Em Garner - Contaminated

“Mom?”

She doesn’t turn. She’s humming again. The songs seem to be more coherent this time. Rather than a mashup, she’s humming some of them all the way through, with only a few stops and starts or mix-ups. She’s moving slowly, shuffling, and there’s no way to confuse this new mother with the old one, who’d always have two or three tasks juggling at once, and usually the music blasting from her iPod speakers at top volume while she did them. She’s not dancing now, she’s barely moving, and even so, all I can do is stand and watch her, without daring to interrupt in case whatever she’s found gets lost again.

“What’s Mama doing?” Opal wipes at her eyes.

“She’s cleaning the kitchen.”

“Oh.” Opal shrugs. “Mama, can you make me some breakfast?”

“Opal.” I follow her into the kitchen. “You know she can’t do that.”

“Why not?” Opal gives me a familiar, stubborn look, hands on her hips. She’s wearing the clothes she wore all day yesterday and to bed. I need to figure out a way to do laundry.

“Because…” I gesture at our mom, who’s now carefully wiping each plate before putting it back into the cupboard. “She just can’t.”

“You know what, Velvet? Instead of telling me all the time what Mama can’t do, maybe you should just watch what she does. She can do a lot, you know. She’s Mama.” Opal’s utterly convinced of this, and I’m not going to try to discourage her.

Besides, maybe she’s right.

During the months of the worst part of the Contamination, news reports quoted doctors and government officials and military leaders on all different aspects of what was going on. Hardly anyone agreed on anything, and even reports from official agencies could change from day to day as they fought against this sudden upsurge in random violence and tried to separate the Contaminated from the people who took the chance to become criminals.

A few months after the Contamination began, their tests started to show some results, and they started warning that it had been some sort of food-borne contaminant, not a zombie virus. The scientists and doctors put out test results, the military and government made a bunch of rules and laws, and the rest of us tried hard to get back to normality, if there is such a thing.

But nobody knows the long-term effects of the prions that caused the Contamination. There’ve been rumors that they can be spread through contact with the Contaminated, not just by consuming the protein water. That they can linger in the brain for months or years and suddenly cause a Contamination in someone who doesn’t remember ever drinking a ThinPro. And there are other faint whisperings about how the brain manages to rewire itself, work around the Contaminated areas and gain back its original functions, but that the neutralizing techniques employed by the scientists and government make it so nobody could ever get better.

Jean said it. She’d never seen a Connie acting like my mom. Reacting, showing emotion that wasn’t fury or savagery. I’ll bet she’s never had a Connie in her kennel who hummed lullabies or cleaned a kitchen, either.

My mom is different. I know she is. I watch her as she moves to the next cupboard and starts removing the glasses, one by one. I think I should help her, that she’s like a child and might drop one. Cut herself again. But I only watch.

It’s too hard to tell, really, if she’s acting on instinct or some kind of repressed memories, or if she’s really someplace inside her head, trying to get out. Her face doesn’t look animated. She moves sort of like a robot. “I’m hungry,” Opal says.

“You’re always hungry.” I am, too. Mac and cheese really wasn’t a big enough dinner. I move toward the pantry. “If we can figure out how to set up the griddle pan on the fire, I can try to make pancakes. But we don’t have any syrup.”

“Hooray! Pancakes!” Opal jumps up and down.

“And after that, we need to clean up the rest of the house. See what’s working and what needs to be fixed. And then… you have to do your homework.”

“Whaaaaat?” Opal’s eyes go wide. She stops halfway to the pantry. “Noooooooo!”

“Yes. You have to. It’s the deal I made with your principal. If you don’t do the work, you know what might happen.” I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at the look on her face.

“How come you get to quit school and I don’t?” Opal stomps her foot. “It’s not fair!”

I shrug. “I don’t make the rules, kid. Believe me, I should be looking at colleges and stuff, getting ready to get out of this crappy town. But guess what. I’m not.”

Opal glares at me. “It’s still not fair.”

“No,” I tell her with a shake of my head. “It’s not. But it’s the way it is. So don’t give me a hard time about it.”

Opal stomps her feet again, both of them one after another. Hard. “Raawwwrrrrrr!”

“Yeah, the dinosaur thing? Not working.” She does it again, louder. Stomping and growling. “Not fair! Not fair! Not fair!”

“Life’s not fair!” I shout at her.

My mom’s stopped her humming. I look up to see her watching us with her head tilted. She’s not just looking at us, she’s seeing us. For real. Her brow furrows. She puts a glass down on the island with a clink .

“Mom?”

She raises her hand, pointer finger in the air. Frowning, she wiggles it back and forth. Scolding us without words.

Then she goes back to cleaning.

Opal settles for cereal covered with milk we get from a can. I eat a couple of granola bars I find in the snack drawer and hope neither of us get the barfies from it. My mom cleans all the cupboards, and then, as we watch, goes into the pantry. She doesn’t come out.

“Mom, you okay?” I peek in on her.

She’s staring at the wire shelves that go all the way to the ceiling. Dillon and I didn’t throw away any of the spilled food we found yesterday. My mom reaches for the broom and dustpan hanging on the back of the door.

She gives me a look and holds up the broom. I think she’s giving it to me, but before I can take it, she uses it to point out the door, into the kitchen. She says nothing, but I’m staring hard at her face.

“You want me to… clean out there?”

It’s not quite a nod, but I’ll take it as one. My mom turns back to her task in the pantry, and I face mine. Opal’s still eating her cereal, but I tweak the end of her ponytail.

“Betcha I can clean more rooms than you can.”

“Nuh-uh,” she says at once. She has a milk mustache.

“Betcha I can.”

“What’re you gonna bet?” Opal says practically and licks her spoon. I’m not sure how she can stand the sweet cereal marshmallows along with the extra-sweet milk, but she’s gobbled it all up and even served herself a second bowl.

“What do you want to bet?”

“If I clean more than you, I don’t have to do my homework.” She looks pleased with herself at that.

“Haha. No. You have to do your homework, I told you.”

Opal grins, eyes squinting. “You’ll do it for me!”

I roll my eyes. “That won’t do you any good.”

“Don’t care.”

“Fine,” I say. “And what are you going to bet?”

This stumps her. “I don’t know. I don’t have anything.”

So much for my idea of motivation. But then Opal snaps her fingers. The gesture’s so adult, so funny in her miniature fingers.

“I know. I’ll make you a cake. A chocolate cake.”

I look at the stove. “Yeah, how are you gonna do that?”

Opal just gives me a mysterious smile. She’s only ten, and way too smart. I could always eat chocolate cake.

I hold out my hand. “You’re on.”

We start upstairs. We stand together in the hallway, both of us stopped in the doorways to our bedrooms, staring. I don’t know what Opal’s thinking, but what’s running through my head is the fact that when they came and took us away for our “safety,” we left almost everything behind. We didn’t even make the beds. My laundry hamper still has the clothes in it I was wearing the day before the army showed up at our door. The clothes are probably ruined, or at the very least desperately in need of a good washing. Yet my quick run-through of the house shows me that most everything’s still there.