“WE WERE TOGETHER”

“four flowers” by Kirk Stansbury.

Cambria was exceptionally quiet. The kind of quiet that feels safe, where nature moves with a rhythm that says: “Today will go on unhindered and unmemorable, just like yesterday.” We were still a village when it started. The blue, sun-bleached welcome sign off Highway 1 claimed we had 6,174 people. I haven't seen more than eight in the last three years.

My friend Catherine would sit out on the headland and play these movies in her head. She does it almost every day now—sit out on a flat rock overlooking the ocean, close her eyes and think of nothing until she remembered a scene. Today, like every day, it was a rerun from when we were in the seventh grade. Like an omniscient figure flying above her own life, or like when stage actors refer to their character as if it's separate from them, Catherine watched her memories in third person:

“Make sure you take the thing out of the middle and put it back where it grew—” Julia sang out, “—to try and make more.” It had been a few months since we’d seen a plant in such good shape.

Allie was always asking questions about people from school. “Do you think any of the boys would have a little facial fuzz if we saw them, like, right now?”

“No, no. Definitely not,” Catherine started before I was even done speaking, shaking her head like a cartoon as if to say, “Yes, there are stupid questions, and that was one of them.”

“Well Jason, maybe,” Julia interrupted, her eyes fixed on the faded green stem of a half-ripe Santa Barbara daisy.

“There’s no way,” Allie snapped.

“He’s literally Italian … ” Julia noted.

Macy jumped in next, thinking that I was saying what everyone was thinking: “I think they’d all look like shit … ”

“We don’t look like shit?” Thank you, Julia. We threw a telling silence in her direction and my eyes shifted knowingly to the left without moving my head.

“ … But not even David?” All of the girls laughed in that cruel, condescending way that girls do, where the inner corner of their eyebrows curled in as if to ask, “Are you stupid?” I just smiled and looked at the ground, because Allie got her, she did.

“Well, we chose to shower even before they made us stop, so … ” Catherine added.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” We all agreed to a quiet tune of defeat.

Julia was rolling the brownish-green stem of the flower between her index and thumb, then setting each one beside her in a neat line. No one said anything, but you could feel everyone was really grabbing for a new topic. Anything at all could be circled back into talking about what had happened, so a lot of grocery store checkout line chit-chat was ruined. Julia started tying a simple knot around the base of where the petals met the stem.

“Did you guys hear that you’re not supposed to swallow seawater anymore?” Macy noted with sincerity.

“Well, you were never supposed to do that … ” Allie said back, because she knew everything when she was twelve. A chain of seven daisies was sitting lightly on Julia’s lap before we managed to say something upsetting or someone had to go home again.

“Who wants this one?” To break the tension, she held it up in the air the way that a little kid holds up a worm up they picked up off a rainy sidewalk.

Ocean spray kissed the skin of Catherine’s knee, launching her back into her real life with a kick-start. She jolted open her eyes for the first time in 40 minutes, realizing she had been out longer than she told the girls she would be. This was something she did a lot. Watching memory movies and also being late. Catherine would think of a time when she was happier than right now, focusing on the sounds of the water. She’d replay the couple of minutes that she could remember from back when things were good. Even though they were getting worse then, the past is still better than right now.

It had been four years now since the Hyperdrought moved from being something that conspiracy theorists talked about online to something that had even the Joneses lining up outside of the Costco on a Wednesday for gallons of filtered water. Everybody we knew had left town, or worse. The world was made up of strangers now. All alien. Except for our little group.

Julia lost her parents first. Her mom became really tired and lethargic, and her skin looked grey the last time I saw her. Anyone who was even a little weak was a goner in the first year. Macy came to my door when it was just my sister and I. We found Catherine alone at the beach one day, and we invited her to move in with us. Macy was in my room with me, Catherine pulled a mattress into the home office. Julia moved into my sister's room when she wasn’t using it anymore. By summer it was just the four of us. The same clique I’d had since I was nine years old, and we were playing house until the day that the foundation gave out. I couldn’t stand the sound of the termites eating at the wood anymore, that sound like sugar shifting in a ceramic jar, that disgusting soft scratching against the space underneath your bed and the floor when you’re just trying to sleep and with everything else going wrong of course they're under your bed too, I couldn’t take it, not for one solitary second longer. Neither could they. So sometime when it was dark we grabbed our blankets and our raggedy pillows and we walked, further and further into town.

We settled into our old middle school because we didn’t recognize any other buildings. It was strong, with three and a half brick walls still up and lots of space. We had just barely graduated when things started to get really crazy, but I wasn’t that upset about not making it to freshman year. Everyone told me how much high school sucks.

I see only a few people now, in my dreams. Most of them I recognize, but their faces start to kind of take on the shapes of each other when you don’t see them that often. I have an image of my brother still, in my head, but it’s kind of like a watercolor. I can’t really make out any definitive traits, just an outline. Enough for me to get the idea. We realized today that we haven't seen anyone besides each other in almost three months. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, because I don’t know what kind of people are still out there. I wonder if there’s another group like us. I wonder if my dog broke into a Ralph's. Maybe he will smell me and know how to get home.

We’re all criminals now, if that word even matters anymore. We started smashing the windows off of old stores and abandoned restaurants, just looking through the pantries for something substantial to eat. We skip the ones whose doors are left open. We figured someone’s probably already taken whatever’s worth having in there. And there’s no way for us to know if they ever left. Not worth it. Not for a 15-year-old girl.

We have one bike between the four of us that someone left behind in front of the school. It was the only one with all of its tires still on by the time we moved in. There was one room in the back of the gymnasium that Catherine remembered the password to from volunteering, so we cleared out all of the equipment we didn’t need and brought towels we stole from a beach souvenir shop and made a big bed. It worked fine.

We only go looking at sunset. Too hot otherwise. It’s just Julia and I today. We bring these sling-bags we made out of tying fabric in knots and bring these old steel water bottles we found in the gym, but most days both of those things come back empty. We can usually find at least one old shop with something still in the back. We would leave the school and head east, away from the water and into whatever town we hadn’t looked through in a while. Julia and I had been doing this job at least once a week, more if our last haul was light. I couldn’t tell if there was less to find or if we just weren’t looking hard enough. It made me want to get up, get out more, look in that same place again, just in case. In the beginning, Me and Julia would get really excited about going out looking, sometimes we’d find canned soups in basement cold cellars and fancy coats in old lady closets. Macy would tell us that we can’t keep risking our lives “just for stuff.” I thought my life was most at risk right there, in our three-quarters of a gymnasium, when I’d try and fall asleep. Because when I couldn’t go looking, I’d crouch over with my eyes closed and the voice that narrates my thoughts would keep asking: “What’s the point? What’s the point? What is it?”

Most of the street signs were entirely worn pale. I had nearly forgotten what color meant “STOP.” Julia led me towards an old Main Street in some suburb an hour inland. A few of the shop windows were still in one piece. We passed by rows and rows of haunted houses, long abandoned and collapsed into sad wood piles. Sometimes people would leave things in the bushes around their house. In case anyone comes back, I suppose. I liked to do a circle around houses that seemed more recently abandoned. I rounded the corner on a bungalow and saw a backyard, still partially shaded from a half-up roof, with cactus bushes at the base of a half-melted playground slide.

Julia called out from the sidewalk, “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing … ” I answered too quick—

“I just thought I saw something.” I knew that I saw something.

“What is it?” She asked unconcerned, without looking up.

“There’s nothing there, I just thought that I saw it.”

“Well, what did you think that you saw?” Julia had a way of making a question sound just like an accusation.

“It looked like there was maybe something over here … I thought I saw a cactus, but it’s just a lampshade someone threw out.”

“A lamp?” I could tell she thought I was lying. Would that be so strange? Under the circumstances?

“Like a piece of a lampshade, someone threw it out.” People default to throwing trash anywhere when there’s no one telling you not to.

“Did you touch it?” I hated when she got all strict-motherish.

“No … ?” I upticked my voice to hide my desire to start using fight words prematurely.

“Okay … ” A pause hung in the air, just for Julia to fill it again—

“Don’t touch stuff.” I already know that. I’ve been here as long as you have.

“I know?!” I snapped back real smart-alecky.

“We don’t know if we’ll get sick … ” Julia herself again with the heavy responsibility of stating the obvious.

“I didn’t touch it!” I barked, in a tone equally condescending.

“Okay!” She conceded, as though she had never even prodded at all.

I moved into some dried-up bushes behind a few other bungalows. I had found a dusty cooler once, it had three cans of Diet Coke inside it. I’d look in all of the weird spots no one else saw, like a dog who waits under the legs of the dinner table. I hadn’t been fed in days. Someone might drop a treat.

Julia strayed further behind me as I made my way down the avenue. She figure-eighted through the back and front lawns of crumbled plaster homes like she had never learned what manners were. Walking right past the house with the sad crumpled playground and onto the next, beachcombing backyards for an old bike or an open patio door. We’d try not to break the windows on houses. But if the door was already cracked, we’d take a look around. Julia crept steadily by the store display windows and scanned around inside, like a sheriff with a flashlight and a heavy suspicion does in those old crime shows that all follow the same template.

I remember the first time Julia hurled a rock through a window. It was just last year. Me and the girls watched as she smashed the back patio sliding door to this guy’s house we all went to school with. Hayden Lewis, yeah, we used to run through the sprinklers in his backyard. Julia cut that window off at the kneecaps and entered with the swagger of a heroine dressed all in black leather. In our shock, we asked what exactly she was looking for: “Anything,” Julia said, all the wiser than us— “Pretty much anything we find, we can make it into something else … ”

An old fishing gear spot had a few bags of two-dollar potato chips, hooks and thread leftover in inventory. I thought we could use it to sew up the mattress if we wore another hole into its side. Everything was useful, as long as it didn’t have something living in it. I took a couple sips from my water bottle. It tasted like soil. But I gave up being picky a long time ago. It's something I think about more often now—how swiftly people who find themselves sufficiently desperate will discard their decorum. Someone who’s been starving for 30 nights does not ask about the ingredients of bread found on the floor. They do not pontificate about the spores on its underside. They devour it, ferociously. Focused only on the fact that, finally, they get to eat.

We threw the hooks and the stale chips into our makeshift bag and headed back towards the school. We were halfway home when Julia asked me, “Could I have some of that?” with a lazy point over to the dented steel water bottle I carried everywhere.

“I finished it … sorry … ” I feigned an apology. 

“There’s not even a little left?” She could always tell when I was lying.

“No, sorry, I had a bunch when you were checking around the houses.” She scoffed at me in response like she knew.

So we walked. We walked five miles back in the torrid sun and my throat felt sticky from breathing the mean air in. And I didn’t drink a single drop because I needed to keep the bottle closed. It was holding the flowers. The ones I told Julia that I didn’t see behind those cactus bushes.

I wasn’t going to tell her, of course. I had done this trick before; taken something I’d really liked and hid it in my back pocket or a bag I’d found. I tried to bring this cool pink American flag that I found in the back of a general store home, to decorate our room at the school. “You decorate homes … ” Julia said to me before ripping it down. “This is just a hotel.” My flag was cut eight ways into dishrags.

By the time we got back to the school, a little past 9 p.m., Catherine was gone. I found her out in the middle of two brown bushes, close enough to hear the ocean trilling against the sand.

“What are you watching tonight?” I asked delicately.

“My mom’s birthday … ” she replied in dead affect. Most diabetics went first. Catherine was 13 when it happened.

I walked away. She didn’t need me to say, “I’m sorry,” and offer to rub her back. She needed her mom. So I let her see her.

Julia went to bed without saying goodnight, or anything else. She was out by 9:30, or looked it, at least. Catherine went to bed teary-eyed, but didn’t tell me so. I could hear her sharp breaths as I walked around the bed, towards the wall that opened to the outside. I walked over slowly and peered over the fallen stone wall. Macy was sitting there, her back against the brick, wrapped up like a bat in a dust-grey blanket. Her shoulders were rolled forward, vibrating like a hummingbird against the concrete. I hadn’t seen her without chills in three days. She had less sweat on her forehead than yesterday, so I knew it was close. She started throwing up a week ago, only after normal meals at first. By Monday she couldn’t keep water down for more than half an hour. Tomorrow will be Sunday. 

Macy told me she was just really tired, over and over. She told me she hadn’t slept yet, and I agreed like I didn’t already hear yesterday and the day before. I took her right hand softly into my left and reached over her to grab the makeshift pillow she had made from a ratty old sweater and gymnastics mat fuzz.

“Let’s just sleep out here tonight.” I breathed, with a smile that hid my trepidation. As I was tucking her in, I tried not to think about keeping the water bottle next to me right-side up. She laid down, keeping her eyes open, and keeping them on me. She had been alone a lot this last week. We went looking at pharmacies and general stores for something to make her swallow, but places like that got cleared out even before the grocery stores. I felt especially responsible for her at that moment. For her comfort. Macy always felt safer when I was close by. She never told me that, I just knew.

“I wanna show you something that I found today,” I sang out.

A labored “What is it?” escaped from her split lips.

“Look … ” I pulled seven pink daisies out of the water bottle. Some were mangled on one side. A few petals had detached from the middle. They floated in the circle of water still at the bottom of the bottle. They were worn, but they had color. I thought she might like that. Macy gasped as I took the second, then the third, then the fifth one out, slowly placing them in a line on my right thigh.

“They’re so nice, oh my god ...” her voice took on a color more vivid than it had in weeks.

“I know!”—I shared in this moment of warmth with her— “ ... and there were only like ten there!”

I whispered to her closely: “I hadn’t seen them in so long,” my impulse to speak gently combined with a giddiness that responded to her upturned eyes.

There was no one around and the wind was whipping, ever louder and louder throughout the night. I kept whispering. Catherine and Julia were fast asleep, but I wanted that moment to just be for us. She smiled with her mouth closed and watched me, silently, as I picked each flower up by the wide spot underneath its stem. One by one, I wrapped them around each other lightly until they made a straight line. I liked feeling her eyes on me as I fashioned the chain into a crooked circle with one overhand knot. I held the flower crown in my hands and looked back up at Macy with an expectant half-smile. Her eyes lay steady on what I had created to celebrate her. I smiled, big and beaming, and placed the halo on her head, as if I was crowning her the adorned princess of this place. I heard Macy laughed for the first time in two weeks before lying down again. I watched as she settled her arms under the tattered blanket, folded inwards like an animal. I made sure Macy had chosen her place before I met her there. She seemed to sink her head heavier into the pillow this time. I understood.

I could hear someone making powder out of the dirt ground behind me. Julia had a specific shuffle; she never took her toe fully off of the ground when she walked. I couldn’t even twist my neck enough to turn my head. I was profoundly tired. Not just in body. In a way that’s harder to really grab ahold of. Tired in the chest. Tired in the spirit. Tired of getting back up after being hamstrung, just to get knocked down again, breathing in the filth of the dirt floor. I hungered for a kind of comfort I hadn’t tasted in three years. Still starving, I laid flat and took Macy’s hand in mine. We fell asleep face to face, cuddled into each other like nesting chicks. I felt her chest rise and fall. I tried to ignore how shallow her breaths felt against the inside of my forearm.

Do you know how it feels when something really bad happens, something so bad that you think that you’ll never be able to get to sleep again? Something that hurts you so badly in the moment that the space between your belly button and your heart feels like someone bruised it from the inside? That is how I felt when I woke up in the middle of the night, still holding onto Macy’s left hand. Not right away though, not for a minute. I forgot in my disorientation where I was, exactly. I opened my eyes. I saw I had moved a little, up towards the top of her head. I saw the pink petal halo and I remembered, immediately, all at once. I looked down at Macy’s eyes, and they were relaxed, hanging loosely closed. But her mouth hung open in a way that told me something that I already knew. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve seen it in real life. Scary movies don’t show it right. The jaw is wrenched open in a way that looks like someone has hooked their four fingers into the body’s mouth and pulled down. Hard.

It felt rotten to cover her face with such an ugly blanket. It made it seem official in a way that I wasn’t sure I was ready to commit to. But Macy was my friend. She was a great friend. So I covered her. Because that’s what you do, you do what’s right for the other even if it makes you feel bad, even if you feel guilty about it at the moment, even if you have to say sorry even though she won’t hear you and it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. She was a really, really good friend to me.

I came back inside and slipped into the far side of the bed. Julia was facing the wall, away from me and away from Catherine. I moved Cathy’s hand delicately off of my third of the mattress and tucked myself in, trying not to pull up the covers too quickly. I closed my eyes and imagined again what Macy’s smile looked like. I wanted to fall asleep remembering her. My subconscious could lock every detail deep in if I fell asleep remembering her. There were so few ways to keep anything nowadays— I wanted to keep this memory of her, how she looked in a daisy crown, how her gums showed too much pink when she smiled, how her voice was strong and boomeranged off the three walls of our room when she made herself laugh. Just as I was about to nod off, I felt the blanket shift. Julia crept out of the covers and moved without a word. She slipped into the space between Catherine and I. She swung her left arm around me like she was my mother, and held me tightly in a hug that felt like a swaddle.

“Did it happen?” she whispered. I nodded once and then swung my chin down like an ashamed child. We both wept in a subdued way, a way that told each other that we’d be waiting until the morning to tell Catherine.

I woke up one more time that night. The sun was shining through the cracks in the easternmost wall, right into my eye. I knew that I wasn’t going to sleep anymore. I just laid there, with the kind of headache that you get between your eyebrows from crying. I stared, looking around the room again. Remembering what was right outside. Remembering that I would probably have to be the one to tell Catherine. I was floating in my thought-world when I saw something out of the corner of my eye; it grabbed my focus quickly, it yanked me forcefully by the chin. Julia’s jean cutoffs were on the floor, crumpled up like she pulled them down and just left them there. Among the denim accordion I saw something I recognized: three tiny, pink petals, in a half-moon rising out of her back pocket.

I thought that I was the only one who hoped anymore, for anything. Who could access a desire for beauty, or fun, or joy. But she had saved one. She had seen a reason in bringing something back that we couldn’t eat or use to block the wind. She, for at least a second, without strategy or motive, had hoped. Just in case.

Me and Julia and sleeping Cathy, we had no reason to be grateful for anything at all. But there I was, seeing this flattened daisy, and I wondered for a moment if the middle of Santa Barbara daisies had always been such a bright yellow. I wondered if I would die next. I wondered if Julia would make me a halo of desert flowers if I did. We were standing at the edge of the universe, with no future and nothing to look forward to. But that night, I laid with the only real friends I’d ever have, and we held each other tighter than we ever did when things were better.

I knew that Julia had been stung once for hoping. I wasn’t mad that she lost it. It just seemed that I might be the only one who thought there might be a day when we could make a good memory again. But I knew when I saw its flattened petals. I knew for the first time since the start of the whole mess that Julia would hold my hand if I ever got too hot.

We’d been alone for so long. Longer than you could imagine, longer than our parents would have ever wanted. But we were warm. We loved each other even when we hated each other, and on that night that Macy finally got to be relieved of it all, we were together.