My Monticello(39)

* * *



It wasn’t long before the first strangers showed up at the foot of our little mountain, but first, like a warning, the power fluttered on. It happened early, in the deep dark of our sixth morning, though each day here feels like a small, hidden lifetime. The power clicked and hummed, liberating whole sections of the house from darkness. We felt that seismic shift from thin pallets or lumpy beds, each of us listening for the thrum of things as they had once been. Knox bolted up beside me, his face half-lit by a lamp from the adjacent hall. His eyes looked naked without his glasses, and a dreamy smile unfurled across his face. Elsewhere I could hear murmuring, the kids stomping and cheering in the nursery above us, Georgie’s satisfied curse from the front porch where he sometimes slept. As for me, I felt a knot in my stomach, as if to signal that something bad was coming for us along with that returning light.

It’s coming back, Knox said, though the power lasted only a few ticking seconds. The brightness that flew into our room had flickered out by the time he spoke. I went to check on MaViolet—her room had held its darkness; I could hear her soft snores. Back in bed, Knox and I listened as the house settled to hushed whispers. I could feel him through the cocoon of darkness, his face intent, his body edging itself along mine. He pulled himself over me, holding his own weight on his elbows. I might’ve been breathing hard already. I know I tucked my body under his. Focused now, he dipped his face toward my face, like lowering himself down into water, something both desired and necessary. It’s been like this between us since the first time we touched: I wanted something in him, or from him, or him from me—a surrender of distance, maybe. That night though, tears rolled sideways down my cheeks, collecting in my ears. Fear or something like it bleeding through my want.

We hadn’t done it properly in weeks, not since right after spring break when those first heavy storms hit us. I’d stopped us because we’d run out of protection, and because I’d finally remembered myself after that brief, reckless time of forgetting. I’d stopped us because everything around us was crumbling, and because—ironically—I’d realized that I’d missed my period. I told Knox we had to be more careful, as if this responsible choice could unwind my earlier irresponsible ones; like I were begging some higher power, Pretty please let me not be pregnant after all. I’d kept up this prohibition even after it was clear it had not worked. That night when the lights pulsed back on, I knew I had to tell him. I should have told him right away.

Instead, Knox and I reached for each other, offering what pleasure we knew we could, with our mouths, our hands, our bodies rocking close. Knox brushed the tears from my cheeks. He must’ve imagined them as full of hope.

The first strangers showed their faces a few hours later, that same morning.

Per our rotation, Mr. Byrd, along with Ira and Carol, were taking their shift down at the welcome pavilion. They carried big walkies, a handgun, and both remaining shotguns. They carried a weird expec-tant feeling since the lights had flashed. It was daybreak when they saw a man with amber skin coming slowly up the road. He came with raised hands and wet leaves in his hair: a tree man, Carol later told me. He spoke with an accent, calling out across the distance even as Mr. Byrd and Ira fumbled to level their weapons. It felt impolite, Carol explained, to aim a weapon at a person trying to tell you who they are.

My name is Norberto Flores, the tree man said.

Arms still raised, he explained that his family had seen the smoke of our cooking fires. They’d seen our lights flash and watched what they could of us from a tree-lined path that cut through the forest below. The woods, the road—it was becoming more dangerous each day, the man said. We watched and decided you all were not more dangerous.

We soon learned that Mr. Flores, along with his grown sons and their families, had driven their camper from town after a disturbance near their home. Turned out they lived around the bend from Devin, on the other side of the trash-strewn gully behind the basketball courts. They were, essentially, our neighbors, and had seen smoke pouring up from First Street the night we fled. That same group of armed men had driven up and down their road, brandishing torches. One bearded man had shouted ugly things through a megaphone as Mr. Flores and his family huddled or fumed behind dark windows. The Flores family had left early the next morning, locking doors, securing all they could secure. They’d left in their Ford Sherrod, the old van full of tents and hunting gear. They’d driven toward the edge of town, taking the same route we’d taken, parking and hiking up to camp high above the Saunders-Monticello Trail, which runs alongside the road we’d turned onto the night we fled. But then, Mr. Flores explained, his family had begun to see armed groups of men below their encampment in the early evenings. Los arsonistas, Mr. Flores called them. Because of those men, his family no longer felt safe in the woods or driving along the road. The Floreses had gathered all they could carry, not knowing where to go, exactly. They’d hiked the path away from town and then they’d seen our lights.

When I heard all this, my fear ticked way back up, a frantic throbbing at my throat. Oh God, I thought, it’s not safe in town, but it’s not safe on the road either. Still, I pushed the fear deep down, until I could hardly feel it, at least not as something separate from me.

By the time Knox and I had jogged down to the welcome pavilion, Mr. Flores had retrieved his sons, Edward and Oscar, from the woods below, along with their wives, and his elfin teenaged granddaughter: all those generations descended from him, but born in Virginia—in the case of his sons, in the Valley near Harrisonburg. The family sat soberly along the benches near the ticket office where we’d once sat, their heads drooping, their expressions marked by a mix of bitterness and gratefulness I knew well. Large duffels, tents, sleeping bags, and hunting gear lay in a neat line near the ticket office. Beyond the pavilion, rain funneled from gutters, glazing the asphalt of the lot. As soon as I saw the Flores family, I knew we would not turn them away.