He never did know what to say to her, drunk or sober. Not once she started to look like a woman and ask questions and push back.
She makes it safely out of the neighborhood without anything horrible happening, which is a goddamn miracle. She realizes she’s been holding her breath for at least a minute, just like she used to do as a little girl running from her room to the bathroom at night in the dark, praying a monster wouldn’t leap out of the linen closet and eat her.
Back on the road, she feels like she’s restarting a videogame level. Last night she was right here, on this road, trying to find someplace that might feel safe and feeling utterly alone and at sea.
Here she is again, same thing—but now she knows she’s got the Violence.
Probably from the mosquitoes she let in when she opened the windows to air out the house. Or, if it takes longer for the disease to develop, from sitting outside by the pool at Nana’s with Brooklyn.
It’s strange—she doesn’t feel any different.
At all.
Physically, that is. No fever, no achiness, just the headache, which is pretty normal without her allergy medicine and which will soon be driven away by the acetaminophen. She’ll have to stop at a pharmacy and spend ten precious dollars on allergy spray if she doesn’t want to feel like her head is full of wet cotton until next December. It’s weird that she could have the virus that’s currently sweeping the warmer parts of the world, destroying local economies and spreading trauma and fear with random murders, and yet she feels…exactly the same.
She stops at her least favorite red light and glances at Big Fred’s Floors. There’s a dog licking the spot where the body was, some kind of pit bull mix.
And she’s deep enough in that all she can think is that she wishes the poor dog had a real meal, as she can see his ribs from here. She’s glad someone finally took the body away—Big Fred must not’ve had any loved ones, or maybe his loved ones were too scared to go looking for him. The way things are now, people just disappear. They hide so they won’t hurt anyone, they hide so no one will know they’ve hurt someone, they hide because anyone could kill anyone at any moment. There are no funerals. She even received a spam email about how easy and cheap it is to start a crematory business on credit.
She shivers.
It’s just hit her that she killed someone and left a body to rot in an empty house, and that whoever opens that door next will find something much more horrifying than a bowl of melted bananas.
The light turned green at some point when she was staring at Big Fred’s mess, and she turns onto the main road and realizes she has nowhere to go. Home? Nope. Dad’s there. Nana’s house? Nope. Not only because she’s not on the list, but because now that she has the Violence, she can’t be near Brooklyn. She doesn’t have any super-close friends, and she knows Olivia and Sophie are hundreds of miles away. Hayden keeps texting her, but she hasn’t read the texts, and he’s the last person on earth she would follow behind a locking door. She almost wishes her Martin grandparents were still alive, but Grandma Becky thought her son was the most perfect man on the planet and would’ve just called Dad on her, anyway.
She needs to find Mom and get Brooklyn back, but she has no fucking clue how to do it.
A drugstore appears up ahead, and she turns in to the lot, grateful that this, at least, is something she can do. She can get a cold drink and a new bottle of allergy meds and know, for at least a few moments, that she’s accomplishing some small task. Thank you, Mrs. Reilly, for your humble stash of cash.
At the door, she’s greeted by a gawky guy in his late teens wearing a navy-blue shirt that says SECURITY. He’s got a gun on his hip and something else—a Taser, maybe?—in hand. He smiles awkwardly and nods, then clasps his hands in front like he’s in the FBI. That’s a fun new thing in the age of the Violence—minimum-wage jobs that give you a gun and an excuse to shoot anyone who looks like they’re vaguely threatening. She hurries inside, hoping he won’t try to start a conversation that might lead to him getting mad at her for rejecting his advances.
Before she shops, she hits the restroom, realizing that she’s been about to pee herself all this time. If she’s going to live out of her car, she’s going to need toilet paper, but does she bury it or what? Or should she use the restroom at McDonald’s? She can’t do that five times a day. But she doesn’t want to get dehydrated. Even the most basic things have suddenly become insurmountable.
If only Dad hadn’t found her. She could’ve camped out at Mrs. Reilly’s until she found her mom.
But wait.
Mrs. Reilly wasn’t her only petsitting client. Her phone contacts are full of families in the area with kids or cats that she’s watched. She just has to figure out which houses are empty.
Buzzing with hope, Ella buys the drugstore-brand nasal spray and a giant bottle of water and heads back out to her car, zipping past the security boy before he can make some terrible joke about how she would be prettier if she smiled, or how glad he is that she’s not wearing a Covid mask, or how maybe he needs to pat her down, or whatever. She locks the car doors and scrolls through her phone until she gets to a likely option.
Just checking in. Do you need someone to feed your cats?
She sends the texts to the Canons and the Zelinskys, both of whom live in her neighborhood but far enough away from her own house that her dad would have no reason to know they exist.
No, we’re home, thanks! the Canons text back with a smiley face.
The Zelinskys don’t text anything at all.
She sends the same message to Mr. Reese and Mrs. Hunt.
Took cat with me, thanks, Mr. Reese texts back.
And nothing from Mrs. Hunt.
What happens next won’t be comfortable. Ella is an introvert. She keeps to herself. She doesn’t want trouble. She remembers how much she hated selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door when she was tiny, even hated having to stand in front of Publix and ask shoppers to buy cookies that—let’s face it—pretty much sell themselves. But she’s going to do it anyway, because a little bit of embarrassment is better than living on the street in a Miata during a pandemic. She thinks about what she’ll say as she drives.
The dog that was licking the spot where Big Fred was is gone, but there are tons of vultures there, black and hopping around excitedly. Ella misses the dog.