Either the Beginning or the End of the World (18 page)

I suck air back into my lungs. I'm crouched on the floor with nothing on. He's beside me. He covers me in the blanket. I feel his arms try to hold me and lift me. My body pulls away from him. “I am so cold,” I say.

I stand, still breathing deliberately. He reaches for me. I hear an awful sound. It makes me turn to him. He is crying. I don't know what to do, so I put on my clothes. Soon I'll have to do something, but I focus on the work of my hands. On buttons, on the laces of my boots.

Luke turns away. I watch him pull on his shirt, then his sweater. It's still dark.

“Let's get out of here,” he says.

A phrase Luke had spoken somehow comes through my mind. Golden hour. I think of the golden hour. That hour after a trauma. You have one hour when you can alter events. One hour when things can change. Start a heart that's stopped beating. Staunch a hemorrhage.

I let out a long cry, “Oh, Luke.” And when I see his shoulders, how his arms simply hang, I know that he knows it too.

But what do we do? I remember the gun and vaguely think I need to get rid of it. Why didn't I get rid of it when I first knew where it was?

I go and press his shoulder. He needs to turn around.

- - -

I am in my jeans, my combat boots. The baseball cap my father gave me. We walk from the cabin and down the dirt road. It's natural to walk toward the small house in the curve of the road by the breakwater, where we've walked before. The cold air fills my chest and burns. We are ordinary people walking. Aren't we?

It's high water. It beats against the breakwater where we stop.

I lift the gun I brought with us.

He stops. He didn't see me grab it as he dressed.

I had imagined I'd show it to him, since we can't talk about it. At least I'd get it in the open. But I want to know how it feels if I hold it with both of my hands.

“I found where you hid it. One day I was reading your book.”

Luke doesn't reach for it. Past the gun, I see his chest lift and fall. He's a soldier. He knows a million tricks to take this gun I barely hold upright. But he doesn't.

“Sofie,” he says.

The gun is cold against my bare skin.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“I don't know,” I say, “I was always scared you'd hurt yourself. I hate this gun.”

I'm aware of the moon. It fills the sky behind me. I turn to the side so I can keep it in my sight. From the ocean comes the unrelenting rhythm of a foghorn. I hold the gun with both hands, but the moon distracts me. I think I see the shape of a rabbit with his legs outstretched.

What an amazing sight, to see a rabbit run across the moon. Luke must see it, too, because he begins to talk to me in the voice I know as his. He doesn't just disappear like he did from his family. He is here.

“No surprises. Warn me, Sofie.” His steadiness returns. We know what we're doing. “I told you.” Again, “No surprises. Do you think I'll hurt you?” he says.

I shake my head. “I know,” I say. I still hold the gun.

“Come back to the cottage.”

“I know,” I say again.

“It will never happen again,” he says. We both are certain this is true.

“I want to fire it,” I say.

He studies the shoreline, the harbor.

“Not here,” he says.

We are so reasonable.

We get in the car. He drives us south to a desolate stretch of dunes that is now ridges of sand and snow. “You want to fire, fire here.”

We walk to the end of a point of land. Ahead is only wind and crashing waves. Luke is beside me. He pulls the slide back on the gun so it's cocked. Places it in my hands. I hold the gun the way I held my father's gun. My left hand wraps around my firing hand, my thumbs crossing. I aim for the waves. My finger wraps around the trigger. Hold my breath. I pull. I'm aware of the blast the gun makes. I anticipated the blast. But I had held the gun so tightly that I feel my hands pop up in the air.

I step back and steady myself. I disengage the magazine.

Then I throw the gun with all my weight through the wind, and it's lost in the sea.

SURVIVORS

He drives. I slide down in the passenger seat, watching the sun's light beginning to disrupt the dark from under the bill of my Mason Oil cap. The gun blast still feels terribly good. I can't explain. He reaches across and takes my hand. I take his. We drive back to the cottage. Pilot is at the door, waiting, but it's too early, and she settles back down by the stove. I put on my dog tags, my hip-long sweater; I brush my hair at a tiny mirror over the sink.

I still have streaks of Spanish green around my eyes. Luke stands with his back to me, facing the ocean. He turns. He's wearing a Greetings from Hampton Beach T-shirt, the shirt he sleeps in sometimes.

I focus on the shirt, but he is saying something. I don't want to listen. I know where we're going. He says, “You and I are always going to have a gun.”

I stand like I did the first time I stayed, my palms against the wood of the door behind me.

I look into his tortured eyes. I know what he means. It's in our history and will always be part of our story.

“You're gonna break my heart if I ask you to stay,” he says, “if we stay together. We need to take care of ourselves. First.”

The
first
saves me.

He comes to me and places his hand on my back. I feel his fingers and hand press up my spine, like zipping a tight, tight dress.

I say, “Where will you go?”

He shrugs. “The place my family talks about.”

“The place out west with river rapids.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you could sleep,” I say, about out west.

He shoves his hair off his forehead. “Could stop by home.”

I wrap my arm around his ribs.

He wraps his arm around mine.

I also see Yiey's face as she looks at us. It is tender.

The foghorn sounds. And again. And again. He straightens. The smell of the incense in my little shrine, although it's not lit, is sharp and sweet.

I want to make plans with him. Call me. In one week. In six months. In seven years like you said. I say, “You'll see your little sister. Mandy.” Maybe we both have a flash of her smile. I wipe tears off my face with both of my hands. He turns away.

I'm trying to leave him, but I have to tell him . . . I start to laugh and bend down and feel my hair fall down over me.

“You're laughing.”

“I know you need to go. I know I need to leave you. But my crazy grandmother's here.”

“She's always here,” he says.

“Just let me say this. Something about being with you,” I say slowly, “helps me—makes me—look at my family. The crazy ones.”

“They're not crazy,” he says.

Like us?
I wonder.

He's trying to help me go. He lifts my head. “We're like this, your grandmother and me,” he says, holding up two fingers, tight, and I smile at him. “We tell stories like a couple lifers. I'm working on getting her into the bar at the VFW.” For a second I imagine my grandmother in her T-shirt and sarong wrapped around her hips on a bar stool with Vietnam vets and guys back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Sophea,” he says. “Strong girl.”

We look at each other.

This is the golden hour
.

Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Pilot is curled in a ball by the stove. I put on my plaid jacket and cap. He watches.

“Pilot,” I whisper. She's on her feet and to the door. Luke doesn't stop me, but he doesn't let me. He holds me with his eyes until I have my dog.

Pilot and I step into the snow.

Outside I bend over in grief. What have I done?

I look up at the moon. I force myself to follow it along the ocean.

COD

My truck crunches on iced-over snow, traveling onto Ocean Boulevard under the early morning sky. I am almost unable to see the road through my tears. I haven't seen a car yet. No one expects me, except Mr. Murray. Vincent doesn't expect me. My father doesn't expect me. Not my mother. If she remembers, she thinks I'm heading to school with Rosa, who will know where I was. Not Luke. It's just me and my dog.

I ride along the ocean past Rye Harbor, where my mother met my father, Wallis Sands, Wentworth by the Sea where Mr. Murray had his honeymoon, New Castle Common, the bridges from New Castle to Portsmouth. I find myself pulling in at the co-op, an old habit.

I step down from the truck, red eyed, blowing my nose. Pete's here, at his boat. “What's going on, kid? What's wrong? No school?”

“Hey, Pete. Oh, hay fever, something.”

He says, “Hay fever. Yeah? It's early March. Come on, kid.”

I go and sit on his dock by his boat,
Cat o' Nine Tails.
He's got a thermos of bitter brew coffee, and he pours me a small plastic lid full. He sits in the cabin among old bags of chips, stacks of bad movies, Kilim cups enough to wade through. I am happy to see him. I start to bawl.

“That hay fever,” he says.

“I miss my father,” I say. I am still wearing the baseball cap.

“Yeah,” he says again. “What kind of work is this, takes your father away?”

I shake my head, sobbing, but trying to drink this wicked bad coffee. “Do you have any milk?” I manage to say.

“Try these Mallomars,” he says and digs up a really old box of the chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies I haven't had since I was six. I take one, dip it in the coffee, keep crying. Pete doesn't know what to say, so he starts talking cod.

“You know, it's cod I worry about,” Pete says. “No cod. Used to rain cod. I dream them. All I ever wanted to do was fish. It's a game of chance. Like the arcade games up to the beach. All I ever wanted. I'll go out for monkfish if I can find them. I'll go out till I die. Going to be about four boats left fishing out of New Hampshire.”

I take short, gaspy breaths. I begin to drink the coffee with melted marshmallow and listen to the old story I know.

“You buy shares of a fish for a buck fifty a pound. Got to pay the fuel, pay the boat, pay the crew. So if on the day I land the fish, they're bringing ninety-nine cents a pound, I'm in debt before I begin. That's the game. Every card's a wild card.”

“Pete, when you go, could I crew?”

“Well, sure,” he says. “But girl, you'd have to get on the boat. Are you changing your ways?”

“Don't know, Pete. I don't know anything. I just didn't want you to go out alone.”

“Hard with a girl. You got to have a bucket.” Pete's an old-timer.

“If I get on a boat, I'll figure that part out,” I say. “You still dream cod?”

“Every night,” he says.

“Please don't stop talking, Pete.”

“You got it bad,” he says.

I lay my head on the dock by his feet.

RIVER

“Sophea?”

“Yes!” I say, startled. I know the voice instantly. The one who has always called me Sophea.

Pilot and I had wrapped up in all the extra blankets when Pete left for breakfast and said I could stay right there if I wanted. I hear Luke say,
You can't hesitate. You have to be ready every second. You have to act or you're gonna lose a soldier. He's gonna bleed out or his heart's gonna stop if you're not on it.
Am I ever going to not remember all the things he told me?

“Sophea,” again, commanding.

I make myself open my eyes and face the new light. My grandmother is leaning down in the silver morning. I see the cloth of her skirt beneath her heavy snow coat. And I see the distinct bones of her face and wide lips and sharp eyes. I am not afraid.

Around us the water is black.

She says, “Now we go fishing.”

“Fishing?” I say. She wants to board Pete's boat.

“Help me get in,” she says.

“We're not going fishing.”

The tide holds the boat a few feet beneath the level of the pier. She is shaky on one foot, the other trying to step down. She is determined to board, and instinctively I steady her body as she boards the
Cat o' Nine Tails.

“Yiey, how did you get here? I'll take you back.”

“We go on river. When I was a girl, before the Pol Pot time, I fish on the river. Tonle Sap.”

“This river is not still. This river can kill you, its current.”

“Many thing can kill you. Now we fish.”

I hear heels on the pier. Light and musical. Not the
clomp clomp
of fishermen's boots. “Rosa bring me,” Yiey says, and suddenly here is Rosa on the pier. Rosa's face is like a sunbeam. I reach up to hug her. I smell her Nirvana cologne from Prelude. Even in the foggy dawn Rosa smells like Nirvana.

“Rosa! She wants to go fishing. Tell her I never go on the river.”

“Well,” Rosa says, “you can't take
this
boat. You don't have a license, and your father would have to pay another fine.”

But Yiey points to the tiny rowboat Pete uses to row to the fishing boat if he has to tie up off the pier.

“I never go on the river,” I say again. My heart is pounding. We are in slack water. But I know the water can overcome and can wash a body out to sea. “Why?” I say.

“To catch magic fish for Srey Pov.”

I look out on the black river. I believe the river holds magic, too. “Rosa, can Pilot stay with you?” I look at her and see she's carrying Yiey's fishing pole. “Why should I trust you?” I say to Yiey. “You don't know this river.”

She says, “You know this river. Like Rithy know that field.”

I think of Rithy hunting crickets. I touch the dog tags pressed against my chest. I have an opening—it's a secret opening—I have some opening in me for Rithy, who must not have slept, either, waiting for the soldier's footsteps. If Rithy comes through that opening to me, well, who's that baby sister he comes bringing by the hand?

I stand by Rosa on the pier. It's Rosa and me and the fishing pole. Yiey is checking out Pete's boat. “Why'd you bring her?” I whisper. “Did they know I didn't stay with you?”