Home When You Get There

Home When You Get There

Only three months after the wedding, on a dry afternoon in June, Virginia buried her husband in a beveled coffin in the Weaverville cemetery. Two days later, he pushed through the thick North Carolina dirt and got back up again. But Reed, the man Virginia loved, didn’t come find her first. There was Carla, his field supervisor, and Rudy, a research assistant. There was Dean and Carey and Margaret. Virginia heard about them, the ways their bodies were found.

She waited nights for Reed to come, spent days asleep on the front lawn with her books. She annotated margins with her hysterics—love notes and limericks and all the dirty jokes he used to tell her over the phone when she was away. On the second morning, Virginia put on the sundress she’d bought in a secondhand store the night after she was discharged from the army and came home to stay. It was the only dress she owned and it didn’t fit well, and three days later when Reed still had not come, she threw it away with the radishes.

Virginia stopped waiting for Reed. It was almost easy. Lyle and Sandra were kindhearted but hapless, and she took over the Neighborhood Watch. It was before things had turned really bad and the Watch was still in its infancy stages, days marked by the uneasy smiles of folks not yet willing to admit the disease wasn’t some big put-on. During the light hours, everyone went about their business as they liked, but at night the neighborhood consolidated houses on the basis of a schedule Virginia devised. All told, there were twenty-one households, and they all slept like one.

In the low-lit kitchen, Virginia sat at the scarred wooden table, tapping her shotgun against her left knee. She was angry and she was tired and she was terrified out of her mind, but she’d had five years of war to make that all normal, which left her exactly here: checking her weapons and waiting with her hackles half up.

Tonight, Larry Bishop’s kid Donovan stayed up with her, talking shit about the disease, the town, whatever he could come up with. He thought he had to be surly and dismissive. Virginia wanted to tell him that she was that way out of no consideration for him. He wanted to be like her, he said, reverent like only a boy could manage. Virginia walked her rounds in the two-story, four-bedroom, Victorian-style house, stepping gently over sleeping bodies.

Sometimes she remembered Markie and Betts and Leland. Virginia had been almost three years back and not talking to her war buddies, but in the weeks after the disease, phones started ringing. Virginia could see them all perfectly: Leland alternating between chewing tobacco and gum, Markie looking all sly as he folded and stretched his fingers across his dark thighs, Betts with his horse teeth and watery eyes, soft-spoken, well-mannered, the best marksman. Leland was in Texas with his ma and his kid and his wife, holding things together with a whistle and that I-dare-you-to-fuck-with-me smile, while Markie and Betts blew in and out of little towns, carrying news and beef jerky and cigarettes, ranging the roads.

There were others beside Donovan who tried to stay those nights with Virginia: uneasy patriarchs smelling like sweat as they good ol’ boy’d her and convinced themselves they weren’t afraid. Men who watched Virginia with her guns and her Appalachian Smokes and her shrapnel scars. The tedium, the tension, the hot pervasive fear everyone stunk of like dogs, was not unlike the years she’d spent away at war. She still drank blistering tea out of a thermos, and she still had the habit of ticking off all the states she’d been to. She stopped adding places where the two of them would go when she remembered there was no Reed, that her bike was wrecked, that they’d sold the rusted red hatchback years ago.

But Cassidy Ruth Arlen, she was with Virginia long after the men had made their embarrassed excuses and laid down on the floor with their families. Cassidy Ruth was thirty-seven months younger than Virginia. Her sister Barbara Ellen had been in Virginia’s grade. She’d been called Barbie for her impossible proportions and her bottle blonde hair, and Virginia’s only real memory of her was from seventh grade when Barbara Ellen had absently given Virginia a broken bead bracelet.

Barbara Ellen wasn’t dead anymore, though Cassidy Ruth wished she was. She didn’t look like a Barbie these days either. She had passed jumping into the quarry, and the skin on her face had scissored off where she’d struck rock. That was before news of the disease had come to Weaverville, and when Cassidy Ruth had put Barbara Ellen in the ground, she’d expected her to stay there. Barbie, after Keith Petruck and Reed—Virginia’s Reed—Reed Monroe, had been the third to get up again.

Cassidy Ruth sang sometimes if Virginia asked her to. Old folk ballads her daddy and brothers laughed through once upon a time before her daddy got mean and her brothers took off. She was a real pale kid with more bones to show than flesh to cover, but when she opened her mouth, she growled like a chain-smoker who drank the blues.

Leland had sung something bluegrass-y the night before Virginia and all her buddies came home from their first tour. Rav, who exploded a year later, had drunk whiskey until it ran out his eyes and clapped and bawled like a baby until Leland said it was all over and sent him off to bed.

                Virginia watched Cassidy Ruth drink her rum straight like she was waiting for magic to happen. Virginia had spent the two months after her first tour doing the same thing. Then Reed had caught up with her, made Virginia want to find her way back to a house, back to him.

                Thirty-three days after he’d gotten up, Reed came for Virginia. She was on her hands and knees vomiting from the bad meat she’d cooked and convinced herself to eat. He stood in the doorway, filling it up to the casements, watching her retch and pull herself together. Virginia locked a gun on him, vomited on her own arm and fired just past his left ear. He startled, shying back like a stray dog, and Virginia heard Leland’s measured voice very clearly in her ears: Don’t think. Go. She forced the screen from the window, climbed out backwards, fell onto the sun-soaked lawn. She stayed there, gun trained on the sill, her body a long strange twist, until Cassidy Ruth found her almost two hours later.

               

                Virginia sat on the Boyd’s front porch in the paint-peeled rocker, holding Leland’s postcard up to the sun. It was dated three months back, and she read the address over and over again. The polished photo on the front was of someplace out West and since she’d never been, she didn’t know if she’d ever be.

                Cassidy Ruth had brought Virginia the postcard, though Cassidy Ruth didn’t work at the Post Office anymore. Virginia remembered when it was Cassidy Ruth and her brother James Harrison peeling apart letters in the summer heat of the mailroom. She remembered watching James Harrison and thinking he was the closest thing to beautiful because he walked like a filly, pawing the ground, shaking his head, becoming animal. And she remembered watching Cassidy Ruth with envelope stick on her fingers and the funny look in her eyes that Virginia knew because she’d had it too. She’d had it for years until the army got her unstuck, and it was the look that said: get me out.

                After the disease, after Barbara Ellen drank James Harrison dry, Cassidy Ruth quit the Post Office. Roy Henry was already long gone, which left Cassidy Ruth without brothers and with Barbara Ellen, who was many things but not a sister.

                Virginia squinted into the sunlight, read the postcard: I named her Susan Poppy. She’s a good looking kid. She turned her head sideways, wrinkled her nose. Watch yourself, the letters demanded, and don’t forget where you’re going.

                Virginia smoked then because she was paralyzed and bored and she couldn’t stop thinking about Rav and how his legs had looked, still strapped into boots, when the rest of him was blown so far away. She thought it must be the light, how it was hanging like a net of little golden fishes. Virginia knew it wasn’t the smell that made her think of him, and she was more than clean because she was without desert sand so it wasn’t that either. But Virginia could almost feel Leland in her hand, and maybe that was it. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be near him, to be near all of them, and how could she not think about Betts and Markie and Leland without Rav and the bits of his body?

                A neighbor waved from across the street as he ducked into his car. He, like the rest of Weaverville, was in the process of leaving. Word had gone out over the radio last week and a steady procession of cars had caravaned to Raleigh since. It was safe there, they’d said, with fences and checkpoints and trained men and their guns. Virginia watched them leave, watched Cassidy Ruth rearrange the things in her hardtop suitcase. Virginia thought she was missing something, the urgency, but she couldn’t think why with the sun like it was and Rav pulling her back into places where she’d rather never go again.

                Virginia loved Cassidy Ruth like she hadn’t loved anyone in such a long time. Now she watched Cassidy Ruth park James Harrison’s truck, flip the keys out of the ignition and sit there, staring at Virginia from inside the cab. Cassidy Ruth was helpless with a gun, which was alright because Virginia was no good at anything else, not since she’d got back. Cassidy Ruth was smart about all those important sorts of things.

                Virginia wanted to tell Cassidy Ruth about so much. She’d say something about Leland, about Leland’s mouth, and Rosie, who she always pictured the same way: thick ankles, black curls and a boxy red dress. She’d say that he’d had a photo of Rosie-the-wife, but she’d never once asked to see it. Virginia would have liked to tell Cassidy Ruth about what she had done when she was so far away, what Leland had told her. Just because you come back doesn’t mean you come back. You’ve got to have some place you’re going to, somebody that brings you home when you get there.

                Rosie had brought Leland home. She’d brought him home all the way to some tiny town in Texas. There was a baby now, a baby they called Susan Poppy, and she thought that Rosie must not know that Poppy was Virginia’s middle name, that Virginia knew Leland better because sitting up at night he’d told Virginia why he couldn’t sleep and about the dreams that had done that to him.

                Cassidy Ruth looked tired in the bright light, looked old, though Virginia must have looked older. Cassidy Ruth stood in front of the porch in what used to be the Boyd’s flower bed, her face as hard and tight as a fist. She put her hands on Virginia’s knees and Virginia swayed to a stop, lowered the postcard to her lap and thought that Cassidy Ruth looked much more like James Harrison than Barbara Ellen, which would have been a beautiful thing to say to Cassidy Ruth right then, though like all the things Virginia would have liked to say to someone, she couldn’t. Because really, what needed saying was all about Reed.

                “What’re we still doing here, Virginia?”

                Virginia’s fingers got the feeling like they needed to check over her guns. She knew that Cassidy Ruth had been waiting for her to leave, and she knew that she couldn’t think of going like this. Virginia thought about the places she had once wanted to see, thought about the address written in Leland’s block letters.

                “There’s Reed.”

                Virginia had always been a good shot. This time, she wouldn’t miss.

                Reed sat in the basement of his and Virginia’s house, the ground windows covered with cardboard and duct tape. They said something about the disease made the eyes irritable to sun. They said it was a sickness of the brain. They said it wasn’t catching, but if you’d caught it, take the trouble not to die. Virginia thought, because Cassidy Ruth had told her, that it was a cancer the likes of which had not been seen before. She didn’t know why now, what had caused it, but she did know that the body refused to process the act of its own death, that the mind pushed onward.

                Virginia heard the vulgar name the papers called it, and she knew well enough why. Cassidy Ruth had sat down to explain some of the mechanics of the disease the day Reed came into her house through the thin basement window and Cassidy Ruth had found Virginia hysterical on the front lawn with vomit on her shirt and a gun in her hand. Virginia didn’t understand, didn’t want that intimate knowledge, not when she still lost hours to the war and the wounds it had left festering, taken to distraction and distress by moments and memories that kept coming after her.

                Virginia couldn’t know the particulars about what had happened to Reed, what had overcome him. There were things about inhuman capacities, chemicals misfiring in heady sequences, adrenalin steeped to unmarked levels. She had swallowed a sore dry tongue when Cassidy Ruth, kneeling in the yellow grass, had told her about Reed’s circulatory system.

                The wondrous disease, which picked the dead back up again, could not overcome the issue of central heating. Certain physical deficiencies, Virginia had heard Cassidy Ruth say, could be fixed rather simply by appetite. She got that, the hankering for milk and vitamin D, orange juice and vitamin C. Reshaped appetites brought Reed and Barbara Ellen and hundreds of those once-loved to blood. A body that couldn’t heat itself, but a body that refused to realize it had died. Virginia had thought about all the hot blood running through Reed’s veins, how none of it was his anymore as it passed through tiny channels in his body, brought him warmth.

                Virginia had listened, four days later, when Cassidy Ruth told her about the ways in which it was possible to kill them. The brain was the key part unless Virginia wanted to bleed them dry, and she had no time for that. Forget stakes to the heart, don’t look in their mouths for fangs. The papers may have branded them vampires, but though macabre, they were not supernatural. Reed may have gotten back up again, but Virginia knew that he’d lie down with a bullet’s invitation.

                And so she knew why Reed had become what he had, and she knew what there was to do about it. Virginia expected many things as she entered her house. It was still shitty because Virginia never could hold down a job, even after she’d stopped drinking, but it was trying not to be because of Reed, who had always wanted things to be nice for her. There were the ridiculous pressed flowers hanging on the kitchen wall and Reed’s stacked books of botany. There was a picture of Virginia’s war buddies tacked to the cheap plaster, which was her contribution to the décor, and a photo of their wedding which she liked because of the way Reed was looking at her and the way she was looking back and laughing with her whole face. Virginia loved Reed in her way and would never have left him, not for Leland or a thousand thousand of his postcards.

                She pulled a pack of Appalachian Smokes out of the drawer where she’d left them weeks ago and lit one. It was eight in the morning and she knew Reed was there, stretching out his body under her feet in the basement. She’d snuck out in the morning before Cassidy Ruth had resolved herself from the other members sleeping under her Neighborhood Watch. Virginia hadn’t known how to make the words say to Cassidy Ruth what she was going to do today.

                Virginia swung the shotgun up over her shoulders, walked the edges of the patterned rug in the living room. She was always surprised by how much easier thinking got to be when she had a gun in her hand. She felt calm and cold but not yet ready. It wasn’t courage that she was lacking or conviction for that matter, but she wanted to give Reed the final moments that his first death never had afforded him. Virginia wondered who he unknowingly had chosen for his last supper, if it was someone she had known or liked.

                Virginia fixed a time in her head and when the clock paused on it, she walked to the basement door, threw it open, and pounded down the steps. She looked at him for a long moment. He was sitting on a stool by her workbench and made no move to stand. The light from Virginia’s headlamp forced Reed to screw up his eyes, but still he waited, hands on his knees, head slightly turned, slightly down. Virginia was holding the barrel straight and steady and though she knew this wasn’t Reed, that Reed had died months ago riding the bike now stamped to metal in the Weaverville dump, she looked at that familiar face and forgot what she was doing.

                “The last time,” he said with a slow whistling voice, and Virginia recalled the punctured lung, “the last time you came back seemed better. You took off your tags and told me we were going somewhere.”

                “Utah,” Virginia said, because she could remember the secondhand atlas he’d bought her and the roads she’d traced in red ink. “Arizona. Montana. Alaska.”

                “Virginia. I don’t understand. I keep trying to think about everything that’s happened. But I can’t—and I don’t know why. And you tried to shoot me Virginia—and you’re all I can think about that makes sense—and you tried to shoot me—and Virginia I can’t stop, I can’t think—and all that I know is you, Virginia—but when I came, you tried to shoot me…” Reed’s voice was rolled tight with hysteria, and Virginia watched the panic building in him like it still did in her sometimes, and she didn’t lower the gun but she didn’t squeeze the trigger either, and she looked at what had become of her beautifully kind husband.

                “Virginia. Virginia. Virginia. Why?” He shook his head, stared at Virginia with slitted eyes as he knocked the stool over in a slide to his feet. He was angry and all shook up, and as Virginia followed him with the barrel of the shotgun, she smelled him as he moved, and it was the smell that always made her remember Rav on that hot bright day when he had died.

                Virginia fired just as he broke toward her, not quite sure whether he had meant to harm or hold her. She flicked off her headlamp so she wouldn’t have to see where he fell or how he looked with his head blown clean through. She held the shotgun away from her, ascended the stairs with short steps, walked out of her house and didn’t look back. Things had gotten very clear very quickly. Virginia replayed the act of pulling the trigger, the resistance and the pressure and the release. She walked across her lawn, her neighbor’s lawn, every lawn until she got to the Boyd’s house, which was where she’d been spending her days and where Cassidy Ruth came back before dark. She packed the few things she’d appropriated from Lilah Boyd, high-waisted and high-water jeans, chunky sweaters and floral blouses, things she’d found in boxes in the attic. She had nothing else, nothing from before, which suited her.

                Sitting down on the bed in the room Lilah had painted yellow, she stared at her lap and tried to understand what she’d done. Hours later when Cassidy Ruth found her, she hadn’t moved, and paralyzed she stared at Cassidy Ruth, mouthing things without saying a word. Cassidy Ruth looked at Virginia’s gun, fumbled around in Virginia’s things until she’d come up with a cigarette to fit between Virginia’s lips. Cassidy Ruth looked at her like she was on fire.

                “You’re lucky, Virginia, that you got to be the one.”

                Cassidy Ruth sits behind the wheel like she’s been born to it. In the passenger seat, Virginia spreads the map across her lap without really looking at it, her eyes intent on the things outside as they pass by. A picture of Cassidy Ruth and her brothers is taped to the windshield next to Leland’s postcard.

                Cassidy Ruth and Virginia stop in little towns just off the highway, picking up gas and food and news. Since they’ve run out of money they pay in what they can, which is labor on Virginia’s part and skill on Cassidy Ruth’s. Cassidy Ruth makes a good deal of money by singing, while Virginia levels her shotgun and shoots. Like Reed, most of them are confused and traumatized, though Virginia never lets them get more than a few words out before firing.

                The two of them camp a lot, sleeping on the topper of Cassidy Ruth’s truck in the heavy sunshine, boiling water for tea over a campfire and singeing hot dogs on sticks. They drive at night, always on a full tank and always with extra containers of gas stored under their feet, a gun on Virginia’s knee. Cassidy Ruth talks a lot and laughs, and beneath layers of fear and anger and sadness, Virginia senses something else growing in her.

                Yesterday they stopped at an old ma and pa diner. The food was terrible, and they ended up washing dishes for a few hours just to pay for some greased potatoes, but there was a tack board on one of the walls where those traveling through left notes. The sentimental scrawls from before the disease were easy to discern from the messages that came after. Virginia read warnings about this or that town, a road washed out or a bridge pulled over. She read about someone seeking someone else they loved, someone leaving word in case anyone was to follow.

                Virginia left one too, for Leland and Markie and Betts, for anyone who might ever want to find her and Cassidy Ruth.

                Cassidy Ruth Arlen + Virginia Poppy Monroe of Weaverville, NC: Heading southwest then northwest in blue Ford truck (LOR - 1798) — August 28, 2012.

                Cassidy Ruth is singing as she drives because she knows Virginia likes it when she does. They’re up by the South Rim in Arizona, and the Grand Canyon looks like a long wound that’s been dug out of the ground. The clouds that swept in an afternoon monsoon are turning away, and when Virginia closes her eyes and listens, the slap of the tires on the wet road rumbles off the names of those who’ve brought her home: Leland Cassidy Ruth Reed LelandCassidyRuthReed lelandcassidyruthreed