Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

She was right. I knew it as soon as she suggested it. I knew exactly what Grandpa would think, what he would say, but right then I didn’t care. The idea of walking out of town without her seemed impossible.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Nice! It’ll be great, you’ll see. And your dad is totally gonna love me. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I kind of have a feeling he might.”

Jenny popped up on her toes and kissed me again, holding it longer this time, slipping her arms around my back so our bodies pressed tight together. “Still want to go get those books?”

I smiled. Our foreheads met, making a close little pyramid. “Yep.”

“Jerk.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I get them.”

By the time I got to the door, Jenny already had her sketch pad in her hands, drawing, lost in it. Her dark hair was a tangled mess, and in the growing light of the morning, her skin glowed. Her sweater slipped away from her shoulder, revealing a tiny island chain of freckles. I watched her for a second and then slipped out the door into the cold morning air.

I stood for a moment in the barnyard, then made for a path that cut like an arrow into the woods. Everything seemed golden and crisp around me and I felt I was close to touching something I had never seen, or even hoped for. The future.

I avoided the main road, following the decaying perimeter fence as it wound through the woods before jumping it and heading toward Settler’s Landing. My steps felt lighter than usual as I walked through the bare trees. It was funny trying to imagine Jenny out with me and Dad on the trail. Somehow I couldn’t see her trudging along, donkey in tow, picking up scrap.

Maybe we won’t even go back on the trail.

I stopped dead in the middle of the woods, surprised by the thought. I rolled it around in my head like it was a jewel I had just discovered.

Was it possible? After all, Dad had been talking about it before the accident, and now with Jenny along, maybe we really could make a new start. Settle somewhere. Go west and see what there was to see. There was a whole world out there.

I laughed a little to myself. The idea would have terrified me just weeks ago. How had that changed? Was it Jenny? Was it Settler’s Landing? Did it even matter? Hope was hope and I’d take it.

I clambered down a hill and leapt over a stream. The trees opened up above me. The sky was thick with looming gray clouds. The way the temperature was dropping, I wondered if I might actually see snow this year.

Usually we were down in Florida by this time of year, since real winter storms could sometimes last for weeks on end. The last time I’d seen snow was during a freak storm years before. We had just gotten to the Canadian camp in early April, when the day suddenly grew cold and snow began to fall. It had seemed like a miracle. The trading camp had buzzed around us, everyone rushing to celebrate before it was gone. There’d been a bonfire and food roasting on spits and a three-man band whose music had floated above the camp.

Mom and Dad and I had stayed behind while Grandpa went out looking for tobacco. We’d gathered around our campfire in a semicircle of folding chairs, cooking a skinny chicken on a spit, a plastic tarp angled over us to keep the snow off. We knew from experience that several hours from that moment we would have to take refuge to escape the drunkenness and the fights that inevitably broke out after a big party, but that was later. Right then the air was full of laughter and music and the clean-smelling snow that had painted the muddy camp around us a fresh, brilliant white. I had The Lord of the Rings on my lap but was listening to Dad talk about his days as a theater usher in San Diego while Mom talked of wild party after wild party and teased him for being a nerd.

“So how did you guys meet?” I’d asked that night.

Mom had glanced at Dad. I was maybe eight then and they’d only recently started talking to me about the Collapse and the war.

“P Eleven had just started up,” Dad said. “There were rumors about a quarantine in San Diego, so your grandparents and I piled into the car, using Grandpa’s military ID to get us through the roadblocks. We thought we’d head out east to this old army installation in the desert to wait things out. On our way out of town, we stopped for gas at the station your mom’s parents owned.”

“By then my whole family was gone,” Mom said. “My sister, Sarah, went first, then Dad, then Mom.”

Mom’s face had darkened, remembering it.

“I heard the bell ding as your dad and his folks pulled up. I came out from behind the station to meet them. I was filthy. It’s funny — I was such a prissy little thing when I was little, playing dolls and insisting everything I owned be as pink and frilly as possible. But by that point, I barely bothered to wipe the dirt off my face before going to fill up their gas.”

Dad had held out his hand, stretching it across the space between them, and Mom had taken it.

“I pumped it for your grandpa, and when I was done, he dug down into his pocket to pay, but all he had was a hundred. When I told him I didn’t have change for a hundred, he started yelling and screaming, claiming I was trying to cheat him! I laughed. I was like… the world is coming to an end, man! I mean, the sky is falling! I just buried my entire family out in the desert, and you’re having an aneurysm over your eleven dollars and fifty cents in change? Finally I just said forget it. Go with God, Ebenezer!

“So he took his hundred and jumped in the car, but by that point your father here had gotten out of the car and said he wasn’t getting in until his dad agreed to take me with them. Well, if you thought your grandfather had been impolite before, imagine the tidal wave of profanity that erupted when number one son decided to stage a little coup. Your grandpa screamed and hollered, he stamped his feet, even hit him! Can you believe that? Hitting something as adorable as your father? Didn’t matter, though. Your dad was a brick wall. He wouldn’t give an inch. Not one inch. I hadn’t said two words to him yet! And here he was… my noble man.”

“Why’d you do it, Dad?”

Dad had locked eyes with Mom over the orange flames. The snow swirled behind him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t really even think about doing it till then. It was just… the second I saw her, it was like a jigsaw puzzle. You know? You’ve got all these pieces and, on its own, each piece is a splotch of blue or a bit of green. But then a bunch of them click into place and you’ve got the sky or the grass and the whole thing just makes sense.”

I’d recognized the look that came over his face then. He got it a lot when looking at Mom. It was like he was seeing her as she was right then, bright and rosy in the fire’s glow, but at the same time seeing her as she was on the day they met, and when they’d first kissed, and when they’d snuck away from Grandpa to be married, and then as he imagined she might be ten years down the line, then twenty, then thirty, and finally as the old woman he had no idea she would never have the chance to become.

It was like he was looking at his whole life with her in that one moment.

I stepped out of the tree line and into the Greens’ backyard. There were no candles lit in the windows and I couldn’t hear any sign of movement from inside. Still, I skirted around the edge of their backyard garden toward the front door. I knew they wouldn’t mind my coming, but I thought it would be better if they didn’t see me. Hiding behind the corner of the house, I peeked out into the neighborhood.

It seemed strangely quiet, empty, almost as if everyone who lived there had picked up and moved on the night before. I told myself it was just my imagination.