Emergency Places: Part II

Mary had to finish planning her son’s funeral, and all she wanted to do was take herself to a movie. She woke up, just before dawn, and imagined how she could manage to stay inside the theater for a week straight. Sleep there. Eat there. She’d slip into the blackness of the theater after the showing started, and hide when the theater attendants came to clean up the spilled popcorn and crinkled soda lids between showings and go missing. Just like Eddie did. Eddie, her son, who was a mummy in a hot car when he was finally found. Her first born, who broke their family in half and bent them into weird, sad shapes. Mary and her younger son Thomas; the two of them dragged along the pavement behind Eddie. Mary blamed herself, of course, but mostly she blamed Eddie. He was hateful and gorgeous, and wanted to annihilate.

Now Mary had to honor him. And she would. She wouldn’t go to a movie. She would be organized. She would go and greet the few people who’d turn out for it and be gracious and then go home and not leave her bed for a week. Her younger son, Thomas, would be there, too. She imagined he’d leave after a day or two and run back to the city where he’d fall away from her, for good this time. It was inevitable. It had always been happening, since Thomas was small. This secret knowledge they shared. Both of them in on it. Biding time. They never really knew each other, Thomas and Mary. They ran parallel. They acknowledged each other. Respected each other. And there was love. At least on Mary’s end. They’d lose touch after Eddie’s funeral. And that was okay.  They’d been circling the world together like satellites, and Eddie was the world. Now Eddie was dead and there was no more orbit and just gravity, shooting them both into space in different directions. In any case, Mary was happy Thomas would be home, to stand next to her, eat with her, be awake in the next room when she was sleeping. He was company and she was grateful.

Mary’s younger sister Annie would be coming to get her at 7:30 for a last minute meeting with the funeral home, and then would drive Mary to pick up Thomas at the train station. Mary had stopped driving a year before. For the environment or something—Mary was vague about her reasons. She gave her car to Annie’s son, Marcus, a year earlier and walked or took the bus everywhere. This week, though, she wished she had a car. Marcus was boring and worked at a bank. He had a boring girlfriend and they lived in a boring house in the town over.

Eddie and Thomas were never boring. Mary always felt pride over that. Eddie, in all his wreckage, and Thomas, and his strange, lovely mystery; they were special. Everyone knew it. Especially Annie, who Mary knew was jealous. Even at the end, when Eddie was missing, and the FBI offered Mary security in case Eddie came home and held her at gunpoint, he was interesting. Eddie was something. Compelling. Annie hated him for it. Mary loved that. 

She walked into her kitchen and flicked on the light switch to see if the power had returned, which it hadn’t, and stood at the sink and looked outside at the brightening sky. The power had gone out the night before. Her neighbors filed out into the street with flashlights and cell phones. Mary watched them through the window. A man in his 40s named Leo, who moved to the street a few months prior, knocked on Mary’s door and asked her if she needed anything. Mary thanked him, but said she had everything she needed, which was a lie. Leo lived alone, worked as a contractor, and was the only neighbor to check on her since Eddie died. He was handsome, too; Mary assumed he was gay. But sometimes she wasn’t sure. Leo said he had a generator and told Mary to fill her bathtub up with water “just in case.” She didn’t ask him why, but figured it had to do with what she’d been hearing from Annie over the last week. She’d stopped watching the news, and took the internet off her phone after Eddie was found dead, and both her cell phone and landline were bombarded with death threats and spam calls from the countless internet strangers who celebrated Eddie’s death, and wished it on both Mary and Thomas, too.

But the news never stopped, even when you tried your best to make it go away. Annie sent Mary constant updates over text: unexplained power outages up and down the east coast. The electric companies were scrambling to solve it, and the White House released a statement that they were investigating, whatever that meant. 

Suddenly in the kitchen window, she saw red light reflected and spinning, and turned towards the front of her house. Ambulance lights. She walked towards the front door and looked through the small glass oval. In the street, an ambulance was parked. It was silent and bright. Mary looked around to see if any one was watching. But her neighborhood was empty. No cars. No people. An EMT, wearing a surgical mask, jumped out of the driver’s seat, and walked to the back of the vehicle, where he opened the two doors, and waited—sort of hanging, like he was tired. Ahead, in a house across the street and one over, two other EMTs, also wearing masks, plus hazmat suits, flanked and wheeled a man on a stretcher to the ambulance. He was wearing an oxygen mask and did not look conscious. A woman trailed behind on foot, wearing a long coat, and pajama pants tucked into boots. Her name was Theresa, and the man was undoubtedly her husband. They were a young couple with two small children. Theresa had always been friendly to Mary, but the previous winter, had posted in the Next Door app that she didn’t feel safe with Mary being part of the group, considering Eddie’s part in the January insurrection. Mary watched Theresa now, crying while stepping into the ambulance with people who looked like they were wearing space suits, and thought she looked beautiful. The ambulance pulled away as quietly as it arrived; a ghost carriage. A UFO disappearing into the sky. 

Mary decided to not make sense of what she just witnessed, and instead get dressed and walk to a Starbucks a mile from her house and wait there for Annie to pick her up. She climbed the staircase, and on her way, without even looking, took a photo of Eddie at his 5th birthday party off the wall, and let it fall to the floor, shattering the frame. In the bathroom, she went to start the shower, and remembered what Leo had told her about filling it, but when she turned the shower knob, a few spurts of brown fluid came out and then nothing. The pipes brayed and screeched behind the wall and were still again. Mary stayed there, stretched out over the empty tub, her knees on the bath mat, and for the first time since before Eddie died, she was afraid.

In her bedroom, she got dressed, and sent several texts in a row to Thomas, who she hadn’t heard from since yesterday afternoon.

My service is bad. Have you tried calling me? 

Is the power out in the city?

Let me know when yore at Penn Station

*you’re

She called Annie once she was fully dressed and asked her to come get her early. Annie didn’t answer. She tried Jeffery, too, Annie’s fiancé, who was profoundly unsettling, and who Thomas decided had definitely murdered someone at some point. Nothing. She called Marcus next, who was just getting to the bank when he answered. He said he hadn’t heard from Annie today, but she’d called him last night to say she wasn’t feeling well. Mary thought about Theresa stepping into the ambulance an hour earlier, and her heart began to race, imagining Annie on a stretcher, too. On Marcus’s end, there were sirens, and they waited in silence till it passed.

Mary asked if there was even power at the bank, and Marcus said no, but they needed him to wait for new security to come guard the bank till it was back on again.

“Everyone else called out sick,” Marcus said. 

Mary didn’t tell Marcus what she’d seen this morning, but instead asked him to keep in touch with her. He said he could leave work in an hour to come drive her to the train, but Mary said she would walk. Then Marcus’s phone fuzzed and cut out, and Mary put on her coat.

***

There were two people inside Starbucks, which of course, had power: a college student with her headphones on and typing on her laptop in the corner, and a guy in his 30s with long hair, blow-sipping a hot coffee by the door. At the register, a barista stood scrolling on their phone, swaying in place. They were wearing a face mask, and didn’t even look up at Mary when she approached. Mary waited for a moment, before saying hello. The barista looked up–their eyes were wide. They backed away slightly when Mary was close. Mary rushed out an order she didn’t even want, and went and sat down at one of the high tables near the window, on the other side of the store. She didn’t know she should even be inside right now, with other people. Maybe they were sick, too. Or she was. Sick with what, though? A flu? Some kind of new thing? Smoke? She knew there was a huge wild fire in California, and smoke was spreading to the east. But otherwise, she’d heard nothing. She’d taken leave from her job—HR at a moderately sized shipping company in Jersey City—when Eddie died. Surely, they would have emailed about a public health issue. Maybe they were firing her. This was their way of letting her down easy, not looping her into emergency protocol.

‘It’s because of Eddie,’ she thought.

She was suddenly angrier with Eddie than she’d ever been. She wanted to shake him. Push him. Yell in his face. She would be marred by him for the rest of her life. Ousted into the shadows. Then she remembered she desperately wanted to hold him, and nearly threw up, right there in Starbucks. But she didn’t. Instead, she composed herself, and drafted a text to her best friend at work, Harriet. She rewrote it several times before deleting it.

Mary put her phone down and watched the barista making her drink, when suddenly, their cell phone rang. They answered right away, loudly. She could hear them before they left the floor.

“I’m at work,” the barista said.

The barista then looked around the store, almost suspiciously, and disappeared behind the employee’s only door.

Mary looked at her phone again—the service still spotty—and checked if Thomas had respond. Not yet. She called him this time, but there was an immediate out of service signal. She tried Annie, which rang, but no answer. She re-downloaded the news app on her phone and felt savvy.

She looked up right as the barista burst through the door, now with their coat on. They power-walked out of the kitchen, and towards the store entrance. The guy and girl on the other side looked up and watched, too. Before exiting, the barista stopped, as if they were going to make an announcement, but instead turned and rushed out. Mary watched them run into the mostly-empty parking lot, get into their car and reverse right into the side of another—setting off its alarm—before speeding off. Mary sat there, stunned. She looked across at the college girl, who was now looking up with her headphones around her neck, looking equally confused and offended. The long-haired guy continued to blow on his coffee. Mary stood up and approached them both, then was silent for a moment.

“I‘m going to go,” Mary suddenly said. They stared at her. Mary suddenly felt embarrassed, and walked out.

On her way through the parking lot, Mary considered going back to Starbucks twice.

“Seek shelter!” She would yell to them. “Follow me!”

But she didn’t know what they’d be seeking shelter from. Mary then thought that maybe those two had been soulmates. They would make a home for themselves there and live for years and years. 

‘Thank god I left,’ Mary thought. ‘Now they had each other.’

She hurried down the sidewalk, towards the train station. She would collect Thomas at the train, and they would stay at Annie’s house with Jeffery, then boring Marcus and his boring girlfriend would join, and they would all wait out whatever was happening together.