“That sounds like some weird kind of horror movie.”
“No,” I said and laughed. “The thing is, the story is about dating and marriage. It’s about how people fall in love. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was about brothers and sisters? What if you’re the other half of my soul and I’m the other half of yours?”
Tommy’s toothy smile faded, replaced by a warm, contemplative grin that bordered on embarrassment. “Leave it to you to think of a thing like that at a time like this,” he said.
“If I could be half of anybody, Tommy, I’d want it to be you.”
The words came from somewhere I hadn’t intended. But I meant them all just then. Looking back now, I wonder how I ever drifted away from believing them. I wonder how I betrayed my brother, who really was the other half of my soul, like I did.
* * *
The miles came and went. I counted off each footstep as a way of keeping my mind from drifting back to the cold that was always gnawing at the edges of me. I followed in Tommy’s shadow as the wind came down from somewhere in the world far, far away and poured over us both. No matter how hard the wind, Tommy never wavered. It was easy to follow him if I let myself.
Without speaking Tommy reached back and took my hand and pulled me off the road and down into the large ditch bordering it. When I started to ask what was going on he put a finger to my lips and slid closer to the grass and turned and looked up at the sky and seemed only to wait. After a few seconds I heard the sound of the car coming.
I held my breath and waited as the sound hissed closer. The wind pushed and pulled the sound so that the car seemed to be coming from all directions at once, like standing inside a bell after it’s been struck, but the glare of the headlights showed that the car was coming from the direction from which we had just come. There was no reason to believe that it wasn’t Gannon.
The seconds stretched out long.
The car came and the car passed, giving no indication that it had ever seen us.
After it had passed Tommy lifted his head and watched the car recede into the dark. “We should get off the road,” he said. “At least for a while.”
I only nodded and followed my brother’s lead.
He led us down the embankment toward a wall of dark trees that grew up along the road in dark, scruffy shadow. The bark shone in the dim starlight and bounced a reedy light off the cold, hard earth. The air inside the forest was denser, warmer. The sound of our footfalls and rustling of our clothes bounced around from tree to tree and came back to us sounding like the movement of a dozen other people. As if, at any moment, we might turn a corner and find our own faces peeking out at us from behind some tree.
“Stop,” Tommy said.
After a few seconds of standing in the cold, dense forest, I heard the sound. It was a gentle rustling at first, like canvas rubbing flesh. And then came the low, rhythmic thud of footfalls followed by young lungs pushing and pulling at the cold, thick air.
A light flared in our eyes, blinding us both.
“Who are you?” a hard, female voice hissed. “What are you doing out here?”
She held up a hand to beat back the light just as Tommy did the same. Then he took a step forward, putting himself between me and whoever was behind the flashlight.
Tommy lowered his hand and looked directly into the glare. Then, having nothing productive come of it, he shielded his eyes and over his shoulder whispered to me, “Who do you think they are, Ginny?”
I already knew who they were, even before the light was lowered and our eyes were able to adjust so we could finally see them.
There were almost ten of them standing in the forest before us, beneath the dim starlight. Embers, each and every one. And all of them old enough to be drafted. All of them trying to get away from the war.
Save for one, they stood with their heads down, coats pulled up to their ears, legs trembling from cold and fatigue, as though everything in their lives was being carried on their shoulders and was pushing them into the earth, grinding them down with each moment.
“Hey!” Tommy said before I could stop him.
In unison, they all trained their eyes on him. “We’re not police or draft,” Tommy said. “We’re just on our way to Florida,” he continued. “Heading down to watch the launch. How about you guys?”
After a long moment and a watchful stare, the person holding the flashlight spoke. She was dark-skinned with her hair cut close like a soldier’s. She had hard eyes. And when she spoke, her voice was confident as steel. “You both about the right age,” she said, looking us up and down. “You been drafted yet? You don’t have to go. None of us has to. If you’re smart you’ll come with us.” Her voice was still firm, but there was sympathy in it. Almost pity. In spite of whatever compassion might have been there, she never let her eyes leave me as I moved closer to Tommy and placed my hand inside his pocket. Gannon’s gun was still there.
“Like my brother told you, we’re heading down to watch the launch,” I said.
The girl with the hard eyes barked a sharp laugh. “Is your map broken? Because you’re a long way from Florida.”
Tommy managed a smile. Then he squinted, looking over the group, and I could see that his brain had finally figured out what it was seeing. Now if only I could stop him before—“You’re dodgers, aren’t you?” Tommy asked, almost happily.
A tremble went through the group. The girl with the hard eyes seemed to harden even more. “And if we are?” she asked, the question bordering on a threat.
All over the country there had been groups of Embers running from the war. In some parts of the country it was becoming a rite of passage. The biggest case had been dubbed “The Dublin Disappearance.” Twenty-seven high school seniors simply didn’t show up for school one day. By the time the school and the parents found out about it, the kids had a three-day head start. They’d orchestrated it so that their parents had given them permission to go off on a weekend camping trip. But by Sunday night the kids weren’t back and then on Monday morning when time came for school, the kids still weren’t there.
It was late Monday afternoon when a package arrived at the school containing all of the students’ cell phones and all twenty-seven draft letters with the words NO THANK YOU scrawled across them. It had become the slogan of the movement, a polite refusal to be a part of things, a deference so polite that it seemed as though they were only turning down an offer of dessert at the end of a meal. All across the country NO THANK YOU began showing up in the empty beds of seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds who had been drafted.
It was just over two months ago—seventy-seven days, to be exact, which my memory always was—since The Dublin Disappearance.
In the beginning the story filled the news outlets. The people came on television and blamed the government, blamed the war, blamed the parents, blamed the students. There was no shortage of places to point. But when the days turned to weeks and the students still weren’t found, the concern shifted. They were called cowards and deemed “lacking in moral fortitude” by one of the pundits. “A generation of polite cowards” is what some people called them.
Slowly, compassion for frightened kids hardened into anger at cowardly brats.
More weeks came and went and a couple of the students were found. They were caught not far from the Canadian border by a pair of local hunters who had been chasing both deer and dodgers—their words. The pair was sent to jail and there they sat right up until one of them couldn’t take it anymore and decided that the war would be better. So his lawyer spoke to the judge and, sure enough, he went off to the war and died a miserable death but got called a hero for it.
Still, NO THANK YOU showed up spray-painted on walls, plastered on websites, written on abandoned draft