4
THAIS
We didn’t talk about our father. Sosie knew he was dead—my silence only confirmed it.
“I got you some boots.” Untying the laces, I set the boots in front of Sosie on the ground. “They’ll protect your feet better than those.”
In true Sosie fashion, her nose crinkled when she got a good whiff. For the briefest of moments, it made me smile.
“I’m thirsty,” Sosie said minutes later.
I fished the stainless-steel water bottle from the backpack, hit the bottom against the palm of my hand to knock the dirt out.
“Well that’s another problem solved,” I said proudly, and stood up. “I found something to boil the water in.”
I went down the rock incline in my new old boots and made my way to the stream; already I felt the spots where I knew I’d end up with blisters later as the leather rubbed against my skin.
The stream was small; I could stand over it with a foot on each side, and if it didn’t rain soon, it would dry up in a couple of days. I filled the bottle and took it back up the hill to the cave.
“I’m scared,” Sosie said, sitting against the wall where she seemed to stay, just like her chair by the window at home. “I’d rather get shot than cut up by somebody and put in a pot.”
“They weren’t cannibals,” I assured her as I prepared a small campfire.
“How do you know?”
“They left the bodies.” I struck one of the matches I’d found in Mr. Hatley’s pocket, against a rock, setting a small mound of twigs and some dried leaves aflame. “All of the dead were old, too,” I added as an afterthought, ignoring my father’s age. A small fire crackled and spitted as I slowly added more sticks, strategically placing them so as not to suffocate the flames.
“And everyone else?”
“They were gone,” I said. “And so was everything else before they burned the houses. I was lucky to find a can of beans. It was probably dropped. They left nothing. Nothing, Sosie.” I wanted to stay strong for my sister, but the reality of all that had happened was eating away at me. And worse than what I could not change, was that I had no idea about what we would do from here on out.
When the third night fell, Sosie had stopped talking much again. “Put out the fire so no one sees us in the dark” was all she’d said in three hours.
I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night on watch, thinking about what we would do next, where we would go. We couldn’t stay in the cave forever. We had little to eat as it was—the beans, after nearly cutting my finger off trying to open the can with a knife, turned out to be spoiled—and I wasn’t a good hunter like my father. But even if I could hunt, I had no weapon with which to hunt. Catching fish and eating bugs would be our only means of survival. But for how long? I had five matches left, tucked away inside Mr. Hatley’s handkerchief, wedged between two rocks inside the cave to keep them from getting wet if it ever rained.
But four days later and it still had not rained and the stream was drying up.
I kept filling the water bottle and sterilizing it over the campfire, burning the bottom of the stainless-steel until it was as black as charcoal. We drank as much as we could instead of letting the water disappear into the earth. We still had the lake, but it was a risk going there even to fish. Not only was it a thirty-minute walk away, but I’d have to go across the grassy field to get to it and that would leave me exposed.
I’ll crawl through the field on my belly if I have to, I thought, hoping I wouldn’t have to.
On the sixth day, it finally rained.
A violent storm came in, pushing us against the back wall of the cave where we huddled together, shaking in each other’s arms as the thunder boomed overhead and lightning cracked through the sky like a whip and the winds howled and ripped through the trees. When the storm was over, we crawled out of the cave to a replenished stream, but a sodden pile of sticks that had been our campfire, and a forest full of wet everything that would surely hinder the lighting of a new one.
And we had only two matches left.
“We have to leave the fire burning throughout the night,” I said after finding wood dry enough to burn on the seventh day. “I’ll pile rocks around it and keep it low so no one will see the flames.”
Sosie did not argue; she was still her unmoving, unemotional self.
By day ten, we had no more food. My stomach ached with hunger to the point I felt nauseous and lightheaded. Sosie felt the same, I knew; I could hear her stomach rumbling. But she never complained; for once in her life, she didn’t have the energy.
“You have to eat.” I held out a few earthworms draped over a stick that I’d just roasted over the fire. “I know they’re disgusting, but they’re full of protein.”
“I don’t want it.” Her voice was listless.
“It’s all we have.”
“I don’t care. I’m not hungry.”
I threw the stick down in front of her. “Then I’ll go fishing,” I snapped, and rose to my feet, hunched over to keep from hitting my head on the cave roof. “I can’t survive this alone”—I stomped away—“You could at least act like you want to help me.”
“I told you I’m not hungry,” Sosie said with a little more emotion. “You can eat the worms and the ants and whatever else you find. There’s no need for you to get yourself killed going to the lake for me. I’m just not hungry.”
“But you still have to eat!” I squatted beside her, tired of her attitude. “Without food, you have no energy. Without energy, you can’t do anything but sit here in this stupid cave and die.”
“MAYBE I WANT TO DIE!” Sosie raised her body from the ground, her face stiff, enraged; her ratted hair made her look savage.
The sheer anger in her words shocked me and stole my breath away. For a moment, all I could do was stare into my sister’s blind eyes, desperately searching for words fit to respond to her admission, words fit to reflect how the admission made me feel.
“What do you mean?” It was all I could get out.
Sosie shook her head and laid back down.
“Momma is gone,” she began. “Daddy is gone. Everybody’s gone, Thais. I don’t know why you want to keep doing this.”
I felt sick; the things Sosie was saying I just wanted to close my ears up to, pretend I had never heard a word. Long ago I had felt this way, when I thought that going the way of our mother was the easy way out—the only way out—but since then I had given up ‘giving up’, trading it for strength and determination. I wanted to live, but more than that, I wanted to live with Sosie.
“You don’t mean that,” I said, knowing she meant it, and it cut me to the bone.
“Look at this world, Thais,” Sosie began. “There’s hardly anything left. For years we lived in peace with Daddy, but we were always afraid, always looking over our shoulders. We were prisoners, confined behind bars, with this great big world going on all around us that we could never see or touch or taste or experience.”
She drew her arm up and pressed her hand beneath her cheek, palm down, padding her face against the dirt.
I sat and listened, tears welling up in my eyes, because I knew that everything she was saying was true, that her argument made more sense than anything I would’ve been able to come up with.
“Before all of this,” Sosie went on, “I used to come home every day from school and rush to get to the television before you because I knew it would make you mad. I dreamed of being a model on that show. I thought: ‘If that one ugly girl can win, then I can win!’—(I smiled thoughtfully)—It was my dream, to be a model, to dress up in weird clothes that nobody ever really wore, and get my picture taken. I wanted to travel the world to exotic places and be on commercials.” She sighed, and the subtle reminiscent quality she’d displayed, disappeared. “Now not only will that never happen for me, much less any kind of life where I don’t have to look over my shoulder every second of every day, but I can’t even look over my shoulder at all. I have to depend on you to do it for me. And I love you Thais, I love everything about you—except when you snore”—(my smile was as faint as it was brief)—“but I don’t want to live this kind of life. I’d rather end it like Momma did.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and stopped blinking.
“What are you talking about?” I hoped I’d only heard her wrong.
“Oh, Thais,” Sosie began, her tone sympathetic. “I know how Momma died. I know she killed herself. I knew all along.”
Her confession took the breath from my lungs, the beat from my heart—I didn’t know how to feel. Should I be ashamed for keeping the truth about our mother’s suicide from Sosie? Or angry with her for keeping the truth from me?
I looked down at my dirty hands, aching fingers curled, empty, helpless, and all I wanted to do was embrace my sister for reprieve and forgiveness—but for Sosie, or for myself?
“How did you know?” I asked.
Sosie sat up and felt her way over to sit next to me. She draped an arm around my back.
“I heard Daddy that night,” Sosie began. “I heard him asking Momma why she did it.” She got quiet for a moment. “And you had nightmares. You’d call out for Momma in the night and ask her why she wanted to die, why she left us.” She gave my arm a gentle squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” I said breathlessly, feeling a pang of guilt.
“For what? For not telling me you knew?” Sosie pushed air through her lips. “Come on, Thais. If that’s why then I guess I should be sorry, too.”
Quiet passed between us as we reflected on the moment, as we felt the weight of the same secret we had been hiding for so long from one another, lift from our hearts.
“Sosie?”
She looked over.
“I’m just as afraid as you are,” I said. “I don’t even know what we’re going to do next, but I have to believe that we can find something better, somewhere safe.” I reached out and laid my hand atop my sister’s. “I just want you to know that without you, I don’t think I could ever make it, or would want to. But at least give it a chance, give me a chance to find us someplace to go.” I squeezed her hand. “Who knows, we could find a city full of good people who live better than we ever did in these mountains.”
Sosie’s head shook in protest. “Not the cities, Thais,” she argued. “You know we can’t go to any of the Big Cities. If that’s what you have in mind then I’ll stop you right there. I’ll go no farther than this cave; I’ll die in this cave, right here”—she pointed at the ground—“before I let them have me.”
I squeezed Sosie’s hand.
“No, I don’t mean the Big Cities,” I said, trying to ease her. “Just someplace bigger and better than this place. There has to be something out there, there have to be good people left in the world.”
“There are,” Sosie said, and a small smile lit up her powder-white face. “There are two sisters sitting in a cave deep in the Kentucky woods. One of them is good, but the other one is good and beautiful and the strongest person the other has ever known.”
I felt my face flush with heat, and I smiled, and I hated every mean thing I’d ever said to my sister when we were growing up.
I kissed Sosie on the cheek. “You are the beautiful one,” I said. “You stink right now and you look like a madwoman with that wild hair and dirt across your face, but you’re still the beautiful one.”
Sosie laughed lightly, then she laid back down on the ground, wedging her flattened hand between her cheek and the dirt again. “It’s easy for you to say that because I can’t see myself,” she quipped. “I’ll never know if you’re only saying it just to make me feel better.”
But Sosie was beautiful, had a childishly round face like a cherub, with big doll-like eyes and full lips. And she was tall and slender, had an enchanting smile—Sosie was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
Before the night fell, Sosie gave in and ate the worms, and a small lizard I had caught skittering along the rock incline. It wasn’t big enough to split between us, so I lied and told her I’d caught two, cooked them and only pretended to be eating a lizard when I was eating earthworms.
I slept much better, almost through the night, but was so hungry when I woke up the next morning I knew it was time to risk going to the lake to fish.
“But you don’t have a pole,” Sosie argued. “I don’t want you going out there anyway. It’s dangerous. And it could take hours just to catch one fish. It’s not worth it.”
“I’ll just set out a line from the bank,” I explained. I took the sun-bleached soda can from the bag, pressed my thumb and index finger around the tab, and then twisted it right off. “Daddy taught me how to make a hook, remember?” I flipped the blade from my father’s pocketknife and fashioned the tab into a makeshift hook. “I’ll tie it to something and toss it out and come back. After a couple hours, I’ll sneak back out to check the line.”
BOOM!
The gunshot stripped the rest of the words from my mouth. We looked at each other in a panic. I dropped the knife and the hook and grabbed Sosie’s hand, dragged her back into the cave where we sat against the wall, shaking next to one another. I could hear only Sosie’s heavy breathing, and the furious beating of my own heart pounding in my ears, until another gunshot rang out and drowned it.
“That one was closer,” Sosie whispered through a tear-choked throat.
I grabbed Sosie’s hand and squeezed.
We didn’t move or speak for what felt like an eternity. I couldn’t think of anything other than who’d made those gunshots and from which direction they’d come. Three hours of silence became four hours of only adjusting our positions on the cave floor. Five hours later we were finally talking again, but any sense of safety we had acquired over the days in the cave since we’d fled home, was gone.
“We’re going to find a safe place,” I promised, but I didn’t believe it so much myself anymore. “Tomorrow we leave here and we’re going to find the next town. Daddy said there was another safe town about a day’s walk.”
“B-But y-you don’t know where it is?” Sosie cried into my blouse; I brushed the palm of my hand over the back of her snowy, matted hair.
“I know it’s southeast,” I answered, “but I…”
Sosie looked up, hopeful and hopelessly at the same time.
“You what?”
I don’t know which way is southeast; I don’t have a compass. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.
“I remember now,” I lied again, and patted Sosie’s head once more. “Don’t worry; by this time tomorrow we’ll nearly be at the other town.”
Sosie fell asleep. As usual, my mind kept me awake, whirling with worst-case-scenarios. Strong? Positive? Hope? I kept telling myself I needed these things, that I was the one in control of my own destiny. But I was afraid. Because I knew in my heart that worst-case-scenarios were all we had left. And so as I lay next to my sister, watching her sleep, I surrendered to weakness, negativity, and despair, instead. I accepted that we would die, and that the manner in which we would die probably would not be quick or painless. As the tears streamed down my face, as I brushed my sister’s dirty cotton hair from hers, as I felt the last shred of hope fade from my heart, I accepted our fate. I accepted that we were the only two good people left in the world, that there were no safe cities, and no one out there who would ever save us from what the world had become.