Todd (23 page)

Part of him is terrified that Todd
will hear and come to find him, but part of him hopes he does, because as
fucking pathetic as it is he could use a goddamn
hug
right now and Todd
is literally the only other being in the universe that can give him one. But
none of it matters. Todd doesn't hear, or he hears and doesn't come. No one
comes, because there is no one.

There is only him.

87

His grief pours out of him. His
outrage and his incredible, powerful loneliness leak out in babbling moans and
tears and snot. In the end, he is left a shivering wreck on the floor of an
empty kitchen in Bumfuck, Iowa.

Except that's not the end.
Eventually, he still has to climb back to his feet, where he finds that nothing
has changed.

He wipes his face, wincing at the
burn in his frostbitten cheeks, and returns to the dining room. Todd has
harvested a stack of the shitty road-trip books and is working through them
with the diligence of a 13th-century scribe.

As if his father never left the
room, he says, "The more you have of it the less you see. What is
it?" He's grinning with the suspense of it all, but the contrast of his
adorable front teeth with the mottled damage to his cheeks makes Alan wince and
turn away.

"I'm going out for a little
bit," Alan says, as if this were a reasonable thing to say.

"Oh!" Todd starts to get
up, and Alan stops him.

"You,
" he says,
"stay here. I'm serious. You need to stay off that foot and let it
heal."

"It's feeling better."

"Bullshit. I saw you hobbling
around earlier." He snaps off another chair leg, adds it to the fire, and
starts digging through the customers' clothes for car keys. He saw a huge Ford
pickup in the parking lot earlier and is hoping to drive it out of here.

Todd has no answer. He sits back,
apprehension heavy in his face. "You're gonna leave me here?"

"I'm not gonna
leave you
here
.
Jesus, Todd, you make it sound like I'm never coming back."

"It doesn't hurt that bad! I
can walk."

"No!" Alan snaps.
"Sit down! God dammit, you need to rest your fucking foot! Do you want it
to heal crooked? You want it to slide out sideways every time you try to
fucking walk?"

Todd snaps his mouth closed. Panic
and old pain burn in his eyes.

"Look. I need to see what the
area looks like. I need to see if there's a grocery store, or a gas station,
or—" He finds the Ford keys, slides them into his pocket. "And you
can't
walk
. Okay? I am a shitty parent if I let you hobble out of here. Stay
here, stay warm." He points at the stack of books. "You have plenty
to do. If I'm not back before the fire gets low, just break off a chair leg and
toss it in there."

Alan puts on his hat and gloves.
Todd mumbles, "All right."

"You'll be fine," Alan
says, and walks out.

88

The Ford starts right away. By
some cosmic miracle, it has a full tank of gas. It rolls over the snow in the
parking lot easily, but the back's not weighted down at all, so Alan keeps the
speed low. The memory of his vehicle going into a fishtail haunts him as he
pulls onto the street.

He was wrong earlier. The snow on
the road has not formed a perfect plain. There is a slight dimpling down the
middle of the oncoming lane, a path that runs all the way back to the 35
overpass. He thinks of an old Christian poem as he follows it:
Where there's
one set of footprints, I carried you.

He takes a deep breath. The vise
in his chest loosens just a little.

The suitcase is nearly a mile up
the road. He jumps out and hauls it into the cabin. Everything is there—the
first aid kit, the siphon pump—but taken together it is more than that. It's a
hand on the rudder, a tiny piece of control. He draws another shuddering
breath, slowly coming back to himself.

It is ironic,
he thinks,
that
even when we're the only two people left on the planet, I need space from my
kid to avoid throttling him.

He hadn't planned on going any
farther, but it felt so good to recover the suitcase that now he wants to push
on. Staying gentle on the accelerator, he rolls up the exit ramp and follows
the highway back to the crash site.

The eyepiece for the telescope is
broken, but everything else has survived, including—especially?—his pills. He
pops one immediately, right there in the snow. Then he rounds everything up and
stuffs it into the truck's passenger seat, even going so far as to dig through the
debris in the front seat for Todd's 3DS, and the sack of extra batteries.

Look at that,
he tells
himself on the drive back.
Practically no harm, no foul.
Despite the
snow, despite the accident, they have a vehicle and almost all of their things.

The very notion that this would
lift his spirits is asinine. They are still trapped in the exact winter
scenario he was so keen to avoid, homeless and alone. He's caught a break,
that's all. But the psyche is weird that way. Every little bit helps.

He rolls into the Jericho Diner
parking lot feeling like a goddamned sultan, parks just outside the door, and
goes in. For once, he finds Todd where he left him. The look of crushing relief
on the boy's tear-stained face washes Alan in guilt. His son has obviously been
crying, but a shitty, vindictive part of Alan feels like ignoring this fact
simply makes them even.

"Darkness," Alan says.

Todd blinks, wipes his nose on his
sleeve. "What?"

"'The more you have of it,
the less you see.'" He crosses to the boy and hugs him, kisses his head.
"Right?"

Todd sniffles. He is stiff at
first, but he caves fast and hugs his dad back. "Yeah."

"Tell me another one."

89

They have real bedding tonight,
from home. They don't need all the tablecloths. Alan throws the extras into a
pile, and the two of them sleep like kings.

He wakes to the roar of the dining
room burning.

The pile of tablecloths, only feet
away from him, has become a fountain of flame. Two tables are engulfed, and the
fire is slithering toward Alan and his son like a viper.

Alan jerks Todd backward,
screaming. "Get up! Fire! Get up!"

The boy starts awake and scrambles
to his feet as Alan shoves him toward the kitchen. "Get out! Get out the
back!"

Todd starts to obey, limping for
the kitchen door, then stops and turns back when he sees Alan's not following.
"What are you doing?" he screams. "Come on!"

Alan's eyes dart across the fire.
He left the siphon in the truck, but everything else was in the suitcase—which
he brought in with him, and is now burning. He has an instant of wild bravado
in which he fantasizes about grabbing the extinguisher in the kitchen and
putting out the fire. But it's already spread too far; as he watches, it leaps
into the window curtains, devouring them from the bottom up.

There is a wild scream in his
head, a disbelieving shriek.
GOD DAMMIT!
He is frozen in place,
wondering once again if it simply makes more sense to just die.

"The activity books!"
The ragged cry is Todd's, a gruesome echo of the one in Alan's head. "No!
The books!" And he actually tries for them—tries to limp past his father
and into the fire, willing to die for them. When Alan hauls him backward he
fights,
kicking and flailing, regressed to a toddler throwing a tantrum.

"No, Todd!" The boy's
thrashing skull clips Alan's temple, and the room explodes with stars.
"Todd!
God damn it!
" He drags him through the kitchen, where
his son smashes a row of glasses and sends a frying pan thundering to the
floor.

"No!" the boy screams.
"
No! No!
"

"Todd! You will fucking
die
in there!
"

"
Nooo!"

Out through the emergency exit,
into the cold and the Blurs. Already the windows are livid with flames, burning
like the world's last lighthouse. He drags his boy through the snow, around the
building to the truck, and stuffs him in the passenger seat.

The keys—
ah Christ, oh thank
the gods
—are in the ignition where he left them. The engine roars to life;
the headlights leap over the snow. He pulls away from the Jericho Diner at ten
miles per hour, as Todd bangs on the windows and sobs.

90

He can't stop. Can't idle to watch
the diner burn, or try to sleep through the night. They have one tank of gas.
They have to find shelter before it runs out.

But he can't go on, either. He
could barely make out the edge of the road in broad daylight. In the dark, he's
certain to wander into the ditch.

So he creeps forward, flogged on
both sides by indecision. Ahead of him yawns a dark, infinite road into the Iowa heartland.
Somewhere along it, there will be a house—but if it's not heated, does it even
count? Does he follow the road, hoping to hit a place with a proper
wood-burning stove? Or turn on to 35, and continue south at 15 miles an hour?

"I wanted my books,"
Todd mutters. The sobbing and screaming has finally stopped; now his voice
drips with petulance. "You should've let me get them. Mom would've let
me."

Alan scoffs despite himself.
"Let you run into a fire? No." Somewhere in the darkness ahead the
freeway entrance is drawing slowly closer, and he doesn't know what he'll do
when he reaches it. "You would have
died,
Todd."

The boy's face is plastered to his
window, as far from his father as he can get it. Alan almost doesn't hear him
murmur, "So?"

That single syllable hurts more
than the day-old frostbite on Alan's face. It hurts like finding Brenda's empty
clothes, like watching his dreams fall to ash. "Don't say that." The
desperation in his voice surprises him. "Please."

"Why?"

Alan wants to launch into a list of
reasons to live, to turn his son's thoughts around, but he doesn't have them.
Even now, even here, he is failing as a father one final time.
Reasons to
live? Sorry, son, I'm fresh out.
"Because that's not you." He
reaches over and squeezes Todd's shoulder. The boy flinches, but doesn't pull
away. "I know you. That's not you."

Ahead, the freeway entrance
finally crawls into the Ford's high beams. The moment of truth approaches.

"Besides. We can get more
activity books. The world is your oyster, man. It's all yours. We'll find new
ones."

"Yeah, and they'll burn
too."

It's fatalism worthy of a Goth kid
twice Todd's age, and it punches Alan in the stomach. He knew it would come one
day, but he isn't ready for it, and it's
his fault
more than Todd's.
Depression runs in their blood; how could the kid possibly resist its pull,
spending month after dragging month with his impossible downer of a father?

But Todd's hands have found a pair
of paperclips in the coin tray, and started to play. They haven't gotten the message
that nothing matters anymore; they are too busy transforming these objects into
straight lines, then geometric shapes, then letters. When one of the paperclips
snaps, his hands discard it and grab a new one from the tray. "Is this my
suitcase?" Todd asks, noticing the luggage on the floor for the first
time.

"Yeah. But—I brought your 3DS
into the restaurant. It's not in there." He winces, wondering if this was
really the time to break that news. "I'm sorry. Your clothes and whatever
else you packed should still be in there. I didn't mess with it at all."

"Okay." Weirdly, this
seems to comfort the boy a little, and Alan tries to remember what Todd packed
that could possibly be capable of cheering him up. When Todd murmurs,
"Thank you," Alan wonders for a moment if he's hearing things.

Then they're at the entrance to
35, and he rolls the Ford to a stop, thinking.

They need a running car in order
to stay warm and keep heading south. But there won't be any gassed cars on the
highway. So they have to stay off the highway to find a new car when they need
one.

But they have a car with a full
gas tank right now. It makes more sense to get on the highway and start heading
south, even crawling through the snow in the dark, while they still have this
gas to work with.

But the highway is dangerous. It
involves long stretches between towns, where there is no food or other shelter.

But they can't just stay where
they are. If they get snowed in and can no longer drive, they will die.

All right. You're going in circles.
He grabs the tail of his own thoughts, and yanks it to a halt. There is no
reason to risk the roads if they can help it. If he had a guarantee that they
could find a woodstove in a house somewhere and wait the winter out, the
decision would be easy. But he doesn't have that guarantee.

He tries to get creative, starts
thinking about somehow getting the heat from the truck into a house, and that's
when he remembers the RV lot they passed yesterday morning.

"Why are we stopped?"
Todd asks. "Where are we going?" The paperclips in his hands are
joined together now. A pair of long ears, a squat head, two round eyes: a bunny
face.

"Somewhere with heat,"
Alan says, and pulls onto the black highway, heading back to the north.

The biggest risk with the plan is the
possibility that he misses the RV lot in the dark, or freaks out before they
reach it and turns around early, so he tries to remember exactly how far past
it they were when they crashed. Twenty minutes, at maybe 75 miles per hour? His
brain grinds on the simple math, nerves and sheer exhaustion gumming up the
works. 15 miles or so? 18? Since he doesn't have a clock, he checks the
odometer.

"Hey, try to remember this
number: 67,248."

Todd cracks the glove box, finds a
pen, and writes the number down.