“You had to,” I whisper back.
But I didn’t. I didn’t have to apply; I didn’t have to leave. None of it was necessary.
“How old are you?” I ask Brennan. My jaw throbs; it hurts to speak, to think, to breathe, to be.
“Thirteen,” he says.
The world rocks, and then he’s in my arms and all I can say is “I’m sorry,” and I’m saying it to him and to my husband and to the child I left to die in a cabin marked with blue. There was blue, I know there was. It wasn’t all blue, but there was some. There was.
Pink cheeks. Mottled arms.
“Everything you said about the sickness was true?” I ask.
Brennan nods in my arms and sniffles. His hair rubs against the open wound throbbing on my chin.
I close my eyes and think of my husband, alone through it all. Worrying, wondering, and then maybe a tickle in his throat or a burble in his stomach. Lethargy like lead weighing him down. I’m sorry, I say again, silently, but with all my heart. I’m sorry I implied that life with you wasn’t enough. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry I left. Even if—even if this was all to come, at least we would have been together.
If the stories Brennan told are true, then the chances of any single individual surviving whatever this was are infinitesimal. For both my husband and me to have been immune is so statistically improbable as to be impossible. I know what’s waiting for me at home, yet here I am begging: please and maybe. The smallest maybe ever, and I know that if I don’t go I will wonder for as long as I continue to exist on this horrid, wiped-clean Earth.
An invasive thought: a cleaning-product commercial showing a microscope view of before and after—kills ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of bacteria. Those few stragglers in the “after” shown only for legal purposes—that’s us, Brennan and me. Residue. From what he said it was only a matter of days before everyone inside the church was dead except for him. At least a hundred people, he said. Extrapolate from there and it’s millions. When did it start, just as we left for Solo? Sometime between then and when I found the cabin four or five days later. Such a short window.
I remember the cameraman who left after the lost-hiker Challenge, too sick to work, and suddenly understand why Wallaby never showed that Solo morning. And I was relieved. I was thankful.
I called the one who left Bumbles. I named him that.
Self-revulsion slams through me.
Did any of them survive? Did Cooper? Heather or Julio? Randy or Ethan or Sofia or Elliot? The sweet young engineer whose name I can’t remember? I need to remember his name, but I can’t.
Brennan shudders in my arms and sorrowful wonder brushes through me: I thought he was a cameraman. I thought—
“I’m sorry about your mother,” I say.
I feel the tacky skin of my chin prickle and tear as the boy pulls away from me. “Why did you act like it wasn’t real?” he asks.
Thirteen. I want to tell him the truth. I want to tell him everything, about the show and the cabin and the love I abandoned for adventure, but it hurts too much. I also don’t want to lie anymore, so I say, “Can you blame me?”
He sniffles a laugh and I think, What a remarkable child.
Soon we’re walking again, slowed by our respective aches and injuries. My right hand is swollen, useless. I can’t move my wrist or fingers. I’m concerned Brennan might have a concussion, but he seems steady and I don’t see anything wrong with his pupils, so I think he’s okay. Unless there are signs I’m not seeing, signs I don’t know to look for.
Eventually he asks, “Have you ever killed someone, Mae?”
I don’t know how to answer because I think the answer is yes but I didn’t mean to and I don’t want to lie anymore but I can’t tell him everything. I can’t speak everything. But he needs an answer because he’s thirteen and he stabbed a man. A man who was going to kill me and likely him too, but even so. I think of the rabid coyote. I still remember seeing gears, but I also remember seeing flesh, like two versions of that day both exist, equally true. And for a second I think, Well, why not—maybe I’m wrong and that was still part of the show. Maybe it didn’t become real until later—but the thought is sour and forced, and I know I’m reaching.
Brennan is waiting for an answer. His puppy eyes watching me.
“Not like that,” I tell him. “But there was someone I think I could have helped, and I didn’t.” My throat is closing; the last word barely escapes.
“Why not?” he asks.
In my memory the mother prop has green eyes I know from mirrors and I don’t know if that’s real, if her eyes were open or closed.
She wasn’t a prop.
“I didn’t know,” I croak, but that’s not right. “It was a baby,” I say, “and I thought…” But I didn’t think, I panicked and ran, and how can I explain something I’m not sure I remember? “I was confused,” I try. “I made a mistake.” Not that that excuses it, excuses anything.
“I don’t regret it,” says Brennan. “I feel like I should, but I don’t. He was going to kill you.”
The soreness at the base of my throat, where Cliff’s arm pressed. Bruising I can feel but not see. Why did he attack me? If this is the world, why would one’s instinct upon meeting another be aggression? Why would—
His hand on my shoulder. I remember his hand. His breath. But that’s all: a stench.
The first blow, was it mine?
“Mae?”
Was he defending himself from me?
He was. He touched me, but he didn’t strike me. I can’t remember his words. I try to clench my fist; a pulse of pain, but my fingers don’t move. Brennan’s guilt, that’s my fault too. But he didn’t know and he can’t know—that I brought it on myself. That he didn’t have to.
“You have nothing to regret,” I tell him.
But I regret everything. All of it.
Their blood, meaningless. Their cries behind us, meaningless. All this death, meaningless. A meaningless observation. There is no why, no because. All there is is is. Systems colliding, wiping out existence, leaving me, an unlucky outlier. Worlds end, and I’m bearing witness.
“Thank you for saving my life,” I tell Brennan. I’m not thankful for it, but he did; he shouldn’t have, but he did. He’s been left behind too, and at least he doesn’t have to be alone, at least I can carry this burden for him—this burden that I caused.
I’m sorry.
We soon cross the bridge, ducking through an E-ZPass lane, and break into an historic tollhouse to spend the night. I know what dreams will come, so I don’t sleep, and I shake Brennan toward wakefulness periodically because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do. He seems more annoyed than grateful, and I take that as a positive sign.
After my fourth time waking Brennan I sneak outside and sit, leaning against the tollhouse beside the door. My clothing is heavy with dried blood; the weight of it pins me to the earth.
“I miss you,” I whisper.
Our children would have been born with blue eyes. But would that blue have turned to green or brown, or surprised us both by staying blue? Hair black or brown or blond, maybe even that beautiful auburn shade your mother wears in pictures from when you were young? No way to know. Roll the dice, have a kid. Cross your fingers that the genes are good. What if. Who knows. Questions become statements in this cowardly new world. Our children will never be. But that loss is nothing, nothing compared to the loss of you.
The door beside me creaks open. I look up and feel the sting of my eyes, the pressure in my chest. I feel myself quaking. The physicality of knowing.