The Cabin at the End of the World(23)

“So, yeah, I’m Adriane. I’ve been a lot of things but right now, or before I came up here, I was a line cook at a Mexican restaurant in Dupont Circle, D.C. I could show you my forearms covered in burn marks.” Her hands are alive, flapping around, crashing into each other, sock puppets in a Punch and Judy show. There’s a thick black ring on the thumb of her right hand and she twists it or checks to see if it’s still there after all the hand waving. She talks with a papery rasp that pitches her voice, making it sound lower and higher at the same time. Wen decides that this is how all people who live in Washington, D.C., talk.

“What else? Um, I have two cats, and you’d love them, Wen. Their names are Riff and Raff.” Adriane’s hair is longer than Sabrina’s and much darker. Probably fake darker. Her eyebrows are thin and arched, encroaching on her forehead. She looks like the youngest of the four from a distance, but the oldest when she’s close up because of crinkle lines that show around her mouth and eyes. “Do you like cats, Wen?”

“You don’t have to answer her,” Andrew says, and he says it like he’d be mad at her if she did.

She answers in her head. Yes, I like all animals.

Leonard turns off the television, tosses the remote control onto the couch, and checks his watch again. “Sorry, Wen. Maybe I’ll put it back on later.”

The room darkens as the sun continues to play hide-and-seek. Shade blankets the deck and seems to act as soundproofing for the surrounding forest, muffling bird chirps and insect wings.

Redmond stands dumbly in front of the slider doors with the heading of the curtain in his hands, the rest pooling around his feet and ankles. His fingers are lost inside the thick loops through which the rod is supposed to pass.

“Forget the curtain. It’s time,” Leonard says.

Redmond doesn’t respond with a joke. He drops the curtain, walks back into the center of the room, and stands with the others. The four of them make a line across the room. Seeing them together in their button-down shirts and jeans makes Wen afraid all over again. How they are dressed must mean something important but no one has explained why and maybe they’ll never explain why.

Andrew says, “Wait, hold on, time for what? Keep talking to us. We’ll listen. We are listening . . .”

Leonard smiles weakly. “Wen asked me earlier if the four of us were friends. I did not lie to her then and I will not lie to you now, not ever. I don’t know if I can say that Sabrina, Adriane, and Redmond are my friends exactly. But I trust in them and I believe in them. They’re regular everyday people like me—”

Andrew mutters but loud enough to be heard, “Fucking hell, someone save us from all the everyday people.” His pleading tone from a moment ago disappears, and he sounds angry, like Professor Daddy, which is what she and Eric teasingly call him when he lectures about minor infractions that include abandoning glasses of water or juice boxes on the windowsills, leaving cereal bowls half filled with milk next to the kitchen sink, and not replacing the toilet paper roll after one is spun down to the cardboard tube.

Leonard stammers and fumbles through “—and regular just like you.”

Redmond laughs.

Leonard twists left and right as though looking to fellow actors who have forgotten a line or cue. “Let me start by telling you the four of us didn’t meet each other in person for the first time until this morning.”

The three others nod. Sabrina has her arms crossed, and she swirls tiny circles on the floor with a foot. Redmond has his hands behind his back and his jaw clenched tight. Adriane’s face swaps into and out of an odd smile or a snarl and a wince at a punch she sees coming.

“Look, Leonard, just let us go and we won’t call the police or anything, we won’t, okay? I promise . . .”

“As you’ve heard, we’re all from different parts of the country and we didn’t know each other before”—Leonard holds his arms out—“before this. We didn’t even know that each other existed before last Monday. 11:50 p.m. I know the exact time my life changed forever. That’s when I first got the message. They got the message, too. The same message. We were called and are united by a common vision, which has now become a command we cannot ignore.”

Andrew thrashes around in his chair.

Eric says, “Stop, just stop, please. Please, God, whatever this is. Stop . . .”

Wen wishes she had the small shovel in her hands. She wishes the TV were still on. She wishes she could stop shaking. She gets up and scrambles behind Andrew’s chair.

“Wen, I’m sorry, I really am, but it’s important that you hear this, too. What you decide is as important as what your dads decide.”

Andrew shouts, “Don’t talk to her! Don’t say anything to her!”

Eric calls out to Wen and tells her that she’ll be okay, that everything will be all right. The white wad of paper towel as big as a movie screen on the back of his head has a bright red bull’s-eye. She feels terrible that she went behind Andrew’s chair and not Eric’s but she doesn’t move.

Leonard says, “The four of us are here to prevent the apocalypse. We—and by we I mean everyone in this cabin—can stop it from happening but only with your help. In fact, it’s more than help. Ultimately, whether the world ends or doesn’t end is entirely up to you three. I know it’s a horrible burden, believe me, I do. I didn’t want to believe it, either, when I first got the message. I tried to ignore it.” Leonard looks to the others and they nod their heads, and the world’s quietest yes escapes from someone’s mouth. “I didn’t want it to be true. But I was quickly made to see it was the truth and this was what was going to happen whether or not I wanted it to, whether or not I thought it was fair.”