The Garden of Darkness

“I found a can of Dinty Moore,” said Roger from the kitchen.

“Thanks,” said Trey. “There’s still not enough snow on the road to get out of here.” No need to speak. The silence was long. Then—

“We could ski,” said Roger.

Trey walked into the kitchen, disconcerted.

“What about supplies?” asked Trey. “And wood? And sleeping bags and a tent? We can’t just waltz down to Denver.”

“Maybe we can.”

“I’m the big brother. And I say we can’t.”

But they both knew that Trey, as always, would give way to Roger.

The first day they skied for six hours until the dark was on them, and they took shelter in an old lean-to that, at some point, had probably sheltered a horse. They doubled the sleeping bags and shared the warmth. Trey’s cold was worse, and by midnight he started in with chills and fever.

“We’ve got to get off the mountain,” said Roger. He had his arm around his brother, trying to stop him from shaking with cold.

They didn’t ski far the next day. One moment they were careening down a steep hill, the next, Trey took a spectacular fall and lay shivering in the snow. His arm was broken; a tip of the bone poked through the skin.

Roger wrapped up the arm while Trey lay in a delirium of fever and pain.

“I can’t move,” said Trey.

“You can,” said Roger. Roger half-dragged, half-walked his twin to a stand of pines that offered a little shelter. He put down sprays of fir to keep the sleeping bags off the ground.

Sometime in the night, Trey died.

Roger held Trey as Trey grew cold. The chill wind was coming in off the mountain. Roger decided to stay with Trey until sunrise, but when the sun had cleared the trees, Roger still hadn’t left the sleeping bag. He was cold. The wind was bitter now. He was very cold.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN





THE LEAVING





DARK NIGHTS, AND a little snow. Winter coming. Time to move on. They were eating the last of the cans of Chef Boyardee that Clare had scavenged what seemed like years before. Nobody minded the idea of leaving anymore: Darian had poisoned the house, the meadow.

Still, inertia reigned. Finally Jem, with Clare’s help, gathered all the backpacks and little wagons in the living room. But the packing effort was, at least at first, wildly unsuccessful. Sarai kept trying to hide a great heap of her books in her little pack. Jem would find them and fish some of them out. While Sarai took this like a stoic, Mirri became weepy when she found she couldn’t take all of her Pretty Ponies and her Breyer horses and her unicorns. She wanted her whole collection.

“We have too much stuff holding us back as it is,” said Jem reasonably.

“I love my stuff,” said Mirri.

Clare watched the negotiations with Mirri and Sarai from a distance. They were still, when it came right down to it, Jem’s little girls. Clare stared at the flames in the fireplace, and in the fire she saw one of her old dreams unfolding. She saw a young girl walking towards her out of the woods.

“Do you think there’ll be a happy ending?” Mirri asked abruptly, startling Clare out of her reverie.

They all looked at Mirri.

“A happy ending to what?” asked Jem.

“To us.”

“I don’t know,” said Clare, still feeling half asleep. “I don’t even know what a happy ending would look like.”

“Maybe this is it,” said Sarai.

“We should finish packing,” said Jem.

“We could just leave right now,” said Clare. “If we had to.”

“In an emergency,” said Mirri, “we could leave yesterday.”

Clare looked over at their handiwork. The wagons were full, but they hadn’t loaded the packs, which were propped on the floor with open mouths.

They all took a break, and the break turned into a leisurely afternoon. Clare and Jem, both daunted by the idea of leaving, prepared for dinner. They picked weevils out of the flour so that they could make dumplings and float them in canned chicken broth. Jem began opening a jam jar so that they could each have a spoonful for dessert; he banged it against the floor to loosen the lid.

Clare thought of Michael. She wasn’t sure anymore how he would have adapted to the post-Pest world.

Jem stopped trying to open the jam jar, and he stood up. He was as tall as Clare now. He would be fourteen soon.

“You know,” said Clare thoughtfully, looking him over. “We might have been friends in high school, if I had known you.”

“You? A cheerleader? I don’t think so.”

“Maybe not,” Clare said. She thought for a moment. “My world was pretty small then. Cheerleader by day. Insomniac reader by night.”

“You sleep now.”

“Now it’s safe.”

Jem did not point out the absurdity of this. Instead he said, “You wouldn’t have noticed a ninth grader.”

“Well. You weren’t invisible.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“And now my cheerleader glamour is gone.”

“Naw.”

They smiled at each other.