“Actually, I’ve seen several bodies. Three men. A woman in a car. My husband.” I paused to think if that was all. “A neighbor. A dog.” Lola winced at the last one, as though it were the final nail in the coffin. “But I didn’t touch them and if I’d been infected by those bodies yesterday, I’d be dead by now. We all would. I don’t know how this works, but I do know we survived because we were shut away in the forest. So I just want to get the kids back there, because we don’t know who’s infected and who’s not.”
Joni grabbed a gobbet of hair and started sucking on it. “You know how people always say they live day to day? Take it one day at a time? That’s what we’re going to do.” She spat out the hair and looked over to the copse again. “If we’re not dead because we were isolated, then maybe that kid was, too.”
“So why’s he on his own? Where are the parents?” I asked. Not giving them a moment to jump in, I carried on. “Dead, that’s where they are. Which means he’s been exposed and he’s not coming with us.”
“Shh,” said Lola, “he’ll hear you.” We turned to see a little Asian boy, holding a gray blanket, peering down at us between the bars of the barrier on the bridge. We all stared at him, until Lola gave a finger wave. The boy raised his gray blanket and waved it back.
“So,” said Joni, hands on hips, up on her toes to look down at me, “are you going to drive away and leave him there?”
“I’m thinking of all of us.”
In fact, I was thinking for all of us. I turned away from the child, back toward my own kids in the car. Billy had stopped “driving” and was staring up at the boy on the bridge. Charlie’s face was also pressed up against the glass, alongside Peter’s, both looking as stunned as the blowfish woman back in the village. I really wished the kids hadn’t seen the lost boy—I could cope with Joni and Lola thinking I was broken, but not my kids.
“I say he could have been exposed, and I’m not risking my kids’ lives,” I said.
But Lola was already marching toward the bridge. “And I say he’s just a little kid, and we’re taking him.”
Joni gave a shrug and jogged after her.
I let them go.
When I opened the door to get Billy and the others out of the car, the din drowned out any voices from the bridge. I explained that the child was lost and would come with us for now. By the time I installed the four of them in the Beast, Joni was coming back across the carriageway with the boy following a few paces behind. I got up into the driver’s seat and closed the door. Now that he was close, I could see that he was six or seven, about Maggie’s age, wearing supermarket pajamas and plastic shoes. A big leaf that had stuck to one sole scraped against the road with every other step, giving the effect of a pitiful limp. His lips were grayish and cracked. I opened the window just enough to throw a water bottle to Joni, who caught it and crouched down to help the boy drink. He choked and coughed, spittle flying everywhere, but got some down. Joni offered the bottle back to me.
“Don’t want it back.”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s just dehydrated.”
“Maybe. You can take him in your car,” I said, “the kids are coming with me. What’s his name?”
“He doesn’t want to speak yet,” said Joni.
“Must be traumatized,” I added in a whisper, “from watching his parents die.”
Joni shushed me, but the boy was totally zoned out. “If he survived, then he’s immune.”
“Could be a carrier.” I started my engine. “Anyway, you’ll soon find out after being cooped up together in the car. I assume Lola’s riding with me?”
Behind us, Lola hauled open the back door of the other car and started shifting the detritus left behind by my kids, making room for herself and the boy. “I’ll sit in the back with him,” she called out.
“Really?” I said to Joni. “Like a canary down a mine shaft?” She gawped at me as I put the car into drive and rolled forward onto the carriageway.
“When did you get so hard, Marlene?” she said.
Hard. I slipped the car into reverse and backed up. How to explain to Joni the gradual process of my hardening. How it builds up without you noticing, like lime scale. How you steel yourself to sit rigid on the plane that might crash and leave your children motherless. How the long-distance phone calls make them cry, so you stop calling. Or should I tell her instead how I paid the mortgage each month for ten years? How I provided—provided everything—even a team of babysitters once Julian reneged entirely on his side of the parenting deal. How I did it because I never had a choice. All these much-celebrated choices that we have, apparently, us modern women. There are no choices, only higher expectations.
Except that now, sitting in the Beast with my kids, on the side of an empty motorway, I did have a choice. If I had to be hard, I would be hard for all of us. I would choose for all of us to survive.
“People aren’t hard, Joni,” I said. “But decisions are. It’s up to you, it’s your call.”
“Wait,” Joni said as she started off along the hard shoulder toward Lola. After several minutes of rapid hand gestures, Lola high-stepped over to my passenger door and managed to slide in without ever unfolding her arms.
Chapter Seven
In hindsight, I probably should have consulted my lists. I sat on the empty cooler, poking at the fire with a long stick. But there was nothing to cook. And nothing to drink except water. The kids sat on logs on the far side of the clearing, eating salt ’n’ vinegar crisps in a steadfast rhythm, licking their fingers down to the knuckles to get the last few crumbs. They were hushed and dopey, humbled by hunger.
At my insistence, the kids kept their distance from the Lost Boy, but Maggie still subjected him to a stream of information about the camp and our life here. Joni had him out of his filthy pajamas and into some of Charlie’s clean clothes and, even with the trouser legs rolled up twice, the family uniform of head-to-toe Boden meant he looked the part. He remained mute, wide eyes taking everything in, while he dabbed every last speck of salt off the foil of his crisp packet and sucked crumbs from his chapped lips. The boy was hungry. How many days had he been alone? I cut up our last apple into a bowl for him. Maggie never stopped talking while he ate.
I watched them while I pondered a fact that had been pushed to the wayside while we were busy disagreeing over what to do with the Lost Boy: his presence meant there were definitely other survivors.
“Did you bring medication?” Joni was stamping to and fro between the cars and the camp, dragging back to the tents all the stuff we’d hauled the other way only that morning.
“A few bits.”
“Disinfectant?”
“No.”
“What about food?” Lola chimed in.
“Nope.”
“You were supposed to be getting supplies.”
“There was a dead bloke in the kitchen.”