On the Edge of Gone Read online

  “It’s not a decision,” I say, which is what Iris always told me. Even if it’s true, it still doesn’t sit easy with me. I’ve asked myself all the questions Max is asking me now. It’s odd, the way I find myself defending Mom to outsiders even though I long ago gave up on her in my head.

  It’s guilt, I think. It’s guilt because I’ve given up on her, and I can’t possibly explain to them why I had to.

  “Addiction is an illness,” I mumble. “She needs help.”

  “If she got on board, would she accept that help? She’d have to,” he says, nodding like he’s answering his own question. “It’s not like she could get those drugs here.”

  “People always find a way.” With six hundred people on the ship, someone will set up some kind of underground trade. Steal from the med bay. Tinker in the corner of a chemistry lab.

  I balance on my toes for a second, still staring at the ground. People have tried to help Mom with her addiction before. Dad, her older brother, a friend. It never took. I don’t know why the Nassau should be any different. She’d have lost her home, most of her family, maybe even her older daughter—if anything, she’d have even more reasons to want to forget.

  “Well . . . you really think she should be here, then?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m tired. What do you mean?”

  “I mean: if you’re going outside to look for your sister, I get it.” Max goes silent. Maybe Mirjam’s death is hitting him now, maybe his voice will choke—but he goes on. “But if you’re going outside to help your mother . . .” He gestures helplessly at my injured arm. His fingers stop a centimeter away, hovering in midair. “Don’t risk it. Don’t risk you.”

  “She’s my mother.”

  “The captain will never let her on if she doesn’t even try. Not when there are so many people who haven’t had the chance to try. People we can use on the ship. People who have been on that waiting list forever.”

  There are a dozen things I want to say. But she’s my mother—as though that means as much as people pretend it does.

  She is trying, just in a different way—as though I’m convincing myself.

  I wasn’t on that waiting list, either.

  I might not be someone the ship can use, as much as I’m trying to be.

  But I’m tired.

  So I just wonder, softly, “Why did you all come to find me tonight?”

  His head tilts. A tangled lock of hair drops in front of one eye. “We’re friends.”

  “We only met the other day.”

  “You saved our lives.”

  “You were nice before that.”

  “Well . . . sorry?”

  I balance on my toes again as I think. This isn’t coming out right. “I just never had many friends. I’m weird.”

  He hesitates, too. “Like, autism weird?”

  I drop back flat on my feet so fast, my heels hurt. So he does know.

  It’s hard for my autism to be a secret, given the way Mom tells people left and right. It’s not that I need it to be one; I just want to tell people myself.

  And I wasn’t ready to tell my friends yet.

  “Sorry if I wasn’t supposed to know. My mother told me.”

  “Yes. Autism weird.” I step back. “I should sleep.”

  “Wait.”

  I stop. I wish desperately I’d never started this conversation at the same time as I want to know what he’ll say.

  “It’s not the same, but I wondered about why you and Sanne and Fatima tolerate me, too, you know,” he says. “I think . . . people are just easier outside of school.”

  “School was pretty awful,” I agree, for the sake of something to say.

  “For you too, huh?” He eyes the new distance between our feet. For a moment, I think he’ll close that distance. Instead, he steps farther onto the walkway, where the light from my room barely reaches him. “Fatima would kick my ass if she knew I was keeping you up. Good night, Denise.”

  I thought only Els and my friends knew I’d been gone. After I stagger out of bed the next morning, though—seven forty-five, as usual, so I can start work at nine again—the walk to the dining room is filled with people practically leaping at me.

  “You went into the city?” a man in his twenties asks. “What’s it like?”

  I reach for the same description I gave last night, but don’t even know where to begin.

  “You met survivors?” someone else asks.

  That’s easier: “Yes.”

  “Are they all right? How many . . .”

  A third person: “Did you see any shelters? Do they have a way of getting to safety? My brother and his kids . . .”

  “I—”

  “What happened to your arm?”

  Farther down the walkway, two others begin to approach me. I back up and go down the first staircase I see. I thought the worst thing about this morning would be the muscles burning in my shoulders and arms, or perhaps sleep deprivation.

  Footsteps behind me. “Hey. Hey! You didn’t tell anyone about the ship. Did you? Listen—”

  “Leave the girl be,” Els says sharply. I hadn’t even seen her approach. I stop again, trapped between her and whoever is following me. I can still hear people on the balcony above me discussing what must’ve happened. I bow my head. There are so many footsteps and voices and questions that I don’t know what to focus on.

  Els comes closer. “If there’s anything any of you need to know about,” she says to the people gathering, “you’ll hear about it in due time.”

  “I just want to make sure—”

  “And you think you get to ask before the captain does?” Els hovers a hand behind my back without touching me. “Come on, Denise. Let’s get breakfast.”

  Breakfast is much of the same. We take a table in the corner, and Els fends off anyone coming close. The way people react to her, I think she might be more important on board than I thought.

  I see Max out of the corner of my eye, talking to a family of four. He points at foods on the buffet table; the parents wrap various items, squeeze Max’s shoulder, and exit the dining hall with their kids in tow. Then Max turns to scan the room, his gaze pausing when it lands on me.

  I tell Els to let Max through.

  “But people aren’t allowed to take food out of the dining halls?” I say—somewhere between a question and a statement—when he arrives at the table.

  “The captain allowed an exception. They’re bringing my parents breakfast.” He doesn’t answer the obvious question of why he’s not the one doing it, instead nodding at my arm and asking if it’s doing any better.

  I barely manage to answer his questions, the words coming too slow, like I have to hunt them down one at a time. “I’ll . . . Let’s talk later,” I promise as Els and I finally get up. She escorts me through the hallways, taking a quiet route. New people are still approaching us, but now that I’ve got Els shielding me, it’s almost cool. Within days, I went from a temporary nobody to a minor celebrity.

  When we enter her workspace—there’s that hiss of the door again that makes me wince—and sit down at the desk, Els steeples her fingers in front of her. “So.”

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” I say, which I think is the right choice since Els nods.

  “I was worried sick. You never showed up, and it took me over an hour to hear that you’d left on a freaking raft.”

  “It was a good print. They had several models available.”

  “It’s not OK, Denise.”

  “I found a water scooter in town.”

  “Still not OK. You got hurt!”

  “I couldn’t predict that. Or that it’d take so long. It won’t happen again.”

  “You’re staying on the ship?”

  “No. I just have a scooter now. I’ll be much faster.” As long as I don’t miss work, don’t reveal the ship’s existence, and don’t endanger anyone else, I can do what I want. That’s what the rules say. I hate that I worried Els—maybe even disappointed her—but it
’s not like I can stop going. And I’m not planning to miss work again, so this discussion is pointless. “I need to find Iris,” I explain. “But even fully charged, the scooter’s battery won’t last long enough. How can I borrow spare battery packs?”

  Els sighs. I check my watch: it’s not nine yet, so I’m not wasting work time.

  “You’re not the only one who wants to find their family.”

  “But I got the ship a scooter.”

  “We’re low on power as is. I don’t know how you could convince them to let you use extra. What did happen to your arm?”

  We still have a few minutes, so I tell her.

  “Oh, God, honey. Do you need to rest? You had a hell of a day.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I glance away. I know what Are you sure? means. They’ve already made up their minds, and my response won’t matter.

  “I’m not asking because you’re autistic,” Els says. “I’m asking because what you went through would be tough on anyone. If you say you’re fine, I believe you.”

  I briefly meet her eyes. “I’m OK,” I say. “I can work.” Everyone else on board is doing so. Besides, I already missed work yesterday. I can’t keep doing that if I want to ask for those battery packs.

  Els doesn’t ask me again. I move slowly at first, but I like the silence here. As the day goes on, my mind feels like a dust storm settling: the sand is still there, ready to blow back into my eyes at the first breeze, but for now, the sky is clear.

  It’s nice working on something I know how to do. Even one-handed, I can work a tab. I rock gently back and forth as I update the ship on the repairs, which are going according to schedule. I’m sure Els could do my task faster, even if I had the use of both hands and my palms weren’t thick with blisters, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She tells me what to put down for the second announcement, word for word: about the radiation from the impact lessening, the static clearing up, and the ship picking up snippets of attempted communication. The first thing they picked up on were communications from groups in the east of the country talking about helping those trapped in the shelters, which I file away to tell Samira and Nordin later; the second thing they picked up on was about volcanic eruptions from across the planet. (“Including Yellowstone,” Els confides in me, “but there’s no need for that much detail.”) The only ill effect we’ll receive is a fine dusting of ash, but with so much dirt already in the air, we probably won’t notice.

  For a few seconds, my mind spins with worry—Yellowstone is in the United States, but not in the South, right? Not south enough to affect South America? He’s fine, he has to be: he’s thousands and thousands of kilometers away. Even if a nearer volcano erupted, it shouldn’t be a threat. The shelters were built with that in mind.

  “Why are we telling everyone this?” I ask once the announcements are live. “Won’t it make them panic?”

  “Keeping secrets always works so well in the movies, right?” Els laughs. “It’s the uncertainty people struggle with. If you tell them what to expect, how it will affect them, and what to do, they deal. Better yet, they trust you.”

  It’s like what Mirjam said at the airport. Full disclosure. “Is it working?”

  “You tell me. Considering they’ve had their world destroyed, most of the passengers seem calm.”

  I’d attributed that to the safety of the ship. Sturdy walls, three meals a day, a guarantee of leaving this place for good.

  “You’d have to ask Leyla if you want to know more. She’s a psychologist. One of a dozen on board. We don’t just want our passengers to survive—we want them to be OK. We’re dealing with a lot of trauma. So if you ever need to talk . . .”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Bad experiences?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What happened?”

  I shrug. “It took a long time to diagnose me.”

  “From what I understand, autistic girls often don’t run into trouble until a later age.”

  I bark out a laugh. Oh, I ran into trouble, all right. I barely said a word between the ages of four and six. I hit three of my preschool and grade school teachers. In a class photo taken when I was seven, my face is covered in scratches from when I latched onto a particularly bad stim. Therapists and teachers labeled me as bipolar, as psychotic, as having oppositional defiant disorder, as intellectually disabled, and as just straight-up difficult, the same way Els did. One said all I needed was structure and a gluten-free diet.

  When I was nine, a therapist suggested I might be autistic, at which point I had already started to learn what set me off and how to mimic people; within two years, I was coping well enough to almost-but-not-quite blend in with my classmates. It’s funny when people like Els have no idea anything is off about me, given that my parents spent half my childhood worrying I’d end up institutionalized.

  At the time, I thought the diagnosis was delayed because I was bad at being autistic, the same way I was bad at everything else; it took me years to realize that since I wasn’t only Black, but a Black girl, it’s like the DSM shrank to a handful of options, and many psychologists were loath to even consider those.

  Els is watching me. I straighten out my face. However nice she’s been—since finding out I’m autistic, anyway—I don’t care to tell her any of this. “So . . . the ship needs a lot of psychologists.”

  “And thank God for that,” she says, not pushing the issue. “Old ladies like us would never get on board otherwise. But we agreed to double as teachers, and once the captain saw my work, I got two promotions in as many weeks.” She rolls her chair back and stretches. “Before I lost my research position at the university and switched to teaching, I studied agriculture. I know how food grows, how many people a given crop will feed, and the odds of successful harvests.”

  “OK?” I say, not sure where she’s going with this.

  “The damaged storage bay was sealed and drained last night. I need to see which barrels survived and which got swept away so we can recalculate our supplies. I can use an extra pair of eyes and hands. Join me?”

  We walk side by side through the ship. Outside, a lightning storm rages, far-off flashes slicing through the darkness, but inside the Nassau it’s quiet: people in the ship’s bowels are too busy getting it in flying shape to descend on me with their questions. The way Els hovers over me might scare them off, too. She’s not dangerous-looking—she’s in her sixties, shorter than I am, bordering on frail—but she carries herself in a way I don’t think she ever did at school. She wears the same all-black outfits, the same long scarves she’ll fling around her neck with a gesture so dramatic, it borders on the comical. I’d never even noticed the scarves until I’d heard classmates giggle about them. After that, I’d hidden a smile every time Els straightened, raised her chin, and swooped the scarf back around.

  None of that has changed. Perhaps I simply see her differently: she’s no longer my teacher, and I don’t know what that does make her. A boss? A mentor? Someone tasked to keep me from reading about useless feline anatomy—no more, no less?

  Els slides open a door. “Here we go.”

  At first, I don’t notice the difference between this hallway and the next. Then: thin lines of dirt in the corners. Streaks on the walls from recent cleaning, with a hint of discoloration in the streaks, like dried mud.

  Someone has left flowers against the wall. Dandelions. Daisies. Two long purple flowers I can’t identify. The plants in the park must have been their only option.

  This was the flooded hallway.

  I tilt my head, imagining water up to the ceiling, people being slammed into the doors and catching their last breath. Then floating. Bloating. Mirjam, doing the same on the other side of these walls.

  I shudder. Pain radiates from my arm, reminding me to keep it still.

  “Through here.” Els’s shoes clack as she slides open a different door and takes me into the storage bay. This hasn’t been cleaned like the h
allway has. There’s still mud heaped around large crates, reminding me of the ones I saw when I first entered the ship. The crates are shoved against the wall or tumbled over one another. There are shipping containers, too—some intact, others with the walls or doors cracked open to reveal glimpses of smaller crates inside.

  “Some of the contents were damaged by the water. I think most survived, but we’ll need to sort through them. These, though . . . the band holding them snapped.” She walks around a container lying on its side. The bottom—now a wall—is lightly crumpled but whole. She gestures inside. It contains the same smaller barrels I saw before. Blue plastic, white lids. The band Els mentioned lies uselessly on the ground, but the barrels themselves have been put more or less back into place, neatly lined up and grouped together.

  I know these barrels.

  The blue color, the curved plastic—

  “A lot of barrels got swept away. They contain essential materials: all kinds of vital modified seeds, as well as protein and vitamin bars. We need those to supplement our diets when the perishable foods run out. Not all our crops will be ready by then. To figure out how badly we got hit, we have to scan the lids to identify what’s left and compare it to our manifest.”

  “I saw one.” I walk up to the barrels and sweep one hand across the smooth plastic. “I saw one when I fell into the water.”

  All of a sudden, my battery problem has a solution.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “IF I FIND THE LOST BARRELS,” I SAY, “EVEN just one, will that be enough to convince whoever makes these decisions? I could borrow spare battery packs?”

  “Well, yeah—” Els goes on, but she’s said all I need to hear.

  I have to be in town anyway to help Samira and Nordin find food. I can look for the barrels while I’m there. They’re bright blue: now that I know what I’m looking for, they’ll stand out.

  If I find a barrel, I might appease the captain and be allowed to borrow enough energy to power the scooter all the way to Gorinchem. If I do my job right, my family will have a better shot on the waiting list. It’s a straight line to Iris.

  Els is still talking. I try to recall what she’s been saying but it was all about the odds of finding any barrels, particularly intact ones. I shrug it off. There’s a chance. That’s what matters.