“The first one was a girl at school,” she said. “There were others, too. But the girl at school was the worst.” She added, “Up close like that,” as if to turn his own words back around on him.
As she said it, he recalled the incident with the girl at school. It had happened during recess, out on the playground. But other than that, he hadn’t been aware of any other occasions Ellie would have witnessed such horror.
“What others?” It seemed impossible. In fact, it seemed as if he had failed her in some way. He and Kathy had done their best to sequester her from it all, and until that moment, he had thought they’d done a commendable job.
Ellie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Well, I want to talk about it with you.”
“I don’t.”
He continued to stare at her until someone blared a horn at him. He jerked the wheel, centering the car back in its lane. His whole body felt prickly with perspiration. When he glanced up at his reflection in the rearview mirror, he was dismayed to see streaks of black sweat spilling down his forehead from his hairline. Goddamn hair dye.
“Okay,” he said after a time. “That’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it right now if you don’t want to.”
“How ’bout the radio?” she said, still not looking at him.
“Have at it.”
She switched it on and scrolled through the dial. Most of the stations were nothing but static. She paused when she came upon an evangelist orating on the sins of mankind. “Many will tell you that the time for repentance is now, brothers and sisters,” he rallied amidst washes of static and crackling audio. “They’ll tell you to repent, repent! But what if we are faced with some greater truth? What if the magic has turned black? Perhaps repentance is no longer an option, children. Perhaps we are the marching doomed, a parade of devils, the hopeless dregs paying for the sins of a world that has gotten so out of control, so repulsively foul with sin—”
“Find something else,” David said.
She was staring at the radio dial, unmoving.
“Find something else,” he repeated.
Ellie reached out and spun the dial, eventually stopping on a station playing old swing music. She finally settled back in the passenger seat, her posture seemingly more relaxed. Yet her eyes remained alert.
12
They drove for another two hours before David decided to stop for lunch. With no destination in mind, he had fled the main highway to the back roads that wound and twisted and looped through a gray September wilderness. He guessed they were somewhere in the southwest corridor of Virginia by now, though he couldn’t be sure. For all he knew, he’d spent most of last night driving in circles.
“I’m not hungry,” Ellie said as he pulled into the parking lot of a diner. There was a large handwritten sign over the entrance that said, simply, WE ARE OPEN.
“We should really eat something,” he said, pulling into a parking space. The parking lot was comprised of white gravel, the tiny stones popping beneath the Oldsmobile’s tires and raising a cloud of white powder. When he turned off the engine, the whole chassis seemed to shudder and die. He resisted the urge to crank the ignition again, just to make sure the engine hadn’t seized up on them for good.
Ellie did not move. She stared at the diner through the windshield, as if trying to divine some great secret hidden within the 1950s-style design of its chrome-and-glass construction. Her forehead glistened with sweat. She looked like a stranger sitting beside him, her long tresses shorn away, her face stoic and impassive.
“Put the hat back on,” he told her.
She only stared at it, turning it over in her hands.
“Ellie,” he said.
“Back at the motel,” she said. “Were you telling me the truth? About what’s going on back home? The quarantine, I mean.”
He felt the skin across his face grow tight. “Yes,” he said.
“If we’re not sick, then why would people be after us and wanting us to go back home? Why would they want to keep us locked up if we’re okay?”
“It’s just how they do things now, Ellie. They don’t know who’s okay and who’s not.”
“But we’ve been doing our blood tests,” she said. “They should know.”
“I don’t make the rules,” he said. “Now, put your hat back on.”
She tugged the ball cap onto her head.
Before climbing out of the car, David blotted the inky runnels of sweat from his forehead with a wad of Kleenex. Then he offered Ellie a sad little smile, hoping the girl would give him one in return.
She didn’t.