The Shore (29 page)

“When I saw you at the door I thought it was your mother come to settle things.” I don't know if I'm supposed to laugh, so I don't, and somehow that's the right thing to do.

He sees me through the house and back out the front door, offers any kind of help I ever need before finally shutting it and leaving me on his front step, breathing in the cool night air as deep as I can. The tears don't come, though, until I get to the car, and these I feel. Relief, I think, just because the wondering is over. Later there will be anger, and fear, and bitter sadness, but now it is just relief and it aches like a sore throat.

I wait until I can breathe again, then call Seth.

“Hey, no, I'm all right, was just crying a little.”

“Did you find out…”

“Yeah. I guess it's better than having a murderer for a father, but not by much,” I say. “I met him earlier today, before I knew. He tried to get me to sleep with him.” And then I'm laughing, loud and long and uncontrollably.

“It sounds like you're losing it, baby.”

“I might be. I'll tell you about everything tomorrow. I'm going to spend the night and then drive back first thing, I think.”

“I'll be watching for you. Text me before you go to sleep, all right?”

“I will.”

I go straight to the motel—my stomach feels full of cement, and I know better than to try eating when it gets like that—check in without saying anything to the desk clerk, just hand over my reservation printout and ID when he asks for them, then lock and chain the room door and get in the shower. The hot water pouring down my back usually helps me think, usually helps me unwind, but right now my brain feels numb, half-thoughts pinballing around like they do right before I fall asleep.

There are lots of Bloxoms on the Shore, and if you go back far enough everyone that lives out here is related, but I don't want to interrogate the connection too closely: Cabel, Tiny, me. I want Jacob Potter to be lying, to be the source of half my DNA. When Tiny had opened the door I had seen Cabel in him, heard him in his words; I didn't want to see myself as well.

Dried off and in my pajamas in bed the thoughts come faster, looping and repeating, and I can't shut them off. This is the mental illness that they found: obsessive spiraling that keeps me awake for days at a time, not the serial killer's psychosis they expected but the normal human preoccupation of thought, taken to an unmanageable extreme.

It's still evening, more or less, when I give up and put my clothes back on. Usually my break point is around three in the
morning, so maybe I knew already, maybe from when I got in the shower, that I'd be going back out.

Once I'm headed down Route 13 though, it feels like the middle of the night. It's only been truly dark, nighttime dark, for a little while, but there aren't more than one or two cars on the road: farmers, hunters, watermen all start their days early, and the chicken-plant workers that aren't on shift are probably sleeping. I keep it just below the speed limit, but still I get to Matthew's and the turnoff sooner than I would like. I consider wasting time, driving past and turning around after I've geared myself up some more, but I'm worried that if I wait too long Sally Lumsden will be asleep by the time I get there.

When I kill the ignition in her driveway the clock on the dashboard reads 10:57, but there's a light on in one of the upper rooms of the farmhouse. I knock, then step back to watch the lights flick off and on as she moves through the house, until the little frosted window above the door flashes sudden gold and the bolt is drawn back.

“I take it you found what you were looking for?” she asks me without preamble, but in a friendly way. She has her bathrobe on over her clothes, her thumb marking a page partway through a paperback book.

“I think so, but all of my answers just lead to more questions.”

“Which is why you're back here.”

She opens the door wider and lets me step inside, but I hesitate on the mat.

“As a rule, I try to avoid being helpful,” she says. “But in this case it looks like I've already made an exception.”

“I'm sorry it's so late—it's only a few quick things.” I follow her into the house, not back to the greenhouse this time but instead into the kitchen. Or what had been the kitchen: the butcher-block counters and slate floor, the oven and refrigerator, remain, but the room has been proliferated by test tubes and beakers, spirit lamps, esoteric equipment; a battered chest made of worn dark wood sits next to the sink, and a small still crouches in the space where an appliance, probably an electric dishwasher, has been ripped out. She lights the stove and puts a kettle on, and I wonder how many drinks, hot and otherwise, I've consumed out of politeness over the course of the day; I've probably stopped to pee at every single gas station between Belle Haven and Chincoteague.

“You've lived here all your life, haven't you?” I begin when she turns back to me.

“I can count the times I've set foot on the mainland on my fingers, never been gone longer than a day.” The kettle was hot already; steam streams from its spout and hangs in puffs behind her head.

“So you probably heard my parents shooting at deer from our porch.”

“Probably. They ate our crops, though, and my dad figured your family could use the meat, so we pretended that nothing was happening. The police asked me the same thing, when they found that neighbor boy shot, but you get so used to the sound that you don't really pay attention.”

She has her back turned to me, making tea, so she doesn't see me wince when she mentions the “neighbor boy.”

“So you could hear my parents fighting too?”

“Not so much.” She hands me a steaming mug, then takes
her own and perches on the countertop. “Voices don't carry like gunshot does, especially when the corn gets high. We didn't think them any different from any of our tenants—they paid the rent on time, you and your sister had good manners. Everything seemed normal.”

“So you didn't notice, when my mother disappeared.”

She doesn't answer right away, looks down into her tea like she's trying to see the future. It's got chamomile in it, I can tell by the smell.

“I remember right after it happened—after the police came, that is, and found out about your mom. None of us could believe it, that it had been just down the road, that no one saw anything or said anything. Afterward, there was a piece in the newspaper, about how your teachers should have noticed, about how someone should have noticed, about the responsibility of a community for its weakest members. But we all thought that your mother had left, that we shouldn't say anything because it would just hurt you and your sister, and her leaving fit with what we expected enough that no one wondered. You remember, don't you, how much people value privacy out here? And I watched you and your sister grow up—walking to the grocery store, on your bicycle up and down in the summer, waiting for the school bus. I didn't imagine that anything was wrong.”

What I want to know is if she heard it, the night that Bo killed my mother. If anyone bore witness besides me. If someone could have stopped it, the way I still feel I should have been able to even though the therapist has told me that there was nothing I could do then. But I can't push that line of thought any farther.

“That's all I wanted to know, I guess. If there was any chance of things working out different.”

“No one can tell you that, hon.”

The silence starts to get uncomfortable, then she asks, “Did you find out about your dad, after all?”

“Yeah. I kinda wish I hadn't, though.” I deliberate for a minute, then say, “It looks like the guy that my stepdad shot might have been my half-brother.” It feels weird coming out of my mouth. “Won't know until I get home and look it up, though. There are a lot of Bloxoms out here.”

“Same dad, then?”

“Possibly. Need to double-check, though. We could be cousins, or no relation.”

She holds the rim of the cup against her bottom lip for a moment, thinking.

“It happened on our land, as I recall. Our records are pretty damn thorough—would you like me to take a look? We probably hung onto a copy of the police report, maybe the obit or the newspaper article too.”

“You don't have to bother with that, I can do it just as well when I get back to Georgia.”

“No bother, really.”

“Well, I'm also not sure that I want to know just yet.”

“Fair enough.”

She watches me and I watch her while I drink the tea. I'm trying to think of how to get out of here, politely, but she looks like she's going to say something, so I don't make straight for the door, but wait.

“You've probably been thinking about coming back here for a while,” she finally says.

“Not really.”

“Ever thought about coming back to live?”

I can't answer right away, instead pretend there's more tea in the empty cup.

“Not till today.” When I say it I realize that I have been thinking about it, have been easing back into the landscape like putting on a favorite coat. I hate this place and I love this place and I don't know if I want to go as far away as possible or never leave.

“It's a pain in the ass to get out to, isn't it? Just forever away from anywhere.”

“That's one of the nice things about it.”

“I'm glad we agree on that.” She smiles at me, but it's a crafty smile. “Good place to be when the world ends, don't you think?”

“Sure, if you're the kind of person that thinks the end of humanity means the end of the world. If the world were really ending, the best place to be would probably be Mars or somewhere. Species go extinct, what's the big tragedy in one of those species being humans?”

“But still, where would you go if it looked like humanity was going to end?”

I think for a moment.

“You're right, I'd probably come out here. There's food, there's water, I know how to get by. Why do you ask?”

She breathes in before she answers, and I know she's getting to the part that she really wants to tell me about.

“It's a fact that when a population gets too numerous for its environment, something happens to reduce it. Bacteria, ants, cheetahs, every living thing. It's perfectly natural, and very necessary, but every time it happens to human beings we all go utterly to pieces. Bubonic plague in Europe, syphilis in the
Americas, contagion that we could only assume to be the hand of God, because we didn't understand what was happening. Now that we have germ theory and hazmat suits we think that we're immune to that kind of event, that we'll be able to prevent it. So when it happens again, as it inevitably will, and our doctors and our scientists cannot control the spread, the world is going to panic. And if the goal is, in that panic, the preservation of the individual, then they'd have a very good reason to panic. But if the goal is the preservation of humanity, then there is some hope.”

“So you're planning on preserving humanity?” I'm wondering now if she's got a cellar full of women of childbearing age and plans to repopulate the planet after the apocalypse, or similar craziness.

“Not in so many words. This is an isolated community, a remote place. It's fertile, it's temperate, and it can be very difficult to get to. And it might not happen in this decade, or even in my lifetime, but the next great plague is coming. And I think that it is coming quickly.”

“This is my land. I am responsible for it. I promised to stay. So I've spent my time learning what can be done with what is at our disposal here. I know how to use the plants, how to make the medicines we won't be able to buy if the world as we know it ends. Other people that are close to me and also believe that something is coming have designed ways to make shelter with what is readily available. Some have worked with animal husbandry, horticulture. We're planning, and learning, and experimenting now, so that if and when it all goes sour, our children will have a place to go.”

“How are you going to keep it off the Shore, if it's a disease you think is going to kill us all?”

“We can't.” She grins at me. “And we're not. Accomack Island is too big, more than we need. But Chincoteague and Assateague, we could manage those. Without the causeway—all it would take is one big storm, one perfect hurricane—we would be unreachable. Isolated. Safe.”

“You're crazy,” I say.

“Do you think so? What would you do if you woke up one morning, and swine flu was plastered all over the papers?”

“It was,” I say.

“But what if you woke up a week later and half the people you knew were dead?”

I think a bit before I answer. “I'd go somewhere isolated and wait it out.”

“And that's what I'm planning. Just on a bigger scale. More long-term. Genetic mutations might become a problem, but if we set it up well, we could outlast the disease.”

“I still think you're a little crazy.”

“Just a little, maybe,” she concedes. “But being bound to this place for life would make anyone a little crazy, don't you think?”

I don't know what to say to her. I wonder what I would have been like, if I'd stayed until I was her age, in the same house, on the same land, alone.

“Are you trying to recruit me for this?” I ask.

“Only if you want to. Genetic variety is never a bad thing, and your husband won't be from around here.” She grins at me. “A secret is a secret, remember. Don't tell anyone.”

“I've kept up with repairs on the house you lived in,” she says as she walks me to the front door, and I think she's trying to be gentle. “In case someone ever came back.”

“You shouldn't have.”

“It's a cement-slab building with a cedar roof—it's mostly continued to exist in spite of human action,” she says. “If you want to go and see it before you leave, the keys are still under the whelk shell on the front porch.”