“O-okay.” Had he poisoned it? Would this be his second murder attempt? He looked a bit too eager.
I followed him wearily down to the second floor to find that he’d picked wildflowers and lined the tables with them. Emergency candles were lit on the main table where the “king and queen” were supposed to sit.
“Cornish game hens?” I asked, looking at the small birds on the plates, surrounded by vegetables from a can. He must have been holding out on me with the frozen chicken nuggets.
“Actually, it’s a couple of the chickens. They were too small and fighting a lot, so I went ahead and slaughtered them.”
I shuddered. It must have been before today because when I’d been out by the kiddie rides, I hadn’t seen any smaller chickens running around.
He pulled out my chair for me and then disappeared into the kitchen. Music began to play over the sound system. It sounded like what you’d hear at a renaissance fair, but it was probably all that was available here. He returned a little while later with a bottle of wine. Where had that been stashed?
“The manager kept a few bottles in his office. We swore we wouldn’t open them except for special occasions.”
“And this is a special occasion?”
He shrugged. “Elodie, I don’t want to fight. I don’t know why this is so hard when you don’t even remember what we were fighting about.”
“What were we fighting about?”
“It’s not important.”
“No, I want to know. What were we fighting about?”
Trevor looked like he was scraping the bottom of the idea barrel for any convenient lie to feed me. “It’s not worth upsetting you.”
“Right, because why upset me when our life is so perfect and serene?”
He growled in frustration. “Fine. You asked for it. I got snipped because you kept miscarrying, and it was hurting you every time you lost a baby. So I got the snip so you wouldn’t have to keep going through that. We had a stupid argument about something not important that wound back around to that and how you thought I resented you or some other bullshit. As if we’d want a baby now in all this, anyway.”
I didn’t say anything. I just looked down at my plate and started eating.
***
Months passed in the abandoned theme park. It felt like a combination of camping and the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. Things started to become normal somehow. I started to feel stronger. Whatever may have been wrong with me had seemed to clear up on its own with time. The romantic dinner that night had been a turning point of sorts. It didn’t do anything immediately to make me want to get closer to Trevor, but oddly, time did.
The isolation of no other human companionship quickly grew to be too much for me. Feeling or expressing anger or disdain toward him only left me by myself with no one to talk to or seek comfort or reassurance from. Without Trevor, I’d die out here. I didn’t think he was going to just up and abandon me, but there is a sort of clinging desperation that begins to take hold when your waking reality is only one other person in the world. It was like Trevor was the only other person still alive on the planet. It probably wasn’t true, but it felt true.
Suddenly that person begins to seem almost perfect—your soul mate—the only person you could possibly have ever ended up with even in a sea of billions to choose from. We didn’t have much real sexual chemistry—or at least there wasn’t any on my end. But he was comfortable, like a favorite pair of sneakers.
Little by little the off feeling about him started to dissipate, and I began to be convinced that it had only been due to confusion brought on by my fall and the shock of waking into the world as it now was.
His annoying traits receded into the background, and we actually started getting along. I could see glimpses of what I must have seen in him before the collapse. I could even see how we might have ended up together in wedded bliss, a bliss that had seemed unthinkable as even a minor feature of our past when I’d first opened my eyes inside the pirate ship.
The weather turned colder, and we brought our blankets and pillows to set up camp in the grand dining hall of the restaurant where we could use the fireplaces to keep warm at night. It didn’t get too incredibly cold, but it got cold enough to be uncomfortable without the added comfort of heat.
Trevor had decided it was safer than running the heating/AC unit year round. He wanted to give the unit a break, he’d said. Because if that thing broke down and he couldn’t fix it with what was on hand, we’d be fifteen levels of fucked when summer reached its zenith.
I never questioned why he seemed to do both the hunting and the cooking, as well as the cleaning up. I asked to help, but he’d push me away, as if he didn’t trust my involvement in the process. It created a sort of crushing boredom, and once I’d read all the books in the cabinet, the only thing left to do was fuck—something he seemed quite content with.