The sound of the bathroom door snapping shut opened the floodgates for the tension to scream out of my body, and I nearly fell forward into the sizzling pan.
“Just get through the day,” I muttered. “Get through the day.”
I stirred the rice and beans and squirrel one more time to prevent it from burning to the metal and then gathered the clothes off the floor. I tried to pick them up by the clean sections, but my fingers quickly started sticking to his clothes.
Off the kitchen sat what had been the laundry room. I used it for the same purpose, though now the washer and dryer both lay in the middle of the front yard. Our supply of gasoline for the generator limited the amount of electronics that we could use, and an electric washer and dryer ranked low on Flynn’s list.
I nudged the washbasin beneath the waterspout with my toe and turned on the water. After adding a scoop of detergent, the water’s gentle ripple was overcome by bubbles. The light hit the bubbles just right to turn the soapy film a translucent purple with hints of green and blue at the edges.
I carefully laid the clothes into the basin one at a time, watching the bubbles pop with each piece of fabric breaking the water’s surface. The wind howling outside turned into white noise, and I found myself drawn to the soothing rhythm of the clothes slipping into the bottom of the tub. I almost didn’t notice the gritty pebbles sticking to my fingers or the small pebbles floating amidst the bubbles.
It took my brain a second or two to recognize what I was seeing. The gritty pebbles on my fingers and floating in the water were flesh. Maybe with chunks of bone mixed-in.
Flynn’s jacket slipped from between my fingers.
My vision blurred at the edges until all I could see was the washbasin. Then I doubled over and emptied my stomach before sinking to the floor. I was barely aware of what I was kneeling in or the smell of charred food coming from the kitchen or the footsteps thudding down the stairs.
“How stupid can you be? Do you have any idea how long it took me to catch and skin that squirrel?”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t move.
Flynn stormed through the doorway, and his stocking foot smashed against my lower back and sent my kidneys banging into my other organs. It knocked the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t get it back before his fingers wrapped around a section of my hair and used it to lift me nearly to my feet. His fist kissed my cheekbone, sending me back to the ground. In the tumble, I smashed into the washbasin and water sloshed over the edge.
I managed to roll over onto my hands and knees and began to crawl. My hands slid in the soapy water, but I redoubled my efforts until I started making forward progress toward the corner where a built-in cabinet stood.
“Get back over here,” Flynn growled.
His hand wrapped around my ankle, and he yanked me backward. I dug my fingernails into the tile floor. The strain as my nails began to separate from the cuticles was the most bearable pain that I would feel for a long time.
“I’m so sorry, Isabel,” Flynn said for the ninth time in the past half-hour. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I slouched against the dining room table, battling to stay upright even as the room spun around me. Endorphins had taken the edge off the pain inhabiting almost every square inch of my body, but where my forearm had broken still felt like it was on fire. The sensation only worsened as Flynn wrapped it in a makeshift splint.
My blood was splattered across the front and arms of his gray, long-sleeved shirt along with the front of his pants. It would have been turning stiff as the blood across my shirt and jeans was well on its way to hardening into the fabric. He’d yet to wash the blood from his hands.
His fingers gingerly caressed my skin, and he worried his bottom lip between his teeth.
“You know I didn’t mean it, hon,” he said. “Right?”
I channeled my energy into ignoring the spinning room and focused on Flynn.
It was the last thing that I wanted to do. I wanted to lay my head on the cool wood of the table and let it soothe the throbbing beneath my cheekbone. I wanted to close my eyes until sleep or unconsciousness let me escape from the pain for a little while.
The lie that’d danced across my tongue and slipped from my lips a thousand times balked at being said.
This was not the life that I expected when Flynn discovered me huddled inside a jackknifed tractor trailer on I-495 outside of Boston. I’d survived for more than a year on whatever expired canned food that I scavenged from empty buildings and had avoided being mauled by Howlers. It was a life lived day-to-day with no guarantee of seeing what passed for sunrise.
Flynn promised an end to that. Surviving alongside another person meant sleeping an hour without bolting awake at the creaks or hard gusts of wind; it meant cooperating to accumulate more resources than I’d gather on my own; and it meant human contact. That was what convinced me to crack open the back of the trailer that day nearly ten months ago: leaning into another living person.
Solitude cannot be a way of life for anyone intending to remain human; it wears too much on the soul. It wore on mine.
Flynn was on his way north to Bear Mountain in New Hampshire and to the over-stocked, seasonal cabins buried deep in ski country. He had an SUV and a Browning rifle, and he was a handsome man. So I said yes and climbed into the passenger seat the next morning.
“Isabel?”
I wrapped my fingers around his muscular hand and squeezed.
“I know you didn’t mean it,” I said. “I know.”
He held my hand gingerly in his own before bringing it to his lips.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Flynn brushed at his eyes with his sleeve, sniffling as he did so. Then he pushed his chair away from the table, eased my chair backward until there was enough room for him to pick me up, and then carried me upstairs to the master bedroom. After helping me undress as carefully as he could, Flynn laid me beneath the covers and kissed my forehead.
“I’ll bring up some ibuprofen,” he said.
I didn’t hear him walk across the wooden floor or come back inside the room to pour water and pain killers down my throat. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, and the door was closed. The grayed, hazy light that normally seeped through the lone window behind the headboard was gone, leaving the room dark.
I eased myself onto my elbows and waited for the bed to stop rolling like it was on a ship at sea rather than on the second floor of a mountain cottage. The motion eventually turned into a quiet rocking, and I was reasonably sure that I could be upright without tipping over. I slowly sat up until I leaned back against the headboard.
The broken bone of my forearm suddenly felt like it caught fire. Despite the tight splint, the bone had moved. Maybe a fraction of a centimeter. Or a millimeter. But it had shifted, and the pain dug its claws into me, resisting the numbing of endorphins and the painkillers still in my bloodstream. I clutched the splint to my chest and breathed through clenched teeth.
Slowly, the pain receded ever so slightly the longer that I remained still. It was too dug-in to go away completely.
I embraced it. It was the only thing keeping me from tumbling back to sleep, and I wanted to stay awake. There were too many nightmares licking at the edge of my dreams.
So I sat still, listening to bombs being dropped on Howlers on the other side of Bear Mountain.
A foot and a half of snow had fallen by the time I’d recovered enough to emerge from bed. I clung to the walls and the counters and the chairs whenever the blood rushed from my head. And while the pain of a broken arm had mostly faded to static, I still kept it protectively against my chest when I walked.