65
ATTICUS
I pried my uninjured eye open with a painful grunt; my lip split again, and I could taste a trickle of blood running into one corner of my mouth. The room seemed darker than moments ago when I’d fallen asleep, just minutes after Thais reset my elbow and splinted my fingers. The patter of raindrops on the pavement outside was soothing, and I could smell something burning that was neither foul nor particularly pleasant.
I lifted my head, tried to reposition my back against the chair. When I opened the eye further, I saw that it was darker in the room because it hadn’t been just moments ago I’d fallen asleep—it must’ve been hours.
“Thais?” My voice was weak, shaky.
“I’m right here,” I heard her say, but I couldn’t see her; I noticed a shadow moving against the wall, and I could hear liquid sizzling against coals, and her footsteps moving across the floor.
“Ho’vlong…I been ‘sleep?”
She stepped into my line of sight with a coffee mug in her hands; steam rose from the rim.
“Since yesterday,” she told me, and held the mug out so I could grasp it. “You needed the rest. Here, drink this. Good vitamin C.” She held the mug until I had a good grip on it with my uninjured hand.
As I brought the mug to my lips, the smell of pine needles wafted into my nose.
“Use the straw,” she told me, and then I felt her fingers touch mine as she guided it toward my mouth. “And sip slowly; it’s still a little hot.” I hadn’t even seen the straw before, my vision limited to only one eye.
I took a sip and then held the mug out for her to take it.
“No, you need to drink all of it,” she mothered. “And you need to take this pill. Should’ve started a round yesterday, but I couldn’t wake you enough to make sure you got it down.”
She held out her hand and a little white oval-shaped pill sat in her palm.
“What is it?” I was leery; taking random pills was as risky as eating wild mushrooms, and I thought we’d already been over that.
“It’s penicillin,” she said.
I looked at her awkwardly with my one opened eye.
“How…do you know?” I asked. “Better yet, how’s vat even vs’ossible?”
Thais put the pill into my hand and enclosed my fingers around it. Then she slipped out of my line of sight for a moment, and came back with a white bottle. She held it up so I could see. On the label there was a tropical fish, and above it read: ‘Fish Pen Forte’, and in smaller letters beneath it: ‘(Penicillin)’.
I looked at her with part disbelief, part shock.
“Where’d you v’ind dis?”
“Pet store across the street,” she answered. “I’m surprised no one noticed them before.”
“Vem? How many?”
“I found three bottles. Unopened. Seals unbroken. Atticus, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
I looked down at the pill in my hand again, still not believing it, and then tried to give it back to her.
“Need to save it,” I insisted. “I’m going to’ve vine, but in case you ever get sick—”
“Take the damn pill, Atticus,” she told me, her gaze darkening.
I thought on it a moment, and in the end decided I had better do what she said. Not because I probably needed the medication this time to stave off infection, but because Thais was not in the mood to listen to my reasoning she would consider ridiculous.
I wedged the pill in-between my swollen lips and drank it down with pine-needle tea.
A fire burned in a small barbecue grill on four skinny legs near the glass windows; Thais left the door open to let the smoke and deadly fumes out. The flames were low, casting small shadows on the wall. Outside the rain fell steadily, without thunder or lightning, just a peaceful downpour, my favorite kind. It must’ve been how I could’ve slept so long.
I gazed around the rest of the room, taking in for the first time, what kind of building it had once been. It was also the first time I was fully conscious of my surroundings since the gauntlet in Paducah. I remembered when it happened, when I’d lost consciousness: the fighters had piled on top of me all at once, shutting out the light; I felt the heat of their bodies closing in all around me, robbing me of oxygen; the sensation of knuckles and knees and rock-like toes pounded on me from every angle; and then the searing-hot sensation of a blade splitting flesh, and then another. As if the pain from the stabbing and the broken fingers and the dislocated elbow wasn’t enough, I felt the moment when my ribs fractured, and then in the same instant my head struck the gymnasium floor, and everything went black.
After that moment, I remembered bits here and there: Thais standing above me, talking loudly as if to an audience, but I couldn't recall sentences, just words—Spanish, French, Roman Empire, American Autocracy—and trying to make sense of them on my own was a wasted effort; and I remembered being thrown back into a cage, and then—it seemed like only one second later—Thais and a pretty Black girl were dragging me from it; and I vaguely remembered seeing the city’s lantern lights in the windows as I was carried away; and then the stars above me came to mind, and my memory had strengthened. I remembered Thais lying beside me; I could feel the warmth and smoothness of her fingertips tracing my eyebrows. Lastly, I recalled—in great detail—Thais resetting my elbow.
But now I was fully awake, and nothing was happening in frames anymore, and although every part of me hurt like hell, I was glad to have control of my mind again at least.
I looked down where a bruise had spread out like spilled paint across my midsection.
“Must be broken,” I heard Thais say.
I looked up at her.
“Same side as before, isn’t it?” she asked. “When you were attacked in Lexington.”
I nodded.
“Yeah. But dis time dey’re fractured for sure.”
“How do you know it’s more than one?”
I thought on it. “Well, I don’t, really.”
Then I noticed the black tape stuck to my left arm, right thigh, and right hip, securing three rectangular pieces of something white that looked like paper towels but were not.
“Dried up baby wipes,” Thais explained.
I looked up.
“Unused?”
Thais smirked, and then it turned into a smile. “Yes, Atticus, unused.”
I smiled lightly on the side of my mouth that could still show it.
Thais pointed to the table beside me.
“I collected rainwater to clean your wounds,” she began. “Couldn’t find anything to pass for antiseptic, and nothing to stitch them up with, but I suppose the penicillin makes up for that.”
“Can’t ‘ave it all,” I said.
“No. Can’t have it all,” Thais agreed.
She looked down at the floor then, and I couldn’t help but notice that something was bothering her.
“Thais, vat’s vrong?” I reached out the hand with the broken fingers and I touched her wrist.
Thais knelt before me, her knees pressed against the dirty floor, and she touched her forehead to my knee.
“Thais, vat is it? Tell me.” I stroked her hair, and then fitted my hand underneath her chin to lift her head, not caring about the pain it caused my splinted fingers.
Suddenly, I felt my heart ram upward into my throat, like being punched there, and without even knowing if my assumptions were true, I was ready to fly out of the chair, go back to Paducah and kill whoever had harmed her.
“No, Atticus,” Thais urged, putting a hand on my waist and forcing me to stay seated. “Please, don’t get up.”
“Vat did vey do to you?” My unbroken fingers clutched the arm of the chair.
“I wasn’t harmed,” she assured me. “And I had help. But no one hurt me.” She sighed and looked at the floor again. “That’s not what’s wrong with me.”
“Ven…vhat is it? Tell me.”
When she raised her face to mine, tears trailed down her cheeks; I reached out and wiped them away with the pad of my thumb.
“I was just so scared,” she said. “I thought they were going to kill you. And then when I saw you—when I look at you now—Atticus…” She stopped to steady her breath, and then hit fast-forward. “Atticus, what are we going to do? How long has it been since we escaped Lexington City? A month? Maybe two? It has to be at least that long, and we’ve only gotten this far—I don’t even know where we are. A day from Paducah. That’s all I know.” Her voice rose, and her desperation deepened.
I let her speak, let her get it all out; I felt her hands clutching my leg.
“Everything that has happened to us since we left—oh, Atticus, the odds are so stacked against us that I’m beginning to think we’re never going to make it to Shreveport. And look at us now”—she shot into a stand and threw her hands out at her sides—“we have nothing: no guns, not even a knife”—she plucked a pair of scissors from the folds of her skirt—“this is the closest thing I’ve found to a weapon. And we have no food. Atticus, I looked everywhere. There’s nothing. I looked under rocks for worms and in windowsills for dead flies—nothing.”
Thais stopped, and she stood there for a moment with her hands balled into fists at her sides. I could only wonder what she was thinking, what war was raging inside of her, and still, I didn’t have the heart to interrupt; I let her words cut me because they were true and I could do nothing to change the facts.
She knelt in front of me again, and her angry face had softened as if in that moment she had forgiven the world. Tears were still wet on her cheeks, brimmed in her eyes. She took my hand into hers, careful with my broken fingers, and then she kissed it.
“But I know, despite what the world wants me to believe, that we’re going to make it. And I know that when we do, when we walk through the glittering gates of Shreveport, that everything will change, that our lives will…truly begin.”
I smiled, and I stroked her hand with my pinky finger, and my heart filled up with love for her, for her patience and her optimism and her unimaginable strength and her hopes and dreams I myself could never hold onto for as long as she had. I wanted to kiss her, deeply, softly, I didn’t care and wouldn’t be picky if I had a choice, but my face was too swollen for kissing. And I wanted to make love to her, but my body was too battered for love-making.
I settled with words, pushed through my swollen lips, and willed my mind to make sure my mouth said them perfectly. “I love you with all my heart, Thais Fenwick.”
THAIS
My eyes found his in an instant, and for a moment they did not blink. My chest filled with up air, my heart with emotion that threatened to choke me. But I did not choke; I swallowed the emotion down, and I pushed my body toward him and kissed his broken lips with the gentleness of a feather. “And I love you…Atticus, I’ve loved you since the day you carried me in your arms away from my sister. And in my heart I know I’ll love you long after the sun dies and takes the world with it.”
~~~
ATTICUS
We talked of many things: about the people of Paducah and their strange beliefs that were neither right nor entirely wrong.
“I can understand their ways,” Thais had said. “And a part of me feels that because of how they are, more people have found their strength.”
“And more have died because they couldn’t,” I had added.
Thais told me all about her unexpected friendship with a girl named Drusilla.
“She saved my life,” Thais had said. “And yours. We might still be in that place if it wasn’t for her.”
“Did he hurt you?” I had asked about Kade.
Thais shook her head. “He tried,” she answered. “He would have if Drusilla hadn’t come back for me.” And she looked at me, and in her eyes was something unfamiliar, dark, and she said, “I was relieved to see him die. Just like that man you killed in Lexington City. I was relieved…” It was a confession of guilt.
“They deserved it, Thais. Remember that. Don’t let your heart lie to your conscience. They deserved it.”
After a moment, Thais said, “I know.”
I told Thais about my time in the cage, and with a heavy heart, about Peter Whitman.
“Oh no…I remember now,” Thais had said. “The first fight. I thought I’d seen that man before, but I couldn’t place his face. Were you good friends?”
“I guess you could say that,” I had answered. “I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, but then again, he didn’t know me, either.”
I told Thais about the dangerous secret Peter had been hiding, and about his wife and daughters.
“No one should ever have to hide who they are or who they love,” Thais had said, her head hung in dismay.
After a moment, I, thinking about my friend, said, “I know.”
I told her the news about William Wolf heading to the South soon.
“Do you think they’ll go to Shreveport?” Thais had asked.
“Eventually,” I had said, and I explained what Peter had told me about Texas.
And then I told her about Edgar.
“He was telling the truth.”
“So, then Shreveport is real?” Thais paced the floor. “So, we really do have a chance.”
After a moment, I, finally believing it, said, “We do.”
We left the beauty salon the next day. Fortunately, the raft was there, but unfortunately, so was the rain. It had rained for two days, would stop for an hour, and start all over again for three. But Thais and I could stay no longer. We didn’t even have to discuss it; we just packed up the following morning and set out.
Thais carried the scissors—broken in half to make two separate blades—in the folds of her skirt, secured by ripped fabric; and the toy bucket with the electrical tape and dried-up baby wipes and precious penicillin. We both wore black beautician’s smocks: Thais’ over her white, ruffled blouse—she ditched the suffocating corset—and I wore mine over my bare chest and makeshift sling. I was without shoes, but the bottom of my feet moving over rocks and debris was nothing compared to my many injuries, and travel of any kind was painful and arduous.
THAIS
And Atticus, being Atticus, had a difficult time passing the reins over to me. It was I helping Atticus walk the distance to find the raft, I who uncovered it from the brush—he tried to help, but I ordered him to sit down—it was I who went in search of an improvised oar—a broken water ski—and it was I who rowed us down the Mississippi River, underneath a dreary, cloud-filled sky and the constant rain that fell from it. The only relief we took from the weather was that it still had yet to be accompanied by dangerous lightning or stormy winds. Just rain. A lot of miserable rain. So much rain that by Day Five on the river, its banks were swelling.
“We have to get on land,” Atticus said. “And we need to move inland as far as we can or else this river is going to swallow us.” His swollen mouth still had trouble forming words correctly, but I was already used to it, so in my mind I no longer heard his difficulty speaking.
Together we dragged the raft on the bank—Atticus ignored me telling him to let me do it, this time—and we left it there, not anticipating ever having to use it again. We would be traveling on foot from here on out, getting as far away from the rising waters as we could.
But by late afternoon, hours after we’d left the water for land, the power of The Mississippi proved greater than our efforts to hide from it. The water had broken its banks and flowed far and deep into the land that once contained it. We heard trees snapping in the distance, and the rush of violent water consuming everything in its path as though it were coming straight for us with the whip of retribution ready to strike our backs.
“We have to get to higher ground!” Atticus shouted.
I grabbed Atticus’ arm and he pulled me alongside him, through the pain of his injuries he could not hide from me no matter how hard he tried, and toward a water tower.
I could hear the water coming, like a train barreling over tracks. Glancing back, in the distance I saw the tops of trees swaying, some trees toppling, and I gripped Atticus’ arm tighter, saw a flash in my mind of the water reaching us and tearing us away from each other.
“Where’s the ladder?” I shouted when we made it to the immense water tower.
We found the ladder, but it had been raised and padlocked, and neither of us could reach it.
“Let’s go!” Atticus grabbed my hand and we ran past the tower and went toward an old grocery store.
Moments later: “The water is coming, Atticus! The water is coming!”
Without stopping, we looked out at the open space behind us with awe and terror as the rushing river, littered with cars and roofs and trees raced toward the water tower with violent determination. The beams that held up the massive dome-shaped structure snapped and buckled like four broken legs, and the dome crashed into the Mississippi River like a tiny raft overturned and swallowed by white rapids.
”HURRY!” Atticus roared.
Ditching the sling to free his other arm, Atticus grabbed me around my waist and lifted me into the air, and he threw me onto a ladder that led onto the roof of the store.
“What if the river takes the store, too!” I shouted as we hurried up the ladder, hands gripping the bars above us, feet climbing the ones beneath us.
“Then you hold onto me and don’t let go!”
I will never let go…
We made it onto the roof seconds before a wall of water slammed into the store below; the glass windows exploded, and we could hear the shelves and shopping carts smashing against the walls inside; the ground and the building shook beneath us like an earthquake.
We sat in the center of the roof, huddled together, holding onto to one another with inseparable force as the river battered our only life raft. And we waited, for life or death, or more of the in-between we’d been surviving since we met.
I will never let go of you, Atticus.