Contaminated (11 page)

I tuck the blankets around her the way she used to do for me. Tight, like a cocoon. She’s already closing her eyes. I push her hair off her forehead and lean in to kiss her
good night, something I haven’t done for years but feels right now.

She has scars on her face, too. Two small scars, one on the inside corner of each eye. You can’t see them when her eyes are open, or from far away, but they’re there. That’s where they put the electrodes in.

I kiss her forehead. “Good night, Mama. I love you.”

She doesn’t answer.

I’M SLEEPING HARD, TOO DEEP EVEN FOR dreams, when the crash wakes me. I sit straight up in bed, arms flailing, but there’s nothing there to hit. I blink. It’s not dark in the room, because Opal can’t sleep with all the lights off. I rub my eyes as another crash comes from the kitchen.

“Mom?”

I swing my legs out of bed and run into the kitchen. She’s in the fridge, bent over so that all I can see are her butt and legs sticking out beyond the door. I come around the table to find her eating the butter. A stick of butter, held in one hand, and she’s biting off the end like it’s a chocolate bar.

I sort of gag at the thought of that—I like butter, but not enough to chow down on it like that. “Mom. Don’t.”

She pays no attention, which doesn’t surprise me. She lets me take it from her hand. I don’t put it back in the fridge after that, but toss it into the garbage. Her mouth is smeared with it.

“If you’re hungry, I can get you something else.” I look at the clock. “But it’s past midnight now. You’ll have to wait for breakfast.”

My mom had been strict about bedtime snacks. Nothing after 9 p.m. unless it was New Year’s Eve or something. She said it wasn’t good to go to sleep with food in your belly, that it wouldn’t digest, or something like that. I don’t have time to worry about that now, since I have to get up in a few hours to get Opal off to school and then see about getting some extra hours at work now that I’m not going back to school myself.

“Back to bed,” I tell her.

I’ve barely managed to drift off again when I hear another series of footsteps. I sigh, not wanting to get out of bed again. But I have to.

She’s in the living room this time. She’s turning the television set on and off. There’s nothing on the channel—unlike before the Contamination, when there were hundreds of stations that ran programming constantly, now there are only a handful of stations broadcasting, and they go off the air at two in the morning. Now it’s static.

She clicks the TV on. Off. On. Off. She’s not using the remote, but pushing the button on the front of it. “Mom. You need to go back to bed. It’s late.” She presses both hands to the flickering gray light. Suddenly, I’m spooked. She looks exactly like that little girl in the movie
Poltergeist
. That movie scared the crap out of me when
I was small. I had to sleep with my closet light on for weeks. My mom had been mad at my dad for letting me watch it with him. A chill runs through me as she kneels, motionless, staring into the shifting pattern of black and white.

“Mom.” I force myself to move forward and take her by the shoulders. “C’mon. It’s really late.”

I turn off the TV and lead her to her bed. I tuck her back in. She closes her eyes. I watch her for a minute or two, but she doesn’t move.

In my own bed, I can’t sleep. Memories of the movie are racing through my brain. I expect to hear the
boom
of thunder and the
tap-tap
of crazy scary tree fingers against the glass of my window, even though we have no trees outside and it’s not raining.

I hear her get up again. The creak of the floorboards. I think if I put my feet out of bed, or even look underneath it first, there will be a scary clown doll there waiting to wrap me in its freakishly long arms. That the closet door will fling open and suck me and Opal into some other dimension as we scream. Yeah, I know it’s just scenes from a horror movie, but hadn’t we all learned horror movies can become real?

“Please go back to bed,” I whisper into the darkness.

I’m ready to just let her wander until morning, until I hear the locks on the front door being unlatched. Then I jump out of bed, cringing in anticipation of being yanked down under the bed by Mr. Jingles. I leap like the floor is lava, out
of the bedroom to catch her by the back of the nightgown just before she escapes. A burst of freezing air swirls into the apartment, blowing off a stack of bills from the table. I close the door.

“Mom!”

She turns at that, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’ve shouted in anger or she recognizes her name. I realize something terrible, so awful, it makes me want to throw up. I’m afraid of my mom in that moment, when I’m not sure what she’s going to do.

I have never been afraid of my mother. Even as a little kid. She never spanked us. She yelled sometimes, sure, but she was a good mom. She laughed a lot. She played games with us, even when I know she’d rather have been reading or doing something else. I could always go to my mom whenever I needed anything and never be afraid to ask her any question, even the embarrassing ones, like about periods or sex or drugs and alcohol. Just now, I’m afraid of my mom. “You should go back to bed,” I say in a small voice. During the worst of the Contamination, with the riots and looting, Connies attacking everyone, people getting shot for the tiniest reason, things were scary. A lot of people think those were the worst times because everything was falling apart and nobody knew what was going on. Every day we woke up to the sound of sirens or the smell of smoke. If we were lucky, nobody was slamming themselves
into a sliding glass door trying to get us. It felt like the end of the world.

Then the reports changed. Lots more information about how the military restrictions, the curfews, and evacuations were going to bring about the return of normality to everyone. Accounts of the Contamination spreading to Europe and Australia were exaggerated to give us the false sensation that we weren’t alone.

Only after it had all been figured out did we in America learn that not only was it not the entire world—just us—but that it wasn’t even the entire population. There were and are huge areas in the U.S. where the Contamination never reached. That’s why it doesn’t make any sense that it’s taking so long for things to return to the way they were before. Why resources like electricity and cable television continue to be restricted. Why the military and police keep patrolling the streets and enforcing rules for a “safety” that shouldn’t be necessary anymore.

Those were a bad few months. The ones that came afterward, when it had died down a little but there were still people getting sick and nobody knew exactly what was going on, those were bad, too. And after that, when they’d finally figured out what was causing the breakdowns but nobody could be sure if that one bottle of ThinPro they’d drunk the year before would turn them into a monster … yeah, that was bad. All of that was bad.

This is so, so much worse.

Because everything’s supposed to be all right now. The collars are supposed to keep the Contaminated calm. The police and the army and the game wardens are supposed to be hunting down and neutralizing the last of the wild ones. People are supposed to be getting regular checkups to make sure they’re not going to come down with Frank’s syndrome. Everything’s supposed to be going back to normal, if you can ignore the fact we still have the curfews, and the TV shows only reruns because most of the actors and actresses are dead or insane. If you can look past the schools’ being half empty, and the buildings with glass broken out and smoke damage that just haven’t been repaired, or the ruts in the road from where the tanks came through. If you can forget about all that stuff, sure, it seems like we’re going back to normal, except I think this is now the normal.

Being afraid has become normal.

“Mom,” I whisper. “Please. Go back to bed. Okay?”

She doesn’t move. It’s not too bright in here, though there’s light coming from the bedroom and from the front windows that look out onto the landing. She’s mostly shadow. I can’t see her face.

I reached for her hand, tense. “C’mon. You need to sleep.”

She lets me take it. She lets me lead her back to bed this one more time. She gets under the covers as placidly and easily as she did the other times. She closes her eyes.

The video says that we’re supposed to restrain them
when they’re alone, or when they’re in public, but it didn’t say anything about when they’re sleeping. Are we supposed to tie them to their beds so they don’t go wandering? How else can I make sure she stays here, for her own safety and my peace of mind?

I look in the tote bag, and, yes, there is a set of long elastic cords that loop through the wrist restraints and are meant to be hooked to something. Not quite a leash meant to attach to the collar. They didn’t go that far. But there’s no question this is meant to keep someone from going too far.

She doesn’t move or protest as I hook her wrists together and run the loop through the wooden slats of the headboard and secure them. I try to make sure they’re not too tight, but there’s not much I can do. They fit how they fit.

My mother doesn’t balk at any of this. There’s enough room that she can move around in bed, but if she tries to get out of it, she won’t get more than a few steps. Unless she breaks the headboard. That would require a big, aggressive effort, something the collar’s supposed to prevent. I’ll just have to hope she doesn’t decide she needs to get free. Or that nothing catches on fire while we’re sleeping. Or nobody breaks in …

I shake myself. My eyes are drooping and I’m so tired, I can’t see straight. All of my muscles ache. I feel … old.

Standing in her doorway, I turn out the light. I hear her sigh. She shifts a little in the sheets, and they rustle. I hesitate, thinking about sleep.

But I go to her, anyway, to check on her one last time. To make sure the restraints aren’t too tight, that she has room, that the blankets haven’t fallen away. This room, with the damage to the ceiling and the windows, can get cold.

I look down at her. This is my mom. I’ve tied my mother to the bed with something only a little better than handcuffs because I’m afraid of what she might do if she’s left loose. She wears a collar on her neck that shocks her if she so much as tries to defend herself against someone lifting her nightgown when she doesn’t want them to, she can’t speak, she can’t even be sure she’ll make it to a toilet on time.

And this is all too much for me. When I was looking for her, all I could think of was how much I wanted her home. How I needed to find her, and that it didn’t matter what else happened, because she’d be here with us. I thought I’d take care of her the way I take care of the patients in the assisted-living home, that it would be maybe a little hard, but not impossible. But I can’t take care of her like she’s them, because she isn’t. She’s not old, and I’m too young for this. I haven’t had her home here for even one day, and already I’m stressing out about what might happen.

I can’t do this.

“I can’t do this,” I say aloud.

Then I’m on my knees next to the bed. My forehead dents the mattress as I press my face into sheets I made sure were clean for her because I couldn’t make sure they were new. The floor’s hard and cold under my knees. I’m
chilly in this room without blankets to cover me or a sweater or anything. And I cry.

I cry and cry, letting it all out. Everything I’ve been saving up all these months. Every time I wanted to cry and didn’t, it all comes out now. Big, nasty, ripping sobs tear at my chest and throat. Tears boil out of me. Snot spouts from my nose. I swallow my tears and the thick paste of snot makes me shiver. Gross. I cry in sharp, hitching sobs that hurt my throat and chest. I pound the floor with my fist, and it hurts.

I’m crying so hard, I don’t feel the bed shake or move, don’t notice my mom as she sits. Not until her hand is on my head. Her fingers tangle for a moment in my hair, and I look up, shocked. Her fist pulls, hurting me a little, but it’s an accident, the pulling.

She strokes my hair with a clumsy fist. She croons. It’s a wordless hum, no tune to it. It lasts only a moment or two before her hand falls away and she’s still again.

But she did it. My mom reacted to me. I’m frozen, tasting salt, unable to see in the dark with swollen eyes. I can’t tell if she’s looking at me, but I think she is.

I don’t want to move. I can’t move. And the next thing I know, I’m asleep.

OF COURSE I’VE OVERSLEPT, AND OF COURSE Opal doesn’t care. She used to be a good student, never getting into trouble or needing reminders about her homework. This, like everything else, has changed.

I wake on the floor of my mom’s bedroom. I’m covered by a blanket, but I don’t have a pillow and the floor is hard, cold, and pretty dirty. I’m stiff when I get up, blinking and disoriented. I’m not sure what time it is, just that it’s not the right time.

My mom’s not in her bed. The restraints are still attached to the headboard, though. For one scary moment I wonder if she got herself loose, but then I hear the bubble of Opal’s laughter and I know she’s the one who let Mom free. Scrubbing my face with my hand, I go into the kitchen, where Opal’s demonstrating some sort of dance that she learned on TV to my mom, who’s sitting at the table with a plate of uneaten toast in front of her.

“See? Like this! Around the world and up and down, to the side, to the side …” Opal breaks off when she sees me. She has the decency to look guilty. “You didn’t wake me up on time. I missed the bus.”

“You still have to go to school, Opal. Even if it’s late.”

“Can’t I please stay home with Mama today?” Opal’s lower lip quivers. “Velvet, it’s Mama. I haven’t seen her in so long.”

I can’t blame her for wanting to stay home. We haven’t been with our mom for a long time. I took the day off to stay home. Opal’s just a kid who can barely wait long enough to eat dinner before dessert. How can I ask her to go back to school the first day our mom’s home with us?

As if on cue, the phone rings. We all look at it, but my mom’s the one who gets out of the chair. She swings at the old-fashioned phone, attached to the wall by a long cord, and knocks it to the floor, where I scoop it up before she can do anything else.