What I remember after that is more like a feeling than any actual thing. I remember children crying, and being hungry, and the dark and heat and smell of bodies all crammed in. We could hear gunfire outside and feel the heat from the fires passing through the walls of the train like the whole world was aflame. They got to be so hot you couldn’t even touch them without burning the skin of your hand. Some of the children weren’t no more than four years old, practically babies. We had two Watchers in the car with us, a man and a woman. Folks think the Watchers were Army but they weren’t, they were from the FEMA. I remember that because it was written in big yellow letters on the backs of their jackets. My daddy had people down in New Orleans, he’d grown up there before the service, and he always said that FEMA stood for “Fix Everything My Ass.” I don’t remember what became of the woman but that man was First Family, a Chou. He married another Watcher, and after she died, he had two other wives. One of those wives was Mazie Chou, Old Chou’s grandmother.
The thing was, the train didn’t stop. Not for anything. Time to time we’d hear a great big boom and the car would shake like a leaf in the wind but still we kept right on. One day the woman left the car and went back to help with some of the other children and came back all crying. I heard her tell the man that the other cars behind us were gone. They’d built the train so that if the jumps got into a car, they could leave it behind, and those were the booms we’d heard, one car after another falling away. I didn’t want to think about those cars and the children inside them, and to this day I don’t. So I’m not going to write anything more about that here.
What you’ll want to know about is when we got here, and I do remember something of that, because that was how I found Terrence, my cousin. I didn’t know he was on the train with me, he was in one of the other cars. And it was a lucky thing he hadn’t been in one of the cars at the back, because by the time we arrived there weren’t more than three, and two mostly empty. We were in California, the Watchers told us. California wasn’t a state like it used to be, they said, it was a whole different country. Buses would be meeting us to take us up the mountain, someplace safe. The train slowed to a stop and everyone was afraid but excited too, to be getting off the train after all the days and days, and then the door opened and the light was so bright we all had to hold our hands over our faces. Some of the children were crying because they thought it was the jumps, the jumps were coming to get us, and someone else said, don’t be stupid, it ain’t the jumps, and when I opened my eyes I was relieved to see a soldier standing there. We were someplace in the desert. They took us off and there were lots more soldiers around and a line of buses parked in the sand and helicopters thwocking overhead, stirring up the dust all around and making every kind of a racket. They gave us water to drink, cold water. All my days I’ve never been so glad just to taste cold water. The light was so bright to my eyes it still hurt me even to look around but that’s when I saw Terrence. He was standing there in the dust like the rest of us, holding a suitcase and a dirty pillow. I’d never hugged a boy so hard or long in my life and we were both laughing and crying and saying, look at you. We weren’t first cousins but more like second, as I recall. His father was my daddy’s nephew, Carleton Jaxon. Carleton was a welder at the shipyard, and Terrence later told me his daddy was one of the men who built the train. A day before the evacuation, Uncle Carleton had taken Terrence to the station and put him in the engine car, closest to Driver, and told him to stay there. You stay put, Terrence. Do what Driver tells you. So that was how Terrence had come to be with me now. He was just three years older than me but it seemed like more at the time, so I said to him, you’ll look after me, won’t you Terrence? Say you’ll do that. And he nodded and said yes he would, and that was just what he did, until the day he died. He was the first Jaxon who was Household and a Jaxon’s been Household ever since.
They loaded us onto the buses. Everything felt different to me with Terrence there. He lent me his pillow to use and I fell asleep with my head leaned against him. So I couldn’t say how long we were in the buses, though I don’t think it was more than a day. Then before I knew it Terrence was saying, wake up, Ida, we’re here, wake up now, and right away I could smell how different the air was, where we were. More soldiers took us off, and for the first time I saw the walls, and the lights above us, standing high on their poles-though it was still the daytime so they weren’t on. The air was fresh and bright, and so cold all of us were stamping our feet and shivering. There was Army everywhere and FEMA trucks of all sizes full of every kind of thing, food and guns and toilet paper and clothes, and some with animals in them, sheep and goats and horses and chickens in cages, even some dogs. The Watchers put us all in lines like they’d done before and took our names and gave us clean clothes and took us to the Sanctuary. The room they put us in was the one most everyone knows, where all the Littles sleep to this very day. I took a cot next to Terrence and asked him the question that was on my mind, which was, what is this place, Terrence? Your daddy must have told you if he built the train. And Terrence was very still for a moment and said, this is where we live now. The lights and walls will keep us safe. Safe from the jumps, safe from everything until the war is over. It’s like the story of Noah, and this here’s the ark. I asked him what ark and what are you talking about and will I ever see my mama and daddy again and he said, I don’t know, Ida. But I’ll look after you like I said. Sitting on the bed on the other side was a girl no older than me, who was just crying and crying, and Terrence went to her and said, quietly, what’s your name, and I’ll look after you too if you want, which made her stop. She was a beauty, that one, you could see it plain as day, even as dirty and worn down as all of us were. The sweetest little face and hair so light and wispy it was like a baby’s, the way they do. She nodded to what he said and answered, yes, would you please do that, and if it’s not much trouble can you look after my brother too. And wouldn’t you know that girl, Lucy Fisher, became my very best friend and was the one that Terrence married later on. Her brother was Rex, a little bit of a thing who was just as pretty as Lucy except in the manner of a boy, and I’m guessing you probably know that Fishers and Jaxons been mixed up together one way or the other ever since.
Nobody said it was my job to remember all these things, but it seems to me that without me to put them down, they’d all be gone by now. Not just how we came to be here but that world, the old world of the Time Before. Buying gloves and a scarf at Christmas and walking with my daddy up the block for water ice and sitting in a window on a summer night to watch the stars come on. They’re all dead now, of course, the First Ones. Most been dead so long, or else taken up, that no one even remembers their names no more. When I think back on those days it’s not sadness I feel. A little sadness, for missing folks, like Terrence, who was taken up at twenty-seven, and Lucy, who died in childbirth not long after, and Mazie Chou, who did live a good while but passed in a manner I don’t just now recall. Pendicitis, I think it was, or else the cancer. The hardest to think on are the ones who let it go, the way so many did over the years. The ones who took it into their own hands, from sadness or worry or just not wanting to carry the weight of this life no more. They the ones I dream on. Like they left the world unfinished and don’t even know they’ve gone. But I suppose it’s part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in the mind. No one’s left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have no children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometimes it’s like I’ve got so many people inside me I’m never alone at all. And when I go, I’ll be taking them with me.