Harry's Mom

Frankie was supposed to be my leaf buddy, but she wasn’t there when I got up. I went to tell Rose Ida.

“Frankie’s gone,” I said.

Rose Ida gave me a look and said, “Gone where?”

“I don’t know, but she’s not here, and I have to pee.”

Rose Ida huffed and pulled her hair back into a ponytail with one of the elastic bands she wore around her wrist. “I’ll go with you,” she said, “but make it quick. We’ll have to find Frankie.”

She walked me away from camp and stayed with me while I did my business. When we came back from the woods, Rose Ida called the whole group together, a knot of females with herself at its center. “Who was Frankie’s leaf buddy last night?” she asked.

Katie raised her hand.

“Did you stay together the whole time?”

“Uh, yeah.” Katie stopped just short of rolling her eyes.

Rose Ida’s face folded into a scowl. “Well, let’s find her. Go in groups of three. Move slow and listen for the signal.”

Katie and I went with Harry’s mom. Everyone else called her Joan; before the world fell apart, her son, Harry, was my classmate and my best friend. Harry was dead now, just like his dad, and my dad, and all the other men and boys, and some of the older women; victims of the virus that appeared from nowhere, leaving calamity in its wake.

#

People had reached out to one another at first with sympathy and concern and offers of help; but that stopped as things spiraled downward. Everybody was trapped in their own personal hell, too busy trying to save their family or themselves to pick up the phone and make a call, send an email, or text. We stayed in our homes under isolation orders, depending upon delivery drivers for groceries and other supplies. Then the deliveries dwindled, became irregular, stopped; there weren’t enough living to fill the all the places vacated by the dead.

It was Harry’s mom who found me sitting by my father’s body. “Maggie, honey,” she said in my ear, hugging me from behind, “you need to come with me now.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve got nobody else, baby, and I can’t just leave you here to fend for yourself.”

#

“Which way did you go last night, Katie?” Harry’s mom asked now, knocking back weeds with her machete as we headed into the woods. Katie pointed to a thicket of young trees.

“Frankie’s idea, right?” Harry’s mom asked.

Katie nodded. Harry’s mom sighed. Most of us had quickly gotten used to bathing and relieving ourselves in front of each other, but not Frankie. She hid her thin, flat-chested, middle-aged body in long-sleeved dresses whose hems grazed her knees. A heart-shaped gold locket was her only ornament. Word got around in whispers that she had a skin condition that made her shy about being undressed. We didn’t make a big deal out of it. Her leaf buddies pointedly looked away, and we all pretended not to notice how she searched at every drugstore we happened across for the drug that made her condition bearable. When she was lucky enough to find it, she stuffed her pockets full of bottles, a sick squirrel hoarding medicinal nuts for an endless winter.

We left her alone because we were all in the same boat: robbed of our fathers and husbands and brothers and sons, grandmothers and Sunday school teachers and elderly aunts. Those faces now lived only in our memories and in bittersweet dreams. No one asked why Frankie cried in her blanket at night. All of us were grieving. None of us was able to carry the weight of someone else’s sorrow on top of our own.

Harry’s mom led us into the thicket of locust saplings. Bent at the waist, she studied the ground, then straightened up and stretched her back. “What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Tracks.” Her eyes scanned the perimeter of the woods. “We should go a little further. God only knows what Frankie was thinking.”

We were almost to where the trees thinned when we heard the signal.

“They found her,” Harry’s mom said. “Let’s go back, girls.”

We expected to find Frankie by the fire, but she wasn’t there. The rest of the group straggled in, three by three, the relief on their faces giving way to confusion.

“Where’s Frankie?” Katie asked.

Alva, checking her ankles for ticks, answered without raising up. “She’s dead.”

Katie slapped her hand over her mouth, too late to strangle a scream. She was afraid of everything, that Katie. “Roughing it,” to her, was a town without an Olive Garden. Sleeping on the ground, carrying water, peeing in the woods – she’d been schooled for none of that. She got on my nerves.

Harry’s mom gripped the handle of her machete until her knuckles turned white. “How?” she asked.

Alva straightened up with a tick caught between her fingernails. “Don’t know,” she said, flicking the bloodsucker into the fire, “but it was bad. My group found her. Georgia puked.”

Harry’s mom wheeled on one foot, took a few steps, turned back, pointed the machete at me and Katie. “You girls stay here, you hear me?” We nodded and she turned again, running toward the forest-muffled voices.

Katie chewed her fingernails and sobbed. Alva gave her a disgusted look but didn’t speak. I watched the fire; I wanted to say, for God’s sake, Katie, shut up, but I didn’t. We had all watched someone die; none of us, not even Katie, had escaped that. Death was the glue that bound us together, turning strangers into sisters.

After a while, the indistinct voices became understandable words, and the remainder of the group emerged from the treeline. Georgia was in front, dried vomit crusted on her chin. She’d been a smoker before everything happened; her empty fingers twitched and played around her face now. Abby walked with her arm around Georgia’s waist, saying words I couldn’t hear. Rose Ida, Linda, and Harry’s mom followed behind. The rest of us shouted questions across the clearing. Rose Ida walked to the ring of stones around the fire and stopped, her hand raised for silence.

“Frankie’s dead.” The bald words set off a wave of murmurs. “We need to get as far from here as we can before dark. Some big animal got her, I don’t know what. It might come back, and it might not come alone. Let’s strike the fire and grab a cold breakfast, and get on the road.”

“We ought to bury Frankie,” someone suggested.

Alva and Rose Ida exchanged a long, silent glance. “There’s not enough left to bury,” Rose Ida said at last. “Now, get moving.”

#

Katie wasn’t the only nervous one around the fire that night; all of us listened for footfalls and watched the darkness beyond the firelight. We kept our weapons – sharpened sticks, knives, machetes, whatever we had – within easy reach of our tense fingers. We talked in quiet voices, mostly about Frankie.

Frankie’s death had freed us to speculate out loud about her life before, back when the world was normal: where she had worked, what she had liked to do, who she had lost to the virus. We pitied or admired her determination to survive, with a condition that needed medication in a world where medication was increasingly scarce.

We divided her belongings: a comb, a few dresses, a book of poetry. There was no sign of her medicine.

Just when we thought we’d said all there was to say about Frankie, Harry’s mom folded her legs and rested her elbows on her knees. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said, “but I know what was wrong with Frankie.”

We all leaned forward, letting our curious faces ask the unspoken questions.

Harry’s mom looked around the circle, her eyes solemn, and said, “She wasn’t like us.”

We exchanged confused glances, unsure what she meant. Alva came right out and asked, “What do you mean, ‘not like us’?”

“I mean she wasn’t one of us.” When we still didn’t get it, she snapped, “I mean that Frankie wasn’t a woman!”

A wind of indrawn breaths circled the fire. “How do you know?” someone asked.

“I saw her – you know – when I was her leaf buddy.”

“Last night?” Rose Ida’s question stabbed our astonished silence.

Harry’s mom raised her eyebrows and said, “Why, no, I was Linda’s leaf buddy last night, wasn’t I, Linda?” Linda nodded. “This was back at the beginning,” Harry’s mom went on. “Frankie wouldn’t stay close, even though you were very insistent on that point, Rose Ida. I thought she was going to leave without me, so I turned around and…” She shrugged, letting her shoulders finish the sentence.

Rose Ida looked at Harry’s mom the way she looked at whiners, slackers, and food-hoarders. Harry’s mom met that stare, unblinking, her face as grave as a carved saint. “It was hormones,” she said. “That’s what Frankie took from the drugstores. I guess that’s what saved him from dying.”

"That explains a lot,” Linda said.

Harry’s mom nodded. “Exactly. And that locket? It had a picture of him and another man. I’d bet money on it.”

“We didn’t find the locket,” Rose Ida said.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of Frankie to find, now was there?” Harry’s mom cocked her head, considering. “That locket was a small, fine thing. It could be back there under the leaves with what’s left of Frankie. It could be sitting in a coyote’s belly, headed toward Jellico Mountain. Wherever it is, I guarantee you we’ll never find it, and we’ll never know if I’m right or not.”

Rose Ida didn’t answer. She studied Harry’s mom as she would study a map. She glanced at the machete, then back at Harry’s mom’s placid face. Rose Ida’s spine was tight from the top of her head to her tailbone; she sat silent and motionless for a long moment, wrestling with unspoken thoughts.

“Why didn’t you say something sooner?” Rose Ida finally asked Harry’s mom.

Harry’s mom dropped her eyes and prissed her mouth, the way people do when they pray for sinners or when they must unavoidably speak of something unpleasant. “Well really, Rose Ida, what would you have had me say?”

Rose Ida wasn’t satisfied, but she let it go and changed the subject. But nobody was in the mood to talk anymore. One by one, the others rose and moved toward bedtime. Harry’s mom stood up and sheathed her machete. She came around the fire and grinned at me. “Hey, sugar, how about we be leaf buddies tonight?”

“Okay.”

She folded her arm behind my back and rested her hand on my shoulder as we walked beyond the edge of the firelight and into the darkness of the woods. I couldn’t stop thinking about Frankie. Whatever had killed her – and no matter what Harry’s mom had said, Frankie would always be a her to me – whatever had killed her might be out there right now, following our group, tracking our scent, waiting to catch another one of us alone and not looking. I wondered how Frankie felt, when sharp teeth ripped into her flesh, and I shivered.

“Cold?” Harry’s mom asked.

I shook my head. “No. I’m scared, I guess. Of the thing that killed Frankie, whatever it was.”

Harry’s mom laughed the way moms do when you say something silly, and she gave my shoulder an affectionate squeeze. “Oh Maggie, honey,” she said, “you don’t have to worry. It got what it wanted.”

Her smile, I knew, was meant to reassure me; but I did not feel reassured. That smile unsettled me; it was too broad, too satisfied. It seemed tainted by something feral. It made me uncomfortable. It made me very, very afraid, but I didn’t know why.

END