Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(68)

“I’ll tell everybody you said goodbye.”

I kicked at one of the concrete steps. “Yeah. Thanks.”

I started to move away, but Hannah spun and ran back down the stairs. The next thing I knew, her arms were around me and her lips were pressing into mine. I closed my eyes and it was as if some barrier between us had dropped away, as if we’d both melted into this warm darkness.

“Do you remember the night we saw the fireflies?” she asked.

Our arms were still around each other and our foreheads were touching. I imagined our breath swirling together in invisible eddies between us. I said that I did.

“And then later, when it was just you and me on that trail and the moon was out?”

I tried to say yes, but I couldn’t seem to speak. She pressed the flat of her palm against my chest.

“You’ll forget that too,” she said. “And this.”

She kissed me again, and then a light came on inside the school, erasing our reflections in the door. Tomiko and Carrie came out of the auditorium, yawning and stretching. Snow Cone padded beside them, sniffing at the air. Hannah reached back and undid the leather cord that held her key.

“Here,” she said. “Take this.”

“No, I can’t. You—”

The key twisted and flashed as she tied it around my neck. It settled in the hollow of my throat, still warm from resting against hers.

She went back up the stairs and reached for the door.

“Do you still feel it?” I asked. “The heartbeat.”

Tomiko and Carrie saw Hannah and waved, huge smiles brightening their faces. Hannah waved back, and then she looked over her shoulder at me.

“Every day.”

She pushed open the door and went inside. Snow Cone barked happily as Carrie and Tomiko threw their arms around Hannah. As they started toward the cafeteria, Hannah turned back to me one last time. The glow from the lights in the hall washed over her, warming her face and her shoulders and her long neck. She smiled, and then she was gone.

I ran a fingertip along the blade of the key, and then I walked away.





28


WHEN I PULLED the phone out of my backpack and turned it on, I was greeted by a dozen old voice mails and text messages, all from Gonzalez, all from the days following the riots. I got him on the third ring, and after a few minutes of assuring him that I was fine and Hannah and the kids were fine, I asked if he thought he could still get me out. He said he could, and then there was a long silence that made me think we might have lost the connection.

“Gonzalez?”

There was a sigh, and then he said one word. “Greer.”

I was in the park then, and I sank against the fence that surrounded the basketball courts. “Didn’t know you knew.”

“Whole thing was twenty-four-seven breaking news out here,” he said. “For a few days, anyway. There was some noise about the guy who shot him being prosecuted, but nothing came of it. Chaotic night. He was just doing his job. He felt threatened. The usual thing.”

There were other voices on his end. Gonzalez leaned away from the phone and called out to them in Spanish.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m back in the Bronx with my folks for a while. I’ll text you the address. You’re coming here when you get out, right?”

My hand went automatically to Freeman’s letter in my pocket. “I don’t know. There are some things I have to do.”

“Could really use you, buddy,” he said. “Remember that portfolio review at Comic Con?”

I had forgotten about it completely. It seemed impossible to believe that there was a world where things like that were still going on.

“It got me a sit-down with some guys at Marvel, which is awesome, except they want me to pitch projects to them. I’m sitting here trying to brainstorm, and it’s like, when nobody cared about my ideas, I had a million of them. Now that someone does care, I got nothin’. I need that Cassidy brain.”

I kicked at the bottom of the fence. “Listen. I better—”

“Yeah. Say your goodbyes, man. I’ll have news soon. A few hours from now Cardinal Cassidy will be NYC bound!”

Gonzalez hung up. By then, scores of infected were coming into the park. I threw the phone into the backpack and got moving without any real destination in mind.

As the sun rose, the infected headed toward Monument Park or to the barricades. They gathered into work crews as they went. Some set about carting off the last of the riot debris, others fought back overgrown foliage or fortified the wall that stood between us and the rest of the world. On a tree-lined street one group stood around a vacant lot between two houses that had been cleared and tilled, revealing rich black earth.

“So we put cauliflower here,” a man said as he sorted through packets of seeds. “And the broccoli over there.”

“But then where does the cabbage go?” asked another.

“What cabbage?” a woman asked. “Where do you see cabbage?”

“Right there.”

“That’s not cabbage, that’s arugula.”

“What about the tomatoes?”

“Guys! Hold on, okay? Just give me a second.”

The group shifted, revealing a woman in a wide straw hat standing with her back to me, poring over a book. She looked from the garden plot to the book and back again.