Silence in the City

“I can’t get a signal.”

Her voice seems so loud in the electronic silence of our apartment. My twelve-year-old daughter turned off her phone as soon as the power went out. She’s gotten used to doing that during the rolling blackouts, so we can use it if mine dies. So she explains why she broke that rule.

“I wanted to call Mom.”

This will be our third night without power. It’s time to be straight with her. “I quit getting reception when the lights went out. No internet, either.”

Betrayal drips from her voice. “You said you were saving your battery, when I asked you for news, when I asked if Mom was okay.”

“I thought I’d be able to tell you later…”

She’s a smart kid, smart enough to be scared. “So, this could be happening everywhere?”

I nod. “Your mom was right. We probably should have joined that cult with her.”

“Sustainable living community… it’s not a cult.”

Tanya went there with her mother last August, but when Alicia decided to stay, I insisted Tanya should come home and go to school.  Now she turns her back on me and I follow her into the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator door wide and stares at the little food inside.

I slam it shut, nearly getting her fingers. “You know better.”

We’ve developed a system with the rolling blackouts. We keep two gallon jugs of water in the freezer and, as soon as the power goes out, put one in the refrigerator. Then we leave the refrigerator and freezer shut until the power goes on. Usually there’s still some ice in the jugs and the food’s okay. We use anything that spoils easily, anything that started to thaw in the freezer.

Only there’s still no power, no way to cook or make smoothies.

“Dad. It’s like at least a hundred degrees in here. No way there’s any ice left in the jugs. Some of the food’s probably already ruined. Besides, there’s nothing else to eat.”

I run my hand through my hair and nod. Alicia would have had enough canned goods to last for weeks. Not me. We’ve eaten every bit. Tanya put the pasta we had in a pot of water in the sun on the patio. It didn’t really cook, but it softened up enough to eat with a can of tomato sauce.

She’s right. The jugs of ice are nothing but water and everything’s warm to the touch. She empties everything out onto the shelf. The lettuce is rotting and the face she makes when she sniffs the milk tells me it’s sour. We should have used it this morning. Or yesterday. It may not be a hundred degrees in the apartment, but it’s probably close. There’s no way to be sure – the thermostat’s electric too. But the weather outside has been in triple digits off and on for weeks, and it’s not even summer yet.

Why didn’t I listen to Alicia? I laughed at her when she got a Sun Oven to use on the patio. She took it with her.

We eat what’s safe from the refrigerator and I cart the rest to the garbage can out in the apartment complex parking lot. The cars don’t work, either. I tried to go to work the first morning and it was dead, not so much as a click of life. Same thing was happening to half a dozen other commuters. I went back inside and told Tanya she could stay home from school and I’d play hooky from work so we could play board games all day. Her Harry Potter Clue wasn’t as much fun with just two of us, but she loved beating me at cribbage and backgammon. As the apartment heated up, I tried to wet washcloths for our heads, but the water wasn’t running, either.

“That’s okay,” Tanya chirped. “I filled the tub last night like Mom always did for blackouts.”

My twelve-year-old is handling this better than me.

The garbage can is overflowing with bags that can’t contain the rancid smell of rotting food. I go by my car for one more try. I’m surprised Tanya hasn’t already suggested going to her mother’s community – I have to start thinking of it that way, so I don’t call it a cult again. Still nothing – the car may as well be a rock for all the good it will do us. I sit back against the seat and one tear slides past my blinking eyes and down my cheek. I have to pull it together for Tanya.

My ears throb with the absolute silence in the city. No traffic, no motors, no air conditioners, no electric hum of thousands of different pieces of civilization. But the faint stench of burning rubber reaches through my musing to clarify my resolve. We have to get out of the city.

It’s sixty miles to Alicia’s community. If we had bikes we could do it in a long day, but they didn’t seem to be a safe idea in the city. So we’ll walk, wear our running shoes with good socks. Take the bare minimum. It’s hot during the day and we may have trouble getting enough water, so we should probably leave now, walk through the night. I think Tanya can do that. We slept some this afternoon when the heat made us too drowsy to play games.

Maybe by the time we get there, the power will be back on and I’ll feel like a fool. It’s only been two and a half days. Snowstorms and hurricanes knock out power a lot longer than that. Usually they say shelter in place.

But the apartment, the city with all that pavement, is too hot. And we’ve run out of food. I’d have to find an open store, if they haven’t all been looted.

It was such a relief when Alicia moved out and no one was nagging me to buy a chest freezer, or a dehydrator, or… Well, she ordered the solar cooker herself, without consulting me. She used it a few times before she took it and left. It worked pretty good. It just seemed silly when there was a perfectly good oven in the apartment and AC to keep the place cool.

I’m sure her doomsday friends will have explanations for all of this – government plots or aliens or both – all kinds of whacky conspiracy-theory nonsense. When the power does come back on, they’ll be suspicious of that, too. I don’t want Tanya getting sucked into their paranoia.

But the way the internet and cell reception crashed right along with the electric – that was rather unsettling. Some kind of magnetic force? Would that do it? There’s been some talk of the poles reversing. But wouldn’t that have given all of us a jerk?

I’m still sitting in the car, trying to decide what to do, when I hear them. I’ve left the door open because of the heat – the battery’s dead so there’s no light and no way to lower the power windows. The voices are quiet, soft murmurs. A baby’s cry quickly hushed. It’s a group of people walking down the middle of the street, making their way in the dark. Headed for the freeway ramp, I’d bet. Getting out of the city before murder and mayhem become the order of the day.

That’s what we need to do, too.

I get off my duff and head for the apartment, thinking of ways to present this plan to Tanya, but she’s already packing – sensibly, of course. Alicia prepared her for this, taught her the difference between essential and superfluous. I remember her telling Tanya, “Pick one small, light item that’s just to make you feel good, to connect you with what you’re leaving. That connection is essential, too. It will help you remember who you are, what kind of person.”

She’s chosen a printed photo of the three of us on a ride at Universal Studios, a year and a lifetime ago, just before Alicia decided to check out that sustainable living center. I had to get back to work, so she went with Tanya, saying it would be a good education. When I insisted, she brought Tanya back and left with her solar cooker.

There’s a crack like a firework, or a gunshot. I have no clue how to tell the difference. Maybe we should wait to go later, or in daylight.

Tanya sees my indecision and channels her mother. “We’ve got soft-soled shoes. We just need to stay in the shadows – if there are any places that aren’t in shadow – and not talk at all. We’re headed to Mom, right?”

I nod. She’s packed a bag for me, too.

“I put most of the spices in your bag,” she says. “If this really is worldwide, they’ll be valuable for trading.”

“I suppose my bank books may as well stay here.”

She shrugs.

One of my accounts gave me a printed checkbook. I bring it and all the plastic, in case they’re of any value going forward. In the drawer with my bank books are passports for all three of us – we’d planned to spend Christmas at a cabin in Canada, a place run by an old friend of mine. Instead Tanya split the day between me and her mother. I slip them into my bag. Who knows?

I lock the apartment on our way out. I have to believe we may be able to come home, back to our real lives. I have to believe this is just a hiccup.

© Sheri McGuinn

Audio version at sherimcguinn.substack.com/small-traditional-publishers

Review: Fly Like a Bird

A small-town family drama stretching from the 1950s through the 1980s, with all kinds of secrets. Wonderful description of Iowa country living and the racial realities of that time and place. An example: "The early evening arrived sullen and moist, ushering in the period of the day when time slows down, and the earth relaxes." Not only does the protagonist grow through the course of the novel, so do most of the supporting characters, creating thick layers of story that make it an engaging read.

While this is strong women's fiction throughout, focusing on the development of the female protagonist, the last few paragraphs offer a deux ex machina happily-ever-after ending. That could have been handled much better, but the book is still a good read.

Note: I read a pre-publication copy in which there were minor flaws, which I relayed to the publisher. Hopefully they were corrected.

Novel Bites: Nina’s Thanksgiving

Novel Bites is a series of short stories from the perspective of secondary characters in my novels. Sometimes the story is straight from the novel, sometimes it’s not. Nina is Alice’s daughter and narrator of the book, Alice. This is a Thanksgiving when she was younger, before the events in Alice. Please comment. Thanks.

Mom pulls the oven rack out enough to poke the withered orange lumps with a fork.

“Done!” She pulls the pans out and puts them on top of the stove. Eight halves of those little pumpkins she says are the best for pies, face down on cookie sheets.

“Why don’t you just use the canned stuff, like a normal person,” I grumble. I’m twelve and my mother’s no longer perfect.

She shrugs that off. “They taste better from fresh pumpkin.”

“Did you have pies like this when you were a kid? Is that it?” I dig at the issue.

“Yes.” Then she changes the subject like she always does. “We need to let these cool before we scoop them out. Are the ginger snaps ready to roll?”

She won’t ever talk about her childhood. I know her mother died when she was born and she was brought up by her father, and that’s about it. I’m not even sure if he’s dead or alive, and I don’t think she knows, either. But I bet someone always made pumpkin pies this way for the holidays when she was little. I bet she had normal Thanksgiving dinners. We never have.

“Nina.” Her voice breaks into my thoughts. “The cookie dough?”

We mixed up the cookie batter first thing this morning and it’s been cooling in the refrigerator while the pumpkins cooked. Mom’s efficient about energy use – we’ll bake the cookies while the oven’s still warm.

“Yup. All four batches.” I pull the first roll out of the fridge and start peeling the wax paper around it open. We have to make our cookies from scratch, too. Always. Mom won’t buy the frozen stuff. We’ll make six kinds of Christmas cookies, too, everything from the basics of flour, sugar, butter . . . not margarine, no way, not for Mom.

I’d get it if we had family that expected all this tradition stuff, but we don’t. It’s just us. And we’ll take the cookies and pies to the homeless shelter this year and have our Thanksgiving feast there, with a bunch of smelly people who won’t take off their coats because they’re afraid of having them stolen, and raggedy little kids running around screaming. When I was little, we’d go to a soup kitchen. The people there were usually cleaner. Most of them still had homes, I guess.

I try one more time. “Why can’t we go to the soup kitchen instead?”

Mom gives me the look, the one that says we’ve already been over this. There aren’t as many volunteers at the homeless shelter and I need to be less judgmental. If she lost her job, we could end up homeless.

But she’s a teacher and she’s been doing it long enough to have tenure, which means they can’t just fire her. She’d have to like murder someone in class or the school would have to collapse or something. She’s also dead set on this Thanksgiving tradition.

“I’ll help you with all the cooking, but I’m not going this year.” I try to sound as firm as she does when she’s giving me no choice. “Mary invited me to their house.”

Mom just looks at me. I’m not sure if she’s disappointed or what. But she’s not saying “No” right away, so maybe there’s a chance.

I work on it. “They’re having the whole family, her cousins I met last summer and a bunch more relatives, so one more won’t be any problem. Her mother said it was okay.”

Mom sighs and nods. “You’ve never had that kind of Thanksgiving. You should. It’s special.”

“I can go?” I almost didn’t bother asking! And she caved right away!

She smiles like it hurts and blinks like maybe she’s holding back tears, but she nods yes and I hug her, hard.

“Thanks, Mom!”

“I’ll miss you.” She says it quietly and it tugs at my heart, but this is something I need to do.

Guilt makes me try to explain. “I need to have one Thanksgiving with a bunch of people who know and care about each other, not strangers sharing an especially big meal.”

“I know,” she says. “When I was little, we didn’t have real family, but we had a huge group of friends who gathered together for the holidays – and baked the pumpkins for the pies – then when I was older, it was just two of us, and sometimes we ended up . . . anyway, yes, you can spend this holiday with Mary and her family. It’ll be good for you.”

“Were you homeless?” Maybe that’s why she never talks about it.

She smiles as if she’s having a memory that makes her feel warm. “Between homes. Sometimes we were between homes. Go call Mary, then get back here and help me with these cookies.”

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