? ? ?
Nora offers to help us but I politely decline. Clearing out my former home is an emotional process and Julie is the only one I trust to treat my trash with respect. Nora shrugs and takes Sprout outside to watch her father while we dig through my surrogate memories, placeholders for my absent past.
We attack the mess with an everything-must-go gusto, but when I pick up the record player, Julie slaps the back of my head. “Are you crazy? Put that down and turn it on.”
“It’s heavy.”
“We’ve spent the last five days listening to nothing but military strategy, gunfire, and our own screams. I want to hear some music.” She puts on a record from the overhead bin. The opening horns of Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” burst onto the speakers and Julie beams. “I never thought we’d get to play this unironically.”
She DJs with dedication while we work, doing her best to keep things upbeat despite the general joylessness of my record collection. Without being conscious of it, I seem to have gathered two distinct genres in my musical salvages: warm, comforting relics from a simpler time, and bittersweet melancholia from the edge of the end. And since most of the classics are unplayably scratched, we quickly exhaust my supply of house-cleaning jams.
“I guess it’s back to Sinatra,” she says when Sgt. Pepper slips into its inner groove loop, howling its indecipherable incantations.
“Wait,” I say as she stops the record. I pull one of my old favorites from the pile and hand the sleeve to her as I slide the record onto the turntable.
“Elbow?” Her grin fades as she reads the back of the sleeve. “I remember them. One of my mom’s favorites.” I hesitate with the needle hovering over the groove, but she waves away my concern. “It’s fine. Play it.”
I lower the needle. The song is gentle and full of yearning, and it drastically alters the mood. I give her a tentative smile, hoping this is okay. “Wanted to hear something new.”
She reads the fine print on the sleeve. “2008? That’s not new, R. I’m newer than this.”
I shrug. “I’m . . . a little delayed.”
She smirks, then looks at the ceiling as the first verse begins.
We had the drive and the time on our hands
One little room and the biggest of plans
The days were shaping up frosty and bright
Perfect weather to fly
Perfect weather to fly
“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Okay, this is good.”
A throat clears behind us.
“Sorry to interrupt your little listening party,” Abram says, standing in the doorway, “but I did mention that people are coming to kill us, right?”
Julie looks around at the cabin, empty except for a few baseball cards and worthless dollar bills under the seats. “We’re done.”
“That turntable looks heavy.”
“If it comes down to a few pounds, Abram, I’ll cut off my arm. Deal?” She closes her eyes and sways to the music. “God, this is pretty.”
Abram gives her a thoroughly unenthused stare and slips into the cockpit to begin powering up the plane. No sooner has he left the doorway than Nora steps into it. “R?” she whispers, glancing after Abram to make sure he’s not listening. “You might want to come up here.”
I follow her through the boarding tunnel into the waiting area of Gate 12. Several carry-ons lie open and emptied on the floor, and while the toiletries and computer gear have been ignored, the clothes have been put to use. Between two rows of seats is a huge fort made of dresses and robes draped over mop handles. The engineering is impressive.
“We need more mops,” says a small voice from inside. “Go get some mops.”
Julie and I exchange a glance. We duck down to peek through the entrance. Abram’s daughter appears to be having a tea party with my two Dead children, still sticky with their mother’s blood.
Sprout turns, grins, waves. “Hi! We’re building a building!”
I realize that the items on the floor between them are not plates and silverware but notepads and compasses. Sprout seems to have found an architect’s drafting kit. But I’m less concerned about the girl’s impractical career goals than I am about her choice of friends. Joan and Alex kneel under the fort’s colorful ceiling of luminous cotton, staring at Sprout with a dreamy disorientation in their dull gray eyes. I see no signs of hunger or aggression. They seem to have witnessed both the massacre of their neighbors and the liquefaction of their mother without succumbing to relapse, but I remember them running through the airport, laughing and playing like something very close to normal children, and I also remember them picking up a man’s severed arm and sharing it between them like a jumbo hot dog. The plague is uncertain of its welcome. It circles their hearts, tapping on windows. I can’t trust it or them.
“Come out,” I tell Sprout, and her smile fades.
“Why?”
“You can’t be around those kids.”
“Why?”