Summer 2008

BEN FIRST FOUND ME ON THE EDGE OF APRIL. I was peering out across the saltwater marsh, wearing my mother's jeans and clutching a funerary urn.

Those first days of navigating frantic traffic up from Portland had been terrifying. As I crawled through York, Cumberland, Sagadahoc, Lincoln, and Knox counties, I witnessed scenes that I would prefer to forget, though they left an impression as indelible as a tattoo. 

Vehicles were left to burn on the side of the highway. The windows of darkened rest stops flashed with gunfire. Families tore each other apart in gas stations over fuel cans. The trip should have taken only four hours towards the beach cottage where my grandmother had lived when I was a little girl. She had died the year before, but it was the only place I could think of when the shit hit the fan.

I ran out of gas after a day and night of driving at a snail's pace. The congestion on the roads cleared to nothing north of Penobscot Bay. The sedan broke down on Route 182 on Catherine's Hill outside Bar Harbor. 

It was a grey dawn. The mist was thick on the road. I was alone. But the infamous ghost of Catherine in her white dress never appeared. Desperation clawed at my insides. If the dead bride killed on her way to her honeymoon had shown up, I probably would have burst into tears and tried to hug her.

Mom was dead. My roommates and other college friends had scattered to the wind, racing back to their own families. I had some extended relations down in Massachusetts, but the freeways became gridlocked all the way to New Jersey as the major cities of the Northeast emptied with the disintegration of martial law. Electricity was cut off in my apartment. The nights were still cold so I decided to get out of the Old Port. I didn't know where I was going, but something told me to get out of the city. Instinct told me that those who survived, ran.

"Hey! Hey! Is anyone out there?"

A snowy egret lighted from it's perch on a sunken stump and flew over the wetlands towards the pale east. I blinked out of my stupor. I hadn't even heard the truck drive up.

"Hello," the voice echoed.

Male. My brain signaled danger, but my body was too weary and heart too shattered to care anymore.

"Anyone there?"

Ben materialized out of the mist. He was tall, wearing jeans, a leather jacket, and a backwards baseball cap. A handgun was strapped to his thigh and a knife was holstered at his waist. He froze, his eyes widening before he gave a relieved smile.

"You scared me," he admitted with a smirk, running a hand over the scruff on his chin. "I thought you were Catherine's ghost for a second."

A freezing drizzle dusted the air. I brushed away the damp strands of brown hair stuck to my neck and the side of my face. I looked down at his hands as he wiped away a red stain with a dirty cloth. I scared him?

Ben had come upon another drifter sniffing around my abandoned sedan. After feebly attempting to assess the damage, I left the hood open with the engine still smoking and walked away with my mother's ashes. Ben later mentioned that the drifter had gotten violent with him. If I had gone back to the car before Ben had arrived, I might have ended up dead on the side of the road like so many others.

But I didn't. Ben had arrived right on time. Fate, I suppose, though the times hardly rendered such beliefs feasible. I had never been a believer to begin with and I wasn't about to start now. 

Ben told me that the abandoned trailer park looked the same as it always had, even before the downfall of modern society. Before the internet, telephone lines, and electricity went down, there had been healthy gardens of dandelion fluff and rusted wheel rims buried in the stony soil. Battered dog bowls filled with rain water sat by coiled chains. A tattered Maine state flag hung in an overgrown rose garden beside our aluminium trailer.

I'd never gardened before the event. I couldn't explain the impulse now. But I did my best to keep up with the two beds hemming the teal siding of our camper. I weeded then tore up the sod before planting the seeds from the wildflower packet that he'd brought me as a surprise. Watered it daily, whether it rained or not. It was an untidy patch, but it was mine. 

The china that we used in our matchbox of a kitchen was mine too. I had brought it with me accidentally when I had gone on the run. My grandmother's floral plates and delicate saucers were still packed in tissue paper and tucked into the trunk when I had fled the city. My mom had left them to me. She'd known that I'd always liked the pattern.

The stockpiled clips, shells, and boxes of bullets belonged to him. The stacks of canned goods overflowing from the cabinets. The bottles of cleaning liquid. Hunting knives. Guns with names he'd mentioned, but I had chosen to forget. He'd shown me how to load and fire a couple. I hadn't forgotten that. 

And the cat. The cat had been his, but I had won over the animal. I suppose it was more ours now, like that little camper. It was the last piece of sanity we had to cling to in that disintegrating world. 

Every other day, he left to scavenge and search for other survivors. Arming himself in the grey light of dawn, he would take the motorcycle and leave the truck with me. I never drove it though. I hadn't sat in a car since we'd arrived at Silver Gardens Park three months earlier. While working in the garden, I'd turn it on just for the rumble of the engine, the strains of the Foreigner cassette in the stereo, for the echo of humanity.

We combed through the other trailers time and again, gathering what we needed. I never told him how I would go by myself when he was gone, the sun baking the back of my neck in that treeless plain, and roam among the double and single wides. 

I flipped through water stained photo albums, perused record collections, and neatened piles of toys scattered before blackened TV screens. I made beds for ghosts. I even washed a pile of dirty dishes once, dried them, and then put them away. It was like my attempt at gardening; menial tasks to maintain sanity. 

It was a better use of my energy than what I had done in that first week. I'd cried for days, languishing on the threadbare quilt covering the bed, weakened to the bone by grief. He looked on, unsure how to manage his own pain, even more unsure how to comfort this girl that was still a stranger to him. That was before we started sleeping in the same bed.