Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

If only she could have her old life back. Before Alice. Even without Mom, if she could have … what?

If she could just get rid of Alice’s stuff. She’d be eighteen in two and a half years. She could avoid Alice, if it wasn’t for Alice’s stuff.

Alice’s fucking stuff.

She thought about running away. She closed her laptop and packed a few things. But it was just going through the motions. Drama.

She turned the light on in the living room and looked. In the kitchen she got some garbage bags, and she started picking up clothes and putting them in the garbage bags to throw them out. She could just throw everything out.

But if she put stuff out for the trash, for one thing there would be so much of it she didn’t know if the trash people would take it. On TV when they cleaned out hoarder places, they brought big trucks to load stuff in. She could try calling one of those hoarding shows and see if she could get Alice on. “Hey, my mom is a lesbian who died of APD, and my stepmom is a hoarder!” Maybe the whole lesbian thing would get the TV people interested.

But Alice would probably have to agree, and Alice probably wouldn’t.

Fuck Alice.

Fuck cleaning.

She got her backpack with her laptop and her phone. She packed a few things. She took it all outside to the front yard. It was a cool and breezy evening and from the front yard, the house looked nice and normal. Irene went to the garage, going in the side door and switching on the light. The garage didn’t have enough space for a car anymore. It had boxes of stuff that Alice had brought when she moved in “to just put in here until she could sort through it.” Alice did sometimes sort through stuff. She picked up stuff from a pile and looked at it and then put it on another pile.

Irene picked her away across the garage to the lawn mower. The can of gas for the mower sat next to it. She picked it up and sloshed it. It was only about half full, but she hoped that would be enough. All the newspapers and magazines and old mail would help.

She watched for neighbors, but no one saw her carrying the gas can back in the house.

She poured the gasoline on the stack of newspapers and on the clothes on the couch, and then she just tossed the can on a pile of stuff. The matches were in the kitchen drawer with the candles. The smell of gasoline was really strong. She hoped the neighbors didn’t smell it.

She turned on all the lights in the house. Was there anything else she wanted? You couldn’t even tell that her mom had lived here. Not really. The walls were still painted yellow, but it didn’t look anything like home. Alice had completely covered up all traces of her mom. What would Momms think? Would she finally get it? Probably not. But if it couldn’t be her and her mother’s house anymore, it wouldn’t be anyone’s.

Irene lit the match and dropped it. The fumes from the gas flashed, and she jerked her arms up in front of her face. The flash was so intense she smelled burning hair and she ran.

Outside she checked her hair. She wasn’t on fire or anything, but she had blisters on her arms and they hurt. God, she was stupid. She hadn’t known that was going to happen. She looked back at the house. Had it gone out? Part of her kind of wanted it to have gone out, like the grill did sometimes. But not really. She wanted to see fire. She wanted to see it burn.

There was smoke, and then inside she could see the glow of the flames. Burning all of it. Burning things clean.

She wished her arms didn’t hurt. If it weren’t for that, it would be perfect.

Jane puts out the sleeping bags in the backyard of the empty house by the toolshed. She has a lock and hasp and an old hand drill that they can use to lock the toolshed from the inside, but it’s too hot to sleep in there, and there haven’t been many people on the road. Better to sleep outside. Franny has been talking a mile a minute. Usually by the end of the day she is tired from walking—they both are—and quiet. But this afternoon she’s gotten on the subject of her friend Samantha. She’s musing on if Samantha has left town like they did. “They’re probably still there, because they had a really nice house in, like, a low-crime area, and Samantha’s father has a really good job. When you have money like that, maybe you can totally afford a security system or something. Their house has five bedrooms and the basement isn’t a basement, it’s a living room, because the house is kind of on a little hill, and although the front of the basement is underground, you can walk right out the back.”

Jane says, “That sounds nice.”

“You could see a horse farm behind them. People around them were rich, but not like, on-TV rich, exactly.”

Jane puts her hands on her hips and looks down the line of backyards.

“Do you think there’s anything in there?” Franny asks, meaning the house, a ’60s suburban ranch. Franny is thirteen, and empty houses frighten her. But she doesn’t like to be left alone, either. What she wants is for Jane to say that they can eat one of the tuna pouches.

“Come on, Franny. We’re gonna run out of tuna long before we get to Canada.”

“I know,” Franny says sullenly.

“You can stay here.”

“No, I’ll go with you.”

God, sometimes Jane would do anything to get five minutes away from Franny. She loves her daughter, really, but Jesus. “Come on, then,” Jane says.

There is an old square concrete patio and a sliding glass door. The door is dirty. Jane cups her hand to shade her eyes and looks inside. It’s dark and hard to see. No power, of course. Hasn’t been power in any of the places they’ve passed through in more than two months. Air conditioning. And a bed with a mattress and box springs. What Jane wouldn’t give for air conditioning and a bed. Clean sheets.

The neighborhood seems like a good one. Unless they find a big group to camp with, Jane gets them off the freeway at the end of the day. There was fighting in the neighborhood, and at the end of the street, several houses are burned out. Then there are lots of houses with windows smashed out. But the fighting petered out. Some of the houses are still lived in. This house had all its windows intact, but the garage door was standing open and the garage was empty except for dead leaves. Electronic garage door. The owners pulled out and left and did bother to close the door behind them. Seemed to Jane that the overgrown backyard with its toolshed would be a good place to sleep.

Jane can see her silhouette in the dirty glass, and her hair is a snarled, curly, tangled rat’s nest. She runs her fingers through it, and they snag. She’ll look for a scarf or something inside. She grabs the handle and yanks up, hard, trying to get the old slider off track. It takes a couple of tries, but she’s had a lot of practice in the last few months.

Inside, the house is trashed. The kitchen has been turned upside-down, and silverware, utensils, drawers, broken plates, flour, and stuff are everywhere. She picks her way across, a can opener skittering under her foot with a clatter.

Franny gives a little startled shriek.

“Fuck!” Jane says. “Don’t do that!” The canned food is long gone.

“I’m sorry,” Franny says. “It scared me!”

“We’re gonna starve to death if we don’t keep scavenging,” Jane says.

“I know!” Franny says.

“Do you know how fucking far it is to Canada?”

“I can’t help it if it startled me!”

Maybe if she were a better cook, she’d be able to scrape up the flour and make something, but it’s all mixed in with dirt and stuff, and every time she’s tried to cook something over an open fire it’s either been raw or black or, most often, both—blackened on the outside and raw on the inside.