Gone
©2004 The Angst Guy
(theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent,
just want to bother me, whatever) is appreciated. Please write to:
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Synopsis: The Cuban Missile Crisis
boils over in October 1962—and the lives of three sisters change forever. The
young Helen, Rita, and Amy Barksdale star in this tale of family bonds tested
under the worst of worst-case scenarios.
Author’s
Notes: The
story’s title is the same as that of the last fantasy fiction I wrote for TSR,
Inc., and Wizards of the Coast (“Gone,” from the 1999 Dragonlance anthology, Heroes
and Fools: Tales of the Fifth Age). Aside from this, the two stories are
completely unrelated. Copious additional notes are found at the story’s end.
Acknowledgements: “Daria” fanfic stalwarts
Kara Wild, RedlegRick, Renfield1969, and Lawndale Stalker provided detailed
feedback on this story that led to major revisions in the conclusion. Thank you
for your excellent help.
*
This is General Power speaking. I am addressing you for the purpose of reemphasizing the seriousness of the situation the nation faces. We are in an advanced state of readiness to meet any emergencies and I feel that we are well prepared. I expect each of you to maintain strict security and use calm judgment during this tense period.
—General Thomas Power, Commander in Chief, USAF Strategic Air Command,
transmitted
to all SAC Wings, Wednesday, October 24, 1962, at DEFCON 2
Friday, October 26, 1962
Helen Barksdale, twelve and a
quarter years old, heard and reached for the ringing alarm clock before she was
fully awake. Slapping it off, she groaned, then threw off her covers and sat up
in bed. A cold shiver ran down her spine as she hugged herself, goose bumps on
her arms. The house was freezing even with the central heat on, and Helen’s
bedroom at the end of the hall was the coldest room in the house. Even her
sisters called it “The Refrigerator.”
As she stood on the cold wooden
floor in her bare feet and rubbed her arms to warm them, a noise caught her
attention. It was the sound of water running in the pipes. Someone was already
using the bathroom shower. Helen glared as she stalked over to her door and
opened it, looking out into the hallway. Yellow light spilled from under a
nearby door, the bathroom she shared with her two younger sisters.
Temper boiling, she walked over,
turned on the hall light, and banged on the bathroom door with her fist. “Don’t
use up all the hot water!” she yelled.
“I can’t hear you!” came her
youngest sister’s voice from the other side. The shower kept running.
“You little creep!” Helen yelled.
“Shut it off right now, and save some for the rest of us, Amy!”
“Like you save any hot water for me,
whale butt?”
“Amy! I’m telling on you for that!”
Helen snarled. The little rodent had set her alarm early just to get in and
steal the hot water. Helen wrestled with the doorknob, but Amy had locked it.
“Mom’s going to paddle your backside good!” she shouted in a fury. “Do you hear
me?” Helen hammered on the door with both fists for good measure.
“Stop it, will ya?” her middle
sister Rita yelled from her bedroom. “I’m trying to sleep!”
“Amy’s using up the hot water!”
Helen told Rita, then turned to shout at the bathroom door. “You better turn it
off, four-eyes, or I’ll stuff your head in the toilet!”
The shuffle of feet came from Rita’s
room. Rita opened it, squinting as she walked out and past Helen, her short
blonde hair looking like a tangled bird’s nest. “I’m telling Mom,” she
grumbled, heading down the hall.
“Tell her to get Amy out of the
bathroom!” Helen shouted after her, but she knew it was a lost cause. Rita
would complain that Helen and Amy were fighting and the noise woke her up, and
their mother would make Amy get out of the bathroom, then put Rita in, so Helen
would be third and get the cold water. She hammered on the door in frustration.
“Get out! Right now!”
“Flintstones!” Amy sang, the shower
still running. “Meet the Flintstones! They’re a modern Stone-Age fa-mi-ly!”
“Out! Get out!”
“From the . . . town of Plainfield,
and Helen Big Butt is about to screeeeeeam!”
“Amy!” Helen screamed.
“Helen, for the love of mercy!” called her mother from the other side of the family’s ranch house. “It’s six o’clock in the morning!”
“Make Amy get out of the shower so
we can have some hot water!” Helen shouted back. “I have a really important day
today and I have to get fixed up early! And she said ‘butt,’ too! I heard her!”
Her mother wearily thumped down the
hall toward her, wrapped in a bathrobe with huge bunny slippers on her feet. “I
can’t believe you girls can’t wake up one single day without screaming your
heads off and waking up all Creation! Move!” she said, motioning Helen aside.
Rita came down the hall behind her
mother, yawning wide and not watching where she was going. As her mother banged
on the bathroom door, Helen was immensely pleased to see Rita walk into the
wall and smack her head on the low-set thermostat box.
“Ow!” yelled Rita, grabbing her
forehead.
“Get out of there right now!” their
mother shouted at the bathroom door.
“I’m coming!” Amy said—and the bathroom door opened a moment later. Amy walked out in her pajamas and bathrobe and big-frame glasses, rubbing her long, dark brown hair with a towel. The shower was still running behind her. “What’s the problem?” she asked with eight-year-old innocence.
“Mommy!” shrieked Rita in tears. “I
hit my head!”
“Mercy! Are you all right?” cried
their mother, and she tried to pull Rita’s hands from her face to assess the
damage.
Helen started past her little
sister—then noticed something strange. “Your hair is dry!” she shouted
at Amy. “You weren’t even in the shower!” Amy tried to run, but Helen
lunged and grabbed her by the right hand—a dry right hand. “Hey! You
were goofing around wasting hot water the whole time! You little—!”
“Ouch! Mom!” yelled Amy. “She’s
twisting my arm!” She jerked out of Helen’s vengeful grasp and got out of the
bathroom.
“Helen!” yelled their mother,
turning from Rita. “I’m ashamed of you!” Behind her, Amy stuck out her tongue
at Helen.
“It’s my turn in the shower!”
shouted Rita. “And I banged my head!”
“It’s an improvement on your regular
face!” said Amy. She darted into her room, slammed the door, and locked it one
second before Rita got her fingernails into her.
“I got here first!” Helen yelled,
having now turned the shower off. “I get it next! I give a speech today in
class!”
“You hit your little sister, you
wake up the whole house, and for that I’m supposed to reward you?” said her
mother. “Go to your room and wait your turn!”
“Is it possible for a man to get any
peace at this hour?” roared Helen’s father from down the hall. “Would everyone
please just shut the hell up?”
“Walter!” yelled his wife. “Don’t use
that kind of language in this house, and keep your voice down!”
“Mom!” shouted Helen. “This isn’t
fair!”
“It is too fair!” yelled Rita,
walking into the bathroom and crowding Helen aside. “Get out and let me
shower!”
“I won’t have any hot water, and I’m
giving a speech! I can’t go in front of my whole class without a shower!”
“Helen!” shouted her mother. “I told
you to go to your room!”
“God, strike me down!” her father
cried in despair.
“Walter! Stop it!”
“Can I use your bathroom, then?”
said Helen, holding the towel rack to resist Rita’s efforts to shove her out of
the bathroom. “Let me shower there!”
“Your father’s about to use it,” said her mother, pointing out the door. “Go to your room until you can behave like a lady!”
“Ooooh!” Helen stamped out of the
bathroom, making sure she bumped Rita hard as she left, then went her room and
slammed the door. She threw herself on her bed and pounded the mattress with
both fists. “I hate you!” she yelled into her rumpled blankets. “I hate all of
you! It’s not fair! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
Several minutes passed with her face
buried in the blankets. Life wasn’t fair. It stank like cow manure. Why
couldn’t everyone go by the rules? The rules being, Helen gets the shower first
because she’s the oldest and gets up so early. Didn’t being the oldest count
for anything at all? Rita was a year younger, but she got everything, she
always got her way because their mother treated Rita like gold. You were the
easiest baby I ever had, their mother always said. Not like Helen, God
no, or Amy, who almost killed me—eighteen hours, oh mercy. You were the
easiest, Rita, and I love you.
“I wish I was dead,” said Helen into
her blankets. “Everything stinks. I hate everything. I wish they’d blow up the
world and get it over with. I can’t wait to get out of this town and go to
college. I’ll show ‘em. I’ll be on that bus and out of here so fast, their
heads will spin. I’m going to make some big changes. I’ll make a difference in
this world. They’ll find out. They’ll see.”
She sniffed and pushed herself up on
her elbows. It was 6:09 a.m. on Friday morning, the best day of the week—or it
would be, except Helen knew she would get only cold water when Rita was done,
because Rita took forever and a day in the shower, and God only knew what she
was doing in there. And then tonight there would be the Friday Night Dinner
That Takes Mom Forever to Make. (Wasn’t there some way to just make a dinner in
a couple minutes, like something ready-made, like frozen lasagna? Helen loved
lasagna, but they had it only once a season, if that.)
And then there would be the Friday
Night Fight for the Big Television Set. It was worse than having Sonny Liston
and Floyd Patterson duke it out in the front yard. Rita would want to see “Sing
Along with Mitch,” and she’d get their mother to sit with her in the living
room and they’d both sing those lame songs in their horrible off-key voices,
while Amy reminded everyone (in writing) that it was her turn to watch “The
Flintstones” on the little TV in the den, so Helen would miss the first half of
“Route 66,” and what was the good of watching the second half of a show when
you didn’t know anything about the first half? Maybe Dad knew what he was doing
when he went down into the basement Friday evenings, beer in hand, to putter
with his short-wave radio behind a locked door.
“I hate everything,” Helen grumbled.
“I wish they’d go ahead and blow up the world.” She considered other options as
well, like leaving home when she was sixteen and lying about her age so she
could work as a waitress at a truck stop, and then after earning some money
maybe hitch a ride to New York City and find a coffeehouse and meet a guy who
wore dark clothes and smoked and was going to college and writing great protest
songs, and he’d fall in love with her and they’d travel the country together,
righting wrongs and becoming folk heroes, and one day she’d see her family
again and they’d all be as miserable as the people in The Grapes of Wrath,
but they’d be so surprised they’d drop dead when they saw her—Helen Barksdale
(or whatever her name would be after she got married), the All-American
Heroine. That would show them.
Helen sighed again and got off the
bed. She went to her wall calendar and crossed off the previous day, Thursday
the 25th, and looked to remind herself what was in store in just a few hours.
Today, she would give a presentation on civil rights and what it meant to
Plainfield. It was for her seventh-grade American History class before lunch,
and she knew her speech would really upset the bigoted kids and maybe her
teacher, Mr. Benedict, too. In moments, everyone would tell a story that
started off with, “I heard from my uncle about this Negro who . . .” (except
some kids would not say “Negro” and would use that other n-word word instead).
That would touch off a fierce argument with the minority of kids, including
Helen, who didn’t think there was anything wrong with going to school with
Negroes—heck, Plainfield High had three of them, and they were okay. Helen knew
she’d give her talk anyway, hang the consequences. If the school called her
parents in for a conference, so be it. She had all As and was the best student
in Plainfield High School’s junior high section. Let ‘em do their worst.
Over the weekend, she’d finish
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring after doing her homework, then call around
and see if anyone wanted to get together Saturday afternoon and talk about
important stuff and listen to her Kingston Trio albums. Maybe she could stay at
a girlfriend’s house Saturday night, and they could watch “The Defenders,”
which Helen loved—a TV show about lawyers who weren’t afraid to take on big
cases about real issues. Maybe she should be a lawyer, too, and scare the pants
off evildoers all over America. She’d hammer those rotten people, all of them.
They’d see.
Except for setting the clocks back
one hour, Sunday would be boring, as it always was, but that’s what church was
all about: boredom. Helen couldn’t see the use of it. Walt Disney that night
would be the one good spot in the day. Monday was the start of the school week
cycle all over again, plus it was PTA night. Helen was expected to help serve
cookies and punch at PTA, and that meant having to fend off that creepy Mr.
Meyer, who kept trying to grab or pinch her rear end while staring at her
breasts all the while, and she’d have to smile while everyone complained to her
about Negroes and Communists and Democrats. Negroes and Democrats were fine,
and frankly, what the heck did anyone really know about Communists, anyway? Had
they ever met one? Probably not. Here it was, 1962 and the dawn of a new era of
hope and peace and love, and people were acting like it was the Stone Age, like
in the Flintstones song, like they should be out beating each other with clubs
and rocks.
Helen sighed and shook her head.
Halloween was next Wednesday, and she’d be expected to walk Amy and Rita around
the whole neighborhood in the freezing cold so they could collect candy and
wear dumb costumes. No doubt Rita would again go as a princess (imagine that!)
and Amy would wear that hideous black robe and skull mask again and carry
around that wooden scythe Dad had made for her, pretending to be the Grim
Reaper. “Always good to see a classic,” Dad said every time he saw Amy in that
outfit. Why couldn’t Amy wear something like a Wilma Flintstone mask, or Minnie
Mouse, or even Amy’s hero, Rocky the Flying Squirrel? She was so weird for a
third grader. Helen suspected Amy kept wearing that Grim Reaper costume because
she liked the shock value. It creeped out everyone.
Someone banged on her bedroom door. “Shower’s yours, geek!” yelled Rita, who then walked off to her bedroom and locked her door. Helen was too tired to even yell an insult back, which meant she was very tired indeed.
I am tired, she thought,
stepping back from her calendar. Her thoughts were as cold as the October wind
outside. I’m sick of everything. Just blow up the world. Let’s just throw
those bombs around at Cuba and Russia and everywhere, nuke the whole planet.
Just blow the whole rotten thing up, and see if I care. Today would be fine.
She got her things and went to the
hall bathroom, knowing the hot water would be gone. It was.
“Save some of the Frosted Flakes for
me,” said Rita at the breakfast table, stifling another yawn. Her blonde hair
was perfectly coifed in Marilyn Monroe movie-star style, despite the fact that
Miss Monroe had killed herself only two months earlier. It’s a remembrance,
Rita always said when she was reminded of this, and that was that.
“There’s only enough for one more
bowl,” said Helen, pouring the rest of the box’s contents into her bowl.
“Helen,” said her mother, “let Rita
have the Frosted Flakes. You can have the Corn Flakes.”
“I don’t want the Corn Flakes!” said
Helen. “I had the Frosted Flakes first!”
Her mother got up and took Helen’s
bowl before she could grab it back, then put the bowl in front of Rita and took
Rita’s empty bowl. “I’ll pour you some Corn Flakes,” she said. “Just put a
little sugar on them and they’ll be just like—”
“Mother! Those are my Frosted
Flakes!” Helen yelled. “That’s not fair! How can you do that?”
“Helen, keep your voice down!” her
mother yelled back. “You’re a young lady now, and I expect you to act like one!
What does it matter what you eat? Have some Corn Flakes!”
“I don’t want Corn Flakes!”
Helen shouted, standing up and shoving her chair back.
“Here’s a Frosted Flake,” said Rita,
picking one out of her bowl and flipping it at Helen.
“Rita!” said her mother—but Helen
was faster. Dipping her fingers in her glass of milk, she snapped them at Rita
and splattered white droplets all over her sister’s face.
“Aaaaah!” Rita shrieked, also
jumping up from her seat.
“Helen!” shouted her mother. “You
apologize!”
“She threw something at me first!”
Helen shouted back.
“Go to your room!” her mother
ordered. “Right now!”
“What about Rita? She threw
something, too!”
“I have to fix my hair again, you
bozo!” Rita shouted at Helen. “You ruined it!”
“Your hair is fine, dope!” Helen
yelled, stamping out of the dining room for her bedroom. She slammed her door,
waited three minutes by walking in a circle and watching the clock, then walked
back out. Only one person was in the dining room when she returned—Amy, reading
a comic book while eating the bowl of Frosted Flakes that Rita had left.
“Hi,” said Amy without looking up.
“Did I miss anything?”
“You retard!” Helen snapped. “Those
were my Frosted Flakes!”
“Oh,” said Amy, engrossed in the
comic. The Amazing Spider-Man, Issue #1, said the cover. “I’m sorry, I
thought they were Rita’s.”
Helen hissed, but it was too late to
do anything else now that Amy had her germs all over the cereal and she was
almost through with the bowl, too. Stamping over to the refrigerator, Helen
took out the jelly, stuck a piece of bread in the toaster, and glowered at her
little sister.
“Halloween’s next week,” said Amy,
turning a page in the comic book. “Know what I’m going to be?”
“Dead,” said Helen, under her
breath. She looked down on the kitchen counter at the newspaper her father had
brought in earlier. U.S. SHOWS CUBAN MISSILE BASE PHOTOS AT U.N., read the
headlines.
“Yeah, sort of,” said Amy. “I think
I’m going to be the Grim Reaper again.”
“You’re supposed to go as something
other than what you really are,” Helen said, flipping the paper over to read
the first page below the fold.
“So,” said Amy to her comic book,
“you’re not going as a girl dog, then?”
With a sharp intake of breath, Helen
dropped the paper and headed for the kitchen table, making a fist—just as her
mother came back into the room. Helen slowed and pretended she was merely
walking over to get the salt from the table.
“Oh, Amy!” said their mother in
annoyance, hands on her hips. “That was Rita’s cereal!”
“Oops,” said Amy, turning another
page in her comic book.
“And don’t read at the table,” said
her mother, snatching the comic book away. She flipped it into the trashcan.
“You shouldn’t read junk like this, anyway.”
“Mom!” Amy screamed. She immediately
jumped from her seat and rescued the first-edition comic from its fate, then
fled the kitchen for her room.
“Amy! Come back and finish your
cereal!” her mother called. She sighed and walked to the refrigerator. “Why
can’t we eat a civilized breakfast together like everyone else?” she asked.
“Because Dad left at ten till seven,
and Rita took my cereal, then Amy ate it,” said Helen. “That’s why.”
“But you’re having toast!” said her
mother. “Why are you so upset about the cereal?”
“Forget it,” Helen grumbled. The
toast popped up, and she gingerly took it out to smear jelly on it.
“I’m going into Baltimore this
morning,” said her mother, pouring some orange juice for herself. “I might have
lunch with your father at Beckman’s Grill if he can get away from the office.”
“You’re taking the bus?”
“I’m taking the bus. Mrs. Hammond
next door is driving me over to the bus stop before eight. I should be home by
three. I have to do a little shopping.”
For Rita no doubt, thought Helen.
You always make special shopping trips for Rita, but not for me. Helen smeared
jelly on the toast with angry swipes of the knife: zip zip zip.
“Listen,” said her mother, putting
down the orange juice. “I want to talk to you.”
Helen exhaled heavily and put down
her toast, ready for another lecture on Behaving Like a Proper Young Woman.
“What, Mother?”
“If anything happens—wait, look at
me when I’m speaking to you. Listen. Helen, if anything happens, I want you to
get Rita and Amy and come home, right away. You hear me?”
Helen frowned at her mother. “What
are you talking about?”
Her mother pointed at the newspaper,
which Helen had flipped over to reveal the main headline again. “That’s what
I’m talking about. You know what I mean. If anything happens, you find Rita and
Amy, and you bring them home at once, right here. Don’t stop for anything. You
get them and come right home. Nothing else matters.”
This was weird, much too weird.
“Why?” Helen asked, her mouth suddenly dry.
“I don’t want my girls out if
anything happens,” said her mother.
A last spark of annoyance surfaced
in Helen’s mind. “Why don’t you tell Rita to do it? You let her do everything
else.”
“Stop it!” her mother snapped.
“You’re the oldest, so you’re in charge. You do whatever you have to do, but
get them here. That’s all I’m asking. You understand?”
Helen hesitated, almost forgetting
what she was trying to do, which was to make toast. A new tone was in her
mother’s voice, one Helen did not ever recall hearing before. It sent a cold
shiver down her back to hear it. Her mother, who irritated everyone and feared
nothing, was afraid. It was more shocking than anything Helen could imagine.
“Sure,” said Helen slowly. “I’ll
bring them back.”
“I’m counting on you,” said her
mother, pointing at Helen’s chest. “Don’t breathe a word to them. It’s up to
you. Whatever you have to do, get—”
“Hey!” shouted Rita, walking back
into the kitchen. “What happened to my Frosted Flakes?”
“Amy happened to it,” said Helen,
glad to get away from her mother. Her nerves were shot.
“What am I going to eat?” Rita
wailed. “I’m starving, Mommy!”
“Helen made some toast,” said their
mother. “She’ll share it with you.”
That was the last straw. “Mom, no!”
Helen yelled. “I have to eat so I can give my speech! I made that for me!”
“Oh, Helen, for the love of mercy,
just share it! The bus comes in ten minutes!”
“This is my toast! Rita can make her
own!”
“Mom, please, can I have some
toast?” said Rita.
Seeing all was lost, Helen snatched
the toast and threw it into the kitchen sink. “There!” she shouted and ran out
of the kitchen for her room again. Grabbing her books and ignoring Rita’s
shrieks of dismay and her mother’s reprimands, Helen rushed past the kitchen,
opened the front door and slammed it behind her. Fighting back tears, she ran
down the steps for the end of the driveway, which was where the school bus
stopped every morning at 7:20 a.m., give or take three minutes. It was still
dark outside, except for a haze of light to the east over the rooftops of the
subdivision.
Helen stopped at the road. She had a
few minutes to herself, so she wiped her eyes, blew her nose in her
handkerchief, and tried using her compact mirror, but it was still too dark out
to see herself in it. Snapping her compact shut, she put it back in her purse,
and then she realized she’d run out of the house without a coat. She had only
her magenta sweater to go with her white blouse and just-below-the-knee
powder-blue skirt. Worse, she’d forgotten to make herself a paper-bag lunch,
too, so she’d have to spend thirty cents to buy one—or else go back in the
house. Thirty cents it was, then.
Groaning, she looked down at her
chilled, bare shins. At least her white socks and shoes were unstained, which
was a miracle given the way she’d run out of the house through the leaf-filled
yard. And her long fingernails were still intact. She’d put pink nail polish on
them, stolen from Rita’s room.
“I hate this,” she muttered. Here
she was, breakfast-less and lunch-less, freezing her buns off by a dark
roadside waiting for a school bus. What if a crazy thrill killer drove by,
someone like Charles Starkweather, and he kidnapped her or worse? Would her
mother even care? Would Dad come out of the basement long enough to attend the
funeral? Would Rita and Amy fight over which one got the best pew in the
church? Probably.
Or . . . maybe one sunny morning,
Helen would be standing there by the road, waiting for the school bus—when she
was sixteen or so—and this nice car would come by, a red Corvette Stingray, and
the driver would be a handsome blond guy from California, a lawyer—maybe
secretly working for the government, too—and he’d pull over and ask where
such-and-such a place was, and he’d be funny and she’d laugh, and he’d offer to
drive her to school. Rita and Amy would both happen to be sick that day with
scarlet fever, or maybe polio, so Helen would be at the bus stop alone, and
she’d say, sure, and she’d get into the Corvette because she knew she could
trust this guy, he was a nice man, and off they’d go.
Somehow they wouldn’t quite get to
school but would instead stop at a coffee shop somewhere, and he’d tell her
about his secret work with President Kennedy, righting wrongs all over America,
and he’d fall in love with her and she’d go with him on missions to places like
Cuba and the Bahamas and Hawaii, and they’d outsmart the enemies of peace and
freedom, and one day they’d drive through Plainfield on their way to
Washington, D.C. to meet with the President again and at a stoplight she’d look
over, and there on the sidewalk would be her family, destitute and wearing
rags, and Helen would wave and smile just as the light turned green and they
roared off in the Corvette, and she would hear Rita scream in agony as they
left.
That would be wonderful. The very
idea thrilled her down to her toes.
The daydream faded as she heard a
twig snap behind her. She didn’t turn at once, but instead pretended to yawn as
she casually looked back at the house. Someone small was hiding behind the
walnut tree in the front yard, with one foot and the edge of her skirt barely
visible. Helen turned around as if she’d seen nothing, looking down the
two-lane road for the school bus. She waited ten seconds, then said, “Knock it
off, you little rodent. I see you behind the tree.”
Amy stepped out from behind the
walnut tree and walked only a few feet closer before she stopped in the yard.
She was far enough from Helen to have a good head start in case her sister
began chasing her. She wore a buttoned-up dark brown coat and white socks with
shiny black shoes, holding her books and her Rocky and Bullwinkle lunchbox.
“You can come closer,” said Helen.
“I’m not mad.”
“Right,” said Amy, staying where she
was.
“Doing anything in school today?”
asked Helen.
“We have a field trip,” said Amy.
“We’re going to a pumpkin field to pick out pumpkins for Halloween.” She
frowned, staring at her big sister. “I bet I can make a jack-o-lantern that
looks like your butt, if I can find a pumpkin fat enough.”
“Drop dead,” said Helen amiably.
“You first,” said Amy.
The front door slammed shut, and
Rita danced down the front steps. Amy immediately moved to one side to get
clear of both sisters, trying not to become trapped if they decided to join
forces and chase her. As it was, neither Rita nor Helen showed any inclination
to do that. It was just too cold.
Rita had her Marilyn Monroe hairdo
protected with a scarf. It was just light enough now to tell she wore her
canary yellow dress, the one with the white-checked blouse, covered only by a
thick white cotton sweater. Without a trace of fear, she marched up to Helen
and stood next to her at the bus stop, shivering a little from the cold wind.
She’d remembered to bring her Junior Miss lunch pouch, at least.
“Mom’s really mad at you,” Rita said
in a richly satisfied voice. “Wait till you get home tonight.”
“Kiss my ass,” said Helen, who had
had enough.
Rita gasped and looked at her with
huge eyes. “Oh, you are really going to get it when you get home!” she
crowed. “I’m telling!”
Helen turned to her, her voice as
cold as the wind. “And I’ll tell Mom you put on a bra when you get to school,
and you stuff it with Kleenex until you’re a thirty-four C,” she said in a
level voice. “I’ll even get witnesses—two teachers, for sure. I’ll even get
copies made of that photo from that guy on the yearbook staff who sold me the
negative, the one with your front sticking out like you put grapefruits in
there. You know which photo I mean—the one with you smooching Frankie March.”
Rita stepped back but stayed at the
bus stop. “You are in so much trouble,” she whispered, but her voice shook.
“So are you,” said Helen in a voice
filled with promise. “You wanna tell first, or let me?”
“Bus is coming,” said Amy from the
middle of the yard.
“Good,” said Helen. They remained in
their standoff until the huge orange-yellow bus pulled up, red lights flashing,
and the door opened. Helen let Rita on first, which surprised her sister. Helen
then got on, but she stopped at the top of the steps—and waited.
Amy slowly approached the bus. A
look of deep anxiety crossed her face as she saw the trap prepared for her.
Though she hesitated before boarding, she gave in to the inevitable and climbed
the steps, hunching her shoulders for what little protection it would give.
“Hi, rodent,” said Helen, giving her
little sister a sharp pinch on the right arm when she got to the top of the steps.
Amy jumped and shrieked, but Helen hung on. “Don’t you ever again call me what
you called me at breakfast, got that?” Helen snapped, then let Amy go. Turning,
Helen walked off to take a seat near the rear of the bus—but halfway there, she
turned and pointed at Amy. “And you tell on me, you’ll get it again, double!”
Amy silently took a seat near the
front and rubbed her arm, glaring back fiercely through her big-frame glasses.
Helen thought she saw tears in Amy’s eyes. Maybe it was just a trick of the
overhead aisle lights. A stab of remorse went through her, but it passed when
she told herself that Amy deserved it. Call me a girl dog, will she? I’ve
got the highest grade-point average in junior high, and she calls me that?
She’s lucky she doesn’t get worse. Helen took her seat, wrapped in her
self-righteousness like a mummy.
A boy with a crew cut and glasses
thicker than Amy’s got on the bus and sat down next to Helen at the next bus
stop. He was a freshman and one of the boys on the school’s math club. “You
hear the news this morning?” he asked.
She fought down her gag reflex. This
boy had the worst breath in Plainfield school history, on the level of First
World War chemical weapons. “No,” she said, and she looked out the window to
signal she wasn’t interested in talking or breathing his air.
“The Navy caught a Soviet ship
sneaking in to Cuba,” he said. “They found missiles on it when they searched
it, and Russia’s really mad and is telling us to give the ship back.”
“Whoopee,” said Helen.
“I bet they try something,” said the
boy. “I bet they try to get it back. That would be great.”
“Great,” muttered Helen.
“I bet we bomb Castro, too,” said
the boy. He pushed his glasses up on his nose with his middle finger. “I hope
we fry him good. Dirty Commie. Better dead than red.”
Helen didn’t reply. The sky was
brighter in the east, but it was amazing how dreary the landscape looked in the
predawn light, the barren fields and bare trees and broken-down barns along the
highway. The world was deserted and empty.
The ride to school was otherwise
uneventful. The bus first unloaded the smaller children, including third-grader
Amy and sixth-grader Rita, in front of Plainfield Elementary. Helen saw Amy
walk around to her window, glare up at her, then shout with purest venom above
the bus engine and noisy students: “I hope you die!” She walked off
immediately after that, lost in the crowd of kids entering school. Helen
wrinkled her nose in disgust. Amy was so immature.
Moments later, the bus went into
gear and drove around to the front of the adjacent Plainfield High School,
where Helen and the remaining students got out and walked up the steps to the
doors. By the time she got inside, Helen’s teeth were chattering. She deeply
regretted not getting her coat before she ran out.
She went to her locker, traded books
around for the first half of her day, and checked her appearance in the mirror
she kept hidden under one of her books. Her short brown hair was still in
relatively good shape, curled under and bouncy as all get out, thanks to the
hairspray she’d used. She touched it up with a comb, then hid the mirror and
shut her locker. All she had left to do today was make her speech during third
period, right before lunch, and the rest of the day was downhill from there to
the weekend.
If she could shake off the knot in
her stomach, it would be a perfect day. She remembered her mother’s face as she
told Helen to bring her sisters home “if anything happened.” What did she think
was going to happen? Nothing would happen. Nothing ever happened in this town.
Everything exciting happened in Wilmington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or
Washington, D.C., at most only a day away over two-lane roads from tiny little
Plainfield. Baltimore was closest, to the southeast. Helen had been there
twice.
Swallowing, she took a deep breath
and held it five seconds. The knot in her stomach eased. She then straightened
her spine and lifted her chin. Today would be perfect. Nothing would go wrong.
She relaxed a little and headed off for homeroom. Maybe she could bribe Amy
with a couple of quarters to forget the pinch and let her watch “Route 66” in
uninterrupted bliss. It was a steep price to pay, but worth it.
The atmosphere in the hallways at
Plainfield High was strained that morning. The whole week had been tense, ever
since President Kennedy’s televised speech Monday night about the Soviet
missile bases in Cuba and how America wouldn’t stand for it. On Wednesday and
Thursday, men brought yellow boxes and barrels into the school storage rooms,
Civil Defense symbols visible on each container. The boys whispered about war
and fallout and Geiger counters and missiles and giant mutant ants. Today, a
number of kids walked around with stricken expressions. Helen saw a girl crying
as she hid her face. What was going on?
Helen walked to her homeroom class
and heard a voice mixed with static as she came in. Most of the guys, the
brains and the football players and the delinquents alike, were crowded around
the teacher’s desk, listening to a plugged-in radio. The red morning sun peeked
through tree branches at the windows.
“What’s going on?” Helen asked the
pony-tailed girl in the seat in front of her, the only person she thought of as
a close friend. Tiny, blonde Caroline Barkley was a junior varsity cheerleader,
the youngest of them all and usually a fountain of chatty fun—but not now.
“I don’t know,” Caroline whispered
in an uneasy tone. “Something about the Navy. I think there was a fight.”
A cold finger went down Helen’s
spine again. “Where? You mean in Cuba?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to hear
about it.” Caroline turned away and buried her face in her notebook, scribbling
down answers from a Social Studies homework paper she’d borrowed for copying.
Helen hesitated, then got up and
made her way to the front of the room where the guys were standing. She
gathered a few strange looks as she went, but most of the class was used to the
way Helen stuck her nose into whatever was going on, even if it was supposed to
be guy stuff.
“—stated it had no information on
casualties,” said the male voice on the radio as she got closer. “The Defense
Department will neither confirm nor deny reports of a conflict involving U.S.
naval forces and Cuban aircraft. We have been informed that the President might
make an announcement this afternoon at one o’clock Eastern time, but we have no
word if he’ll discuss these reports. We will break in to regular programming
once we have further news on events taking place off the coast of Cuba.”
Pop music came on then, in the
middle of an Elvis song. “Turn it up!” said one of the girls in the front row.
The teacher turned the radio off
instead. “In your seats!” he shouted. “Let’s get roll call done!”
“Mister Gaines!” shouted a lanky boy
on the basketball team. “Can the Russians get a bomb over this far into
America? Like anywhere near where we are?”
The class laughed nervously. “Not likely,” said the homeroom teacher, frowning at his attendance roster as he checked off names. “I used to work at a school in New Mexico, near that White Sands missile-testing place. Rockets aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.”
“You worked with missiles?” someone
else asked. “Wow!”
“No, I didn’t say that!” said Mr.
Gaines irritably. “I said I worked near the place where they tested
them. Missiles have a mind of their own. You shoot ‘em off, they’ll go
anyplace. We’ve got nothing to worry about. The Reds don’t have any missiles
around here, anyway.”
“They got those ones in Cuba,”
someone reminded him. “And the Russians got bombers.”
“Yeah!” cried several other people.
“The Cuban missiles aren’t ready to
be fired,” said Mr. Gaines, looking more irritated. “We found them in time. And
planes—we’ll shoot down anything that gets into our airspace. The Russians
haven’t—hey! McNeil, Arthur, Donaldson, the rest of you—sit down, or I’ll get
out my board of education and educate your rear ends!”
Helen took her seat and pulled out
the notes for her civil rights speech to study them. Her mind wouldn’t
cooperate, however. Her attention jumped from word to work on the index cards,
seeing them as collections of letters but not as words with meanings. This
horse hockey about Cuba was getting on her last nerve. She remembered her wish
this morning that this would happen, that there would be a war and the world
would blow up, but what was wished for in righteous anger was pure nightmare
now. When she realized she’d stared at the name “James Meredith” for half a
minute and couldn’t remember who he was even though she knew who he was,
she gave up and tucked her index cards in her American History book.
Mr. Gaines let the class talk in low
voices once roll was called and the morning announcements were made over the
intercom. Plainfield had an away football game that night, and everyone was
encouraged to come out and support them. Classroom chatter turned to pro
football and the usual all-guys argument over whether Green Bay, New York, or
Dallas had the better team.
It was a blessing when the
first-period bell rang. Helen gathered her books and set out for General Math.
The teacher, Mrs. Williamson, was a thin, elderly woman capable of boring to
death even the most devoted students, so Helen took the time to relax and
daydream a little. As often happened when Helen was bored, she began to think
about romance—and sex.
Careful to keep her math book open
in front of her, she focused on the stapler on Mrs. Williamson’s desk and
thought about the book she’d discovered last week in Rita’s bedroom under her
mattress. Helen found it while searching for Rita’s diary for future blackmail
material. The book was a far better find than the diary for blackmail purposes,
but Helen became so attached to the volume, she couldn’t imagine turning it
over to their mother. It was Sex and the Single Girl, by Helen Gurley
Brown. A sex book, and another Helen had written it! Thrilled, Helen went
through the book like lightning, soaking up the information. A single woman
having sex! For fun! Any guy she wanted! Without getting married and having a
baby! It was beyond imagining, too incredible to be true.
Just thinking about it made her
edgy, but not in a bad way. It got her imagination pumping. What if she was at
the drugstore having a root beer float one day, and Rita and Amy were off with
Mother shopping in Lehman’s Department Store across the street, and this rakish
guy with dark hair sat down nearby and ordered a hamburger. He’d be muscular
and tall and look like he was having the best time of his life. She’d watch
him, and he’d notice her watching him, and he’d smile and ask how she was
doing, and they’d sit together and talk, and he’d pay for her float and show
her his black Corvette Stingray parked out front.
You live around here? she’d
ask him.
Nah, I’m from California,
he’d say. Hollywood.
Hollywood? Really?
Yeah, I work in the movies,
stunt-car driver. Pay’s good, the work’s fun. A little dangerous, but that
makes it fun.
He’d laugh. He’d be so at ease, he’d
put her at ease, and she’d laugh with him.
And after they drove around in his
black Corvette for a while, racing other cars and maybe righting a wrong here
and there, she’d ask to see where he was staying, after letting it drop that
she was on The Pill (the details on how she was able to do that were not
important), and he’d have a room in a hotel, nicer than the no-tell motel down
the road that the high-school seniors were rumored to use, and the room would
have scenic windows with a nice, clean room with a big white bed, and they’d
walk into his room and he’d slowly shut the door and take her in his strong
arms and then—
Things got a little dark at this
point in the fantasy because Helen wasn’t exactly sure what was supposed to
happen, but she was a knot of tension, practically dancing in her seat in a
fever. Her brain had shut down, processing nothing except for a need to do
something she couldn’t name, a need that reached out into every part of her
body from her head and feet to her—
Helen jerked and blinked, wide awake
and back in math class. A brilliant flash of light had gone through the room,
which meant—
Without thinking, Helen threw
herself out of her desk and dropped to the floor, ducking and covering as she
had been taught all her childhood to do. She steeled herself for the heat and
blast and flying glass and falling walls.
Everyone began to laugh. “What are
you doing?” said the guy who sat behind her. “Are you nuts?”
Shaking all over, Helen slowly
straightened and looked around. The whole class was laughing at her. Mrs.
Williamson was at the windows, opening them as she always did to send some cold
air around the room and wake up the sleepy students, and as she pulled another
window open, the sunlight flashed on the pane exactly like the previous flash
of light.
Helen stood up and took a seat at
her desk, her face burning with shame. Her daydream was a shambles.
“Goodness, what is everyone carrying
on about?” Mrs. Williamson asked from the windows. “You should be studying now!
Miss Barksdale, is there a problem?”
“I dropped something,” she mumbled.
“I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Williamson stared at her a moment
more, then went back to opening windows. Other students snickered and watched
Helen for the rest of the period, waiting to see if she’d do something else
crazy.
The second-period bell rang after a
million years of this torture. She made it to her Home Economics class and took
her seat, grateful that no one here had been in General Math a few minutes ago.
Caroline the tiny cheerleader took the seat ahead of Helen. Snapping gum in her
mouth, Caroline grinned at Helen, her blonde ponytail bouncing in its usual
perky way.
“Wanna piece?” Caroline asked,
holding out a stick of gum.
Helen shook her head. “No, thanks.
How was your morning?”
“Oh, it got better. French is always
fun. I wish I understood what everyone was saying, though.”
Helen smiled. Caroline wasn’t very
bright, but she made everyone around her feel good and was immensely popular.
Perhaps because Caroline was no threat to Helen’s first-place position in
grade-point averages, Helen thought of her fondly and depended on her high
spirits to lift Helen’s own. Helen was also more honest with Caroline than with
anyone else alive.
“I fell out of my desk last period,
in math,” Helen said, reddening again. “It embarrassed me to death.”
“Oh, no! Are you okay? I think they
make these desk seats too high.”
“I’m okay. It was just something
stupid. Hey, what are you doing tonight? Oh, right—the game.”
“Yeah. We have to be on the bus at .
. .” Caroline’s voice trailed off as she looked at the doorway. “Who’s that?”
she asked.
Helen looked. She recognized the
mother of one of the other girls in Home Ec, standing in the doorway and
talking in a loud whisper to the teacher, Miss Barnes. “That’s Sally’s mom,”
Helen said. “What’s she doing?”
Miss Barnes turned back to the
all-girl class with an anxious look. “Sally?” she called, and made a
come-hither motion with her hand. “Get your things, please. Your mother’s here
to pick you up.”
“What? Where are we going?” Sally asked.
“Come on!” her mother called,
waving. “Get your things right now!”
“Is something happening?” Miss
Barnes asked her mother, but her mother did not answer. Sally got her books and
walked uncertainly for the door, where her mother put her arm around her and
guided her away at a rapid pace.
The starting bell for class rang. Miss Barnes sighed and shut the door. “Well,” she said, walking to the front of the room, “as promised, today we’re going to make a grocery list.” She stopped at the blackboard and wrote OUR LIST on the board in white chalk. “Okay, let’s say you’re shopping for a family of four. There’s you, your husband, and two children, one six years old and one a baby. What kinds of things will you need?”
Hands shot up all over the room. Call
on me, call on me! thought Helen, prepared to talk about ready-to-eat
lasagna.
“Emily,” said Miss Barnes, pointing
somewhere else.
“Diapers,” said Emily, “tons of
them.”
“Right,” said Miss Barnes with a
smile, “but I should have been more specific. We’re just going to the grocery
store today. Look at the four basic food groups and think about it. Let’s say
you’re all out of—”
Someone knocked on the door. Miss
Barnes sighed again. “Julie, would you get that, please?”
Julie, whose chair was closest to
the door, answered it, then stepped back. “It’s Dorothy’s mom,” she said,
looking at Dorothy, the tallest girl in the class.
Abruptly, Dorothy’s mother—a short,
frumpy woman with graying hair and a faded print dress—pushed past Julie and
walked into the room. Without a word, she grabbed her daughter and pulled her
out of her seat, heading for the door.
“Mom!” said Dorothy as she was
dragged along. “What’s going on?”
“Excuse me!” cried Miss Barnes.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Hastings? Mrs. Hastings, please!”
Dorothy’s mother did not stop. She
pulled Dorothy out the door and was gone down the hall at a half run, pulling
her protesting daughter behind her. Everyone stared at the open door and
listened to the sound of the footsteps retreating.
“Class,” said Miss Barnes, putting
down the chalk, “I’ll be right back. Stay in your seats, please.” She strode
quickly for the classroom door and headed down the hall.
“Where’s she going?” someone asked.
Julie got up and peeked out the
door. “She went in the junior high office,” she said. “Some other teachers are
there, too.”
“Maybe she’s going to report
Dorothy’s mom,” said someone else. “She’s weird.”
“Yeah,” said several other girls.
Talk broke down at that point into dozens of small conversations, everyone
looking nervously at the door, where Julie kept watch.
Helen noticed that Caroline was
clutching her stomach and appeared ill. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Caroline shook her head. “No,” she
said in a weak voice. “I’m scared. Something’s wrong, I know it.”
Helen put a hand on her friend’s
shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” she said, but she wasn’t sure she believed that.
“Things are fine, really. People are just acting strange today. Everything’s
under control, though. I’m sure of it.”
Caroline nodded, but she covered her
mouth with her hand and shut her eyes. “I can’t stand this,” she whispered. “It
makes me so scared. I wish they would stop it.”
“Shhh,” said Helen. She got up and
crouched on the floor by Caroline’s desk, taking her hand from her stomach.
“It’ll be all right, okay? Listen, it’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.”
A tear fell from Caroline’s chin and
splashed on Helen’s hands. Caroline hid a sob, but everyone heard it anyway.
Within moments, other girls came over to offer comfort until Caroline was
swamped with well-wishers. Uncomfortable, Helen felt she was getting in the
way, so she pulled back and let Caroline’s other friends move in.
And, as she did, she thought about
Rita and Amy.
If anything happens, you find
Rita and Amy, and you bring them home at once, right here. Don’t stop for
anything. You get them and come right home. Nothing else matters.
Helen stepped back toward the door.
Her eyes were on Caroline’s ponytail, all that was visible of her through the
crowd.
You’re the oldest, so you’re in
charge. You do whatever you have to do, but get them here. That’s all I’m
asking, okay?
She turned to the door and took a
step toward it.
Miss Barnes walked back into the
room. Something was wrong—Helen read it instantly in the awkward way Miss
Barnes moved, the frozen look in her eyes. Everyone stopped talking.
“Take your seat, Julie,” said Miss
Barnes in a strained voice. “Everyone, please take your seats, right now.” She
pulled the door shut behind her and then stared at the wall where all the
windows were. She stared at it for too long, as if hypnotized. “And pull the
shades,” she finally added. “Pull all of them down. Now.”
Several girls got up to do that. The
sunlight faded from the room, and only the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead
gave illumination. Miss Barnes walked to the front of the room and stood before
her desk. She reached back and caught her desk by the edge with both hands,
then leaned against it and looked at the floor. Everyone waited.
At long last, Miss Barnes took a
deep breath. “When I was a girl,” she said, “my family lived in San Francisco.
I really liked it there because of the hills and streetcars and—well, just
everything. I’d like to move back there one day, when . . . oh, one day. We’ll
see.” She cleared her throat and looked up, eyes scanning the classroom and the
girls before her.
“One December morning,” she went on,
“we went to church, but before services started, we heard on the news that
Pearl Harbor had been attacked. It shocked me that anyone would even think
about attacking us, but we went to services anyway, and we prayed for our
soldiers and our country, and then we went home. It got worse, though, because
these rumors started that San Francisco was going to be attacked next—which of
course it wasn’t, but we didn’t know that. It was just . . . just a very scary
day, and a scary month came after it.”
Miss Barnes swallowed. “There’s some
bad news on the radio,” she said. “There’s been a . . . some trouble around
Cuba, but I won’t go into it. All I want you to know is that it might be a
scary day, but it might not. We’ll have to wait and see. If things don’t . . .
if there’s trouble, I want you to remember that we will pull through it, just
like I did when I was your age. I want you all to be brave and think of what’s
the right thing to do, each of you, and have faith in God and our country. I’m
sure we’ll come through this, and everything will be well again. All you need
is faith. Can we all do that?”
Everyone nodded. Many said, “Yes,
Miss Barnes.” Helen felt a stirring of courage inside her. Her dread began to
shrink.
“What’s going on?” asked a girl in
the front row.
Miss Barnes looked down and chewed
her lower lip for a long moment. “There’s been . . . some fighting, some kind
of problem around Cuba, but it’s being fixed. I think that’s all I can say
about it. I’m afraid I don’t know much else.” She stood away from her desk and
walked to her chair, but she did not sit down. “Class,” she said, “before we go
on, let’s have a moment of silence and if you want to pray, that would probably
be a good idea. Okay? Just take a moment and give thanks for something good in
your life, or say a prayer for our country. Or both.” She sat down and, after a
moment, bowed her head, her hands clasped in her lap and eyes closed.
With nervous glances, everyone else
in the class did the same. Instead of thinking about the separation of church
and state, which she would have done under any other circumstances, Helen
suddenly thought of all the times she’d said that going to church was boring
and stupid. Maybe that hadn’t been such a wise thing to say after all, even if
church usually was boring. It served a function, too. Helen bowed her hand and
put her hands together.
God, she thought to herself, please
don’t let anything bad happen to us today. She wrestled with what to say
next, suddenly confronted with the way she’d been treating Rita and Amy. True,
they got on each other’s last nerve, but they were still her sisters. Help
me keep my temper when Rita and Amy try to drive me crazy, she went on. I’m
sorry I pinched Amy and bad-mouthed Rita, and I should be sorry even if they
never apologize, though maybe You’ll remind them about that later. She
winced. Or even if You don’t, I should be a better big sister. Try to make
me more patient with them, whatever it takes. I don’t really want any of us to
get hurt. Oh, and be nice to Caroline. She’s having a bad day. Please cheer her
up. Thanks. Amen.
She opened her eyes, feeling better.
When most of the class was looking around again, Miss Barnes got up and walked
around to the front of her desk again. Instead of talking about grocery
shopping lists, however, she began to talk about her childhood in San Francisco
during World War II. Helen and the rest of the class became entranced, asking
questions as they listening to her tale. The bell signaling the end of class
came all too soon.
Many of the girls hugged Miss Barnes
before they left. Helen didn’t, but on impulse she hugged Caroline before
leaving the room. “Have a good day,” she told her.
“Thanks,” said Caroline, surprised
and touched by the hug. “You, too. See you at lunch?”
“You bet,” said Helen. Calmer and
able to smile now, she gathered her things and headed out the door for American
History. With the civil rights speech she finally felt prepared to give, it was
sure to be a class no one would forget.
Helen’s reborn good mood lasted
about twenty seconds on her way to the stairs and her next class. She passed a
cluster of boys arguing around a locker and caught one of them saying, “Man,
I’m telling ya, there ain’t no such thing as a little A-bomb. It had to be
really big, or maybe more than one.”
She slowed, eyes on the floor ahead
but her ears turned to the talk. “As long as it was in Cuba, that’s fine with
me,” said another boy. “They can shoot ‘em all off at those Commie bastards, as
long as they’re not going off over here.”
Helen kept walking a few more steps,
then stopped and turned back. “What happened?” she said.
The boys immediately looked at her
and fell silent. “Nothing,” said one uneasily.
“Come on,” said Helen, walking
closer. “Just tell me.”
One of the boys sighed and looked
unhappy. “Someone said on the radio that an A-bomb went off,” he told her.
“They don’t know much about it. It was either on Cuba or around it.”
“One guy said it was on a Cuban
missile, ‘cause it hit some of our ships,” said another.
“Oh, bull,” said the first boy
angrily, “it did not! No one can get close enough to bomb our ships!”
“That’s what he said!” the second
boy insisted. “I ain’t kiddin’ ya!”
“It had to be us dropping the big
one on Castro,” said another boy, and the argument was off and running again.
Helen stayed a moment to listen,
then walked away to her class with automatic feet. Her speech was suddenly the
least important thing in the world. Was it true? Had someone done the
unthinkable and dropped the Bomb? That must have been the news Miss Barnes
wouldn’t tell, and now Helen knew why. What would happen next? Anything was
possible, now—anything bad.
American History was on the third
floor of Plainfield High’s main building, on the eastward side. At 10:30 a.m.,
when third period started, Helen slowly walked into the classroom and dropped
her books on her desk, then sat down with a lifeless thump. Where her stomach
had been was a dull, empty ache. Don’t let this happen, she thought as
she sat. Don’t let this happen to us. Stop it now, God, just get down here
and stop it. This isn’t funny anymore, and it wasn’t even funny to begin with.
Pre-lunch classroom jitters on
Friday were always bad, but today there was additional anxiety thanks to the
radio news, which everyone had heard about by now. All the students talked,
shouted, and cut up even after the starting bell rang.
“Shut up!” shouted Mr. Benedict from
his desk for the eighth time. “Everyone, get in your seats and shut up! Shut
up, damn it!” His swearing made the students laugh and get wilder. He slapped a
yardstick on his desk until it broke, which brought more laughter from the
class. “That’s it!” he shouted, throwing down the broken half of the yardstick.
“I’m bringing the principal here!”
Mr. Benedict strode to the classroom
door and walked out, leaving it wide open. From the shouting and noise in the
halls, Helen could tell that other classrooms were similarly disrupted across
the third floor. What about my speech? she thought. Am I going to
give it? Will anyone care? I worked on this thing for days!
A paper wad fight broke out. A ball
of notebook paper hit Helen in the side of her head. She groaned and got up,
leaving her books behind as she walked across the room and stood by the
windows. Scattered clouds drifted overhead in a blue sky, and dead leaves flew
across the school grounds. A number of students were outside the building,
standing in groups talking or walking or throwing rocks. To Helen’s mind,
nothing so clearly showed the breakdown in authority as students not being in
class while school was going on. It was unthinkable. If I was a teacher,
she thought, I’d drag them in by their ears. I’d show ‘em. Two of those
jerks are even smoking! Of all the nerve!
The siren at the volunteer fire
station down the road sudden rose in the air, howling up to an ear-piercing
high note. Helen made a face and left the window as the siren abruptly fell,
then rose again in an unfamiliar up-down-up-down pattern. Great, she
thought, this is just great, we really need a big fire right now to make
everything just peachy and—
The classroom intercom beeped.
“Attention all classes!” shouted a loud male voice over the wall speaker. Helen
recognized him as the school principal. “I want all teachers to—” The rest of
his words were lost in the chaos from the class and the rise-and-fall wail of
the fire siren outside. Helen shouted for everyone to stop talking, but no one
listened. She couldn’t even hear herself. Her place at the window was taken by
students hoping to see fire trucks leaving the station.
Giving up, she pushed her way through the other students to the classroom door and listened in the hallway, but she still couldn’t make out what the principal was saying. However, in moments, students spilled out of classrooms up and down the hall, led by their teachers. “Against the lockers!” one teacher shouted. “Crouch down and face the lockers! Move away from the windows!” Students were white-faced. Some cried.
“What’s going on?” Helen shouted.
Several of her own classmates stood behind her, looking at the madness. “What’s
happening?”
“Attack warning!” the teacher
shouted back. “We have an attack warning! Get everyone out of the room and into
the halls! Get them out!”
Attack warning? An attack
warning?
Stunned, Helen leaned forward to ask
for a clarification.
A very great Light went off behind
her, appearing and disappearing in an instant, faster than she could blink. She
jumped, startled. The unearthly intensity of the Light and the pricking of heat
on the back of her neck were so different from anything she’d ever known, she
forgot all of her blindness-prevention instincts, all of her training to duck
and cover, and she turned around to see it. For a moment, the noise in the
corridor fell except for gasps and cries like “Jesus Christ!” and “What was
that?”
It was impossible to see anything
through the mass of students in the history classroom at the windows—but many
of them had recoiled from the glass, yelling in shock or pain, clutching their
eyes. A wave of voices arose next in terror and panic. “It’s a bomb!” a voice
screamed.
“Bomb!” screamed everyone
else.
Helen tried to get back into the room, but a big male student charging out slammed into her and knocked her backward into several other students dashing down the hall. She fell sprawling to the linoleum floor, banging her head and knocking the wind out of her. Running students stumbled over her, stepping on her arms and legs.
Terrified she would be trampled,
Helen scrambled to the row of lockers across the hall as a stampede began
around her. She instinctively curled, hands over her head and legs drawn up.
Hard-soled shoes kicked and slammed against her. Screams filled her ears as
blows rained down from every side. The battering went on until she was close to
losing consciousness. For the first time ever, Helen feared she would die.
A chaotic age later, she dully
realized the chaos had subsided, and she uncurled long enough to crawl into an
empty classroom doorway in case more people ran past. Horrifying screams, dozens
of them, echoed up stairwells along the third-floor hall.
Half aware of what she was doing,
she got to her unsteady feet. Every spot on her body ached. To her surprise,
she found that she was crying. Blood stained her upper blouse and right hand,
but she couldn’t tell where it had come from. One of her shoes was gone. She
saw it twenty feet down the hall, by a trampled student prone on the floor.
Blinking, Helen staggered toward her
shoe and with an effort was able to crouch down, snag it, and put it on as she
leaned against the row of lockers. All the while, she stared at the student
lying nearby, a vaguely familiar boy who was a senior at the high school. He
seemed to be unconscious. A greenish bruise was forming on his cheek. Despite
the situation, it was hard to feel empathy for him. A feeling of unreality had
taken over Helen’s mind. She thought she was seeing a movie and wasn’t really
there in her body at all.
Voices called in pain from down the
corridor. She shook her head and realized she’d stood in place for some time.
The screaming had faded, but cries could be heard from the stairwells and at
the ends of the hall. As she watched, a sound like long rolling thunder
vibrated everything for several seconds before fading away. Earthquake?
Helen thought, then: Shock wave from a bomb blast. Looking around, she
saw teachers and students walking in the halls, bending over motionless bodies
and trying to offer aid.
My sisters.
“Amy and Rita,” Helen said aloud.
“Amy and Rita.” She stumbled off toward the nearest stairwell down. Bodies were
scattered on the stairway and landings, victims of the stampede to escape the
school and get outside. Some were motionless, others moaned, and a few crawled,
huddled silently in corners, or begged for help for dreadful injuries.
“I’ll be back,” Helen told the
injured as she went downstairs without stopping. “I have to go get my sisters
and take them home. I’ll send someone over to help as soon as I can. I’m sorry
I can’t stay. I’ll be right back, I promise.” She meant to keep her promise,
but she could not stop just yet. Her sisters had to be found first.
Helen was descending the last
stairway to the main floor when she recognized one of the bodies, a crumpled
form at the foot of the steps. It was a small blonde girl with a ponytail,
lying flat on her stomach with her face turned to the left. Her thin arms and
legs were purple from bruising, her left arm clearly broken in two places and
bent behind her. It looked to Helen as if the girl had fallen down the stairs
and been trampled. She didn’t recognize the girl right away, but as she passed
she stared, slowed, stopped, then knelt at Caroline’s side.
Blood pooled on the dirty linoleum
around Caroline’s head, bubbling from her nose and mouth. Helen carefully
touched Caroline’s neck, feeling for a pulse as she had been taught in her Red
Cross classes. Footprints were visible across the back of the smaller girl’s
white blouse.
“Oh, my God,” Helen whispered.
Caroline’s left eye slowly opened
and turned up at Helen, as if the smaller girl were awakening from sleep. Helen
flinched in horror. She had thought Caroline was dead. In a terrible way, she
had hoped her friend was dead, as her injuries were so awful.
“Caroline!” she whispered. “Oh, God!
Oh, God, it’s me, Helen! I’m here, okay? Caroline, I’m here! I’m with you,
okay?” Possibilities for rescue crowded her mind. Should she move Caroline? Was
her back broken? She stroked Caroline’s face and hair, trying to collect her
thoughts. “I won’t leave you,” she whispered. “I have to go soon because I have
to get my sisters, but I’ll stay here with you until I get you out! I’ll get
help for you, okay? Can you hear me? Caroline, can you hear me?”
The little cheerleader’s gaze stayed
focused on Helen’s face wherever she moved, but Caroline did not otherwise
stir. Her breathing was audible now, labored and short. Helen realized most of
the cheerleader’s ribs might be broken. How could anyone do this to another
human being? How was it even possible? How could God let this happen?
“Caroline?” Helen fought back her
tears as she stroked the girl’s cheek. “Don’t die on me, okay? I’ll get help
and get you out of here, okay? You’re my best friend! Just wait for me, okay?
Wait for me until I get back with help? Wait for me?”
Her friend’s lips slowly moved as
another bubble of blood appeared and popped between them. As Helen watched,
Caroline’s lips curled. She smiled up at Helen.
“I love you!” Helen cried, sobbing
openly. “I love you!” She had never once considered saying that to anyone she knew
at school, even to Caroline, who was her best friend in the same way the
radiant Caroline was everyone’s best friend.
Caroline’s lips moved to say
something in return, words without sound.
She did not finish. In moments, she
let out a long, slow, tired sigh. Glittering red bubbles popped from her mouth
and nostrils, but no bubbles appeared after that. Her lips parted. The smile
stopped. Caroline’s left eye ceased to follow Helen’s movements.
“Caroline?” Helen stroked her cheek.
“Caroline, can you wait for me?”
The smaller girl’s face and skin
took on a yellowish hue. Helen moved her hand in front of her friend’s eye.
Caroline’s pupil did not respond.
Helen remained motionless for a long
moment, then put her hand down and touched Caroline’s neck again. It was still
warm. There was no pulse.
“I love you,” Helen said. She knew
what had happened but said it anyway. “I’ll come back for you. Wait for me. I
promise to come back. I have to get my sisters and take them home first. I
promised Mom I’d—”
Helen stopped talking but did not flinch. She did not take her hand from her friend. The second Light died as swiftly as the first, reflected from every surface and lighting even the dark places. In the distance outside the building, Helen heard wild screams and car tires screeching on pavement.
The first flash might have been an
accident. The second flash said it was not.
Atomic war, she thought. They
went and did it. It’s real. They’ve killed us all.
It was necessary to pause for a
moment, necessary to sit still for a handful of seconds and reflect on all the
people Helen knew had ceased to exist in that instant flash, reflect on the
many more who were dying even now, and offer a prayer for them. Helen felt for
a moment as if she talked directly to God, asking mercy for all humanity,
asking that all be saved even if mankind had just failed the final test to
avoid extinction. Spare us, spare us, have mercy, forgive us. Don’t let this
happen.
She sat until she could wait no
longer. The dead were gone. The living called. She opened her eyes and looked
down at Caroline a last time.
“I have to go,” Helen told her
friend. “I have to get my sisters and take them home.” She stroked the smaller
girl’s cheek, then got up. Her knees felt warm and sticky. She looked down and
saw that the front of her shirt and her knees were soaked with Caroline’s
blood, which ran down in long streams into her socks and shoes. She started to
reach down to wipe it away, but gave up. It did not matter anymore.
“I love you,” Helen said to the
little cheerleader. “I love you.” Turning, she staggered toward the double
doors at the end of the first floor hall. A broad blue sky was visible through
the windows. Blue sky, Helen thought. That is just so wrong. How
could the sky still be blue?
Helen pushed open one of the doors
at the end of the corridor, blinking against direct sunlight. Cold October air
swept around her, but she hardly felt it. Her body was detached from her
consciousness and moved without guidance in her shock. As she left the school,
a group of four adult women—parents, she thought—rushed past her and into the
building, after giving her horrified looks. They cried out only moments after
they entered. Helen did not stop or look back. Rita and Amy, sang the
mantra in her head, Rita and Amy, Rita and Amy.
To the north was Plainfield’s elementary school, several hundred feet away across a grass lot and a softball field. A road running past both schools was already carrying a greater than usual number of cars heading into the countryside, most of them speeding and honking horns. Scattered knot