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It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.
The world off the mountain had become a memory, remoter by the day. He’d never managed to get the generator working—he’d hoped to use the shortwave—and had long since stopped trying. If what was happening was what he thought was happening, he reasoned, they were better off not knowing. What could he have done with the information? Where else could they go?
In one of the outbuildings was an old aluminum canoe. Wolgast dragged it to the shore, then fetched Amy from upstairs. He paddled to the middle of the lake while he watched the fires burning up the mountain toward the camp, a sight of furious beauty, as if the gates of hell had opened.
I’m sorry, he thought. I did my best and it wasn’t enough. I was too afraid from the start. If there was a plan, I couldn’t see it. Amy, Eva, Lila, Lacey. I was just a man. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The day-to-day. That was the term they used. Thinking neither of a past that was too much a story of loss and death, nor of a future that might never happen. Ninety-four souls under the lights, living in the day-to-day.
his mother, who, in the end, even when the cancer had taken everything else from her, had spoken not a single ill word of their father for leaving them. He’s in his own time now.
Now here was his mother, dying; if death was a room the soul entered, she was standing at the threshold;
It wasn’t just the batteries that Michael was in charge of; it was the glue of hope that held the place together.
Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody’s business but yours.
drinking Auntie’s tea was simply the price one paid for her company.
It was wrong; it made no sense. Hope was a thing that gave you pain, and that’s what this girl was. A painful sort of hope.
Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on.
Sara didn’t question anything Michael had told her. Michael was Michael, that’s what everyone said, meaning he was too smart by half—too smart for his own good. But the one thing he wasn’t, not ever, was wrong.
“No time for goodbyes,” the old woman intoned. “You go on now, Peter. You’re in your own time now.”
They were six now. They moved across the empty land like visitors to a forgotten world, a world without memory, stilled in time.
They moved, as always, without speaking, scanning the trees. All eyes.
You’ve been waiting for something like Amy to come along your whole life. You can call it destiny if you want, or fate. Auntie would probably call it the hand of God.
The picture was bleached of all color, composed entirely of tones of gray—the palette of a half-remembered dream.
He told her he loved her and she loved him in return, at once and infinitely.
“There are weapons more powerful than guns and knives,” the woman replied. Her face held no fear, only a sense of purpose. “It is time for you to see it.” “See what?” “What you came to find,” said Lacey. “The passage.”
He placed a blanket over the baby, over the two of them, and sat beside them on the bed, and let it all go: he wept.
Courage is easy, when the alternative is getting killed. It’s hope that’s hard.
