More Than This (8 page)

He listens to the silence.

Nothing. Nothing at all beyond his breathing. No hum of electricity, no sound of things rustling. Though, he supposes, the smashing of the doors could have silenced anything in here.

He waits. But still there’s nothing.

He starts to push the unforgiving cart down the aisles.

The produce section is completely empty. The bays yawn open, with only a few shriveled husks of unidentifiable fruits and vegetables at the bottom, and as he goes from aisle to aisle, his hopes start to sink a little. The shelves do have stuff on them, but they’ve gone much the way of the things in the kitchen cabinets. Dusty old boxes that crumble upon touch, jars of once-red tomato sauce now blackened within, a section of egg cartons that have clearly been ripped apart by a hungry beast.

But he turns a corner and there’s good news. Batteries, lots of them. Many are corroded but some are okay. It only takes a few tries before his big flashlight is working.

Torch,
he thinks, shining it down a long dark aisle, seeing piles of flour scattered across the floor.
The English call this a torch.

He balances the torch on the shopping cart and picks his way through the rest of the supermarket, finding some bottled water but not much else. Eventually, he realizes there’s going to be nothing much of use anywhere – not the loaves of bread shrunk to nothing inside their wrappers, not the unplugged freezer chests filled with a black mold that smells like rancid olives, not the packages of cookies and crackers that are so much dust – nothing except the two aisles with most of the cans.

Again, many of them are rusted beyond use or so bulging with bacteria that Seth can practically hear it growing inside, but moving the torch up and down the shelves, he finds plenty that look normal, if dusty. He fills his cart with soups and pastas, with corn and peas, with even, he’s delighted to find, custard. There are so many cans, in fact, he’d have to make several trips here to even make a dent in them.

So, enough to feed him. For a while.

For however long he might be here.

The darkness and silence of the supermarket, even with the comfortably heavy torch in his hand, suddenly feels like too much. Too oppressive, too heavy.

“Quit it,” he tells himself. “You’ll go crazy if you think like this.”

But he puts his weight behind the cart and gets himself back out into the daylight.

He’s tiring again, he can feel it, and the hunger is a real thing now, almost as bad as yesterday’s thirst. He spies some green up around a corner from the market and remembers the little park there, sliding down a hill into a small valley with fountains and paths.

He pushes the cart, grunting at the effort, until he’s at the top of the park. It’s grown up like a jungle, unsurprisingly, but the basic shape is still there. There’s even a little sandbox area nearby. It’s about the only place here free of weeds.

“This’ll do,” he says, and lets his backpack fall to his feet.

He follows the directions on the camp stove, and five minutes later, there’s enough butane left in the small canister to heat up a can of spaghetti he opened with a far-less-rusty can opener he also took from the store. It’s only when the spaghetti is boiling that he realizes he didn’t take any knives or forks. He clicks off the stove and has no choice but to wait for it to cool.

He takes a bottle of water from the cart and holds it up to the sun. It looks clear, clearer than the water from his tap anyway, but even though the seal is unbroken, the water is still half-evaporated away. He cracks it open, the bottle giving a little hiss as he does so. It smells all right, so he takes a drink and looks down at the park below him.

It’s familiar, yes, despite the wildness, but what does familiar mean? he wonders. This place looks like a version of his childhood home stuck in time, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the same place.

It
feels
real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it’s also a world that only seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he’s trapped in, maybe it isn’t really even a place at all, maybe it’s just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying.

He takes another sip of water. Whatever
this
place might be, they’d never come all that much to the real version of the park. Sandbox and small play area aside, the steepness of the hill prevented it from being much fun. A big brick wall across the bottom of the main incline made even skateboarders avoid the challenge, so it must have been more a place for High Street workers to take a smoke break.

But there is the pond still, at the bottom, kidney-shaped but surprisingly clear-looking. He would have expected a film of algae across the top, but it actually looks cool and inviting on a hot summer day. There’s a rock in the middle that was usually covered with ducks preening themselves. There aren’t any today, but the sun is so bright, the day so clear and warm, that it somehow seems like ducks might swoop in at any moment.

He looks up, half thinking that his thoughts might create them. They don’t.

He’s hot in his over-warm hiking clothes, and the pond looks so inviting that he has a fleeting impulse to jump in, have a refreshing swim, have something even like a bath and just allow himself to float, suspended in water –

He stops.

Suspended in water,
he thinks.

The terror of it, the sheer awful
terror
that never seemed to stop. Fear was bearable when you could see an end to it, but there was no end in sight out in those freezing waves, those pitiless fists of ocean that cared nothing for you, that tipped you over and down in a kind of callous blindness, filling your lungs, smashing you against rocks –

He reaches around to where his shoulder blade snapped. He can remember the pain of it, can remember the irrevocable
snap
of the bone breaking. He feels a little sick at the thought, even though his shoulder here, in this place, works fine.

Then he wonders where his body is.

In whatever world this isn’t, out there where he died, where is he? He wonders if he’s washed ashore yet. He wonders if they even know to look for him in the ocean or on the beach, because he wasn’t supposed to be there,
no one
was supposed to be there at that time of year. Freezing winter on an angry, rocky coast? Why would anyone be
near
the water, much less
in
it?

Not unless they were forced.

Not unless someone forced them.

He feels another pain in his stomach, an unease at the memory of his last moments on the beach that makes him feel even sicker. He screws the cap back on the water bottle and forces himself to return to the spaghetti, now cooled enough to eat. He makes a mess of it, tipping it into his mouth and slopping it onto one of his new T-shirts, not caring much.

He wonders how his parents found out. Would he have been gone long enough to be missed before his body was found? Would they have been surprised by policemen showing up at the door, carrying their hats under their arms and asking to come in? Or would they have been worried by his absence, growing more worried by the hour, until it became clear something had gone wrong?

Or if time worked the same here as it did there – though the warm summer here and the freezing winter
there
put that into question, and he had no idea how long that first purgatorial bit on the path had lasted, but still – he might have only died late the day before yesterday or even early yesterday morning. It’s possible they haven’t even noticed yet. His parents might think he’s at a friend’s house for the weekend, and between Owen’s clarinet lessons and his mum’s running and his father’s decision to start redoing the bathroom, they might still be unaware that he’s gone at all.

They never had noticed him all that much. Not after what happened.

In fact, maybe, secretly, they’d have some guilty happiness that it wasn’t
Owen
who had drowned. Maybe they’d be a little relieved that Seth was no longer a walking reminder of that summer before they moved. Maybe –

Seth sets down the empty can of spaghetti and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

Then he wipes his eyes with his other sleeve.

But,
he thinks,
it’s possible to die before you die.

There’s no one walking through the park, no one in this world at all who can see him sitting on the edge of the sandbox, but he lowers his face down to his knees, as he can’t help but weep once more.

“I mean, for God’s sake, just look at them,” Monica said as they lay on a hill out of the sight line of their cross-country coach, watching the cheerleaders practice on the football field. “How can anyone’s boobs be that perky without surgery?”

“It’s the autumn chill in the air,” H said, ironically quoting something Mr. Edson, their English teacher, had said that morning. “Makes everything firm up.”

Monica slapped him upside the head.

“Ow!” H protested. “What’d you do that for? You’re the one who said to look at them!”

“I didn’t mean you.”

It was the second week of their senior year, early September. By mutual agreement, they’d taken a well-known shortcut on their running route, hiding in almost plain sight near the practice finish line, and giving themselves twenty minutes before they were expected back. Remarkably for this time of year, the sun was shining in a clear blue sky, though the wind coming in off the ocean gave the air an extra snap.

Days like this you could almost call beautiful,
Seth thought.

“The chill firms them up?” Gudmund asked H, stretching back on the grass incline. “Is that why you have a permanent boner all autumn?”

“All year more like it,” Monica mumbled.

“As long as you kids stay safe,” Gudmund said.

Monica gave him a look. “Like I’m going to have his baby.”

“Hey!” H said. “That’s not nice.”

“There they go again,” Seth said.

They all looked back over the field, and sure enough, Boswell High’s own blonde and brunette terrors were back at it. Though that wasn’t fair, Seth thought. Most of them were actually pretty nice. They all watched, though, as Chiara Leithauser, one of the less nice ones, left the pack and started walking back toward the main school building.

“Where’s
she
going?” Gudmund said.

“Forgot to give Principal Marshall his after-school hand job,” H sniggered.

“Oh, please,” Monica said. “Chiara’s serious about that chastity shit. Won’t even let Blake Woodrow put his hands on her bra.”

Gudmund shrugged. “Good for her.”

Monica laughed, but when he didn’t reply, she scanned his face closely. “You mean that, don’t you?”

Gudmund shrugged again. “At least she’s got principles. What’s wrong with that? Somebody’s got to counterbalance all us amoral types.”

“That’s what we can tell Coach Goodall when he catches us,” Seth said as they caught sight of the cross-country coach across the field, looking annoyed at his watch, wondering why his senior runners were quite so overdue from their first long training run.

“There’s nothing wrong with anyone having principles,” Monica said. “But there is something wrong with using them to beat four kinds of crap out of everybody else.”

“They’re only her opinions,” Gudmund said. “You don’t have to listen to them.”

Monica’s mouth opened to reply, and then it dropped open farther in amused astonishment. “You like her.”

Gudmund put on an ostentatiously innocent face.

“You do!” Monica nearly shouted. “Jesus, Gudmund, that’s like loving a concentration-camp guard!”

“I’m not saying I like her, don’t be stupid,” Gudmund said. “I’m just saying I could get her.”

Seth looked over at him.

“Get her?” H asked. “You mean like –” and he made a thrusting motion with his hips that caused a horrified silence. “What?” he said as they all stared at him.

Monica shook her head. “Not in a million years. It’s like she’s got a limited lifetime supply of fun, and she isn’t going to waste any of it on high school.”

“Those are the easiest ones to get,” Gudmund said. “All their morals are balanced way up high. One push knocks ’em right over.”

Monica shook her head again, smiling at him, like she always did. “The shit you talk.”

“You know what we should do?” H said, suddenly enthusiastic. “We should have like a bet, right? Where Gudmund has to sleep with Chiara Leithauser by like, spring break or something? ’Cause you could totally do it, bro. Show her where the wild things are.”

“From someone who can’t even find a map to the wild things,” Monica said.

“Hey!” H said to her, his voice low and aggrieved. “What did I say about telling them our business?”