John Adams - Wastelands 2

“About time,” he says, and I can barely hear him. He reaches up to touch my face with his hand; this is how he shows his love for me. “You wouldn’t let me kill her.” He coughs hard, and more blood spills out like tomato soup from the big cans we’ve got down in the basement. “You’ll see your Mama. Now you got yourself a soul.” He taps me on the side of my head. “It’s been planted, just you gotta let it grow.”

“Fatha—”

But his eyes close and his hand drops into his lap, and he don’t breathe no more. And in the distance I hear more buzzing motorbikes like Gwyn’s, and they’re all headed this way. So I pick up Fatha’s spent crossbow and I pray he’s right, that somehow I’ve got me a soul now.

I step out into the sunlight to greet my new friends with my insides all tangled up and heavy in my gut. It won’t ever be the same here without Fatha, and yet I’m so glad of this one thing: that there will finally be an end to all the killing.

Amen.

*out•er rims*, n . *1*. areas of continents flooded in 2014 by rising sea levels due to climate change; the resulting regions.

Why she brought the kids one last time would be the question always troubling her, never finding its reasonable answer. She told herself she wanted them to see the shore before the world changed again. After all, no one regretted last chances unless they weren’t taken. Six years earlier she’d thought of visiting NYC, the bistro where she met her husband, to honor his memory. But she fussed over the budget. Her last chance passed her by, after half of New York City had eventually been submerged by the encroaching Atlantic.

She wouldn’t rob her children of one last stay at the place they spent summers with their father. Branden and Shannon were more excited about the world changing than losing the shoreline. Where will the land be next year? One day the whole world’ll be underwater! they said, but they could imagine such things because they would be far from here when the storm’s eye came roaring up from the gulf.

Shannon’s head lolled against the door crushing her afro puffs, and her neck bent down on her shoulder. Yet she could sleep anywhere at any time, even during the biggest move of her life, and dozed in the back. Branden popped gum in the front passenger seat. He leaned his chin on his sharp knee and looked out the window at the highway. Normally, she would tell him to keep his shoes off the seat, but he was relaxed when he talked about things she thought should unnerve an eleven-year-old boy.

“Where’s everybody gonna live?”

“Good question. Maybe they’ll stay with family or friends like us before they find their own place.”

“Everything’s gonna get crowded real fast,” he said. “The country keeps getting smaller and smaller. One day there won’t be room left.”

“Well, when that time comes, maybe we’ll live on the moon,” she said.

He twirled the bubblegum around his tongue and smiled and went back to the view outside. “All those trees’ll be gone.” No sadness. No longing. Just a fact.

They were minutes away from the shore when she saw a figure laboring with a sedan on the shoulder of the road. The car slowed and she pulled over. Branden spun away from the window. Under those long, straight lashes, his eyes bulged with disbelief. “But he’s a stranger!”

She violated every rule she’d given her children about people they didn’t know. “He’s having car trouble. I’m sure he’s trying to get out of here, too.”

She lowered the front passenger’s window. Branden slinked down in the seat. “You need help?”

A young man emerged from under the hood. In the humidity and car’s heat, sweat sealed his hair to his forehead. Trees shadowed him, but the redness around his pupils made the blue look like marbles protruding from his eyes. He glanced away from her and down the road, as if he couldn’t believe she’d pulled over, either. “There’s a parts place off Exit 6. If you could take me, I’d be much obliged.”

Branden pouted and rolled up the window.

“Act right,” she said.

“Ma’am, I really, really appreciate this,” the young man said from the backseat. “Especially with the flooding coming.”

“Where you headed?” she said.

“I don’t know. Midwest somewhere, I guess. I’m tired of hangin’ around the outer rims. Who knows when the next bad storm’s comin’.”

“I heard that.” Her son wouldn’t stop staring at the young man. “Turn around, Branden,” she said under her breath.

In the rearview window, the young man closed his eyes. He leaned back and angled his face towards the roof, maybe to pray. With eyes wide, his lips parted.

“Mom,” Branden said, “he’s shivering.”

The young man complained of a headache. He scratched his chest until his arms weakened and fell at his sides. But the guilt hadn’t come to her yet. She’d take him to a hospital. If she hadn’t picked him up, he’d be lying on the side of the highway. The worst that could happen, he’d be admitted; they’d make sure he was evacuated as a patient. But he could be discharged before then. It could be simple heat exhaustion. He’d walk out of the ER in a few hours and be on his way.

Guilt didn’t catch up with her until she saw the white tent in the hospital parking lot and the officers directing traffic. A policeman wearing a surgical mask stopped her. He grabbed his walkie-talkie when he saw the young man in the back.

“Can I get you to park over here, ma’am?” Park away from the ER, where doctors in blue suits and large square hoods waited with pens and clipboards.

She nodded at the policeman. Her son sat up. He put his feet on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

*2*. an area at the edges of a greater part or whole: He banished the thought to the outer rims of his mind .

This woman beyond Cantor’s hood respirator did her best to force a polite smile. She rubbed her left thumb with the cracked nail of her right index finger. A bit of dirt clung to the cuticle. Dr. Cantor would rather have a child sitting in front of her, or at least a teenager. She could tell them she was a disease detective who got to wear moon gear, watch them grin or giggle in respect, and downplay the impending rage of water and sickness. But this was her first time wearing the level-4 suit. This woman, with her teeth set firmly against her lips, felt the threat of the hood and the mask.

Cantor felt pushed to find any hint or clue before these people were forced to evacuate, mixing with another population. And already the disease was spreading. This illness that looked like malaria and blossomed in the warm climate. This illness with seemingly airborne transmission and no mosquito bites. The woman in front of her tried to keep her stare on the table, but she’d glance at Cantor’s rubber gloves. Crease her eyebrows at the hood and respirator protecting Cantor from the air she breathed.

She thought of all the ways she could make this woman less uneasy, help her drop her guard in this atmosphere. Make her more relaxed so they’d have some flow to the conversation, a greater chance to suss out an answer in an insignificant detail she wouldn’t share otherwise. The only way she could consider them connecting was as black women, with so few of them living here now. But they weren’t sisters talking over coffee. From the stiffness in her shoulders and the frantic tapping of her heel to the floor, the woman made it clear that Cantor was not on her side.

“I’m… sorry we’ve made you wait,” Dr. Cantor said. “Lots going on.” The left corner of her mouth crinkled up, but she didn’t know if the woman could see it.