I Hope You Find Me (8 page)

Connor came up behind me and tapped something
gently on the back of my arm. I looked over my shoulder to see him
leaning forward, holding out a green apple. I took it from him and
nodded a thank you. I had packed the fresh fruit I picked off the
neighborhood trees before heading into the city. A small bag of
apples was one of the things I dumped out of my pack the night
before to share. It seemed fair, considering Connor was sharing
everything of his, with not only me but my dog as well.

He perplexed me most of the time. He had been
through a disaster, lost his friends and probably everyone he knew
overseas, dealt with a handful of dead people from the hotel and
seen the swarm of sick overrun the airport. Yet, he smiled, all the
time. He laughed just as much as he blinked. His attitude was
contagious but I was beginning to think it was a show. No one could
possibly be as balanced as he portrayed himself and still be
human.

Be careful
, that nagging inner voice
said to me, and rather than push it aside, I listened to it. It
wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, I felt the opposite actually. I
trusted him as if I’d known him half my life, but for some reason
it seemed too early to share my story. I felt, even though he had
shared a great deal of his, that my story should stay private. I
wasn’t ready to talk about my children…or their father. We had been
divorced for two years but were still close. We tried hard to make
life normal for our children and I was sad to have lost him, but
devastated with my daughter and son. It seemed the right thing to
do, to move on and find others and survive, but I knew in my heart,
that part of me would never recover. I would never be able to smile
or laugh without their faces flooding my memory. I didn’t think I’d
ever understand why I didn’t die with them, like I should have.

As I sat at the window, eating my crunchy
green apple, I wondered again about where to go. It would be
unsafe, in more ways than one to stay in the city. I considered
traveling north, to L.A. but the stilled traffic up there had to be
bad. The illness took people quickly, but it didn’t stop them from
jumping in their cars and driving off only to die behind the wheel
a few hours later. Going north would be a bad idea.

That left two choices, go east into the
mountains and the rest of the country, or travel the short distance
south to the Mexican border.

“Connor, do you speak Spanish by any chance?”
It was random and caught him off guard.

“Uh,” he choked down a mouthful of apple.
“Not really.” He shook his head, “Why? You planning a trip down
south?”

“It was a thought. But I don’t speak Spanish
either.” I sighed heavily.

He bit his apple, and I watched as his jaw
muscles flexed effortlessly and when he ran his tongue innocently
over his lower lip, I blushed and looked away from him.
What
was
it about this guy?

“East it is then,” I said aloud to no one in
particular.

“East? Is that where you want to go?” He
looked at me, still chewing. I tried not to watch his jaw.

“Why not? I think it would take a really long
time to get to L.A. especially if we’d have to walk some of it.” I
continued, “And going south across the border would be a mess too.
Even if we did find people there, we might not be able to
communicate and that could be dangerous.” I considered for a
moment.

“There’s a resort-type lodge up in the Laguna
Mountains, called the Big Laguna Hideaway. Have you heard of it?” I
asked, forgetting for a moment that Connor wasn’t from
California.

He shook his head no, so I went on to
explain. “Ok, so it’s a lodge more than a resort. I’ve never
actually been there but when it was built the owners made a point
of advertising its eco-friendly design all over the County.”

“Still not following you.” He said. He licked
his lower lip again and I looked away.
Jesus, Riley…knock it
off!

A pleasant sort of anxiousness came over me
as I remembered pictures I had seen of the place tucked away in the
mountains. “It’s an eco-friendly mountain resort. It runs
completely on solar power.” I looked at him, and watched as what I
said registered.

“Completely solar operated?” He asked with a
hint of excitement in his voice.

“Yes, and it would have its own water supply
too, probably welled.” I shifted around so I was facing him.
“There’s one problem, well, not a problem but it could potentially
be.”

“What’s that?” He got up and walked to my
side of the room, fruit still in hand. Zoey stretched from her
napping place on top of the sofa when he sat down.

“Well, it gets cold enough up there for snow.
Every year portions of the highway are closed down due to ice and
snow conditions.” I watched him ponder over what I had said.

“The cold doesn’t bother me. I guess our
biggest problem would be having enough food.” He settled deeply
into the cushions and continued eating. He was chewing the apple
down to the core, and for some reason I found it extremely sexy.
“We have plenty here to take with us, but how would we get it
there?”

“I left my Jeep on the outskirts of the City.
If we could find something here to drive we could try and leave
downtown by the streets and back-track parallel with the freeway.
The roads are congested mostly around downtown and the major
interchanges. We could probably drive more freely once we hit East
County.” I was excited now, just a little, at the prospect of
having a plan. Now we just had to put it in motion.

We sat quiet for a while, chewing our apples
and as I nibbled around the core, I bit a seed off and tried to
discreetly spit it out of my mouth into my hand. Instead, it stuck
to my lip. I definitely could not eat an apple as sexy as
Connor.

“Let’s do it,” he said, oblivious to my apple
seed incident.

“Let’s do it,” I repeated. “I’m tired of the
warm weather anyway.” We smiled at each other. A plan. We had a
plan. Now we had to get out of the city with our supplies and drive
the hour and a half up into the mountains. It felt good to know
where we were headed, but it wasn’t the most forgiving of places to
venture into alone.

As if to further support our decision to move
on, something across town exploded. Looking into the distance we
could see more smoke rising up from where the airport was. It was
still burning, which meant the fire had probably spread past the
tarmac.

***

As I pulled the covers up around my ears, I
listened to the quiet of the hotel suite and wondered if Connor was
asleep yet. I let my mind drift a bit, thinking about Connor, the
trip out to the mountains and without warning, a memory I had with
my kids at the Zoo from the summer before blazed through my mind. I
fell asleep as I had every night since the day my children died,
with my eyes swollen and my pillow damp.

CHAPTER FIVE

The lace curtains moved away from the
window, then settled back against the frame, and this happened over
and over as if the window itself was breathing and the curtains
were being expelled to freedom with each breath, only to be sucked
back in a second later. My gaze followed the curtains for what
seemed like hours until they just stopped, suddenly. The air had
stilled in the room, and I was aware of the warmth of the new day
working its way through the coldness. I watched as the sun rays hit
the window glass, making bright prisms sparkle like giant diamonds.
The light filtered through the lacey fabric, casting an intricate
pattern on the floor, full of swirls and different sized circles.
My daughter was an early morning person and now that I awoke in her
room, I understood why. Her view of dawn was glorious. The carpet
fibers lit up inch by inch as the rays of sunlight crept over them
and devoured the shadows.

I watched, wide eyed and alert, as the
sunshine slithered up the side of her bed, and I could see the
pinks and yellows of her quilted blanket. I didn’t dare blink as
the light moved up and over our toes, showing our matching red nail
polish. Her bare feet touched at the ankles, and were tucked up
neatly against the side of my right foot and I focused on her
chipped and uneven polish for a moment. I finally blinked. The
blonde hairs on her skin glittered as the sun swallowed us up, legs
first. I couldn’t see above her shins, because I had covered her
with a fleece Winnie the Pooh blanket. The overwhelming urge to see
her knees came over me, so I shifted until the blanket moved,
exposing her right knobby knee with the bruise from her last tree
climbing adventure. I couldn’t smile, but it somehow made me happy
to see that bruise.

I felt the warmth of daylight as it hit my
right arm, and rushed over my shoulder, exploding into my face,
causing my eyes to water. I closed them for only a moment and in
that instant I saw her big and round, bright blue eyes, her small,
perfectly puckered red lips that rested below her little button
nose, the curve of her jaw line that led to her slightly big ears,
and all her blonde hair that curled at the ends. I could see her
freckles and could count each one…she had four on her face and one
on the top of her right ear. I saw all of this and held onto it
before I opened my eyes. That girl was gone. I wanted to remember
her face, the face she had before death took her from me.

When I opened my eyes the sun had filled the
room and it was all there for me to see. I was looking at her
stomach, where her arm rested and her little hand lay still inside
mine. She had a freckle on that hand too. I didn’t want to look at
her face just yet so I kept staring at her arm, willing it to move
on its own, but it didn’t of course. At some point I realized I
couldn’t feel my own left arm, which was tucked under her head, or
most of my left side for that matter. And I didn’t care. I had
cuddled up next to her during the night when the hallucinations
started, and held her in my arms while I sang Into the West by
Annie Lennox, over and over, like I used to do when she was a baby.
I sang to her, even when her fevered body stopped seizing. When her
shallow and uneven breathing quit, I was still singing to her,
gently and methodically rocking her back in forth in my arms.

Her very last minute was peaceful. Her chest
rose slightly and then fell slowly and I felt the hot air of her
last breath tickle my cheek as I whispered to her…The ships are
here now, baby. They are taking you home. I held onto her, my first
born child, my only daughter, until the new day reminded me that my
family suffered these awful and horrible deaths and I was somehow
kept alive to see it happen. It was my own personal Hell. So I
stayed next to her, my beautiful daughter, and cried. I cried until
my heart broke and I thought that for sure would kill me, but it
didn’t.

And now here I am, lying next to her,
willing myself to look at her face. I force my gaze up her throat,
over her chin and her slightly parted lips, which are no longer the
color of my favorite rose but an unnatural bluish-grey shade. I
ignore the blood that had flowed from her nose, spreading down her
cheeks, pooling on the pillow beneath her head. The rusty brown
color of it was dry and caked on her skin almost like paint. I
couldn’t stop now, so my gaze moved up even further to her eyes,
but instead of the deep ocean blue I was used to seeing, her eyes
were red, blood red. The scream started low in my gut and came out
of my mouth almost strangled. I screamed until I was hoarse. I
screamed for my son, who was dead in the room next door, tucked
neatly in bed. For the husband I once had, but lost to a broken
heart two years before, and for my daughter, now dead and cold in
my arms. I screamed and screamed until the wind made the curtains
dance again. I screamed until the sunlight started fading from the
room and the shadows took me over.

***

My eyes flew open and a mournful groan
escaped past my lips as the image of my dead daughter silently
faded away to that place in the brain where nightmares hide. I
bolted out of bed, my chest heaving with anxiety. My lower lip was
trembling and for several seconds I didn’t know where I was. It was
dark, still night, but something was wrong. Zoey was barking at the
bedroom door, nervously looking from it to me and back at the door
again. I blinked back a new wave of tears as I realized I was
standing in Connor’s suite. A hollow thumping sound was coming from
the other room. It must have been what woke me. I wiped my hands
across my eyes and moved past the dog to open the door an inch or
so. Solid dark shadows shrouded the room but there was enough
moonlight filtering through the windows for me to see Connor moving
toward the suite’s front door in long strides. I followed him, as
Zoey rushed ahead of us, still barking. We stood, silently, inside
the hotel room. I shushed the dog and commanded her to move back.
When I squatted beside her, my legs were shaky and unreliable.
Connor was looking through the peep-hole on the door when another
bang made him jump.

He glanced at me before asking, “Who’s
there?”

We heard voices talking before a man
answered, “Hey!” He said with some excitement in his voice, “We’re
looking for Riley, Connor and…Zoey?” There was more hushed talking
behind the door.

Connor moved aside and let me look through
the peep-hole. I didn’t recognize the man, and it looked like a
young woman was standing beside him. I heard a click behind me and
the entryway light washed over us. I blinked at Connor and he
looked just as confused as I felt. Then I remembered the notes I’d
left, I had led these people here. I didn’t know if I should feel
excited or panicked.

“
They’ve been to the depot,
” I
whispered to him.