Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories (3 page)

“I don’t know,” I said. “The set-up we have here is meant to be used for this sort of agriculture. I can’t say what it’d be like starting from scratch somewhere else not knowing what we’d be starting with.”

“Well,” Jon began. My hands clenched under the table. Before he could continue, Suzanne raised her arms again.

“We’ve only just gotten the news,” she said. “We’ve barely had time to think anything through. There are resources in the book room we can consult. We all have our own areas of expertise, to whatever degree they may be useful.” She, as a former painter, offered a slanted smile. “Consider the possibilities on your own and with each other, and we’ll revisit this discussion in a few days.”

I ruined a tomato the next morning. I was kneeling on the boards beside their plot, picking and pruning as I worked along the row of pots that kept their roots protected from any chill in the soil. Soon it’d be warm enough to transplant them, I was deciding. Then I reached and twisted off a small green globe without thinking.

I stared at it in my hand. It barely fit the hollow of my palm. The people on cooking duty could still cut it up and add it to something, but it could have grown at least three times as big. A waste. Why had I done that?

The door’s hinges squeaked. I looked up, ready to direct Meredith to the beans, but it was Suzanne coming in. Because Meredith wasn’t here anymore. This was the third time I’d forgotten that. Wherever my head was, I wanted it back.

“What needs doing today?” Suzanne asked, surveying the plots. She’d been coming by for an hour or two most days the last few weeks. To soak up the warmth she said, though she was pretty handy too.

“It’s about time to open the vents,” I told her. They dropped the temperature a little, but let out some of the humidity. A few of the plants had been going moldy before I’d arrived. “Then the bean seedlings are ready to go in.”

The vents creaked overhead. Suzanne padded over to the plot I’d worked over a couple of days ago in anticipation of the planting. “We’ll be able to grow even more once it warms up, I suppose?” she said.

“We’ll have more options,” I said. “And we could grow some things outside too. We’ll have to be careful about the heat in here in the summer.”

She made a humming sound, and I wondered if she thought we’d still be here in the summer. I turned back to the tomatoes. Grip. Twist. Pinch. The ripe ones formed a solid weight in my hands, the warmth of the sun in their smooth skin. Sometimes the loamy green smell of the air in here, so different from the cold prickle of pine outside, filled me up like a sort of drug. I’d look down at a plot I’d just started on and find myself at the end. Meredith would say she’d called my name a couple of times and I hadn’t answered. “What were you thinking about?” she’d ask, and I couldn’t remember. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’d just been floating along, existing only in the work.

I wanted to sink into that zone now, but I was too aware of the rustle of Suzanne’s clothes. The tap of the seedling trays against the boards. The sigh of her breath.

“I hope you didn’t feel cornered last night,” she said after a while.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“We do value your opinion. You’ve been a great help already.”

“I like working with plants,” I said with a shrug.

“You did a lot of this, before?”

“I wanted to do it for my whole life,” I said. “Develop new, more diverse varieties of common crops. Help farms increase sustainability.” There weren’t enough people left now for diverse plant genetics or overworked land to really be a problem, of course.

“Well, for someone as young as you are, you certainly have yourself together,” Suzanne said. “Be proud of that, all right?”

We know you’ve got yourself together
, Dad said, the last time we spoke on the phone.
Just hold on without us a little longer, all right?

That had been months and months ago. I’d seen the phone he must have been speaking into in the harbor office, when Tobias had brought the bunch of us across the strait from the island after his soldier colleagues had dropped their missiles on the town. Someone had left the dead receiver off the hook in the empty room that smelled like stale potato chips.

“If you ever—” Suzanne started, her voice like a burr prickling against my skin. I stood up.

“Terrance said they found some fertilizer on that last scavenging run,” I said. “I should go see where they’ve put it.”

I didn’t realize I’d left behind the basket of tomatoes I’d filled until I was halfway across the courtyard.

Jon caught me just as I came out of the bathing area entrance after my evening shower. I’d taken only a couple of steps away from the gathering house toward my cabin when he said my name. He was standing at the edge of the courtyard in the declining light, his hands tucked casually into the pockets of his wool coat. His head cocked to the side, bare except for his dark brown curls. He smiled when our eyes met, a little smile that acknowledged the potential awkwardness of the situation while promising he meant well, and I knew what he wanted to talk about.

But there wasn’t anything I could do to prevent it, so I stopped and watched him walking over. He had a distinct way of moving, more studied than Leo but still graceful. A classically attractive face: high cheekbones, straight nose, strong jaw. He looked a lot like I’d imagined my college boyfriend might look like, when college was a thing in my future, which I’d found almost funny when it had first occurred to me weeks ago but now was only annoying.

“What?” I said, a little of that annoyance bleeding out. I hadn’t meant it to. But my hair was damp—the two women who’d come into the changing room had kept looking at me while they chatted, and I’d left without drying it completely—and the air was cold enough that my breath frosted in it. I hadn’t thought I’d need a hat for this short walk.

Jon didn’t meander around the subject, at least. His little smile disappeared, and he said, “I haven’t changed my mind. I believe what I said yesterday. Suzanne respects you. If you said we could manage, away from here, she’d listen.”

“Why would I say that?” I asked.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said, frowning. “A greenhouse in The Middle of Nowhere, New Brunswick, doesn’t have magical properties a greenhouse in Montreal or Ottawa or Toronto won’t. And in a city we’d be able to scavenge everything we needed while we settled in.”

“You don’t know what we’ll find,” I said, and added, honestly, “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“You’re already protected,” he said. “But don’t you care at all what happens to the rest of us?”

“Why should my opinion matter more than anyone else’s?” I said. It wasn’t as if I was even really part of the community. They had a history with this place and with each other in their shared artistic interests, and I’d been fine with that. “If you want to go, you should go. And whoever else wants to, too. Whoever wants to stay can stay. Why do you have to turn it into a fight?”

He was silent for a moment, tucking his chin behind the collar of his coat. His eyes, studying me, were very dark. I couldn’t make out what color they were in this light—couldn’t remember if I’d ever taken note before.

“We’re stronger together,” he said. “We need each other. We need the skills everyone brings to the table—skills like yours. That’s worth fighting for. I’m trying to make sure we don’t break what we’ve already managed to construct.”

There was a poetic elegance to those last words, as if, if he explained it prettily enough, it would change what he was actually doing.

“This isn’t a play,” I said. “Things are going to break whatever we do. You can’t just script us into a happy ending. Good night.”

I left the light off inside my cabin, shedding my coat and crawling onto the bed. When I closed my eyes, his were still looking at me, dark and expectant, until I finally drifted to sleep.

Whenever I walked into the gathering hall’s main room for a meal, people were talking about it. In the shower rooms, too, and outside when there were tasks to help with in the courtyard. I didn’t join the conversations, but voices were raised often enough that I heard plenty. Another scavenging run went out, on the two snowmobiles kept hidden in the woods, and when they returned with sleds full, everyone had an opinion about how long the trip had taken and how much had been found. The haul didn’t look especially different from the last several runs to me.

Meredith had always been curious about the colony residents, so when she’d been with me, we’d usually taken a table with a couple of others and I’d mostly listened while they talked. I’d liked sitting with Hilary the most—she’d had an enthusiasm for food that complimented mine for the garden, and sharing bits of my ideas had ended up happening naturally. But then, after she’d gotten sick…

When I could, I ate alone in the midst of the commotion. When Kaelyn had delivered the news that the vaccine worked, she must have imagined it would be a relief. But people seemed
more
worried than before, even though nothing here had changed.

Three days after Kaelyn and Leo had come by, Lauren was working in the kitchen when I dropped off the greenhouse harvest. She looked over the contents of my basket with the perpetually mournful look created by those deep-set eyes in that narrow face.

“The white beans should start coming in a few weeks,” I said. “Extra protein.”

She nodded, and then peered at me as if she’d just remembered who I was.

“A few weeks,” she repeated. Her fingers gripped the edges of the basket, so tight her knuckles whitened. “You’re not going to leave, are you?”

“What?” I said.

“With Jon and them,” she said, low and urgent. “You know if they go they’ll want you to come. But we need you here if we’re going to manage. Please.”

I stared at her, speechless. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” I said finally.

“Good,” she said. “Good.” She reached out as if to pat my arm, and I edged backward with a vision of her squeezing me the way she had the basket.

That night in the gathering house, an argument between two tables broke into outright yelling. Suzanne banged on her tabletop and got up. The whole room, those arguing and those who’d been watching, fell silent.

“I think we’ve had enough of that,” Suzanne said. “You’ve all had time to think and research and talk. Tomorrow after dinner, anyone who wants to suggest a plan of action can get up and present it,
uninterrupted
, covering all the points they feel they need to. And when everyone who wants to has spoken, we’ll take a vote. Until then, please try to remember that we’re a community, and we all want what’s best even if we disagree on what that is.”

When she sat back down, everyone around me returned to their food and their quieter conversations. My gaze skimmed the room, my fork hovering over my half-finished pasta. I’d been hearing a lot, the last few days, but I hadn’t been keeping track of who’d been saying what. Who was for the whole “community” picking up and leaving, and who was for us all staying here? Who might be in the middle, thinking the group should split apart?

I had no idea how the vote would go. But no matter what Jon had said, tomorrow something was going to be broken.

I was checking the bean plants the next day when it occurred to me that maybe none of what I was doing in that moment mattered. Maybe tonight everyone would decide to go. While I supposed we could bring along a few seedlings, we were hardly going to carry the contents of the greenhouse with us.

“You all right, Tessa?”

Suzanne’s voice tugged me back to the present. I was crouched there, my hands dug into the soil. I had the urge to take off my gloves so I could feel exactly how warm or cool it was, rub the soft grains between my fingers. But I wasn’t sure how long I’d already been hunched there unmoving, for her to have asked that.

“Yeah,” I said, getting up and brushing my hands together. “Just thinking.”

She was pouring water into the channels between the plots, using the buckets I’d filled with snow yesterday and brought inside to melt overnight. If we wanted to avoid using up well water on the plants, we were going to need to find some large trough-like containers to catch rain once the snow was gone.

If we were still here.

I knelt by the lettuce patch to inspect the leaves for bugs. There weren’t many this time of year, but all the major tasks were taken care of. Now that I’d gotten the foundations in place, I could probably write up a daily to-do list and the colony residents could handle everything here on their own. Until summer. It’d get tricky again then, but that was months away.

“You don’t talk much about your folks back home,” Suzanne remarked. She paused, twisting a strand of gray-blond hair back into the clip that held it away from her face. Not bothering to look over, as if it wasn’t a weighted comment.

“I don’t have ‘folks’ back home anymore,” I said. Crunch, a beetle shell under my thumb. “So there isn’t much to talk about.”

She drew in a breath. “You know, when April... When we had to let her go, I couldn’t quite accept it at first. You never think, especially after you’ve seen them grow up, that you’re going to outlive your kids. But it was harder that way. Holding myself back from the full blow. It just hangs over you, waiting.”

“I accept it,” I said.
Crunch. Crunch.
I ripped the edge of a leaf. “I accepted it before I even knew for sure.”

Did she think it was the same? She’d seen April’s body, helped them carry it into the woods, and said a final good-bye. I’d gotten silence from the phone and an empty room. But I’d known. I
knew
.

“I just wonder, the way you keep to yourself, if you’ve given yourself a proper chance to settle in...”

I was on my feet, spinning toward her in the same motion, before I felt the flare of anger inside me. “I’m here,” I snapped. “I wouldn’t
be
here if I thought there was any chance they were out there for me to find. Why can’t this just be the way I am?”

She was looking at me now, hurt and concerned. My skin crawled at the thought of the reassuring words she might try to offer next. I jerked off my gloves.