She didn’t tell August that she’d pictured his death too many times to count. Imagined the duct tape tugging at his T-shirt, the weight of the explosives on his stomach and chest. Why had he said, “Listen!” to the crowd of shoppers? Every day she invented a new sound, a different story, he wanted his victims to hear. Listen.
“It was probably quick,” August said.
“You think?” Frida said.
Before the earthquake, when Dada was still working and Hilda didn’t have to scrounge around for cleaning jobs to keep the family alive, Frida would smoke her joints and bake, and Micah would be in the living room, studying like it was breathing. He’d always been the smart one. No one contested it. Frida could have treated him like a pest, a nerd she’d rather disown than have to talk to, but it had never been like that. “Don’t ask,” she told her friends when they wondered aloud why she didn’t just kick him off the couch so they could chill there. Sometimes they asked if she and Micah were twins, not because they looked alike or seemed close in age, but because they communicated like siblings who had shared a womb: wordlessly, without strife, accustomed to sharing the most limited of spaces.
Frida marveled now at how carefree she had been then. She didn’t have any idea what would happen. The world was already going to shit, but it had been going to shit for countless generations before her. Overpopulation, pollution, drought, disease, oil, terrorism: all of that existed in the background, in the distance. Frida never read the news. She was fifteen and stoned, and it didn’t matter if college wouldn’t be there because she could bake her way to adulthood. She would run a shop or be the head pastry chef at a restaurant, or she would have her own cooking site. The future existed, especially for her.
“Once the bell is rung, you can’t unring it,” Micah had said that night they got drunk in the alley. You can’t go backward was what he meant. But at fifteen she hadn’t understood that—had she even understood it at twenty-four, when Micah died? She actually had thought geniuses were working to repair the world. Stupidity had protected her. The bell had been ringing all that time, and she hadn’t heard it.
Sue brayed, and Frida wondered how long she’d been standing there, staring off into the distance.
“Maybe your brother felt good,” August said. “When he died.”
Frida should have wanted to cry, out of disgust or shock or sadness, but she felt nothing. Bless these drugs, she thought, bless this feeling.
This is what she’d always wanted. A painless life.
4
Cal returned at dusk with four pathetic chanterelles, which looked so much like a dead man’s ears he didn’t want to touch them, let alone eat them. According to Bo, foraging was women’s work, and although Cal enjoyed the intensity of the process—the rooting around in soil, the animalistic obsession of it, his brain instructing him to seek, seek, seek—he thought maybe Bo was right. In the year and a half they’d known the Millers, Frida had become an expert at foraging. Under Sandy’s tutelage, his wife could spot fungi and berries where Cal saw nothing but trees and brush, and though he would never admit it, he found joining her on a foraging trip frustrating. Nobody likes to feel useless. On their most recent expedition, they had returned home with her bag nearly bursting, his nearly empty, and she had said, “It’s okay. You were my arm candy.” He had scowled when she’d said it, but tonight that kind of teasing would be a relief. Even though there had been no more arguing, the tension remained, and Cal wasn’t sure how to shrug it off.
The solar torches lit his path to the house. By sunset each day, one of them was supposed to bring a couple of torches inside, to illuminate the room. Without them, there would be nothing but blackness. Frida must have forgotten to do it. Don’t worry, he told himself. She had not fainted or been kidnapped. She had not been mauled by a bear or stung by some deadly mosquito. She was safe inside. She was just flaky. Always had been.
As he got closer, he saw that the front door was open to let in the last light and some air. And him, he supposed. Was that a sign that she’d forgiven him? Or that she had forgotten about him all together? The door was a mouth, and if he passed through it, he would fall into the dark throat of night. He shivered. Once the sun went down, he could easily imagine an evil out here. A stranger could come after them, a Pirate in search of food, tools, blood. Or a coyote might step through their open door, tongue out, eyes squinted. They weren’t safe, not ever. He hated to think that way, but it was the truth.
He yanked two torches from the ground and made his way forward. He wished he had his gun, but he’d left it behind for Frida.