I was desperate for sleep, weepingly tired, but my legs twitched me awake again and again. Random spots on my body pricked with itches that I slapped at like mosquitoes. Every time I rolled over, the air mattress made a noise like I felt. In the end, I grabbed a blanket and left the yurt before I woke everyone up. I looked over to my own tent, but the silence left behind by the dead boy echoed in the negative space. So much for the trail of ashes. His ghost rode my wake. I walked the opposite way, past the latrine and through the trees to where his grave lay, a black mound on the flat landscape of the field.
I stepped out from under the tree canopy like quarry, checking around with twitchy-rabbit glances. The light from the stars messed up my perception, so that I stumbled over the grave, surprised by its real contours when they rose from the depthless backdrop.
“Sorry,” I whispered. I hunkered down next to the freshly turned soil. The clods of mud were claggy in my fingers. Nothing could grow in this suffocating earth. It was no place for a young boy. “I’ll stay with you,” I whispered. “The first night is always the hardest.” I unrolled my blanket next to the grave and lay down. There were so many stars, it seemed their combined weight had pushed the sky lower. I reached up a hand to the Milky Way, which arched across the sky like an exploding rainbow, thinking I might actually touch it. And that was how I lay for a long time, one hand on the grave and the other on the sky.
Then there were footsteps in the grass.
“Are you sleeping out here?” Joni was incredulous. She stood over me for a moment, looked up, then sat cross-legged at my feet. She released a husky moan, like someone’s last breath after a long fight.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral,” I said. “Couldn’t face it.”
“It was awful. The kids got ornery, so I sent them away. By the end, it was just me and Peter.”
More deadened footsteps, and Horatio arrived. He sniffed at the grass with some disdain, turned a couple of circles, and managed to squeeze most of his bulk onto my legs. His body swelled and deflated as he let out an enormous put-upon sigh, and then we were still again.
“Do the stars make you feel safe?” Joni said. “Like nothing bad could happen under their watch?”
“More like detached. If someone came up and throttled me now—it doesn’t matter, does it, in the scheme of things?”
“That’s horseshit. It’s never mattered more.” Joni’s voice was tight. “You know how people say they would die for their kids? I never got that. What good are we dead? What’s hard is living for your kids. We only matter because we matter to them. It’s doubly true now.”
We both fell silent until Joni spotted a satellite. We watched it like two shipwrecked sailors on the shore, catching sight of a boat on the horizon. I had an urge to wave my arms and shout. But the satellite wasn’t even life. Just another relic moving through space on autopilot. Like us.
“It’s hard to imagine there are people out there,” said Joni.
“So many stars. There must be life on other planets.”
“Not aliens. I mean here. On Earth. It’s hard to imagine there are people out there—and the fuckers have quarantined us on this shitty island. Are they just carrying on? Eating and drinking and going to the movies, while we’re fricking dying? Who’s in charge anyway? Like Europe? NATO?”
“Wish I knew. We need to get a shortwave radio somehow.” I shoved Horatio aside so I could sit up, and he trudged back to the comfort of the camp. “Maybe it’s bedlam out there, who knows? Even if we’ve got the worst of it, like the hermit said—if we’re at the epicenter, in the eye of the storm or whatever—it must have spread to other countries to a degree. Maybe there’s proper apocalypse stuff going on—looting, fighting, killing each other for a loaf of bread.”
“But David is out there somewhere.” Her throat was thick. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
“Wednesday.” I looked at my watch. “Almost Thursday.” In the past few days, I’d not thought much about David or the fact that Joni had had no news of him. Any grief I had for Julian was so tied up in a rat’s nest of him leaving me and the plague and his affair that it was too tangled to unravel. I had simply laid it aside to pick at later. I was good at prioritizing.
“Or maybe they’re fine,” I said. “Maybe they’re still going to work, to school, to the movies. And we’re just another slot on the evening news.”
Joni cried for a long time without a word of explanation or apology. I kind of envied her that.
While Joni cried, I thought about my mother. Deep in my pocket, I still carried her jade brooch. The stars led me back to a safari when I’d been about Charlie’s age. One night, the nurse woke me and took me outside to see the sky. The air was filled with stars and also laughter from the bar: an equal source of wonder. But my mother spotted us and escorted me to bed. She stalked away through the savannah to the party without spilling a drop from her champagne flute. I’d cried because her dress was getting snagged in the red grass. Why did she never look after her beautiful things?
I told Joni the story once she calmed down.
“Did you love your mother?” she asked.
“She was perfect,” I said. “Of course I loved her.”
High clouds unfurled a veil across the stars, as though our time were up. The jade brooch dug into my hip when I got to my feet.
“I think we should leave,” I said, as we headed to the camp to get warm.
“We need to find Lola first.”
“Of course, no question. The Hoar Wood surrounds the hill fort: it’s not that big. We’ll go back again tomorrow. Keep looking until we find her. Then get out of here.”
“I drove all around it earlier. Ran up to the summit, even. Shit.” Joni stopped to unhook her trousers where they’d snagged on a thorn bush. She fiddled and swore in the dark.
“They could be holding her inside the wood—” I said.
“Holding her? Is that what the hermit guy said?”
“No, I told you, he just said he’d seen her at a boys’ camp. But why would she stay away?”
“She’s pissed at us. Both of us. Fricking thing, get off me!” Joni pulled her trousers from the thorns, and there was an inauspicious rip.
“You all right?” I could see only her hunched shape in the darkness.
“Awesome. My kid’s missing and my ass is hanging out.”
The Lady Lola had never struck me as a rebel. A bit enigmatic, perhaps—the Mona Lisa in Doc Martens—but she was no hothead, not the type to sniff glue or come home pregnant. Or run away and scare the bejesus out of her mother. And she had been so intent on finding Billy, her cousin. But I also had no idea if teenage girls’ tantrums lasted for two hours or two weeks. And, of course, it was comforting for Joni to hold on to the idea that she had chosen to stay away.
“I’m going out again now,” Joni said. “She must be somewhere. Maybe I missed some roads—”