Instructions for the End of the World (3 page)

A green toilet.

And not just any shade of green.

I heard my mom muttering something about ugly avocado, but it's like totally the color of a swamp, the color of things dying, the color green crayon you would choose if you wanted to draw an ogre or show someone the color of ugly.

It's Shrek green.

Dad has moved on to showing Nic her room, so I slip back down the stairs to the main hallway and out onto the decrepit back porch, where I dig my compact out of my purse and set it on the railing so I can see my reflection as I start braiding my hair. At least if it's in two tight braids the puffiness will have no chance of increasing. Then I notice that all my lip gloss is gone.

I am ridiculously, strictly forbidden by Dad from wearing makeup, but I have somewhat successfully argued that lip gloss doesn't count as makeup because it's clear (well, sort of) and it's purely for keeping my lips from getting dry and cracked (okay, not at all). Dad didn't really okay the lip gloss wearing, but he mostly doesn't notice when I do wear it. He also forbids us from all the normal things girls are supposed to do to better themselves, like getting our ears or anything else pierced, getting highlights, wearing cute clothes, or wearing shoes with any kind of heel.

If my dad had his way, I'd be wearing a neck-to-floor pioneer girl dress, with my hair all sad and plain and grown down to my knees (with a bunch of split ends, for sure, because Dad doesn't believe in spending money on unnecessary things like girl haircuts), and some kind of granny boots that lace up to, like, my armpits or something—better for keeping the boys away.

He seriously thinks that's how girls our age are supposed to dress.

Seriously.

His head would explode if he found the stash of makeup I keep hidden in the bottom of my purse, or the outfits I've saved my own money to buy—that I hardly ever get to wear—with Mom's help. Mom doesn't agree with Dad about the clothes and makeup stuff, but she says she has to choose her battles, whatever that means. I think it mostly means she goes along with whatever he says, and then when he's not looking she does what she wants.

So I figure it's all right with her if I do the same thing.

I am just finishing up my second braid when I hear Mom's voice rise from its normal tone into an angry shriek, and I bite my lip, wondering where I can go to escape the argument.

That's always my first instinct, but then I realize she's yelling about this house and how she refuses to live in it, and this could be an important argument to be present for. I might be able to support the cause of us getting the hell out of here.

Probably not, I decide on second thought, but I have to hear what Dad says, so I ease my way back inside just in time to witness something I've never seen before in all my parents' years of fighting.

Right after my dad says, “Shut up for a minute, Maly,” my mom slaps him across the face.

It's not the first time he's ever told her to shut up, but it's the first time she's ever hit him, far as I know. My eyes have gone wide, but I hurry to rearrange my face in a way that says all this is no big deal, that I haven't even noticed what's happening, because if Dad sees me gawking, there's no telling what punishment he might concoct later. Skinning a chicken, digging rocks out of the garden …

For a long moment, it feels like everything stands still. My father is in shock that my mother has slapped him, and he stands there blinking, his face turning pink with anger, the reddish outline of my mom's small handprint deepening on his cheek.

I think the heat must be making her crazy like him.

I catch a movement across the room and realize it's Nic standing there, witnessing the scene too.

Her dumb face is pale, her mouth slack.

That my mom has not only dared to hit my dad, but that she's done it in front of us kids—it's a situation so freakish that it feels as if the air between us all is crackling with an electrical current.

And then the current is broken when my father lifts his hand as if to grab my mother's arm, but she screeches, “Don't you touch me!” and dodges his grasp.

A moment later, she has run from the house, and my dad follows after. Nicole follows them both, probably thinking she's going to jump in and save the situation like a good daughter, but I only want to watch and see who the winner will be. I am of course cheering silently for Mom, but for my whole life she's not exactly been a worthy opponent for our brick wall of a father.

Outside, I am surprised to see not more fighting but my dad catching my mom in his grasp and hugging her to him as she struggles and cries. After a little bit of fighting she goes limp in his arms, and my hope of Mom getting us out of this house vanishes before my eyes.

NICOLE

My parents don't fight like this, at least not in front of us girls.

Fighting takes two participants, and my dad, as a rule, does not participate. There are times like now, when my mom gets mad. She will start trying to tell him something, and when he doesn't respond she starts complaining in a heavier and heavier Khmer accent until she is speaking no English at all, and then when he still doesn't respond she will go storming around the house slamming doors and objects as she cleans.

This is a scene I've witnessed countless times growing up, and when I was little I thought it was my mom who was acting badly. As I've grown older, though, I have had to rethink that idea.

Which is harder to do than it sounds.

What if one person is mad and the other person ignores it, over and over again? What if the person you are supposed to care most about in the world has a problem and you refuse to do anything about it? What if you pretend they're not talking to you at all?

It is past midnight. I am lying in a sleeping bag in the dark, curled up on my side, a pillow hugged against my chest.

Mom's ranting, Dad's silence.

He has a way of being silent that is louder than any voice.

“You never asked me,” she is saying. “You just take us here and you don't ask me what I want.”

I can sort of understand why he tunes out. My mother's message is always the same, or nearly the same. She has a standard list of complaints that goes something like: you didn't ask me what I want, you don't listen, you don't care.

Extra things get thrown in, depending on the situation that's upset her. Like now: this house is a dump, it's in the middle of nowhere, there are wild animals outside, bugs everywhere, no people around, you are acting crazy.

This last accusation hits me in the gut, causes me to hug my pillow closer, as if the insult was leveled at me and not Dad.

I don't know why.

I do know why.

Because it's true, and I don't want it to be.

I don't know how we are supposed to recover from crazy. I don't know where we go from there.

My dad, mostly competent, mostly okay, seems to have come a little unhinged since retiring from the military. It's as if the structure of life in the army showed him how to act, what to believe, how to be, and then things started to unravel when we were all shown by a group of terrorists just how illusory our ideas of safety really are.

And now, free to make his own choices, he is leading us astray.

My mother, never much of a willing follower in the first place, is a problem he probably should have considered long ago.

She has been looking forward to his retirement as the time when she could finally go back to school and focus on moving up in her own career. Dad had the idea that when we moved here to the middle of nowhere she would homeschool us, but Mom never seemed to be into that idea.

She has always been a regular teacher with her own second-grade classroom, and I know she loved having a whole room full of students. She most loved the difficult ones, and I remember from looking over her shoulder as she used the computer that she'd been checking out graduate programs in special education, learning disabilities, autism. She'd looked up the distance between our new home and the MIND Institute at UC Davis, which is apparently the new place to go for becoming an expert on autism. And later she'd filled out online grad school applications.

It wasn't hard to see that she would have considered teaching just me and Izzy, at home all day, about as interesting as watching grass grow, especially when there were kids out there who could have really used her help.

I'm not sure Dad ever truly heard her about any of her own goals or wishes. He definitely didn't understand, judging by the state of this house, that she has no intention of returning to the poverty she knew as a small child in Cambodia, if she can help it. She knows there are suburban stucco houses with pristine lawns, clean running water, master suites, luxury bathrooms, all within her reach if Dad would stop acting like the world is about to end next Thursday.

And why shouldn't she want that like everyone else?

My dad has been making me keep a notebook full of his survivalist wisdom for as long as I've been old enough to write complete sentences. I remember the very first entry I ever made, with him watching over me and telling me how to spell the words as we sat at the kitchen table after dinner one night. It went like this: “Survival means being able to rely on yourself, no matter what happens.”

Back then, I was eight years old, and I didn't know what it meant even after Dad explained it. I had some ideas, like if I got lost in the woods, I'd have to find my own food and shelter, or if my parents were killed in a car wreck, I would have to live on my own or with a foster family. I sort of understood, but not really.

The part I didn't get, the part no amount of prepping can make clear, is that there is no one else who's going to save the day in the end. No one else is going to give you a hug and tell you everything will be okay.

ISABEL

Today is the day my life stopped being my life.

Today is the day that will go down in history as the day when everything started to suck.

No, actually,
suck
is a completely inadequate word for what this day has done to my sense of the universe being a fair and nonretarded place.

The government should make it illegal for people like my dad to have kids.

This house only gets worse the longer we're in it. It's like if you were watching a horror movie, and in the movie the family pulled up to their new house with the moving van, you would scream in your head for them to back the fuck up and drive away, go live somewhere on the other side of the planet, because you know there's going to be some ghosts up in there, and people are going to die, and it's just not going to end well for anyone.

Consider my room.

I still am (considering it), and it's 1:14 a.m., according to the clock on my phone that no longer has a signal. I am lying wide awake, trying my best not to touch anything that I didn't pack and bring here from my old room. There is a brown stain on the ceiling above me, shaped like the edge of a continent, all uneven and weird. I stare at it, because I don't know what else to do.

I can't sleep.

I think about running away, but I don't have any friends or family for, like, a thousand miles, and I don't want to end up homeless. I mean, this is close enough to homeless, and I hate it, but at least there is running water, and food.

Apparently my great-grandmother died in this house, so it is probably haunted for real, but I haven't heard or seen any signs of ghosts yet.

Yet.

What I do hear is my mother's voice coming from below. She sounds like she is crying. She is yelling at my dad again, but he's not saying much back. The low rumble of his voice punctuates the rare moments when she is not yelling.

She has been freaking out ever since we pulled up in front of the house this afternoon. No, actually it started before that. She started getting really quiet during the drive, as we got further and further away from the nearest real city with restaurants and malls and big box stores.

My mom
loves
big box stores (so do I).

Then she started muttering in Khmer, always a bad sign.

My parents are in the room directly below me, so I can hear some of what she says now, mostly a broken record from earlier in the day, but she must be walking from room to room while she yells, because her voice comes and goes.

Nasty old house … you never listen … don't care about any of us … not living in the middle of the woods …

I hear enough bits and pieces to know that Mom has had it. Dad's finally pushed her over the edge with the move, and I am starting to feel hopeful again that she might actually win this battle, that Dad will realize we really can't live here, and he'll pack us up tomorrow and take us to a Marriott Suites until we can find a real house in a real city.

This is what
has
to happen, if the universe is even a little bit fair. This is what has to happen, if there is a God in heaven worth believing in. I'm not into praying or anything, but I close my eyes while I'm lying in my stupid red sleeping bag in my dusty old ceiling-stain room and I pray, “Dear God, Get us the fuck out of here, oh Lord. If you are listening, let us move somewhere decent tomorrow. Or right now, whichever is convenient for you. Amen.”

I actually say that. Out loud.

And then I hear a door slam.

And then a car door.

And then the engine starting, and the car driving away. It all happens before I can get to the window and see who got into the car that's disappearing down the gravel road and into the woods now, but I pretty much know it's Mom.

I watch at the window until the taillights disappear, and then I go back to my sleeping bag, wipe my feet off with a towel because I don't want any old-house grime getting on my sleeping bag, and get back into it. The house is completely silent now. My mom is the queen of talking to herself when she's mad. She can have an hour-long argument with a wall, so I know by the silence it's definitely her who's left.