Maybe it was the age difference, then. Nayima was only twenty-four, and Karen was forty-five, old enough to be her mother. Or, maybe Nayima couldn’t just snap her fingers and fall in love, no matter how few candidates were left. Was that it? She was still being picky?
One for the joke file.
Nayima brought out the notebook she’d begun carrying with her after she escaped the chaos in Bakersfield for a change of scenery. She had intended to use it as a journal, but she couldn’t make herself chronicle her story, or any stories, about the flu. Instead, she wrote down thoughts that amused her, like she used to in her theater class at Spelman, the first time a teacher had told her she was funny.
It turns out beggars CAN be choosers, Nayima wrote. She drew a circle, two eyes and a wide O: a surprised face. It made her laugh more loudly than she should have. Even the waves couldn’t smother the sound.
Karen came out of the bedroom wearing the white terry cloth robe the owners had left behind the bathroom door: Nayima’s robe. When irritation flashed, Nayima thought about Karen’s silhouette in the dusk sun when they’d finally stopped circling each other from a wary distance. The law of the beach—the only law, really—was Don’t start none, won’t be none.
Karen was Irish-from-Ireland, so her short, spiky hair was carrot orange and her face was permanently sunburned and peeling, no matter how much sunblock she used. But she was strong, and Nayima thought everywhere her strength showed was lovely: steely eyes, a strong jaw, a body of lean muscle. Karen could haul in fishing nets that were astonishingly heavy. She’d been an airline baggage handler for Delta. Before. Nayima hadn’t had time to be anything but a student.
“I wish you wouldn’t wear that,” Nayima said. “Without asking.”
Karen ignored the chide. “I heard you laugh. Were you laughing at me?”
Karen was already reading her notebook over her shoulder and Nayima had too much pride to slam it shut. That, and she wanted Karen to see her jokes. Karen usually said she didn’t see the point of jokes; nothing was funny, at least not anymore.
Karen gave a short sigh, pointing at Nayima’s last scrawl. “Me?” she said. “Beggars and choosers. I don’t get it, really. It’s a little mean, isn’t it?”
“A little.”
“But it made you laugh.”
“Obviously I need therapy,” Nayima said. Therapists would be making a killing if they weren’t already dead. She scribbled it down before she forgot.
While Nayima wrote, Karen mulled over the page as if she did not recognize the language. “May I?” she said finally—the way she should have asked about her robe. Without waiting for Nayima’s answer, she took the notebook and walked to the love seat, her robe falling open when she sat on folded legs. Nayima watched her face for signs of amusement and saw none. Karen sighed and fidgeted each time the surf roiled beneath the apartment.
“Can we go to the flat I found across the highway?” Karen said. “You can see the water, but it won’t be as loud.”
Karen’s place was practically a shed, the only one she’d found that didn’t stink.
“I already have a place I like,” Nayima said.
She had long forgotten how to compromise. She had fought hard for her pleasures and would let go of none of them. If there was a silver lining, as people used to say, she’d learned how to stand up for what she wanted.
“These houses right on the beach are the first place they’ll look, Neema.” Neema might be a nickname, or maybe Karen couldn’t remember her actual name. That was how little they knew each other.
“I thought you wanted to move because of the water.”
“I can think of a lot of reasons to move. Can’t you?”
There. Karen wasn’t trying to, but her voice had slipped into Mommy mode. Nayima grinded her teeth. “If you want to sleep somewhere else, you know where to find me, Caitlin.”
“Karen,” she said. “Not Caitlin.”
“Nayima, then. Let’s use our actual names.”
Gram hadn’t raised Nayima to envy or notice blue eyes, but damn if Karen’s gray-blue eyes weren’t the color of moonlight. Every time Nayima wanted to start a fight, she noticed another aspect of Karen she liked, and this time it was her eyes, even if it was only because they were hers. Nayima wished they were in bed instead of arguing. Her body was waking under Karen’s eyes.
“Nayima,” Karen said, memorizing her name, her eyes back on the notebook. “I’ll get it.”
With nothing left to argue about, Nayima was forced to remember the truth of Karen’s warning: the marshals would come. She’d driven back southwest to Malibu for the same reasons as everyone else—food, warmth, beauty. Making salt water potable wasn’t easy, but it was better than no water at all in the drought regions. She’d hoped she could stop running. She’d hoped maybe this apartment wouldn’t just be her latest stop, her best stop, but her last one.
And there were others—not many, but a few. They lived scattered among the beach houses and hillsides, but she had spotted at least ten other people at the pier or on the beach in the three weeks she’d been in Malibu, not counting Karen. She’d chronicled them all in the last page of her notebook, describing her neighbors: a father and two daughters about ten and twelve (she called him Mister Mom, his daughters Flopsy and Mopsy); The Old Man in the Sea who took his rowboat out to fish every day; three rough-looking guys who might be brothers (The Three Stooges) and the Brat Pack, one pimple-faced teenaged boy and two girls, maybe sixteen, who mostly stayed out of sight. There might be more, but on the beach sometimes even with binoculars she couldn’t tell if she had seen someone before or if they were new. Like Karen.
The father and daughters moved furtively across the sand in gas masks, always wearing bright blue gloves. They never got close to anyone, so they had survived. Nayima assumed they were not vaccinated—and no way the father and both daughters were immune, if they were related; in any family, maybe one would be immune—or one on any street, in any neighborhood. Maybe one or two in each town. A father and two daughters in one family must not have the virus yet.
Good for them. If their blood stayed clean, they might qualify to go to Sacramento. The city had declared itself a separate republic and had electricity, water, crops, livestock. Mr. Mom and his kiddos might rejoice if marshals came.
But not Nayima. Not Karen. Not the immune—though they could not be infected, they were carriers, and rumors said carriers who weren’t shot ended up in lab cages. Fuck that. If scientists didn’t have enough blood from carriers for the vaccines already, one or two more wouldn’t help.
Karen was right about the beach apartment they were in: it was in plain sight on the Pacific Coast Highway, so any vehicle driving by might see them without even trying.
Nayima’s breath hitched in her throat as her chest tightened, and she could exhale only when the waves crashed beneath her and seemed to knock the blockage free.
The back of her neck tingled. New anxieties, no matter how big or small, crumbled the wall she’d erected around her memories. The strongest memory charged through: Gram’s bloodied pillow case. A cop had shot Gram to force Nayima to evacuate, knowing she would not leave Gram behind. Nayima could still smell the gunpowder and the blood from his treacherous act of mercy.
Karen closed the notebook and said, “These are good.”