“You know what I meant.”
“Why do people always say that after they say something totally cruel?” Then I said it, because I may have certain issues with self-editing: “I happen to know what it’s like to ‘deal’ with death all by yourself. Just you and nothing else but the big empty of where everything used to be. It would have been nice, really, really nice, to have had someone there with me . . .”
“Hey,” Ben said softly. “Hey, Cassie, I didn’t—”
“No, you didn’t. You really didn’t.” Zombie. Because he didn’t have feelings, dead inside like a zombie? There were people at Ashpit like that. Shufflers, I called them, human-shaped sackfuls of dust. Something irreplaceable had crumbled inside. Too much loss. Too much pain. Shuffling, blank-eyed, slack-jawed mutterers. Was that Ben? Was he a shuffler? Then why did he risk everything to rescue Sam?
“Wherever you were,” Ben said slowly, “we were there, too.”
The words stung. Because they were true and because someone else said practically the same thing to me: You’re not the only one who’s lost everything. That someone else suffered the ultimate loss. All for my sake, the cretin who must be reminded, again, that she’s not the only one. Life is full of little ironies, but it’s also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia.
Time to change the subject. “Did Ringer leave?”
Ben nodded. Stroke, stroke. The bear was bugging me. I tugged it from his arms.
“I tried to send Poundcake with her,” he said. He laughed softly. “Ringer.” I wondered if he was aware of how he said her name. Quietly, like a prayer.
“You know we have no backup plan if she doesn’t come back.”
“She’ll come back,” he said firmly.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because we have no backup plan.” Now an all-out, full smile, and it’s disorienting, seeing the old smile that lit up classrooms and hallways and yellow school buses overlaid on his new face, reshaped by disease and bullets and hunger. Like turning a corner in a strange city and running into someone you know.
“That’s a circular argument,” I pointed out.
“You know, some guys might feel threatened being surrounded by people smarter than they are. But it just makes me more confident.”
He squeezed my arm and limped across the hall to his room. Then it’s the bear and the big kid down the hall and the closed door and me in front of the closed door. I took a deep breath and stepped inside the room. Sat beside the lump of covers. I didn’t see him but knew he was there. He didn’t see me but knew I was there.
“How did he die?” Muffled voice buried.
“He was shot.”
“Did you see?”
“Yes.”
Our father crawling, hands clawing the dirt.
“Who shot him?”
“Vosch.” I closed my eyes. Bad idea. The dark snapped the scene into sharp focus.
“Where were you when he shot him?”
“Hiding.”
I reached to pull down the covers. Then I couldn’t. Wherever you were. In the woods somewhere off an empty highway, a girl zipped herself up in a sleeping bag and watched her father die again and again. Hiding then, hiding now, watching him die again and again.
“Did he fight?”
“Yes, Sam. He fought very hard. He saved my life.”
“But you hid.”
“Yes.” Crushing Bear against my stomach.
“Like a big fat chicken.”
“Not like that,” I whispered. “It wasn’t like that.”
He slung the blankets aside and bolted upright. I didn’t recognize him. I’d never seen this kid before. Face ugly and twisted by rage and hate.
“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to shoot him in the head!”
I smiled. Or tried to, anyway. “Sorry, Sams. I have dibs.”
We looked at each other and time folded in on itself, the time we had lost in blood and the time we had purchased in blood, the time when I was just the bossy big sister and he was the annoying little brother, the time when I was the thing worth living for and he was the thing worth dying for, and then he crumpled into my arms, the bear smushed between us the way we were trapped between the before-time and the after-time.