“You’re new,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You from Great Falls?”
“Albuquerque. I’m looking for my family. My wife is Dee. She’s short, brown hair, beautiful. Forty years old. My son is Cole, and he’s. . .” As he said Cole’s name, he thought about Benny and the roadblocks at the edge of town.
“Sir?”
“He’s seven. My daughter is Naomi and she’s fourteen, looks a lot like her mother.”
“And you think they’re here?”
“I don’t know. We were separated, but I think they might have come to Great Falls—”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but we’ve got over two thousand people here. Look, I wish I could offer you a cot, but we’re maxed out and I don’t know when more food is coming. The Air Force base had been trucking in MRE rations, but we haven’t seen them in five days.” She sounded tired and emotionless. Jack thinking, You haven’t seen anything.
He glanced through the open doors into the gymnasium—a mass of sleeping bodies.
“There a morgue around?” he asked. “I’ve got a dead man in my car. Guy I picked up this morning who didn’t make it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’re in a little bit of chaos here.”
“If you see my family, tell them I was here looking for them.”
Jack drove to a nearby park that took up a single city block. Unbuckled Donald’s seatbelt, pulled him out of the front passenger seat, dragged him away from the car. He made it as far as a boulder surrounded by flower boxes whose contents lay in ruin, but could take him no further. He laid Donald down in the grass beside the rock and folded the man’s hands across his chest.
Sat with him for a long time in the dark, mostly because he didn’t feel right just leaving Donald here alone. Thinking there was something more to be done, though he had no idea what. The breeze was pushing those empty swings, one of them making an awful creaking noise that set Jack’s nerves even more on edge.
After a while, he said, “This is the best I can do, Don. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything.”
And he got up and walked back to the van.
Drove fifteen blocks toward the river, the engine sputtering, cylinders misfiring. He’d wanted to make it to the water, but that wasn’t going to happen.
The feeble moonlight was shining off the columns of the civic center several blocks ahead. When he saw them, he realized where he was and brought the minivan to a stop in the middle of the street. He sat staring in disbelief toward the square, little to see in the powerless dark but the five-story block of the Davidson Building. Wondered how it had not occurred to him until this moment to come here.
He put the van back into gear and cranked the steering wheel. Drove over the lip of the sidewalk into the middle of the square between two rows of potted evergreen trees.
Jack turned off the van. Sat in the dark and the quiet, listening to the engine cool. He was in a dark plaza, buildings on either side of him, joined by a skywalk. The fountain nearby, dormant.
So much as he had imagined it, even after all this time.
He opened his door and stepped down onto the concrete. It was cold. There were clouds scudding through the light of the moon. Silence like this was one thing in the wilderness, a completely different matter in the city. No cars out, no people, not even the hum of streetlamps or powerlines. Too dark. Too quiet. Everything wrong.
It hit him. Pure exhaustion. The emotional expenditure of the day. Felt the call of sleep, and the idea of a few hours of unconsciousness, of checking out of all of this, had never sounded better.
The minivan still smelled like death.
He cracked all the windows and laid the front seat back as far as it would go.
* * * * *
WHEN his eyes opened he was staring through the windshield at the windows of an office building thirty feet above him. A sheet of clouds reflected in the dark glass. He sat up. Hungry. Cold. Opened the door and stepped down onto the plaza. Eighteen years ago, there had been a coffeehouse a block from here, and he could almost smell the memory of their French roast, feel how the heat of it had steamed into his face on mornings just like this.
He walked toward Central Avenue. Strange not to know the day, but he was certain it was November now. The sky certainly looked it, and the steel chill in the air felt it. Clouds soft and pregnant, debating whether to snow or drop cold rain.
Up and down the avenue, not a single car on the street. A few of the stores had been looted, broken glass on the sidewalk. Nothing moved but some dead leaves scraping across the road.
Jack went back at the minivan and looked inside. Don’s youngest daughter had been sitting in the third row from what Jack could tell. It looked to him like she’d made the space her own—iPod, magazines, books, a stuffed penguin that had been dragged around forever.
He lifted a drawing pad out of the floorboard, stared at a half-finished sketch of countryside that looked remarkably similar to the Montana waste where he’d stumbled upon this van. She had talent. All she’d used was a black Magic Marker to suggest a sharpened mountain range, miles of sagebrush, and the road that shot a lonely trajectory through that country. He wondered if she’d been drawing when her family was ridden down. A line stopped abruptly at the summit of a mountain, the downslope never finished. The black marker she’d used still lay uncapped on the carpet.
Jack picked a cigar box off the floor, raised the lid.
Markers, pastel pencils, miniature bottles of acrylic paint, charcoal, brushes, erasers, and a sterling silver-etched heart locket that only ten-year-old boys give to ten-year-old girls.
Couldn’t bring himself to open it.
He was all morning writing her name. Big, block letters on the sliding door, the black Sharpies showing up well on the minivan’s white paint. He used up three markers coloring in the letters, then took a bottle of white acrylic paint and brushed her name onto the dark plateglass windows of the surrounding buildings.
Walked out into the street to test the visibility.
Dee’s name couldn’t be missed, even from fifty yards away.
By early afternoon a light mist was falling, and he sat in the front seat behind the wheel, watching the beads of water populate the glass.
Drifted off and when he woke again it was dark and a harder rain falling. He crawled into the very back and stretched out across the young girl’s seat. Wrapped himself in a blanket that still carried her smell. Hungry but he thought he should start rationing his bag of junk food, which contained only twelve packages when he’d taken inventory this morning.