Future Home of the Living God(56)
As soon as he says this, fatigue hits me like a drug. I’m falling asleep, with my head against my mom’s back. As I drift off, I have this feeling of sweetness and security, an ease so intense that I know it must go back to my earliest days with Sera, before I could talk or even knew whether I existed, before an I had formed into a me. There was this goodness, this care, this presence, this dozing sleep. She is still stroking my hair as I come to and the sky is a pre-dawn gray, pink lifting at the edges. We enter what Shawn calls the Merf through its gated checkpoints. There are two fairly new trailers at the entrance, at the edge of the truck parking lot. A huge garage door at the other end opens automatically, and Shawn drives us in. The outsize door closes behind us with an echoing boom and Shawn says, “It’s okay now. We can get out.” So we step down from the truck, dazzled. At the end of the garage, there is a partially enclosed area with a woodstove.
“Go ahead.” Shawn motions past a mountain of recycled stuff toward the bathroom. “I’m gonna beef up this fire, to take the chill off. Just jump back in the shitter if the big door opens again, okay?”
Shawn stalks over to the stove, uses a can opener to neatly remove the top from a can of baked beans. He puts the can on top of the woodstove with a pair of tongs, and looks at us with his calm, melting brown eyes. I can smell the rich sauce and little white globs of pork before the stuff is even warm. We go to the bathroom, a big locker room filled with greasy coveralls and bins of stinking boots. We use the toilets and wash, just with water, not the scratchy slabs of Lava soap streaked black. Our hands are now rope-burned as well as blistered and chapped. Sera stays out with Shawn, keeping watch. Before leaving the bathroom we poke our heads out. All seems quiet. The beans heating in their tin bean can exude a summery hot-dog fragrance. Shawn spoons out half a can each of bubbling and hissing beans, into steel bowls.
“We’re safe here,” says Mom. “For now.”
Tia and I sit against the wall on overturned plastic tubs. We sip at each spicy brown spoonful, suck down each soft bean. You stir and roll as if you feel how good I am feeling right now. Sera brings us mugs of hot raspberry tea, and we find out the rest of the plan. Which Sera and Shawn are making up as they go along.
“Okay,” says Shawn, “I’ll get you back down to the post office later on today, or early tomorrow. Depending. Then we’re putting you three on a mail truck running up north. Your people”—he nods at Sera—“will be up there, somewhere, you know where. I don’t want to know.”
I am assuming that Sera is in touch with Eddy and that he has his own plan in place for getting us farther north, deeper into the bush, maybe out to the islands in the boundary waters.
“I’m not going,” says Tia.
Her pointed chin juts out, her expression is fixed. “I’m going to find my husband.”
Sera nods carefully, sighs. Her eyes go a sweet, faded denim blue. Her white hair tousles from under her cap. She’s such a pretty winter-spirit mom, with her pink cheeks and delicately curved, berry-sweet red lips.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She takes Tia’s hand. “I know how you must feel, but it’s so dangerous. They’ll be watching your family so closely.”
“I know that he’s figured something out. Even if he hasn’t, I’m not going. Leave me in the post office. I’ll hide out in the basement and send a message to him. He’ll come and get me.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. They can’t watch everybody. I just know it’s going to be all right. I feel safer in the city than out in the sticks. We won’t be obvious, especially once my baby’s born.” She strokes her lovely down slope. Smiles. She only smiled once in the hospital that I remember—the first time I stole her a blanket. I hope her child will be a girl. She wants a girl.
“Anyway, I just won’t go. And you know that if I’m not committed to your plan, I’ll be a drag and a danger. So let me off at the post office.”
“Think it over,” Sera begs. But I am quite sure that Tia, who had the idea first of braiding a rope and descending down the side of the hospital building, has made up her mind.
Shawn puts out his big, rangy, skeletal hands. “Let’s just all think about it. Talk it over. We’ve got some time. Cookie?” He opens a battered package of macaroons—stale and utterly delicious.
Shawn brings us back to an equipment storage area and shows us a walled-off secret room, just behind two giant sorting machines. One conveyor pulls off soup cans with magnets. Another shoots aluminum cans down a chute using what Shawn calls an eddy current. The secret room is filled with drums of food, he says, scavenged stuff. You’d be surprised what people still toss into the recycle bins. Behind the drums, there’s a little nest of patched mattresses and couch pillows covered with heavy subzero sleeping bags.
“Okay, you two,” says Shawn, “cuddle in. Your mom’s got some heavy-duty paperwork to attend to. You’ll be safe here. This whole compound’s guarded.” He puts his hands in his pockets and pulls out two platinum-colored automatic pistols—the kind you see in movies. “Yep,” he says, grinning, “you’d be surprised at what people get rid of. Sleep tight now, little mice. No fear.”
“I don’t know why,” I say to Tia, as we pull ourselves into the sleeping bags, “but I think Shawn’s Irish and I have always trusted the Irish.”