“OK.” She looked at the open end of the block, where Cayuga met the cross street. The two SUVs they kept parked nose to nose there had been moved back into place after Scott and Celeste had returned in the pickup. The Witzky brothers were sitting in the beds of the trucks on folding lawn chairs, taking their turns on guard duty. “Let’s move another row of cars out, and maybe the Witzkys can stay out there after dusk for a few hours. Just to make sure.”
“He’s not coming,” Celeste said. “My dad’s not coming here.” She shook her head, but it felt like a gesture that was more to convince herself than anyone else.
At sunset, after Aubrey had made sure Frank and Johnny Witzky were still in their lawn chairs at the end of the cul-de-sac with their twelve-gauges across their laps, she hurried home. She was eager to get to the upstairs bathroom before the sun went off the window.
Opening the door, she was happy to find the room had retained an intense amount of heat from the late-afternoon sunlight. With the window shut and the door closed, it had approached sauna-like temperatures, and as she ran a hand through the water in the tub, she thought it was easily over eighty degrees.
She undressed, feeling a twinge in her right calf, which had slipped on a step to the basement while carrying one of the water jugs earlier. She thought that, if she could find a Ziploc bag later that was near enough to the end of its life cycle, she’d make a gel pack with rubbing alcohol and water and see if it helped. It usually did.
Aubrey stepped into the tub, settled back, and closed her eyes. Downstairs, she could hear Scott noodling on the piano. Sounded like a show tune of some kind, mournful and melodic. She hadn’t heard him practice this one before. It must have been something new he’d picked up from the neighbor over on Third. After years of trying and failing to get him to practice the piano, Scott’s overwhelming boredom had finally won the battle for her. He’d gone door to door around the neighborhood in late June, asking if anyone knew how to play the piano and if they might be interested in teaching him. Mrs. Papadopoulos, nearing eighty and alone, had been happy to oblige.
Aubrey’s breathing became regular as she listened to the music drifting up the open stairwell. She was tired and satisfied. She’d harvested three hundred gallons of water. She’d had satisfying sex with Phil, who in the past few months had revealed himself to be much more substantial than she’d ever thought. She’d been given a sliver of hope by Norman, though she refused to let herself dwell on it. And the neighbors had come together to protect Celeste, who’d shown every sign of not needing protection at all.
The kid had even punched Aubrey’s ex-husband in the throat.
It was, Aubrey thought, a nearly perfect day.
26.
Outside Jericho
Thom sat on the edge of the bed, staring down into the drawer, and wondered if Ann-Sophie expected him to take his glasses too. There were eleven pairs of them, after all; the felt-lined drawer had been custom-built to hold them, and the cases had long since been thrown away. It wasn’t as if he could just bring the nightstand with him, either. It had been molded into the wall in their bedroom. What was he supposed to do, throw a dozen pairs of thousand-dollar eyeglasses into a brown paper bag and take them downstairs? That would be a little ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Then again, the whole situation was ridiculous. Did his things really bother her that much, that she couldn’t bear to lay eyes upon them, even by accident?
Thom had never been thrown out of anything in his life, and, he quickly reminded himself, he wasn’t being thrown out now. No, no, not at all. He’d been politely asked to leave, and, by mutual consent, he and Ann-Sophie had agreed his departure from the big house was for the best. They’d returned to it back in April, after only a week in the subterranean apartment following the “attack” on Sanctuary. Thom’s nightmare scenarios about the risks of the outside world did nothing to persuade his wife and children, and the truth was, he missed the space, light, and creature comforts of the big house above ground anyway. So he had graciously acceded to their request, and they’d all moved back upstairs.
The problem was his wife hadn’t really wanted him to join them. Her behavior deteriorated over the subsequent weeks; she stopped speaking to him or feeling any responsibility to account for her whereabouts, even overnight. By mid May, Thom found himself neatly rotated back to the underground bunker. Alone, this time. Ann-Sophie had insisted it was for a “cooling-off period,” a time for them to give each other some space before coming back together to work on the relationship, but Thom wondered if this hadn’t been her plan all along and she’d simply maneuvered him, in her passive-aggressive way, back into the basement so she could have the house to herself.