Em Garner - Contaminated

“Does she need to stop?” He’s already pulling over to the side of the road.

My mom opens the car door, I don’t know how, before he’s even stopped. She falls out, rolls, her backpack snagging on one arm and then falling off. She’s on her feet faster than I’ve ever seen her since before she got sick. She takes off running across the field. Her feet tangle in some grass. She goes down.

“Oh, no, oh, no…” I barely realize I’m saying this over and over as I struggle with my seat belt.

I’m caught, I’m stuck, I can’t get it undone. I’m trapped. I slap at the glass myself, then hold back. I can’t act like that, even if I want to. But then I feel the driver’s arm across me, his hand clicking the belt. I tense, I jerk, startled and freaked out, but his face is kind.

“You’d better go after her,” he says. “Before she hurts herself.”

I yank my heavy backpack out of his car, careful enough to know I don’t want him driving off with it, but I can’t carry both mine and the one my mom dropped. I drop mine beside hers, and I run.

“MOM!”

She doesn’t slow until she reaches the wall. She goes to her knees beside it, both hands clutching the cold metal. The ground is frozen, which saves her from getting muddy, but it also tears at her pants. She’ll be bruised, maybe even cut up.

The cold air burns like fire in my lungs as, panting, I drop down beside her. “Mom. Please. Come back to the car.”

Her hood’s fallen off her face. I haven’t seen her in light this bright, and I’m sorry to see the shadows around her eyes. The hollows of her cheeks. She has cracks in the corners of her lips, which are dry. Her hair tangles in the wind, blowing. She is my mother, and she used to be so beautiful, but now I struggle to see anything lovely in her.

She’s crying. Bright tears are slipping down her cheeks. She weeps silently, rocking, with her hands gripping the wrought-iron fence. Her forehead hits the metal, not hard enough to bruise, but it’s definitely leaving a mark.

“Mom, please.” I can only manage this in a whisper.

I put my hand on her shoulder. Beneath my fingers, the layers of clothing soften what would otherwise be bony and sharp, since she’s gotten so thin. “Please. Mom. Please.”

She doesn’t hear me, or she can’t. Her grief is so great, it overwhelms her. She shakes with it, and I worry it’s the Mercy Mode kicking in again. If it hasn’t already, it might soon, just from her agitation. I don’t think I can go through watching that again.

I’ve never been to one of the memorials. I know my dad is probably in one of them. We know he’s dead, even though nobody was ever able to tell us when or where, who’d done it. Where they’d put him. It seemed pointless to visit any of the places they’ve decided shouldn’t be forgotten, the places we should commemorate. He could be here, under the dirt and concrete, jumbled up alongside a lot of other bodies, or he could be anyplace else. He could be in none of them. All we know is that he’s gone.

She knows he is gone.

My parents fought sometimes, but they always made up. My mother sometimes seemed exasperated with my dad, who could be absentminded and whose sense of humor often included things she didn’t appreciate, like farts. She complained that he didn’t pick up his socks or when he forgot to bring home the dry cleaning. Their arguments never lasted long, and they kissed more than they fought.

Now she presses her face to the place in the dirt where he might be, and I can’t refuse her the chance for this grief.

I know that what I felt for Tony is nothing like this. We were too young, we didn’t have time, we were just kids. I loved him because he was the first boy to really pay attention to me, and I’ll admit there were times I had a fantasy or two about what it would be like to marry Tony. Have some kids. Argue with him fondly about his taste in cars, whatever it was.

But that was nothing like what my parents had. I lost my dad. She lost her husband. I remember overhearing my mom say once to her best friend that if something happened to my dad, she’d never get married again. I can’t begin to understand how it feels to love someone that much, to have made a life with that person, to have children with him, and then to lose him. I put my hand on her shoulder, but there’s nothing I can say or do about this except try to show her that I love her.

A shadow falls over us. It’s the man from the car. He has a handful of tissues. His eyes glint, shiny, as he gets down on the ground beside us. He hands me the tissues, and I press one into my mom’s hand. She doesn’t use it, but she doesn’t drop it, either.

“Your mother?” he says, and I nod. “Your mom hasn’t been here before, has she?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“But she knows what it is, doesn’t she?” He looks around the field. On the highway, not so far away, cars zip past without even slowing. The wind picks up, ruffling the weeds. He looks at me again. “Funny, how they know what they’re not supposed to know.”

He knows. Maybe he knew the moment he stopped. But, as with the lady at the bus stop, I don’t see condemnation. Nor pity, either, which I’d take even if it made my skin crawl.

“My wife,” he says, then stops. He swallows hard, shakes his head. “My wife.”

He doesn’t have to say anything else. I don’t know if he means she’s in one of these mass graves, or if she’s at home, wrists restrained and wearing a shock collar to keep her subdued. It doesn’t matter.

He understands, that’s what matters, and the three of us sit there together for a very long time.

THE DRIVER’S NAME IS MR. BEHNEY. HE EASES my name and story out of me with a few carefully asked questions that have me talking before I think I should keep quiet. I tell him about Opal. About having to leave the apartment. He says very little after that, but he looks thoughtful.

There never used to be a gate in front of the entrance to the neighborhood, but there is now. Mr. Behney slows the car before he turns in. I lean forward to get a better look.

“Are you sure?” He sounds doubtful.

“It’s open.” I point to the other side of the metal gate, the one behind the stone planter with the sign that says Spring Lake Commons. Nothing’s planted in it now. The gate is open on the far side. “See?”

He sighs, but makes the turn. The car inches forward through the opening. The trees have overgrown here, too, with branches that reach to scrape the sides of the car, but in half a minute we’re past that.

The road’s full of potholes, like something chewed it up and spit pieces of it back out. That’s from the treads of the army vehicles, not from regular cars. It’s not scary knowing what caused the holes. It’s scary knowing how long they’ve been there without being repaired.

We don’t pass a single car as I direct him down the long roads to our house. Spring Lake Commons is a huge neighborhood, not like the ones in town with big houses on tiny lots, all crammed together. Here you can’t even see most of the houses from the street, even in winter, with the leaves fallen off the trees. Driveways are long and narrow. There are a lot of hills. The neighborhood’s built onto a mountain, so the streets can be steep.

The only thing that crosses in front of us is a pack of dogs, all sizes. I see a couple of golden retrievers, a German shepherd, a Saint Bernard I’m sure belonged to the neighbors down the street. They look scruffy and wild, and they don’t pay us a second’s attention as they streak across the road. Mr. Behney puts on the brakes a little too hard. “My God.”

“They’re just dogs,” I say, my voice a bit too shaky to convince him. “Lots of people had dogs out here. That’s all.”