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Tommy was deciding whether or not to run out after them when Gannon, suddenly back to his senses, grabbed his arm. “Tommy...” Gannon said, groggy and slow.
Tommy snatched Gannon’s hand away and shoved him to the far side of the back seat. Then he bolted back just in time for me to slam the door closed, locking the man inside. “Tommy!” Gannon called. He looked out at the boy through the window, a firm calmness in his eyes. “Tommy...open this door.”
Without a word Tommy walked around to the front of the car and picked up the pistol that still lay in the middle of the street.
“I told you to throw that away,” I said.
He tucked the gun into the pocket of his coat. “If you want it, come over here and take it.” His voice was a hard, low warning, something that would let his sister know that for all of my intelligence, despite that flawless, unbreakable memory of mine, he was powerful in his own right. He’d saved me. Not for the first time, and not for the last.
“You’re welcome,” Tommy said.
“It was my idea,” I replied.
“You’re still welcome.”
Then we stood there in the dark and the cold, looking at the man trapped in the back seat of the car. It would be up to me to figure out what to do next. And it would be up to Tommy to do whatever needed to be done. Just like always. I would get us both to Florida in time to watch the launch and then, after that, I wouldn’t need him anymore. And, at the same time, he wouldn’t need me anymore. He’d go off to the war. Do his duty the way his draft notice demanded. He would die.
It was the only way things could turn out for us, no matter how much we wanted it to be different. We couldn’t know that at the time, but years later, the past would be immutable, and I would have to live with it, perfectly preserved in the halls of memory. And, years later, I would be able to speak for my lost brother, to see this trip the way he had seen it. The last great gift he gave to me.
* * *
Tommy hadn’t been a smart boy and he would never become a smart man. But that wasn’t what really bothered my brother. Neither was it that The Disease or the war would one day find him. The latter, in fact, I’d almost say Tommy always saw as something inevitable. Maybe even welcomed.
Tommy told me once that he could never be like me. Not even if he tried at it every single day for five hundred years, cloistered away like a monk. He’d only ever come up short. He said he’d known that for about as far back as he could remember—which wasn’t very far. To be sure, he had memories. As many as most other people did, he figured. He remembered important stuff: the first girl he’d kissed, the first time he got in trouble in grade school, a smattering of song lyrics, a handful of lines from movies. If he was supposed to show up somewhere at a certain time on a certain day he could, for the most part, hold that much in his head. Maybe he’d have to check the calendar again and again in the days before and tell himself, “Now, don’t forget!” But that’s how it went. That’s how it was with everybody.
Everybody except me.
In the last few years before our final trip together, perhaps sensing his growing unease, his body no longer looked like a copy of mine. He had shot up four inches above me and filled out wide and strong. He was all muscle and intention. In spite of the changes to his body, he and I still shared much of the same face. Sometimes when we were together I could look at Tommy and find myself overcome with a feeling of both loneliness and togetherness all at once. Being a twin was cruel in its own way. From the moment you were born you were let in on the dark secret of humanity, the thing that no one wants to know about themselves: that a person is both unique and, at the same time, mass produced. And therefore no better than anyone else.
Hell of a thing for a child to have to grow up knowing.
By the age of twelve Tommy was already being told that he was handsome. Not cute, the way people told it to the other boys his age, but handsome, the way people spoke of grown men. He was athletic. Strong. Everyone knew he would grow up to do something physical. Maybe he’d be a boxer or a wrestler, but never a bully. And then, assuming he lived long enough, the architecture of his physique promised that he could be the type of man that made people feel safe when they had every reason to be afraid. Maybe after he’d been wrestling for a few years he would become a firefighter. Policeman, perhaps. He had a good smile. “A soft smile,” people told him, girls especially. Maybe he’d become a doctor with a stern voice but a soft smile, the kind you trusted to save you no matter what harm you had brought upon yourself.
But that was before things started falling apart. Back when young people like us still thought they could grow up to be something other than what they would come to call us: “Embers.” It was our job, or so the joke went, to be the last remnants of the flame that had burned so long. And, like all Embers, to eventually burn out.
From the time we were five Tommy and I had been shifted from foster home to foster home. Nothing to do with The Disease—that was still years away. But simply because our parents had already died and left us and we became “difficult” children. Maybe it was just the way we were. Or maybe it was because, after their deaths, the only thing we had to remember our parents by was a stack of letters that I’d read once and burned the next day.
After the letters were gone there were only Tommy and me, and we were always together. Only twice had anyone tried to separate us. Tommy had been the one they wanted.
The first time, no less than a day after Tommy had gone, I ran away from the group home in which he had left me behind and found his new home. It wasn’t difficult. Just a matter of getting the records from the social worker’s paperwork when she wasn’t looking. I snuck into Tommy’s room at night, took his hand and left. We made it a day and a half on our own before we were found. The couple who had taken him in gave him up after that and the two of us returned to the same foster home we had been in before. We were together again.
The second time it happened—again, he had been the one the adoptive family wanted—we were thirteen. We ran away again and made it alone together for almost a week. During that week, Tommy thought of a dozen good reasons why we should keep going. He had this idea of picking a direction—any direction—and simply going until that direction ran out. The world was big and we could get lost in it. And even though we would be lost, we would be together the way we had always been.
“We’re too young to keep running,” I said. “Nobody searches for anyone as hard as they search for lost kids.”
“We’re not kids,” Tommy said, and in just saying so I realized how young he sounded. “They’ll break us up again if we go back, Ginny.”
“Don’t call me Ginny,” I answered. “It’s what you called me when we were babies. And I’m not a baby anymore.”
We were standing beneath an overpass just after sunset, listening to the sound of the cars racing by in light rain, their tires sizzling like bacon. When the big trucks went by overhead there was the calump-calump-calump of the expansion gaps in the concrete.
“We’ll go back and I’ll tell them what they need to hear to make sure they keep us together,” I said. I tucked my hands in my pockets and stared off into the distance. The entire conversation was only a formality to be endured before it led to its obvious conclusion.
Tommy’s face tightened into a knot. “Dammit, Virginia!” he said, leaning hard on my name after planting the flag of “dammit.” Curse words were still new to him and still had power. “We can find somewhere to live.” We could both feel the momentum of words building inside him, like a shopping cart just beginning to rattle down a steep hill. “We can go off and make a home. We’re each other’s home when you really stop to think about it!” He belted the words out. He opened his arms, proudly, like a carnival barker making his greatest pitch.
He searched for words that would undo me, but found only the empty breath inside his lungs. If he tried to press me he knew I could always bring up facts and figures, numbers and math enough to break down anything he said. I could recite articles verbatim about the survival rates of runaways if I wanted. True stories of children found dead. Statistics about how badly everything could go for us if the world so decided. I could crunch the math in my head and rattle off the probabilities: such and such a chance of getting kidnapped, such and such a percentage of turning to drugs or prostitution or anything else. On and on, I always knew how to break down any resistance he ever had to anything.
Tommy looked at me, his face soft and afraid and frustrated all at the same time. His mind reached for something to say but his lips knew the fact of futility. Only I could change it. Only I could let him win the argument that he so desperately needed to win.
And he knew—we both knew, and hated—that I wouldn’t let him win.
Rather than fight it, rather than try to make the case for the things he thought we should do, he conceded. Tommy’s life was always easier when he just did what I wanted.
“So be it,” he said.
“Tommy?”
“What?” he answered, sighing the word as his body slumped upon its frame, resigned to defeat.
“They’re never going to break us apart,” I said.
“Then why do they keep trying?”
I walked over and wrapped my arms around him. He was outgrowing me already and my arms had to work to surround him, but the work was rewarded by the feeling of my brother captured, like some splendid and frail animal, in my arms. I had to protect him. It was my job.
“We won’t ever be separated,” I said.
“But—”
“I promise, Tommy.”
“You can’t know that, Ginny. Mom and Dad said they’d always be here too.”
Tommy’s body shuddered and I knew that he was crying. He wrapped his arms around me, if only to keep me from seeing his tears the way boys and men are known to do.
“Mom and Dad haven’t left,” I said. “They’re in me. In The Memory Gospel. And they’re in you too.”
“I can’t remember like you can,” Tommy said, almost as an apology.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re in you. We’re together. A family. And we’ll always be that.”
“You promise?”
“Just as sure as my name’s Ginny.”
We stood for a long time, holding one another, and the world passed us by.
...calump-calump-calump...
Like a beating heart fading into nothingness. And when the sound went away, when the world had drifted off into silence, we were still there, together. The way it would always be for my brother and me.
After that we went back to the foster family who had taken him in and, just as before, the family didn’t want Tommy unless it was without me. So we found ourselves lost in the system. But at least we were lost together.
Four years later, we were seventeen and running away again, but this time, we wouldn’t go back. The launch in Florida wouldn’t wait for me the way the war and death would wait for Tommy.
In three days, when this would all be over.
So be it.
(#u1a514c9e-e573-5827-9d52-3a19530cf496)
To My Children (#u1a514c9e-e573-5827-9d52-3a19530cf496),
We could do nothing to stop the towers from falling. We could do nothing to stop the workplaces from being shot up. And when the shootings spilled out of the office buildings and into the schools, we could do nothing to stop that either. The government began watching everyone because we had given them permission. Climate change. Bankers. On and on and on. All day every day the news outlets came into our homes—slipping in through the waves and cables, screens and surfaces that bound us all together. The television became a hole in the ice through which horror shambled each night, the way it used to in old black-and-white movies. But in those movies dying was all corn syrup. Back then, the world only pretended to be after us and, inevitably, the thing we feared went away, born into darkness on a tide of end credits.
But now the dying we saw on TV was real. The world grew more thorns with each sunrise, tightened in a little closer with each sunset. And all the while we watched. We stared at the news and shook our heads in dismay. We wept. We sat up at night, sleepless and fretting. Asking ourselves, over and over again: What right did we have to bring children into this world?
Your mother and I went back and forth for years. We felt we had a duty to wait for things to get better. A duty not only to you, but to everyone else. This world, in whatever form it takes, is a product of us all. We forge hope or sow terror. We dole them out in measurements of our own choosing.
But still, it’s a big world. I was just a small-town newspaper writer. She a science teacher. How much could we really do about anything?
At some point in your life, you’ll want to know where we were when everything changed. It’s a hard question to answer, like trying to find the moment when a little hill of rocks became a mountain. It happens suddenly and all at once, like a lightning strike, and after the flash fades, you turn to see that your home has burned to the ground.
While there are a dozen days in which the world changed, and some of them I will tell you about, I’ll answer your inevitable question about the moment when things went from the way they were to the way they would become:
We were in North Carolina visiting your mother’s parents on the day the towers fell. Your mother, your grandparents and I all spent the morning huddled together in front of the television, watching it happen, just like everyone else. Your grandfather, a stoic man by nature, sat unmoving in his chair for hours, letting what was happening wash over him like floodwaters sweeping over a headstone. When he did finally speak, all he said was, “I’m sorry.”
By sunset we were all wrung out. Raw and frayed at the edges. We wanted to sleep, but it was early yet and, even beyond that, we knew that it would be a sleepless night. So your mother and I went for a walk. Her parents lived in a small community on the Intracoastal Waterway where large houses smelled of seawater. Small cars steered gingerly over the earth, guided by retired hands. The ocean thinned out into tendrils of tributaries only a stone’s throw from the bedrooms of children.
The streets were empty because the television was still full of tragedy. Your mother and I walked the vacant roads alone. Sometimes the wind carried the sound of sobbing from nearby houses. We pretended it was the sound of laughter. A lie, but one we felt it was okay to tell ourselves.
Eventually we found a sandy road leading off into the woods. It led to a collection of abandoned buildings. Once upon a time, it had been a summer camp of some sort. Square, concrete buildings held empty wiry bunks, rusting and half-reclaimed by underbrush. A large, high-ceilinged classroom stood at the center of the complex, covered in graffiti and shaggy with kudzu that trembled like grasshoppers when the wind blew.
We moved through the empty, forgotten buildings, stepping slowly, detached from everything, even ourselves, like ghosts. When we had seen enough we followed the edge of the property and found that it led to the ocean. The sun was setting behind a wall of clouds. Just before it disappeared, it flared, shifting colors, from beautiful to ominous, the way a goldfish swimming in a bowl can, with the proper play of lighting, suddenly become an apostrophe of blood.
Then the sun was gone and the moon rose above the water.
As we stood and watched, the light from the moon poured down onto the ocean water. The water swung from black to gray to silver. And then it continued to change. From silver to turquoise to, finally, a glowing, electric blue. I can’t remember ever seeing that particular shade of blue. And I have never seen it since. The water looked like lightning, lightning that coiled itself into waves, only to flatten and bubble against the shore, still glowing. Just then, your mother and I could believe we had stumbled upon another planet. Some near-dimension mirror-image earth. A horror-beauty of a world where planes leveled buildings and lightning became water at moonrise.
Wordlessly, your mother stripped off her clothes and, without testing the depths or the dangers, dove in. She disappeared and reemerged, glowing like a glacier. “We don’t know what this is,” I said.
“It’ll be okay,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I followed anyway. There was never any choice. Not really.
We swam into this new world.
Later that night we told your grandfather what had happened. “Heaven’s Tide,” he said. “You don’t know how lucky you are to see such a thing.”
After a bit of research, I learned that it was just a strain of bioluminescent algae. A completely natural occurrence that had happened before and would happen again. The only thing different about this time was that your mother and I had been there to bear witness to it. It was our old, familiar world all the while. It had only chosen to show us something rare and wondrous.
“It’s not all horrible,” your mother said to me later that night. It was her way of saying, “Let’s try a family, even in this world.”
It would be years before we succeeded. In the interim the world continued to change. I responded by writing these notes, letters, whatever they are. I write them for you, in case it all falls apart. I write them for myself, to say that it doesn’t have to. I write them to prove that the world has always been this hard. I write them to prove that the future was always meant to be a promise, not a threat.
THREE (#u1a514c9e-e573-5827-9d52-3a19530cf496)
“There are bad ideas, and then there are bad ideas,” Gannon grumbled from the back seat. The sick Old Man beside him said nothing, because that was the way it always was with him.
Behind the wheel Tommy clunked the car into gear and steered it gently off the highway. I sat in the passenger seat, pointing ahead through the window at the path we should take. “Head toward that tree line,” I said.
“Those trees won’t hide a car,” Gannon said. He chuckled a little, then hardened his grin, as though he hadn’t meant to find anything funny just now. He looked over at his father, checking to be sure that he was okay, then turned back to Tommy. “Hell of a right hook you’ve got there.” He pressed his hand to the back of his head and checked his palm for blood. “But you always were strong as an ox, weren’t you?”
“Can you just stop talking?” Tommy asked.
“It doesn’t matter if he talks,” I said. “Don’t listen. Just get us over behind those trees.”
“It’s a hell of a world we live in, I suppose,” Gannon said with a sigh, as though resigning himself to something. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes and hummed so quietly that the sound was only there for a moment before being swallowed up by the lope of the engine as the car bobbled up and down over the rough-hewn field.
“I’m not the one who sent you that draft notice, Tommy,” Gannon said. “You’ve already let her get you into more trouble than you had to, son.”
“He’s not your son,” I said.
“You’re just a strong back to her, Tommy,” Gannon said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “She’ll never make it without you and she knows it. That’s the reason she’s dragging you along on this. Don’t you dare think it’s anything different than that. I’m the only person that can make this right with the draft, son. I’m trying to help you. They don’t treat dodgers too good.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “they send them off to war.”
Tommy let out a stiff laugh.
Though the ground was frozen and hard now, the winter had come with fits of warmth that had unlocked the earth into a bog only for it to refreeze days later, misshapen and awkward, like a heart riding the highs and lows of love and hate over the course of a long marriage. Here and there the ground dipped, long and deep as a starving belly, and the car was thrown down into a depression and all Tommy could do was hold tight to the steering wheel and keep his foot on the accelerator, uncertain whether or not we would be able to climb out of the hole in which we found ourselves. But Tommy was good behind the wheel and he got the car over to the trees that jutted out, dense and bare, on the far edge of the field.
“Right there,” I said, pointing ahead.
“I see it,” Tommy said, aiming for where the trees were thickest. There was a scrub of green pines and bare oaks. Not much, but enough to make the car difficult to see from the road when the sun finally came up.
“You kids really should think this over,” Gannon said. I thought I heard genuine concern in his voice, but whether it was for us or for himself was hard to say. As the car plunged into one final dip that sent us all bouncing, Gannon grabbed his father to steady the man. “It’s okay, Pop,” he cooed. “I got you.”
Tommy pulled the car to a stop and put it in Park. “Now what?”
“Leave it running,” I replied.
“What about poison?” Tommy asked.
“What poison?”
“Carbon dioxide.”
“Carbon monoxide,” Gannon corrected him, turning and looking at me through the thick Plexiglas divider. “He’s afraid we’ll suffocate while we’re sitting here waiting to be found,” he continued. “He’s got a right to be scared. It’s bad enough that you’re locking a sick man like my father in here, but if something happens to me while I’m waiting—anything at all, even if I have a damn heart attack from boredom—that’s manslaughter for the both of you. If you’re lucky. But they won’t let you have luck. Not with a dead cop on their hands. So they’ll swing for the fences. Try you both as adults. Murder. First-degree. ‘With foresight and malice.’ That’s what they’ll say.”
