Ashfall

Oh, God. Not this again. My face was burning. “We aren’t doing . . . well, we’d like to. We talked about it before we even got out of Iowa. But I don’t want to add a baby to this mess any more than you do. I mean, someday maybe we’ll get married and maybe have kids, but—” I quit talking, shocked to silence by my uncle’s face. He was blushing.

“That’s, um, responsible. I know how I’d have felt about it at your age. I’m not sure I would have made the same— the right—choice. Here.” He pressed something into my hand. I looked down: two foil-wrapped squares. Condoms.

“You shouldn’t feel pressure to use them,” he said. “Abstinence is perfectly fine, preferable actually, as young as you are. But if you should . . . you know, I wanted you to have—“

“Thanks.”

“I can only spare two.”

“Okay.”

“And if you decide not to use them, I’d take them back.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t trying to be terse. I just had absolutely no idea what to say. Uncle Paul apparently didn’t know what to say, either, because he clapped me on my shoulder and fled the room.

I found Darla in the guest room, helping Rebecca move her stuff.

“Why are you blushing?” Darla asked me.

“Well I, um . . .” I looked at my sister.

“Mind giving us a minute?” Darla said.

“Sure.” Rebecca left without a peep of protest. Boy, had she changed.

I pulled the condoms out of my pocket and opened my hand to show them to Darla.

“You got . . .? Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” she said.

“Yeah, me neither.”

“Your uncle gave them to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Only two?”

“He said it was all he could spare.”

“Do you think they’re reusable?”

“Gross!” I said. Darla cocked an eye at me. I thought about it a moment then added, “I’ll ask.”

Darla smiled. She stepped to the guest room door, closed it, and twisted the handle to lock it. Then she took my hand and led me to the bed.

* * *

So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the invisible neon sign proclaiming “virgin” had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obsessing about it, so it seemed like something should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still been at Cedar Falls High surrounded by the gossip and braggadocio of teenage boys.

But on my uncle’s farm, nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. The next day, like every day, we dug corn, chopped wood, and carried water. And it didn’t even really change much between me and Darla, either. Yes, making love was fun, but it wasn’t really any more fun than anything we’d already been doing together. Just different.

I was glad nobody had noticed. I might have been offended if my uncle had punched my shoulder and said something inane like, “So you’re a man now.” Besides being unspeakably embarrassing, that would have missed the true date of my passage into adulthood by a month or more.

One thing did change. After Darla and I moved into the guest room, I slept better. It was colder than the living room, but I didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night anymore to move. She was never more than an arm’s length away.

Chapter 58

A few weeks later, another winter storm blew through. The wind ripped a series of huge holes in one of the greenhouses. Uncle Paul and Max worked on patching the plastic skin of the damaged greenhouse. From the outside, they leaned an aluminum extension ladder against one of the rafters. Paul stood at the top of the ladder, trying to tape the tears from above, while Max steadied the ladder’s base.

Most of the kale had frozen at least partially. Rebecca, Darla, and I spent the morning inside the greenhouse plucking mushy leaves off the plants. We hoped they’d survive if we excised the frozen parts.

“What a waste,” Rebecca said, plucking off another ruined leaf and dropping it into a bucket.

“At least the goats will eat well today,” Darla said.

“Yeah, but what are we going to eat?” Rebecca’s face reddened, and her hands started to tremble. “What if the storms only get worse? We could lose all the greenhouses at once. And even if the storms don’t wreck the greenhouses, it’s only getting colder. Will the greenhouses keep working? What if there’s no spring next year? What if—”

“Rebecca.” I grabbed her shoulders and gripped them gently. “Don’t think like that. We’ll make it.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. I keep thinking Mom and Dad are going to come back. I look down the driveway all the time, expecting to see them walking up, but they never come. Maybe they’ll never return. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe we’ll die, too. Starve to death or freeze in this never-ending winter.” Tears rolled from her eyes.

I pulled my sister into a hug. “We won’t starve to death. Or freeze. And if Mom and Dad haven’t shown up by spring, I’ll go find them. I promise.”

Rebecca was sobbing now. Darla stepped up beside her and hugged us both.

Uncle Paul stopped his work and looked down at us through the clear plastic greenhouse roof. “You guys okay?” he shouted.

“Yeah, we’re fine,” I yelled back.

He nodded and returned to his work, stretching out to patch another hole. I heard him yell and glanced back up just in time to see his left foot slip, falling between the rungs of the ladder alongside the rafter. He overcorrected and fell, landing on the greenhouse roof with a whump and the pop of breaking plastic. The ladder twisted as he fell, violently wrenching free of Max’s hands and hitting him in the side hard enough to knock him to the ground. Uncle Paul’s left leg was trapped between the ladder and the rafter. I heard a nauseating crunch, like a bunch of celery stalks breaking at once, as Paul’s leg snapped just below the knee. He was left dangling into the greenhouse between two rafters, held upside down by his broken leg.

Paul moaned, a sound that started low and pained but quickly grew into something approaching a scream. I shoved away from Rebecca and ran to him. Darla stood still for a second, taking in the ladder that had trapped Paul’s leg and Max in the snow outside the greenhouse. Then she ran toward the greenhouse door.

The greenhouse roof was low enough that I could reach Paul. I grabbed his shoulders and tried to lift him to relieve the pressure on his snapped leg. It protruded from between the rafter and ladder at a sickening angle, as if he’d grown an extra knee in his shin, turned ninety degrees in the wrong direction. I couldn’t see any blood on his jeans, so perhaps the bone hadn’t come through his skin.

Darla reached Max just outside the greenhouse. He had jumped up and was wrestling with the ladder. Darla grabbed the ladder and helped, trying to force it sideways off the rafter to free Paul’s leg.

Uncle Paul screamed as the ladder shifted. Sweat rolled off his face and splashed against my cheek below him. Darla and Max heaved on the ladder again, and Paul’s leg popped free. He fell, and I tried to catch him. Rebecca was there, too, reaching up to grab him, but he fell through our arms and landed with a thud amid the kale.

I knelt by his head. He was sweating, panting, and shivering—all at the same time. “I think he’s in shock!” I yelled. “Get a bunch of blankets. And two poles we can use to make a stretcher.” Darla and Max ran toward the house. I noticed Max was holding his left side where the ladder had slammed into him. Rebecca looked at me, and I said, “I’ll stay with him. Go get Aunt Caroline.” She nodded and ran for the greenhouse door.

“Hang in there,” I told Uncle Paul. “Help is coming.” He moaned, and I squeezed his hand.

Less than a minute passed before Darla, Max, and Rebecca ran back into the greenhouse with Aunt Caroline and A