299 Days: The Collapse (8 page)

He was suddenly terrified. He realized the gap between what he knew about the reality of the situation and what she knew was huge. In a split second, it all came together. They had been living entirely separate lives when it came to what was happening. He realized he needed to tell her what was going on. The stakes were too high now to try to avoid upsetting her. Too late for that; shooting people had pretty much taken care of that.

He owed Lisa an answer to her question of why they needed to go. He calmed himself, to the extent that was possible, and started explaining in his nicest, softest voice.

“You ask a fair question, dear,” Grant said, amazed at how much he’d calmed down. “Why go? Because society is starting to break down, honey. Look at the evidence around you right now. We’ve never even had a crime in our neighborhood in the fifteen years we’ve lived here. No one has ever even called the police here. Now, tonight, we have a gang of God knows how many young thugs with guns charging Ron and me. They were trying to kill us. Don’t you see what’s happening? There are no police because they are fighting hundreds, probably thousands, of protestors down at the capitol.”

She smirked like he was exaggerating the number of protestors. Grant said, “Yes, dear, I saw cars and people on foot streaming there this afternoon. These people are angry, yelling, screaming, and demanding their programs back. I talked to a guy a few hours ago who said that it was a running battle at the capitol.”

“Who were you talking to?” she asked. He could tell she was trying to figure out if this was one of his weirdo conservative friends.

“A guy at the gun store when we were evacuating it,” he said, deciding it was time to come clean.

“Evacuating?” she asked.

“Oh, in all the mayhem,” Grant said, realizing how much he was going to get yelled at, “I forgot to tell you that my friends at Capitol City Guns called around dinner tonight and said they needed some armed guards while they emptied out their shelves. They’re hiding their guns. They know that armed gangs and looters will be coming to steal their stuff. Everyone wants a gun right now for protection.”

“Armed guards?” Lisa yelled. “You? What were you doing?”

This wasn’t going well. “It doesn’t matter now,” Grant said, hoping he could recover from this. “What matters is that people with things like guns are evacuating from the city and need armed guards to do it. With all the traffic jams, the semi trucks can’t get through. The grocery stores only have about two days of food, and that’s if people don’t freak out and stock up, which they will. Hell, they already are. The power went off in the entire western U.S. for a few hours. That wasn’t an accident. Whoever did that can do it again. And will. It might be the Red Brigade who just blew up Congress today.”

“You’re overreacting, Grant,” she said. “What are the odds that there is a terrorist attack, power outages, and the grocery stores are out of food? That just doesn’t happen.”

Grant tried to keep his voice down. “You’re right. That doesn’t just happen. But it just did happen. Honey…Congress has been blown up. The Senate office building, to be exact. Go check the news.” He handed her the TV remote control and continued, “You’ll also see that right after the bombing, the power was off for a few hours all across the West and on the East Coast. Don’t you see that this isn’t just another day? It’s a breakdown of things. Of everything. It might be temporary—God, I hope it is—but it’s happening. It’s happening, Lisa. We need to be ready for anything. Not just for our sake, but really for the kids.” Grant paused. He wanted to gauge how she was taking this in. She was just quiet. He decided he needed to say one more thing. They, or maybe just he, needed to get going on the bug out to the cabin so this conversation needed to wrap up.

“Honey,” Grant said, “for forty plus years of your life, nothing weird like this has ever happened to you. That’s good. I have seen violence and horrible things. I understand that really bad things can happen. But you’re used to things being normal. That’s…well, normal. Normal is normal. That’s fair.”

Grant pointed outside, toward where the shooting had been, “But this is the one time in our lives where normal isn’t there anymore. We need to take the situation as it is and deal with it. For the kids. For us. Let’s go out to the cabin for a little while until this blows over.”

Lisa was silent.

“You’re crazy and this is stupid,” she finally said. “You are overreacting. You just shot some people and you’re not thinking straight.” She paused.

“And I don’t like the implication that I’ve been wrong about things,” she said. “You are yelling at me and telling me I’m wrong and I don’t like it. I’m not going out to your stupid cabin just because there’s some protest.” She folded her arms. “I am staying here, and so are the kids. You can go if you want. Don’t ever come back.”

That stung.

You know what you have to do. This is when you need to leave.

This couldn’t be happening. Grant needed to convince her. “No, honey,” he pleaded. “You need to come with me to a place that’s safe with food. You need to come with me. We need to go tonight.”

She started to cry. “I’m not leaving!” She fully expected him to give in. He always did when she cried. Always.

“Not this time, honey,” Grant said in an amazingly calm voice. “Crying won’t do it.”

Lisa was stunned that Grant just said that. She started bawling. She was shaking and crying harder than he’d ever seen her.

All during their marriage, arguments ended when Grant hugged Lisa. She always interpreted the hug to mean she won; he interpreted the hug to mean he was doing the right thing by getting the argument behind them. Usually Grant didn’t really feel like hugging her after an argument. But he did it because he loved her.

Grant could feel that this was the “hug moment” and he almost started to hug her, out of habit. But he stopped. He couldn’t hug her. Not this time. Things were different. The country was falling apart, there was a riot occurring three miles away from them, and he had just killed several people attacking their neighborhood.

Hugging her would mean he agreed to stay put. And that meant dying. He had tried so many times to talk sense into her. If she couldn’t see why going to the cabin was the only thing to do, then she never would; hug or not. The outside thought was right. He had to go.

“Too bad, dear,” Grant said with a sigh. “I’m leaving. I won’t take the kids, even though Manda wants to come. I won’t use the kids as leverage to get you to come. If anything happens to them…” As mad as he was at her, he couldn’t make her feel guilty for what he knew was going to happen in a few days in the city, so he stopped short of saying what he meant.

Lisa wanted to yell out, “Hug me, stupid! If you hug me, I’ll go out to your stupid cabin for a few days.” She needed the hug because that meant things were like they used to be. Things would be normal if he hugged her, and she desperately needed some normal. She needed that hug so badly. She waited for it. She didn’t think she needed to ask for it; he should just do it.

*****

“Bye,” Grant said. “Please come and join me. Please.”

She just cried.

Grant remembered what his Grandpa said back in Oklahoma. “Don’t ever want something so much you’ll do anything for it. You’ll pay too high a price, in money or something else. Maybe your soul.” That was exactly right. Grant wanted Lisa too much. He wanted to be with her and the kids so much. Too much. He could feel himself actually thinking about staying in the house—even with the riots, looters, and maybe the police after him—because he wanted them to be together. How stupid was that? Talk about paying too high a price for something. No.

Grant wanted Lisa to come with him, but he wasn’t willing to pay a price like death or jail to be with her. People could say he “abandoned” his family if they wanted to. Lisa was making a choice. She was choosing to stay in a place where they would die or Grant would go to jail. Grant couldn’t live with that choice.

He had tried several times over the years to change her mind. He did amazing things to make it possible for her to have a safe place like getting the cabin and stocking it with supplies. What else could he do? Seriously. What else could he have done for her?

Grant wasn’t going to put a gun to her head and tell her to get in the car. People make stupid choices every day. She was making one today. He wasn’t going to die for her. He would die to try to save her but not for ballet rehearsals.

It was weird. After Grant finally decided in his head that he would have to go to the cabin without her, everything became clear. He was relieved. He could actually think just about fighting off criminals, getting past any checkpoints that might be out there, securing enough food, roadblocks, and other “little” things like that. They were little compared to the mental weight of trying to constantly convince Lisa to come with him. He actually smiled. OK. This is how it’s going to be. Play the hand you’ve been dealt and survive. Don’t live by the “normal” rules because there is no more “normal.”

Grant had a plan for this. Of course. He went out to his car, walking past Lisa, who was crying, and got his list of things to take with him. He started gathering them up, including stealing Manda’s cell phone. He had a use for that. He hoped that she didn’t mind that he had stolen it. Given what was happening, it seemed like a small thing.

Grant’s plan for the possibility that Lisa would not come to the cabin was to leave her some food and the .38 revolver with the red laser dot. He went to the garage and got the food out of his trunk that he purchased at Cash n’ Carry earlier that day. Twenty-five pounds of pancake mix, a few big jars of peanut butter, twenty pounds of pasta, a case of big cans of pasta sauce, several hundred individual oatmeal packets. He put the food in a pile in the garage and put the .38 carrying case on top. He put an ammo can of .38 ammo at the base of the pile. He looked at the pile and said to himself, “So, twenty-five plus years together and it comes down to this.”

The pile was a symbol of how Grant had failed. He couldn’t convince a woman who supposedly loved him to leave a dangerous situation and come to a safe place. He had failed.

Deal with it, Grant thought. Deal with it because there will be more heartbreak and disappointment coming in the next few…however long this lasts.

Grant found Lisa in their bedroom crying. He said, “Come to the garage. There is something you need to see.” She didn’t want to come. She probably thought it was a dead body. That actually made him laugh to himself. Dark humor in a dark time.

“Fine,” he said. “There’s enough food for a month or so, even stuff you like to eat. It’s in the garage.” He added, sarcastically, “I’m so crazy that I got you all this stuff. Boy, you have a shitty husband, don’t you?” He couldn’t help it. It was so absurd. He was pissed at her. “I’m leaving you a gun. Manda will show you how to use it. You’ll need it. Of course, you and the kids could be with me far from the rioting and with neighbors who will look out after us. But, no.” He felt guilty for saying something that mean. But he was done trying to persuade her. He’d held back for years. He had nothing to lose. She was forcing him to leave. Making her mad was the least of his concerns.

Lisa just sat there crying. She couldn’t believe this was happening. After a few seconds, Grant realized he was being mean to her. He didn’t mean to do that. He had just slipped. Years of frustration were coming out. He regretting being sarcastic like that.

The fact that he had all that food and a gun picked out just for her made her mad. What an asshole, she thought. He was just trying to win an argument. Trying to make her look bad.

Grant was getting impatient. “I gotta go,” he said. “I will load up my car with the last of my stuff and head out.” That was it. The goodbye to their whole lives. Twenty five years of being inseparable. Having kids. Struggling through having an autistic child, law school, medical school, all the normal marriage bumps in the road. Dreaming about living the American Dream together and hopefully retiring some day in wealth and comfort. And it came down to this. Grant just walking out of the bedroom, leaving her crying. Leaving her and packing his stuff into the car. And, he didn’t regret it.

He was just calmly doing what needed to be done. It was simultaneously the end of the world and a relief. He told himself, you tried. You tried hard. People make choices. She is making a choice. Dying is too high a price to pay for a pretty girl. Then he thought about what would probably happen to her in the city as it slipped into even more lawlessness. He knew what it would be. But he couldn’t think about it. It was like she wasn’t his wife anymore; she was just a woman crying in his bedroom.

Grant couldn’t face the kids. They knew something was up. The sound of a mom crying will do that. He needed to talk to Manda. She needed to understand that he wasn’t abandoning them. Good luck with that, he thought.

Grant popped his head into Manda’s bedroom. “Manda, I need to go.” He was talking loud enough for Lisa to hear. She needed to hear this.

“I have asked your mom to come to the cabin,” he said in the artificially calm voice he had been using. “You know all the stuff we have there. She won’t do it. She can’t believe all this is happening. She’s not a bad person, just someone who can’t process all the horrible things that are happening. You guys can always come out and join me. We have plenty of food out there. Take care of your mom and your little brother.”

Manda was quietly crying. She looked up at her dad and said “Can I come with you?”

What? Grant wanted Manda and Cole to come so badly, but wouldn’t that be “kidnapping”? Grant felt awful enough “abandoning” his wife, but kidnapping their kids? That was too much.

“Honey, Mom needs you,” he said as he went over to Manda’s bed and hugged her. “Your brother especially needs you. I would love for you to come with me, but you need to be with them.” He was so tempted to take Manda. And Cole. So tempted. But he couldn’t bring himself to kidnap them. They’d be better off if he did; he just couldn’t do it.

“Grandma and grandpa will be here and they’ll help you,” Grant said. Lisa’s parents lived in Olympia now. “I don’t want to get the whole family in trouble with the government so I’m…”