“Be right back.” Claire scampers outside again. Examining my sign, I wonder if there’s a street somewhere experiencing terrible accidents due to the lack of a stop sign. Before I can decide whether or not this is something I need to feel guilty about, she returns with an armful of tools—hammers, wrenches, clamps, an assortment of nails and screws and washers, and a car jack. She dumps them on the couch.
“That was quick.”
She beams at me as I select a hammer and a few nails. “People lose tools a lot. Much harder to find other things. Like cupcakes. No one ever loses cupcakes. I miss them.” Her smile fades. “We used to have cupcakes on our birthdays. Our neighbor Mrs. Malloy baked them. She put sprinkles on top. But she died, and I saw her sprinkles in the trash.”
A howl rips through the air.
I feel every hair on my arms stand up. My fingers tighten around the hammer. Claire, perched on the arm of the sofa, swings her legs back and forth, seemingly unconcerned. “You sometimes find lost cookies. People drop those behind couches and stuff. And I’ve found tons of French fries. But not cupcakes. Or ice cream.”
“Did you hear that?” I ask. It lingers in the wind, the howl stretching out like the tail of a comet, fracturing and eventually dispersing.
“It can’t hurt us,” Claire says. She considers her statement, her face screwed up as if she’s making intense calculations. “At least, it can’t after we seal the windows.”
“Right.” I lift the sign up and examine it. It has holes where it was bolted to its post. I position the holes over the window frame and nail it on, using washers to widen the size of the nail head, which makes me feel clever. The sign covers about a third of the bay window and nearly all of the section without glass. I face the “Stop” side out, in case any of the predators can read. The human ones can, I think. “Maybe we should board up all the windows.”
Claire shakes her head. “Then we can’t see them coming.”
Her statement makes me think of a half-dozen zombie movies, which is not comforting. “You need to work on your bedside manner.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Continuing to hammer, I try not to focus on how this isn’t where I’m meant to be, how I should be home with Mom in our familiar apartment with its functional window locks, and how surreal and wrong all of this feels to the point where I wonder if I am having some highly vivid nightmare brought on by too much kung pao chicken. But I’ve never had a nightmare like this.
I have nightmares about Mom. In them, she’s in the hospital again with tubes stuck in her and a monitor counting her heartbeat as if it’s counting down to zero. Standing beside her, I feel a choking weight in my throat, but I can’t scream or cry or speak.
The thing that’s most horrifying and sad about my nightmares is that they’re banal, like scenes from a bad TV movie, fraught with melodramatic sadness and entirely generic. There’s nothing truly Mom in them. Lying in the crisp white bed, she’s in a washed-out pale blue hospital gown, and all the color is faded from her face and hair and eyes. On the windowsill there’s a row of bland sympathy cards beside a vase of plasticlike calla lilies. In real life, she hates phony cards and fake flowers. She loves to grow her own flowers: fat peonies that droop on their stems, roses that are riddled with holes from bugs, daffodils that shrivel within a week. When she moved into my apartment, she could only bring a fraction of her plants, but still her flowers have overrun the apartment and the tiny corner of the yard that the landlord granted us. She also loves handwritten notes. She keeps stationery, rich thick ivory paper, that she fills with her swooping handwriting any time a card is called for. Thinking about her ridiculous notes makes my throat constrict. I swallow hard and follow Claire outside again.
Around us, the light is failing fast. The sky is auburn-colored in the west and dusty dark blue in the east. Everything is beginning to look gray and muted, as if the sinking sun is siphoning the colors out of the world as it sets. I pull the desk drawer, the one that held the paper clips, off the junk pile, and I cart it inside to cover the bottom half of the kitchen window.
As I nail the drawer over the missing window panes, I wonder what Mom is doing right now. She’s most likely home, cooking herself dinner, worrying about me, with the TV a low-level hum in the background so that there are other voices in the apartment. She’ll be shredding fresh basil to top a tomato. She’ll have the window open over the sink (rather than nailed shut with a desk drawer), and her herb collection on the sill would be swaying in the breeze. She has a healthy collection of basil and sage and rosemary, due to the fact she always remembers to water her plants. I’d thrown out my last Christmas cactus—the only plant I was responsible for—because it was a desiccated husk. I wonder what she’d think of where I am, of this house, of Lost, of Claire, of Peter. I’ll tell her about it when I’m home, I promise myself. Maybe it will distract her from thinking about what a horrible person I am for leaving in the first place.
We have one window left that I want to cover, the one in the door. It isn’t large, and we find a sign from a deli to cover it. I hammer it on, driving a nail through a painted pickle. It feels satisfying to bash the nails as hard as I can.
“I’m hungry,” Claire announces.
“You’re saying that because of the pickle.”
“Or because I’m hungry.”
She skips out the door, and I catch her arm before she’s across the porch. She looks at me quizzically. “It’s getting dark,” I say, waving my hand at the deepening blue sky and the thickening shadows. I am trying not to think about what this place will be like when it’s pitch-black. I don’t want to be alone—Mr. Rabbit doesn’t count as company. Plus, Claire could encounter danger, like homicidal townies, feral dogs, or bandicoots, though I’m not entirely sure what a bandicoot is. Rodent of some kind.
She pats my hand as if to reassure me and then wiggles out of my grasp. “You stay here. I’ll be back.” She darts out the door, and I start to follow but then I hear the howl again. It freezes my body in place, even though my mind intends for me to chase after Claire. The howl is echoed by another wolf or coyote or feral dog or hell beast on the opposite side. By the time my bones unlock, Claire has disappeared into the shadows of the lawn and the towering junk pile. I swear under my breath.
Stepping off the porch, I call softly, “Claire?” I don’t dare shout. It feels as if the desert is listening. I wait, straining to hear any sound of her. But there’s only wind. It blows my hair against my face, and I wipe the strands away. Shadows are everywhere, layered thick like cloth, wrapping and hiding everything. The other houses blot out the deep blue sky. She could be near or inside any of them. I don’t think she stayed in this yard but still I call again softly, “Claire, we can wait and find food in the morning. It’s just one night. Come back. Please.”
The evening air smells almost sweet, which surprises me, given the junk pile. I’d expect it to smell like overripe fish or gym socks. Instead it smells like fresh mesquite and sage, like heated earth and dust. Overhead, there are stars spreading across the sky. It’s so stunningly beautiful that it freezes me as thoroughly as the bone-chilling howl did a few minutes earlier. I look for familiar constellations—Orion, the Big Dipper, Scorpius—but I don’t see them. Just an array of stars, scattered like glitter sprinkled over black felt.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” a voice comes out of the darkness.
I yelp, bolt inside the house, and slam the door. I then remember that Claire is out there with whoever spoke. Crap, I think.
Staring at the closed door, I can’t bring myself to open it again. Instead, knowing I’m a coward, I press my face against the half of the window that is intact and not covered by the deli sign. I peer out at the mountainous shadow of the junk pile on the lawn. I don’t see any movement, but of course it’s dark and—