The yards were overrun, choked with weeds and wildflowers in red and yellow and blue. Honeysuckle spilled out onto sidewalks, filling the air with a sweetness so syrupy it smelled like rot. I pictured Mom in her sun hat and gloves, gardening manual in hand, ordering the two of us around that first year in Black River. Cut this! Water that! Ferti-lize over here! She’d spent weeks making fun of our yard-obsessed neighbors, but there we were, beating back the sprawl of weeds to make room for roses and lavender and that yellow spidery thing that nearly took over the entire lawn. After years of living in Brooklyn, it seemed that having soil under our feet instead of grease-shellacked concrete had made Mom deranged. What would she think if she knew how useless all of it had been?
I turned down streets at random, following some internal compass with a needle that spun and spun. Soon the sounds of the park were gone, replaced by wind blowing through untended grass and down empty streets. I passed our high school and the library and the now abandoned vintage store where Mom used to go.
I knew I couldn’t blame the infected for not remembering. But how many times had I seen lightning flashes of the person Greer used to be? Like when some random guardsman was giving him a hassle and he’d clench his fists and grit his teeth. For a second he was that kid from the bus stop all over again. Didn’t there have to be places like that within all the infected? Like knots in a length of wood that could be sanded down but never erased completely. And if there were, how was it possible that I wasn’t one of those places for Mom?
As I came around a corner, a crow shot out of a tree with a shriek. Startled, I jumped back. That’s when I realized I was standing on our front lawn.
I hadn’t been back to the house since the sixteenth. It had almost entirely escaped the chaos that raged through town that night. A few soot marks marred the white porch columns, and the attic window was broken, but other than that, it was unchanged.
A bank of clouds passed over the sun, sending a pins-and-needles chill up my spine. I scanned the yards around me and peered down the gaps between the houses across the street. They were empty. I was alone.
A voice in the back of my head, yours, told me to turn around and leave, but I didn’t—couldn’t, it felt like. It was as if I’d wandered into a stream and the current was dragging me along. I placed one foot on the bottom step and took hold of the railing, then climbed up to the porch. The floor seemed like it was moving beneath me in rounded swells. I steadied myself by staring at the end of a single brass nail hammered into the door, the one Mom used to hang Christmas wreaths and Halloween skeletons. I heard her singing “The Little Drummer Boy.”
I staggered backward. Something brushed against my leg. I looked down and was surprised to see that I was clutching the hunting knife. I didn’t remember pulling it out of its sheath, but there was something about that slab of metal in my hand, with its jagged rat’s teeth and cutting edge, that made the pitching feel of the floor beneath me go still. I moved down to the kitchen windows. I told myself not to look inside, but even as the thought went through my head, I was lifting my hand to wipe the dust away from the glass.
I could make out the edge of the coffeemaker sitting beside the sink, and the turquoise tops of the chairs that surrounded the marble kitchen island. I remembered Mom spending an entire weekend with those chairs after she brought them home from some secondhand store. Cleaning them, sanding them, coating them with layer after layer of spray paint, and then polishing them until they glowed.
I leaned my forehead against the window and yanked my mask down so I could breathe. Sometimes it seems that all the good things and all the bad things are like vines growing up the side of the same house. There are so many of them, and they’re all so tangled up that it’s impossible to tell one from the other. It’s easy to think you’ve been saved when really you’ve been doomed all along.
I should have left right then. I should have turned around and run, but I didn’t. I peered inside again. Light from the windows filled that wide-open first floor Mom and Dad loved so much. I could see from the kitchen to the dining room table and beyond, to the stairs at the edge of the living room that went up to the second floor.
I turned and pressed my cheek against the glass. The wall by the front door was marked by streaks of shadow that gleamed thickly as they ran down to the floor and spread out in dark pools. I stared at them for a long time, long enough to realize that they weren’t really shadows at all.
I heard bells ringing somewhere out in the neighborhood. No, not bells. Wind chimes.
The inside of the house swirled into streaks of turquoise and white. My knife hit the ground and the next thing I knew my knees crumpled and my stomach seized, folding me in half. I vomited acid onto the porch and then fell onto my side and buried my head in my hands. I grasped for the hush of the snowfall and the rustle of pages as they went from your hand to mine, but every time I thought I had it, my fingers slipped and the memory went hurtling away. The last thing I saw before darkness rushed in was the silver blade of a knife.
5
“DUDE! CARDINAL! Slow down!”
“Leave me alone!”
I was running down Water Street toward Brooklyn Bridge Park, and you were struggling to catch up. I hadn’t stopped or slowed down since Mom and Dad announced our impending move to Black River.
“You totally freaked out Mom and Dad!”
“Good!”
“Cardinal!”
“They freaked me out, Tennant! Didn’t they freak you out?”