The Crossing Page 11

  Now, six months later, the Drifting Party was a living, breathing entity that consumed entire towns in the Midwest for a single night. The whole country had taken notice. The Party was being mapped and tracked like a storm, something fearsome and splendorous all at once. It swept over the skin of America in a long, winding line of cars and motorcycles and trucks and buses and everything else that was mobile. There were even people following along on foot, and Kevin and Marvin took sight of this and decided that they wouldn’t travel any farther than a day’s walk for as long as the Drifting Party continued.

  So their small experiment—sponsored by a couple of rich kids who had gotten lucky all of their lives—continued to grow and expand and take on one form after another.

  But the problem—which the brothers didn’t know about—was that those who didn’t want to go off to the war at all were using the Drifting Party as a way to connect with other dodgers for means and methods of escaping the war. The brothers found out the night the police met them in a small Midwestern town that barely had a name. They surrounded the mass of Embers and asked for identification from everyone and it didn’t take long before they were finding the draft dodgers mingled in among the revelers and began arresting them.

  No one knew how the first gunshot was fired. But everyone would come to know the aftermath of that gunshot.

  When it was over the party was silent and Kevin was dead and Marvin was arrested and there were seventeen dead teenagers found among the ruin and wreckage of the Last Party.

  Marvin wept for his brother and raged and wept some more, but there was nothing that he could do to bring back the dead. The next day he voluntarily enlisted. Three months later he was killed.

  His story made the news and captured national attention for a few days. And then the fervor passed away like so many other things. The world returned to news about The Disease and the war and the dark days ahead. But for so many Embers who wound up going off to the war, there were glorious remembrances of a time before the end of things when there was music and light and revelry, and being alive was a blessing and not a burden. When all seems to be falling apart, those are the types of memories that can save a generation.

  EIGHT

  Even though he knew he could never grow up to be like me, Tommy was proud of himself for all the things that he had seen and all the ways he felt he was able to get a handle on the world. It was easy for someone with a mind like mine, Tommy figured. All I had to do was the required reading about the subject and pull it into my mind, able to see everything stretched out in front of me—then if I could sit and think long enough, I could sort out anything.

  But for someone like Tommy, somebody who didn’t have that ability—someone who had to break the world up into bite-sized pieces and, from those small morsels of understanding, come up with a plan on how to make it through the day, how to treat people who were good, how to stay out of the clutches of people who were bad, how to tell the difference between the two—life was a hard proposition.

  Tommy felt he did okay most of the time. He had an inner compass of sorts that tended to tell him what to do, as long as he didn’t spend too much time overthinking. Which wasn’t to say that he thought thinking was bad. We were supposed to sit down and stick our elbow on our knee and our fist to our chin—like Rodin’s The Thinker, though Tommy didn’t know the name of the sculpture—and then, after we’d done all of that brow-furrowing type of thinking, we would suddenly see the clear path ahead. What we didn’t know about something wouldn’t matter because that internal compass would intuitively know the differences between right and wrong, good and evil. That was the thing that could put a not-so-smart person on even footing with someone capable of remembering everything they ever saw or read or said or did.

  And putting people on even footing was the only thing that made the world fair. The only thing that made life fair. And it was damn important to be sure that things in life were, above all else, fair.

  And while he didn’t remember everything the way I did, he remembered the important stuff in his life. He remembered all the things that he was supposed to remember in order to become a good person. And it was important to Tommy to be a good person. If he couldn’t be a smart one, then being a good one was something that he could be proud of.

  Even though he was only seventeen, he’d seen a great many things in his life that had helped his moral compass. Tommy had seen a house burn to the ground and the family make it out in the nick of time. He had seen people stand before the smoldering remains of their life and smile and laugh and cry as though they had been granted the greatest gift in the entire universe rather than having just had it all taken away. He had seen a dog climb a tree—that one was odd, but he felt a lesson was there. He had seen bullies beating up on the weak and he had seen the weak beating up on the strong. He had seen rockets light up the sky like stars. He had seen planes fly so close overhead once—years ago, when one of their foster parents had taken them to a military air show—that when they passed people were bowled over and terrified that it would all come crashing down around their ears. He had seen winters so cold that tree limbs broke in the breeze. He had seen summer days so hot that birds kept out of the sky. He had seen teachers having sex in the bathroom, thinking they were hidden. It had happened not long after there was news of another bombing and people were desperate to remind themselves that there was something other than death in this world. And he had seen his fair share of death, as well, obviously. Death, which seemed hell-bent on balancing the scales and reminding those who loved life that, eventually and without exception, it all comes to an end.

  Even beyond the death of our parents—which he had seen but could not remember because that was the way his mind worked—he had seen the dead on television. Beds full of Disease victims flanked by weeping loved ones. Soldiers sent back from the war missing limbs. Civilians with blood-drenched bandages on their faces lying on cots in dusty desert hovels. On the internet, once, he had spent the night watching war videos. In the videos people were beheaded by the enemies. The videos were never around long. They lasted for only minutes before the censors found them and took them down, but they were there briefly and Tommy spent the night chasing one video around the web as it was taken down from one site and reposted on another.

  Over and over again he watched the man with his hands bound behind his back lose his head. The man was calm to it all, accepting, as though he knew something that Tommy and no one else in the world seemed to be aware of. Whatever the secret was, Tommy wanted to know it. And that, even though he didn’t realize it, had been the reason he had spent the night chasing the video, watching the man be killed over and over again. He wanted to know how it was possible for anyone to stare into the void of their own death with calm resilience and acceptance.

  Whether he saw his own future in that video or not it was hard for him to say. Soldiers were often captured in the war and killed on video. That was the way of things nowadays. Privacy was more of a theory than anything. Births had been filmed and shown around for years. So, Tommy figured, it made perfect sense that death would get the same treatment.

  So maybe one day—he sometimes mused to himself—he would be the man on his knees waiting for the blade to fall and for the lights to go out. He wasn’t sure if he believed in an afterlife. Ever since I had made the decision that we were both atheists years ago, he’d struggled with it. He’d tried, now and again over the years, to convince me that there was possibly another option. But trying to outwit me in a conversation was something that he could never really do, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

  Life, everything that a person did and saw and felt, couldn’t all be for nothing. There had to be more. And it was his job to make me understand it. Life had shown him that. He had seen the country fall further and further into disagreement and arguing. When I read one of our father’s letters Tommy would always listen and not really be sure he believed whe
ther or not things were ever better. People were always talking about how much better things used to be. The sun used to shine brighter. Days were longer. The water tasted better. The world was greener. And on and on. Sometimes Tommy could be convinced that he had been born at the wrong time. Everything that had been good was decaying and everything that had been better would never come around again. The whole world, it seemed, was sliding into some place that it could never come back from.

  And Tommy had, without a doubt, seen enough bad things to become numb to them. Sometimes it unsettled him just how easy it was to forget that there were, truly and without debate, bad things that happened in this world. It was all too easy to take in so much of what was happening that it overflowed the inside of you and you just felt like, well, like maybe nothing really mattered anymore.

  Maybe that was really what was going on inside me. Maybe that was why I always seemed to be able to accept what was happening. Because of The Memory Gospel I carried everything, always saw the big picture, always saw the bad things, and I was never able to get away from them. I never had the luxury of lying to myself and saying that good things mattered more than the bad. Maybe that was why I made such a big fuss about deciding that the two of us become atheists. It was easier to believe in nothing than to believe in something broken and flawed.

  But Tommy—even though a good percentage of what he remembered were bad things—was also able to remember the good.

  Once he had seen a boy jump into a lake and save the life of a drowning man. He’d seen people give money and food to the homeless. He’d seen a dog fight off a stranger to protect a child. He’d seen stars that shone in the daytime even though such things weren’t supposed to happen. He’d seen the sun turn blue once—something to do with the alignment of chemicals in the air. He’d seen the ocean turn a similar electric blue—he hadn’t really seen that one; it had been something his father had written about in one of his letters and Tommy had gotten the image in his head and not been able to get rid of it.

  He still believed in the world.

  But I had seen it all too and I had lost my belief in the world. Tommy knew that it wasn’t likely I’d ever get that back. I was broken.

  What I needed, Tommy thought, was to find something to believe in. Something like he had. When he stopped to think about it—which wasn’t all too often, but it did happen—Tommy knew that he believed in a great many things. He believed in America. In the way the country was always trying to be the best version of itself. Yeah, maybe it didn’t always do what it was trying to do, but at least it tried. He believed in people. Really and truly believed in them, in spite of the foster parents that had come and gone over the years.

  If he could ever make me believe in something—America, people, God, something—then maybe I’d be happy.

  He didn’t know when I had become unhappy. It happened the way a sunny day suddenly becomes overcast. The clouds just seemed to appear out of nothing, as if they had always been there.

  Tommy was pretty sure that it had begun with the death of our parents. That made sense to him. The course of our lives had changed, pushed us into the cycle of foster homes and group homes and foster parents and adoptive parents and social workers and new schools and new homes and new friends and new bullies and new reasons to be afraid to fall asleep at night—Tommy was haunted by a recurring memory that he might one day fall asleep and wake up in some unknown place surrounded by strangers with no way back to me. So Tommy figured that I was filled with similar fears, a whole host of things that I could never forget—after all, Tommy was blessed with the ability to forget anything and I was cursed with the opposite.

  What else could he do but feel bad for me?

  So every single day, from pretty far back as Tommy could remember, he made a promise to do what he could to make sure that I was happy and taken care of. He learned not to be upset when I got mad at him or took my anger out on him by showing off just how good I was at remembering things. He learned to forgive, over and over again. And because he had learned the art of forgetting—for truly and honestly letting go of the things he didn’t want to keep in his mind—he could truly forgive me.

  But since I couldn’t forget, I never seemed able to forgive myself.

  To this day, I apologized for the time when we were children and I had called him “a retarded oaf.” Tommy didn’t even remember the incident. Sometimes he wondered if it was all part of my imagination.

  I would apologize and he would say, “It okay, Ginny.” And then he would smile to prove to me that it was, truly and sincerely, okay. But sometimes that would only make things worse.

  “Do you even remember?” I asked.

  “No,” Tommy replied.

  “Then how are you saying it’s okay?”

  “Well,” Tommy replied, “I think the fact that I don’t remember proves that it’s okay. It’s like it never happened. So, in a sense, maybe it never did.”

  “But that’s not the truth,” I said. “It did happen. I remember it.” With each word I grew more and more frustrated. My eyes narrowed. The muscles of my jaw firmed up like concrete.

  “But if I’m the one it happened to,” Tommy replied, “and I don’t remember it. Doesn’t that mean it’s okay?”

  “No!” I shouted, even angrier than before.

  It went this way over and over again throughout our lives thus far. Him going one way in the world and me going another. Each argument, each time we felt a little differently about something, Tommy could feel that there was a dam being built between us, pebble by pebble.

  Some nights Tommy would lie awake, wondering about that dam. He was smart enough to know people sometimes grew apart in this world. That was just the way of things. A person couldn’t be expected to remain who they were from one end of their life to the other. Especially not with the way life had of falling down around your ears without much warning or reason. How can two people, even brother and sister, expect to get through it unchanged?

  He saw changes in us. Every day I was drifting a bit further away. Every time he brought up something from the past that he couldn’t remember, I would recite the story with a little less energy and interest than I had the time before. He felt bad about making me the keeper of the things he couldn’t hold on to, and so he tried to limit it. If he felt himself getting to a nostalgic place—which was rare, because he hardly understood the notion of nostalgia, not really—he would stop himself. He would slow down and think to himself and ask, “Does it really matter?” And most of the time, he would come to the decision that it didn’t.

  But other times a memory would come into his head and only I could tell him the way things had once been. He would ask me and I would tell him and the gap between us would get just a bit wider.

  He didn’t understand how I couldn’t believe in anything. There was a word for the way I felt about things, the way I believed in nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. I had told him one time that life was just a train ride to nowhere. I’d read it in a book and he knew I believed it—but he felt that it wasn’t a good attitude to have about life. A person had a responsibility to find happiness in things. Maybe responsibility wasn’t the exact word he wanted to use, but he wasn’t good enough with words to be able to say for sure. All he knew was that there were things in this life to be happy about. But it was an elusive thing, like the smell of cedar and jasmine. Happiness was always just beyond the range of what you could see and hear and feel. You had to be on the lookout for it. You had to meet it halfway. You had to get down on your knees, penitent and patient—words Tommy couldn’t think of but that fit his thoughts, nonetheless—and you had to say to yourself: “I’m going to be happy.”

  And if you did that, life could be a bearable thing.

  But because of The Memory Gospel, I dragged around all the bad things in addition to all the good things and, maybe just because the bad had always outnumbered the good, I
had become the atheist and the pessimist that I was. It was his job to fix that. To fix me. To make me understand that a person could believe in things and be happy and that it would all be okay.

  Which was why Tommy didn’t mind the fact that I had gotten him out here running from our foster father and from the Draft Board and the end of the world. If a person believed what the old people had to say about such things, we were on course to find the world hammered into a flat nothing by nuclear bombs and war and taxes and politics and religions and racism and sexism and discrimination and gun violence and murders and accidental deaths and rising sea levels and oil spilling into the oceans and oil spilling into the wetlands and oil spilling into the Arctic and whales beaching themselves because of naval sonar and masked madmen and rapists and solar flares and asteroids and tetanus and high blood pressure and car crashes and alcoholism and opioids and water with too much lead and wind and rain and the way the sky shone on certain days. Even before The Disease, it was never going to last.

  It was everywhere and it was out to get everyone.

  But that didn’t mean that life was all bad. A person could find the good things too. Just like he had. Even though he would go off to war and he would probably die, he could still have a few good times before then.

  * * *

  Tommy jolted awake from some dream he couldn’t remember, heart racing. When he wiped his hand across his forehead, he found it covered in sweat. “Shit,” he swore to himself. He was afraid, but of exactly what he didn’t know. He sat up and checked to see that I was still there. I was. I had curled into a ball on one side of the bed. The other side of the bed was unmussed. I always left room for him.

  When he saw that I was safe, his heartbeat slowed and he exhaled, long and deep. He had slept awkwardly and his neck was sore. He sat up and rubbed the muscles. “Ginny?” he called.