Jason Mott - The Crossing

But that was before things started falling apart. Back when young people like us still thought they could grow up to be something other than what they would come to call us: “Embers.” It was our job, or so the joke went, to be the last remnants of the flame that had burned so long. And, like all Embers, to eventually burn out.

From the time we were five Tommy and I had been shifted from foster home to foster home. Nothing to do with The Disease—that was still years away. But simply because our parents had already died and left us and we became “difficult” children. Maybe it was just the way we were. Or maybe it was because, after their deaths, the only thing we had to remember our parents by was a stack of letters that I’d read once and burned the next day.

After the letters were gone there were only Tommy and me, and we were always together. Only twice had anyone tried to separate us. Tommy had been the one they wanted.

The first time, no less than a day after Tommy had gone, I ran away from the group home in which he had left me behind and found his new home. It wasn’t difficult. Just a matter of getting the records from the social worker’s paperwork when she wasn’t looking. I snuck into Tommy’s room at night, took his hand and left. We made it a day and a half on our own before we were found. The couple who had taken him in gave him up after that and the two of us returned to the same foster home we had been in before. We were together again.

The second time it happened—again, he had been the one the adoptive family wanted—we were thirteen. We ran away again and made it alone together for almost a week. During that week, Tommy thought of a dozen good reasons why we should keep going. He had this idea of picking a direction—any direction—and simply going until that direction ran out. The world was big and we could get lost in it. And even though we would be lost, we would be together the way we had always been.

“We’re too young to keep running,” I said. “Nobody searches for anyone as hard as they search for lost kids.”

“We’re not kids,” Tommy said, and in just saying so I realized how young he sounded. “They’ll break us up again if we go back, Ginny.”

“Don’t call me Ginny,” I answered. “It’s what you called me when we were babies. And I’m not a baby anymore.”

We were standing beneath an overpass just after sunset, listening to the sound of the cars racing by in light rain, their tires sizzling like bacon. When the big trucks went by overhead there was the calump-calump-calump of the expansion gaps in the concrete.

“We’ll go back and I’ll tell them what they need to hear to make sure they keep us together,” I said. I tucked my hands in my pockets and stared off into the distance. The entire conversation was only a formality to be endured before it led to its obvious conclusion.

Tommy’s face tightened into a knot. “Dammit, Virginia!” he said, leaning hard on my name after planting the flag of “dammit.” Curse words were still new to him and still had power. “We can find somewhere to live.” We could both feel the momentum of words building inside him, like a shopping cart just beginning to rattle down a steep hill. “We can go off and make a home. We’re each other’s home when you really stop to think about it!” He belted the words out. He opened his arms, proudly, like a carnival barker making his greatest pitch.

He searched for words that would undo me, but found only the empty breath inside his lungs. If he tried to press me he knew I could always bring up facts and figures, numbers and math enough to break down anything he said. I could recite articles verbatim about the survival rates of runaways if I wanted. True stories of children found dead. Statistics about how badly everything could go for us if the world so decided. I could crunch the math in my head and rattle off the probabilities: such and such a chance of getting kidnapped, such and such a percentage of turning to drugs or prostitution or anything else. On and on, I always knew how to break down any resistance he ever had to anything.

Tommy looked at me, his face soft and afraid and frustrated all at the same time. His mind reached for something to say but his lips knew the fact of futility. Only I could change it. Only I could let him win the argument that he so desperately needed to win.

And he knew—we both knew, and hated—that I wouldn’t let him win.

Rather than fight it, rather than try to make the case for the things he thought we should do, he conceded. Tommy’s life was always easier when he just did what I wanted.

“So be it,” he said.

“Tommy?”

“What?” he answered, sighing the word as his body slumped upon its frame, resigned to defeat.

“They’re never going to break us apart,” I said.

“Then why do they keep trying?”

I walked over and wrapped my arms around him. He was outgrowing me already and my arms had to work to surround him, but the work was rewarded by the feeling of my brother captured, like some splendid and frail animal, in my arms. I had to protect him. It was my job.

“We won’t ever be separated,” I said.

“But—”

“I promise, Tommy.”

“You can’t know that, Ginny. Mom and Dad said they’d always be here too.”

Tommy’s body shuddered and I knew that he was crying. He wrapped his arms around me, if only to keep me from seeing his tears the way boys and men are known to do.

“Mom and Dad haven’t left,” I said. “They’re in me. In The Memory Gospel. And they’re in you too.”

“I can’t remember like you can,” Tommy said, almost as an apology.

“It doesn’t matter. They’re in you. We’re together. A family. And we’ll always be that.”

“You promise?”

“Just as sure as my name’s Ginny.”

We stood for a long time, holding one another, and the world passed us by.

...calump-calump-calump...

Like a beating heart fading into nothingness. And when the sound went away, when the world had drifted off into silence, we were still there, together. The way it would always be for my brother and me.

After that we went back to the foster family who had taken him in and, just as before, the family didn’t want Tommy unless it was without me. So we found ourselves lost in the system. But at least we were lost together.

Four years later, we were seventeen and running away again, but this time, we wouldn’t go back. The launch in Florida wouldn’t wait for me the way the war and death would wait for Tommy.

In three days, when this would all be over.

So be it.

To My Children,

We could do nothing to stop the towers from falling. We could do nothing to stop the workplaces from being shot up. And when the shootings spilled out of the office buildings and into the schools, we could do nothing to stop that either. The government began watching everyone because we had given them permission. Climate change. Bankers. On and on and on. All day every day the news outlets came into our homes—slipping in through the waves and cables, screens and surfaces that bound us all together. The television became a hole in the ice through which horror shambled each night, the way it used to in old black-and-white movies. But in those movies dying was all corn syrup. Back then, the world only pretended to be after us and, inevitably, the thing we feared went away, born into darkness on a tide of end credits.

But now the dying we saw on TV was real. The world grew more thorns with each sunrise, tightened in a little closer with each sunset. And all the while we watched. We stared at the news and shook our heads in dismay. We wept. We sat up at night, sleepless and fretting. Asking ourselves, over and over again: What right did we have to bring children into this world?