“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?” Ashley asked.
“That popping sound.”
Pop! Pop! Pop! There it was again. Like popcorn popping beneath our feet. Brando jumped out of my arms and started howling like a wolf.
I looked at Ashley. Her eyes bulged with terror. Because she’d heard that sound the first time she came here and knew what it was.
CHAPTER 63
* * *
WINNIE
I was not supposed to know about the fallout shelter.
I discovered it by accident. I was little, about eight or nine, when my parents got an overnight babysitter to go on a “special outing.” I didn’t understand that special outings for parents with young kids were about sex. Even as an adult I have trouble believing my parents actually “did it,” even though I know full well how I came to be.
My parents bid us good night, and I went up to my room to play in my pillow fort. I had built it up against the window because I could use the windowsill as a platform for my roof. I was adjusting the pile of books holding my blanket-roof in place when I saw Dad’s car roll out of the driveway. I remember seeing his brake lights blinking on and off as the car disappeared into the darkness as they always did when he navigated that narrow drive in the dark. I watched him go, then went to get more books （the blanket was slipping!）。 As I spread the Black Stallion series across my windowsill, something weird happened. My parents came back. Not in the car, but on foot. Did something happen to their car?
At first I didn’t know the tiny slivers of light bouncing up the driveway were flashlights. But then they passed right under my window, and I saw my mom’s laughing face in a beam of light reflecting off the ground. I could tell from the way they huddled together that this mission was supposed to be a secret, so I proudly did my part in keeping it. Well, for a few days, at least.
My brother and I were playing Egyptian war in my pillow fort when I finally told Charlie how I’d seen Mom and Dad sneak into the toolshed and then sat in the library for hours （until the babysitter found me and made me go to bed）， waiting in vain for them to come out.
Being the firstborn and foolhardier child, Charlie was determined to solve the mystery. I tagged along that brisk Sunday morning as he ventured into the shed to discover what magic had lured them there. After pressing on walls and pulling on rakes and spades and shovels, he finally thought to look under the rubber mat. I had just read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so when we saw that door in the floor, I thought we had found the real live passage to Narnia. I was gravely disappointed to discover that the cold concrete staircase led to a boring little apartment, with no toys, candy, or magical creatures inside. We knew from the way Mom and Dad had snuck in that we weren’t supposed to know about their secret hideaway, so we made a pinkie promise never to speak of it again. The whole idea that our house had a bomb shelter gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I was all too happy to forget it existed.
As I followed Charlie down the claustrophobic stairway, just as I’d done nearly two decades earlier, I marveled at how seeing that empty shelf had poked open my memory bank. I flashed to my nine-year-old self, sitting on the pantry counter, thinking we were just like the Jetsons with their space-age TV-phones. Sometimes Charlie and I used our closed-circuit TV system to play astronaut and comms director. “This is Major Tom to ground control,” Charlie would say into his walkie-talkie from RadioShack. And I would find him on one of the cameras and guide his spaceship back to earth: “This is your comms director, come on in.” But those were silly children’s games. The stakes of today’s outing were way higher than any fake earth landing, and I cursed myself that I was embarking on it sober.
As Charlie stepped into the cinder block living room, I paused on the stairs to take it in—the L-shaped couch, the midcentury modern pillar lamps, the shiny silver countertops.
“Mom?” Charlie called out. “Are you here?”
No answer. My heart was a metronome beating presto, loud and fast in the backs of my ears.
“Maybe in the bedroom?” I suggested.
But Charlie was frozen in his tracks. “Why isn’t she answering?”
“I don’t know, maybe because she hates us?” The anticipation was killing me, so I pushed past him and crossed through the living room, past the cold metal bookcase to the bedroom door. Of course it was closed, but I swallowed my trepidation and turned the knob. And immediately regretted it. “Oh God.”
The expression on my dad’s face when he died was peaceful. He’d looked a little pale when I’d gazed upon his motionless body from the doorway, but not grotesque. Except for the tiny swath of tongue that lilted out onto his violet-blue lower lip, he’d looked pretty normal. His head was on the pillow, his eyes were closed, his hands were palms up by his sides. He was, quite appropriately, in what yogis call Savasana, or corpse pose. By all appearances he had died quite peacefully.