains. It was late, nearly two.

“You should tell your mom,” Seth said. He yawned and stretched out on the carpet.

I lay back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. A few minutes passed. Somewhere a faucet was dripping. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, the sun was beating down on the land.

“She’s going to find out anyway,” I said.

When I turned to look at Seth, I found he was asleep. He was curled on the floor in his T-shirt and shorts. I listened for a while to the reassuring sound of that boy breathing near me. I watched the slight movement of his eyelids as he dreamed. It wasn’t enough just to be near him. I wished I could see what he was dreaming right then. I would have traveled even there with him.

It was not until we woke the next morning that we discovered the burns. Sunburns, the worst of our lives.

We were feverish and thirsty, our whole bodies bright red. It hurt to bend our knees. It hurt to turn our heads. Seth ran to the bathroom and threw up. I still remember how he looked afterward, coughing as he lay down on the couch. In his eyes I saw the beginnings of tears and something else too: fear.

My mother was horrified when I got home. Bits of white skin were already peeling from my cheeks.

“Jesus,” she said. “I told you not to go out in the sun.”

She came alive that day, as if my sunburn were her cure. She spent a long time smearing aloe on my face. The touch of her fingers—the therapeutic sting—made me feel like a younger girl.

“Was this your idea?” she said. “Or Hanna’s? And where the hell were her parents?”

I couldn’t look her in the eye.

“I want your father to take a look at this the minute he gets home,” she said. Tiny flakes of skin were coming off in her hands. I could see the flurry in the lamplight. “He’ll be home from work in an hour.”

I hoped she was right, but I knew that something had swerved in the night, some final shift that had led eventually to the packing of two suitcases and the loading of the trunk of Sylvia’s car. My father and Sylvia could be in Nevada by now, or halfway up the coast of California. I didn’t tell my mother that. I just waited for the truth to land.

My mother leaned toward me, inspected my cheeks. Up close, she looked older, the wrinkles around her eyes more profound, her whole face like the dried flower petals that Seth and I had collected that spring.

She turned me around, lifted the back of my shirt. I was wearing the plain white training bra I’d secretly bought. I closed my eyes and waited for her to say something about it. But she didn’t mention it. Instead, I heard only the sound of her gasping at the sight of my skin.

“My God,” she said. “Weren’t you wearing a shirt?”

But the sun had developed an alarming new trick—it had burned us right through our clothes.

That same morning a moving van appeared in front of Sylvia’s house. Through my curtains, I watched box after box bob across the dirt in the arms of two movers. They carried floor lamps, shag rugs, two baskets of yarn, yards and yards of macramé. Furniture followed: the rustic dining room table, the brown velvet couch, two overstuffed armchairs, a bed frame, the birdcage. The packing of the van went on all morning, but Sylvia did not appear. Her car was already gone by then. A patch of oil was drying in the driveway.

After a while, the moving van drove away.

Twelve o’clock came and twelve o’clock passed, and there was no sign of my father.

My mother tried his cell phone. No answer.

“His shift should be over by now,” she said.

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn’t coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

Around twelve-thirty, the lights flickered. A few minutes later, they went out.

“Shit,” said my mother. “Not again.”

Every window in our house was draped with a blackout curtain, but a little sunlight was seeping through, so it was not quite pitch dark in our kitchen, where the two of us sat waiting and worrying like women of some earlier time, my mother lighting candles in the gloom.

I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands. Small flakes of sunburned skin fell to the floor.

“Don’t do that,” said my mother. “You’ll only make it worse.”

It was not long after the power went out that the cats began to yowl. I’d never heard them make that sound. Chloe moaned into the empty air. A trail of fur stood straight up on her spine. Tony paced the kitchen, ears swiveling. He growled a low growl. When I reached for him, he hissed.

Soon the neighborhood dogs began to bark. They howled from all directions, their voices swelling like a tide. A Great Dane sprinted down our street, his leash whipping behind him. In the nearby rural areas, cattle charged; horses broke through fences.

We humans didn’t feel a thing. The sky looked blue and simple to our eyes.

When we tried the radio, static poured from the speakers. No voice drifted on any frequency. Only later would we recognize what seems so obvious in retrospect: This was the first of the solar superstorms, triggered by the withering of the magnetic field.

My mother called my father again. Nothing.

Chloe’s cry grew mournful, a relentless wavering chord. My mother shut her in the guest room and then went around closing the windows against the noise.

She called my father again. This time his phone went straight to voice mail.

“Where is he?” she said.

I think she knew that he was more than late. Something had changed, and she knew it.

“Maybe you should save the battery,” I said.

She looked about to cry.

An hour passed, then two. There was no word from my father. My mother called his hospital. He wasn’t there.

She tried his cell phone once more. I remember the quick beeps of the numbers being dialed again and again, her fingers moving more urgently each time, the soft sounds of a lost cause.

Before the start of the slowing, no one would have predicted my father to be the kind of man who would abandon his wife and child. Here was a man who showed up, a man who did his work and went home every night. Here was a man who handled crises and paid his bills on time. Much study has been devoted to the physical effects of gravity sickness, but more lives than history will ever record were transformed by the subtler psychological shifts that also accompanied the slowing. For reasons we’ve never fully understood, the slowing—or its effects—altered the brain chemistry of certain people, disturbing most notably the fragile balance between impulse and control.

Thirty miles away, a different drama was unfolding. It began with a golden retriever—or you might say instead that the story starts earlier, much earlier, more than sixty years back, in the year 1961, when Americans first received instructions on how to build a backyard bomb shelter, a time when everyone knew how many inches of cement it took to shield a human being from nuclear fallout.