He searched for words that would undo me, but found only the empty breath inside his lungs. If he tried to press me he knew I could always bring up facts and figures, numbers and math enough to break down anything he said. I could recite articles verbatim about the survival rates of runaways if I wanted. True stories of children found dead. Statistics about how badly everything could go for us if the world so decided. I could crunch the math in my head and rattle off the probabilities: such and such a chance of getting kidnapped, such and such a percentage of turning to drugs or prostitution or anything else. On and on, I always knew how to break down any resistance he ever had to anything.
Tommy looked at me, his face soft and afraid and frustrated all at the same time. His mind reached for something to say but his lips knew the fact of futility. Only I could change it. Only I could let him win the argument that he so desperately needed to win.
And he knew—we both knew, and hated—that I wouldn’t let him win.
Rather than fight it, rather than try to make the case for the things he thought we should do, he conceded. Tommy’s life was always easier when he just did what I wanted.
“So be it,” he said.
“Tommy?”
“What?” he answered, sighing the word as his body slumped upon its frame, resigned to defeat.
“They’re never going to break us apart,” I said.
“Then why do they keep trying?”
I walked over and wrapped my arms around him. He was outgrowing me already and my arms had to work to surround him, but the work was rewarded by the feeling of my brother captured, like some splendid and frail animal, in my arms. I had to protect him. It was my job.
“We won’t ever be separated,” I said.
“But—”
“I promise, Tommy.”
“You can’t know that, Ginny. Mom and Dad said they’d always be here too.”
Tommy’s body shuddered and I knew that he was crying. He wrapped his arms around me, if only to keep me from seeing his tears the way boys and men are known to do.
“Mom and Dad haven’t left,” I said. “They’re in me. In The Memory Gospel. And they’re in you too.”
“I can’t remember like you can,” Tommy said, almost as an apology.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re in you. We’re together. A family. And we’ll always be that.”
“You promise?”
“Just as sure as my name’s Ginny.”
We stood for a long time, holding one another, and the world passed us by.
...calump-calump-calump...
Like a beating heart fading into nothingness. And when the sound went away, when the world had drifted off into silence, we were still there, together. The way it would always be for my brother and me.
After that we went back to the foster family who had taken him in and, just as before, the family didn’t want Tommy unless it was without me. So we found ourselves lost in the system. But at least we were lost together.
Four years later, we were seventeen and running away again, but this time, we wouldn’t go back. The launch in Florida wouldn’t wait for me the way the war and death would wait for Tommy.
In three days, when this would all be over.
So be it.
We could do nothing to stop the towers from falling. We could do nothing to stop the workplaces from being shot up. And when the shootings spilled out of the office buildings and into the schools, we could do nothing to stop that either. The government began watching everyone because we had given them permission. Climate change. Bankers. On and on and on. All day every day the news outlets came into our homes—slipping in through the waves and cables, screens and surfaces that bound us all together. The television became a hole in the ice through which horror shambled each night, the way it used to in old black-and-white movies. But in those movies dying was all corn syrup. Back then, the world only pretended to be after us and, inevitably, the thing we feared went away, born into darkness on a tide of end credits.
But now the dying we saw on TV was real. The world grew more thorns with each sunrise, tightened in a little closer with each sunset. And all the while we watched. We stared at the news and shook our heads in dismay. We wept. We sat up at night, sleepless and fretting. Asking ourselves, over and over again: What right did we have to bring children into this world?
Your mother and I went back and forth for years. We felt we had a duty to wait for things to get better. A duty not only to you, but to everyone else. This world, in whatever form it takes, is a product of us all. We forge hope or sow terror. We dole them out in measurements of our own choosing.
But still, it’s a big world. I was just a small-town newspaper writer. She a science teacher. How much could we really do about anything?
At some point in your life, you’ll want to know where we were when everything changed. It’s a hard question to answer, like trying to find the moment when a little hill of rocks became a mountain. It happens suddenly and all at once, like a lightning strike, and after the flash fades, you turn to see that your home has burned to the ground.
While there are a dozen days in which the world changed, and some of them I will tell you about, I’ll answer your inevitable question about the moment when things went from the way they were to the way they would become:
We were in North Carolina visiting your mother’s parents on the day the towers fell. Your mother, your grandparents and I all spent the morning huddled together in front of the television, watching it happen, just like everyone else. Your grandfather, a stoic man by nature, sat unmoving in his chair for hours, letting what was happening wash over him like floodwaters sweeping over a headstone. When he did finally speak, all he said was, “I’m sorry.”
By sunset we were all wrung out. Raw and frayed at the edges. We wanted to sleep, but it was early yet and, even beyond that, we knew that it would be a sleepless night. So your mother and I went for a walk. Her parents lived in a small community on the Intracoastal Waterway where large houses smelled of seawater. Small cars steered gingerly over the earth, guided by retired hands. The ocean thinned out into tendrils of tributaries only a stone’s throw from the bedrooms of children.
The streets were empty because the television was still full of tragedy. Your mother and I walked the vacant roads alone. Sometimes the wind carried the sound of sobbing from nearby houses. We pretended it was the sound of laughter. A lie, but one we felt it was okay to tell ourselves.
Eventually we found a sandy road leading off into the woods. It led to a collection of abandoned buildings. Once upon a time, it had been a summer camp of some sort. Square, concrete buildings held empty wiry bunks, rusting and half-reclaimed by underbrush. A large, high-ceilinged classroom stood at the center of the complex, covered in graffiti and shaggy with kudzu that trembled like grasshoppers when the wind blew.
We moved through the empty, forgotten buildings, stepping slowly, detached from everything, even ourselves, like ghosts. When we had seen enough we followed the edge of the property and found that it led to the ocean. The sun was setting behind a wall of clouds. Just before it disappeared, it flared, shifting colors, from beautiful to ominous,