A Matter of Days (15 page)

“Are we going to take him with us?”

Frustrated that Rabbit kept asking me questions I had no answers to, I snapped, “I don’t know.”

He blanched and stepped back.

“Sorry. Sorry.” I rubbed my forehead.

He nodded but stayed quiet.

“I’m sorry. I have a headache.”

Rabbit wandered back to his wheelbarrow and guilt crawled in me. He didn’t deserve having his head ripped off because I wasn’t sure how to make decisions that impacted everything. If we took Al and Twawki with us we’d have to feed them, protect them, risk having something happen to them.
I’m not sure my heart can survive more loss
.

That night I stared at the ceiling listening to Rabbit, Twawki, and Al all snore. Zack seemed to sigh every now and then.
Will he come with us? Can I ask him to?

“Nadia,” Zack whispered across the darkness.

“Yeah?” I answered, trying not to wake the zoo.

“Can you see out the window?”

I twisted on my mattress. “No, why?”

“There’s a ton of shooting stars out there. Come on.”

I heard rustling as he got up and tiptoed. I saw Twawki lift his head and then put it back down. He was lying with his back against Rabbit’s.

“Where are we going?” My sock feet slid along the floor.

“You’ll see. Come on.” Zack took my hand and guided me until he could turn on the pocket flashlight so we could see to climb up the flights of stairs. At the very top, he walked us down the hallway until we came to a plain wooden door.

When he opened it the breeze blew across my face, and for
a moment it smelled sweetly of spring and only spring. Then, the waft of smoke drifted over and I lost the warm fuzzy feeling.

Zack guided me out onto the roof.

I didn’t hold back a gasp of surprise. “Oh, wow, they’re amazing.” The stars were breathtaking. So close they seemed like they were hanging within reach and the fingernail of the moon frothed with the bright white of cold milk.

“I know, right?”

We settled against the stonework along the top of the building, dangling our legs like I used to do over the dock’s edge at the beach. Below us, in the square, coals of the bonfire glowed, but the smoke was only wisps that floated in the opposite direction from us.

I almost imagined myself on summer vacation, staying up too late. I didn’t have curfew anymore. I could stay up here all night, for weeks, and no one would yell at me or ground me.
It’s weird to not have rules
.

“You guys are taking off soon, aren’t you?” Zack asked finally.

A
couple of meteors streaked overhead and stole my words. I inhaled, counting to four, exhaled for four.
Why do I feel like I’m letting Zack down by thinking about leaving?
“Yeah. I think so.”

“Well, I think you should stay.” Zack’s face was turned away from me and up at the sky. As if he couldn’t force himself to look at me and say it.

“We made a promise. I made a promise.” My voice barely carried from my mouth.

“To who? What?”

“My uncle, my mom. To take my brother to our grandfather.”

“Odds are he’s dead, you know? Right?”

“Maybe. Probably. But maybe not.” I couldn’t tell Zack about Bean’s research and the shots he gave us.

“You won’t stay, no matter what I say, will you?”

I shook my head. “If it was just me. I would. But I can’t decide differently for Rabbit and he’s too young to decide for himself. I promised.”

“You know there are people between here and there who might not be nice.”

“That’s an understatement.” My grimace turned to a laugh.

Zack touched my hand, quickly letting go. “I don’t want to scare you.”

“You can’t. I’m already petrified all the time.”

“Really? Never would have guessed.”

“I’m not that good an actress.” I shook my head.

“I say you are. What are you scared of right now?” he asked.

“Falling off the building trying to see a star.” I tried to defuse his question—it would be so much easier to tell him what I wasn’t afraid of.

He bumped his shoulder against mine. “What else?”

“The dog dying.” I held up one finger.

“I think he’ll be okay.”

I held up a second finger. “Leaving here for the unknown.”

“Then don’t leave.”

“Come with us?” I wanted to bite the words back as soon as they left my mouth. I dropped my hand to my lap.

“What?” Zack sounded shocked.

“I mean, I know it sounds stupid to leave your very own town to creep across the country with us, but …”

The silence was almost unbearable. “Where are we going?”

“Oh … I can’t tell you.”

Zack laughed. “What? You invite me to go and then you won’t tell me where?”

“I promised.”

“Give me a clue for God’s sake.” Frustration chewed Zack’s tone.

“Across the Mississippi?”

“That narrows it down to a million miles. You gotta give me more than that, Starbucks.”

“West Virginia.”

“What’s in West Virginia?”

“I can’t say more. Please. I already shouldn’t have told you that.”

“But you want me to come?”

“I do. I really, really do.” I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to look convincing.

With a nod, Zack put his arm around me. His hand brushed my back pocket. “What is this?” He tapped it. “You carry it around all the time.”

I slid the little music player out of my pocket. It was scratched and beat-up and the screen was cracked. I didn’t bother with earbuds. I held it out to Zack, who took it carefully.

“Does it work?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It was my dad’s.”

“He liked music?”

I smiled. “Yeah, he’d put in a disc, or plug it in to the car, and he’d crank up these old-school songs and sing along at the top of his voice. Even when he dropped me off at school and picked me up, he’d be blaring Madonna or Lionel Richie.”

“Who’s Lionel Richie?”

“Yeah, see? Totally lame, but he said it was because his job required so much silence that he needed songs to balance it out.”

“Did you run this over or something? Why is it all banged up?”

“He took it with him. His last mission. Afghanistan. He died.”

“Oh.” Zack frowned. “Sorry.”

“It was about two years ago. This came home in his stuff. I don’t know if it works. I didn’t charge it before the power died too.”

Zack laid it back in my palm. “Thank you.” He closed my fingers around it.

“For what?” I asked.

“For showing me, for telling me.”

I thought for a moment and ripped at the scab a little more, confiding, “He’s why I’m here. Why I even left the house when Mom died.”

“Why?” Zack paused as if holding his breath.

“He used to coach us in survival scenarios—he loved this game called Worst Case and he’d make up these ridiculous stories and ask us how we’d do whatever.”

“Like what?”

“One of his favorite scenarios was an earthquake while we were at school. How would we make it through? He told us to be the cockroach.”

Zack chuckled. “I always killed the little suckers.”

“Yeah, but there are always more, right? And he’d tell us we didn’t have to survive the cause of something, like the earthquake, but the effect. What came after was more about our
character than if we were lucky enough to live through something bad.”

“Sounds like he had a lot of faith in you.”

“Maybe too much.”

“So you’re letting your dad down if you don’t try to get to your family?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it. I hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah. This is the effect and he’d be disappointed if I failed my brother.” He’d be ashamed of me if I gave up too soon.

Zack pointed out another streak of light across the heavens. “How’d he get named Rabbit?”

“His name is Robert—same as our dad’s—but when he was little instead of crawling like a normal kid, he hopped around. Dad started calling him Rabbit and it stuck.”

Zack turned his face away from mine. “You’re lucky, you know? That he loved you. Your mom too. I’d have let no one down if I died out in L.A. No one would have cared or noticed.”

“But you think you would have let yourself down, right?”

He swiveled toward me. “How’d you guess that?”

“Seems like you expect a lot from yourself.”

“Now. Not before, I didn’t. And I’m not the one trying to get from Seattle to West Virginia with a boy and a dog.”

“Before doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It’s all about after, isn’t it?”

“Will you think about it? Coming with us?”

“Sure. Maybe.” We stayed up on that roof watching the stars until the moon sank and the first glow of morning turned the clouds to slate gray and lavender.

The next few days took on the same rhythm except in the
evenings, when Rabbit and I completely unloaded the Jeep. I wanted to repack with our newly acquired knowledge about trading goods, and we needed a better way for Twawki to ride along. And Al.
Do birds need seat belts?

We were half done when Zack wandered by. “Photo albums?” Zack nudged the stack. “You gonna eat those?” He continued marching by, toward the tractor.

I sighed. “He’s right.”

“But—” Rabbit nodded as he shook his head like a bobble-head doll.

“Let’s pick a few photographs and leave the rest here. We need room for Twawki—he’s gotta be able to stretch out, right?”

Rabbit chose my parents’ wedding photo. Dad looked so sharp in his uniform and Mom radiant and young in her poufy white dress. She didn’t look haunted or tired. Not yet. I chose a family portrait that Mom set up before Rabbit was born. It was the last day I remembered being the only kid in the family. I picked up the rest of the albums and took them into the nearest living room, setting them carefully on an empty coffee table. I forced myself to turn around and walk out.
Another piece of the past, gone
.

Rabbit was talking to Zack when I came back out.

“Zack, do you mind if we salvage gas for our gas tank? Just enough to get us far enough away from here to look for other supplies?”

“We can fill them all.” He picked up the extra gas cans.

I shook my head. “You’ll need some for the generators this winter.”

“I’ll make do. All the cars are in the bank parking lot.” He and Rabbit started heading that way.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Why’d everybody move their cars to the bank?” Rabbit asked.

“No, Wolf, I moved them there early on.”

“How? Did people leave keys in them?” I asked, catching up.

“Nah, another L.A. skill,” Zack declared, as if it was perfectly normal to know how to start cars without keys.

“Oh.” Heat flushed my cheeks.
Grand theft auto?
Who knew that was a handy skill set? I was beginning to think his life on the streets was much more useful than my life in the burbs.

“You’re cute when you blush, Starbucks.”

As we filled up the gas cans, Zack stared at me. “You’ve got to give me a good reason to leave here. Why would you leave here?”

“We promised.”

I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. But that was before.

Rabbit exploded, “We might have family alive. Like probably they’re okay.”

“Rabbit!” I rolled my eyes.

Zack’s gaze narrowed. “How big a might and probably?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But it wasn’t luck that got us through BluStar.”

“Our uncle is a doctor,” Rabbit added. “He does top-secret stuff for the military.”

“Huh.” Zack didn’t ask more questions and thankfully Rabbit stopped adding his two cents. “You should leave in two days. That’ll give us time to pack your Jeep right.”

Wow, okay, I think we just got kicked out of Zackville
.

D
awn was pink with the promise of a clear sky and empty roads. I swallowed back panic as Zack drove up behind the Jeep in a compact that was one of those cars advertised to get hundreds of miles on a tank.

“What’s that for?” Rab quizzed Zack the second he turned off the engine.

“Need extra storage for my stuff.”

Rabbit grinned. “You’ve got a town. How much more do you need?”

“Can’t carry a town all the way to wherever we’re going,” Zack pronounced with a shrug.

Rabbit launched himself at Zack and wrapped his scrawny arms around Zack’s neck. “You’re coming too?”

I blinked back sudden tears.
He’s coming with us
.

Zack met my eyes over Rabbit’s head, before wrapping his arms awkwardly around my brother’s back, as if he had never been hugged. “Sure, Rooster, I’m coming too.”

I mouthed,
Thank you
.

He nodded. “Ya gotta help me load extra stuff in here like food and medicine.”

Twawki loped after a ball time and again while we finished packing. After a quick breakfast there was nothing left to do but pour the rain barrels out on the fire. According to Zack there was no reason to risk the town catching ablaze. I wondered if he was keeping it as a backup plan. I couldn’t blame him.

“Do you think you can teach Rabbit to drive?” I asked. “At least as we go?”

“Can’t you?”

“Yeah, but since I don’t really know how to either, seems like a good idea if someone other than his older sister tries to explain it all.”

Eyes widening, he choked back laughter at my expression. “Can do.”

When Twawki was tired out and Al lounged in a wire cage, we paused as if holding our collective breath. We were really leaving for the unknown. On purpose.
Again
.

“You drive—you need to learn how.” Zack tossed the keys to Rabbit. “You take Twawki?” he asked me.

“Sure.” I turned away to cover my relief.

“Let’s see if we can’t make good time since the weather today isn’t bad.”

I glanced back. “You expecting something?”

“Nah, but there was one dust storm that locked me up for two days when I first got into town. Red dust so thick I couldn’t see anything. We don’t want to get caught in something like that around here. No idea who’s out in it.”

Gee, thanks. Feel better already
.

I saw the new wire in the dash console. “What’s this?” I yelled back.