The Ocean in the Fire Read online

  “Can I invite all the girls in my class?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way. We don’t want anyone to feel left out.”

  “Yeah that’s the worst.”

  “We can have it in the park downtown. Nothing better than a summer birthday party outside.” Kate kissed Harper on the forehead. “Now we will also make sure to have enough cake and punch for the mothers too. They’ll want to be here also since their kids are so young.”

  Harper sighed. “Awww, do we have to? Moms always make things less fun.”

  Kate gave her a playful shove. “Oh really?”

  “You know what I mean, Mom.”

  “Well would picking out which flavor cupcakes you and Poe get make you feel better?”

  Harper clapped her hands together excitedly. “Yes! I’ll go get her.”

  When Harper left, Connor revealed himself. “Why did you let her do that?”

  “Come on, Connor…the girls should be able to have a birthday party. I want them to experience things, you know?”

  “They do experience things. They’re with other children all day at school. Isn’t that enough?” He felt the familiar fluttering in his stomach, and a tingling sensation spread across his limbs.

  “I want them to experience normal things. Normal kid things, like having a birthday party. I want them to build forts with their friends. I want them to go to sleepovers.”

  “You would let them go overnight somewhere? We hardly know any of the other parents in this town.”

  As soon as he said it, Connor realized his mistake. He had given Kate an opening, and of course, she took it. “Well then maybe it’s time. We can get to know them at the party.”

  After Harper came back downstairs, Poe trailing behind her, Connor watched his girls hovering over the cookbook with wide smiles on their faces. He wished he didn’t have a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he did. And every time he got one of those pangs deep in his gut, he knew something was about to go terribly wrong.

  ***

  Connor watched every guest at the party from his post at the grill they had brought for hotdogs and hamburgers. He peered over the top of it but kept his head down so as to not invite anyone to initiate a conversation. Experience had taught him that: eye contact breeds interaction. He knew he had to be careful, so as he did a visual sweep of the party, he kept his eyes aimed at neck level of all their guests—close enough to the eyes to not be noticed, but far enough away to not initiate contact.

  All the mothers were whispering with each other as their daughters ran through the grass in their bare feet. None of the women were recognizable to him. He and his family kept to themselves, usually only going places that were necessary, like the post office or—at least to them—the bookstore, and for the children, school. He would also go to the grocery store, but he didn’t make a habit of small talk with any of the townsfolk. So he was surprised when he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Connor?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hello. It’s Dr. Matthews.”

  Dr. Drew Matthews had a friendly face, but Connor knew not to be fooled by friendly faces. “Oh, hello. How are you?” He attempted conversation as a formality. Dr. Matthews was pleasant enough, but of course, he had to be.

  “I’m great. My wife Vera and I just thought it would be a nice day to take a stroll in the park, and I saw you over here. You haven’t been in in quite a while. Everything going okay?”

  Connor forced a smile. “Oh yes. You’re right; we have been busy. I’ll get Kate to give you a call and set up physicals for all of us next week.”

  “Excellent. Are you enjoying your summer?”

  He had thought agreeing to the physical would be the end of the conversation, but he was mistaken. “Yes absolutely.” His mind went blank, and the awkward silence that followed made him feel like he was suffocating. Just as he thought he was about to spit out any sentence at all just to make the quiet stop, Connor saw a woman around Kate’s age with hair in perfect ringlets waving and smiling at the doctor. “Looks like you’re being beckoned.”

  Drew smiled. “Yes, it looks like I am.” He gave a wave as he walked toward his wife. “I’ll see you next week. We just got a fresh bin of stickers for the kids. Have a good day!”

  As Dr. Matthews headed back toward Vera, Connor noticed several people at the park wave at him. He returned the gestures with smiles and pleasantries, and it seemed to take him more than a few minutes to get back to his wife. The rest of the town seemed to revere the doctor. Connor knew from moving around when he was young that though doctors seemed to be held in high praise everywhere, it was even more so in their small town. There seemed to be nothing like the ability to save a life to give you prestige among the mob. He felt an ember from the grill leap onto his forearm, and he fought the urge to curse.

  Maybe he should have been a doctor, he thought. His father had always said he could be anything he wanted to be, and after he saw all his report cards from school, he had said it with a passionate enthusiasm. Connor had barely hit puberty when his father died, but that was plenty of time for him to confidently tell Connor that everything he wanted out of life was his for the taking.

  Too bad Connor never believed it himself. He never quite knew what he wanted, except that he wanted to belong. So when on the first day of elementary school, a couple of the bigger kids asked, “Are you rich?” he didn’t know what to say. Saying yes could, and would, get him ostracized forever, but saying no would be an easily-exposable lie. So instead of saying anything, he said nothing at all.

  His mother had written a self-help book that had taught America how to reach deep within themselves to find their inner peace, something that a million books had done before hers, but it gave her enough money to soak up the guilt she may or may not have felt when she walked out on his father. She paid them a huge stipend every month, and probably thought that was enough to heal the pain in his father’s heart that he used nature walks and sweat lodges to try and mend. Sometimes, she would even send Connor a postcard from her travels, a picture of the Las Vegas strip signed Take care, the same thing a classmate signs in the yearbook of someone who they can barely remember the name of. Every postcard made going back to the social world just a little more complicated, yet made him ache for it just a little bit more. The longer he lived in solitude, the harder it became to come back, like when you forget the name of an acquaintance, and the time passes where it would have been acceptable to ask them. Eventually you just pray someone addresses the person in front of you so you can get that all-important answer to the question you can no longer ask.

  As he got older, he didn’t think about it much anymore, until he had to be around a group of people, and the same glistening sweat spontaneously covered his body—the same way it had on the first day of elementary school so many years before.

  After the doctor left, Connor continued to watch the party guests as little pods of people formed, clustering together in conversational groups. He could swear a couple of the pods were looking at him, but he couldn’t be sure. The whole ordeal made him anxious. The little pink banners and ribbons and fluffy cupcakes did nothing to make him feel less on edge.

  They lived up the mountain so he could avoid situations like the one he found himself in at that very moment. He let the children go to school instead of being homeschooled because Kate insisted, and everything seemed to have worked out until that point. Harper and Gabriel seemed to enjoy it, and even Poe did on occasion. But Connor always worried that if other people found out how they lived, they wouldn’t understand. They were all-too-happy to just keep existing, going from one PTA meeting to the next, washing their cars on Sunday afternoons and baking cookies, and ignoring the very real danger that showed itself time and time again. Every night on the news there was some disease, mass shooting, or other phantom that could come knocking on their door at any time. He wondered if it was ignorance or stupidity that made the vast majority of people assume they could never be a victim: i
t was other people that got torn apart by bullets. It was other people who went on vacation somewhere and came back with a bacterium that ate their flesh. The life of a prepper shone a beacon on the reality of their naiveté, and no one likes to be made a fool of. If they knew, he and his family could no longer stay pleasantly hidden in the background. The truth did not always set you free…sometimes it made the earth cave in at your feet. Just like before, his family would only know the magnitude of their mistakes when it was too late to correct them.

  ***

  During rainstorms, he saw him. When he saw his own hands submerged in a sink of soapy water, he saw him. And even on that day in the park, staring into the grill flames, he saw him.

  His father said they could wait out the storm. Their small house was across the street from an office building that had been there for two hundred years… “a strong one,” he had said.

  “But everyone else is leaving, Dad,” a young Connor had pleaded. “We need to leave too. Please. I’m scared.”

  “Don’t worry, Son. Worst-case scenario, the government will send the Coast Guard in and rescue us. We’ve got a couple backpacks full of food and water. We’ll be fine.” His father smiled as he stroked his beard, something he always did when he was absolutely sure of himself. Connor made it a point not to pick up that habit.

  The first night in the office building, Connor clung to his father, listening to the walls bend and shake against the wind. A part of him thought he was too old to need his father’s reassurance, and another part of him didn’t care and squeezed him tighter. “It’s going to collapse,” he said.

  “It’ll hold. Trust me, Son.” His father wrapped his arms around him, and he felt his beard tickle the top of his forehead. He felt he was being cradled like a baby, but he let it happen anyway, chasing the adolescent boy in his head away and giving in to the scared child who wanted to be told it would be over soon. “Let’s sing that song you like. The one about the river and the tent.” Connor obeyed, and they sang, their voices probably echoing through the empty halls, but the storm whipped their notes right out of the air.

  He’d never sung that song since.

  When the helicopters finally came, Connor’s heart raced as the ladder fell from the sky. “I hate heights, Dad. You go first,” he said.

  His father nodded, and was about to take the first rung, when one of the Coast Guard members spoke. “We’re only taking women and children, sir. You’re going to have to wait for the second helicopter.”

  Connor’s heart raced. “No! Dad they can’t! I’m not leaving you.”

  “It’s okay, Connor. I’ll be right behind you. Just get on the helicopter with the man, and I’ll be there soon. And look…” he pointed up into the helicopter where there were already several faces staring back at them. “There’s a bunch of people up there already. A bunch of new friends, okay?”

  His father did an admirable job of pretending the situation was going to turn out okay, but when he reached out and hugged his son, Connor felt the panic in his embrace. He clung to his father with all his strength, but the rescue worker was able to pull him free. As the worker pushed him up the ladder, he looked down to see his father smiling and waving. “Everything is going to be fine, you’ll see.”

  That was the last time Connor ever saw him. Months later, he saw a photo of the devastation the storm left behind it. In that photo was the office building they had cowered in. The roof had imploded on itself, and all that was left were four walls with a hole in the center. If Connor had to guess, his father was buried under that pile, surrounded by water and debris and the lies that he told himself and his son.

  Anyone who had been through what he had would have understood why Connor’s family lived the way they did. He couldn’t be sure how long he waited before his mother was able to pick him up from the place where displaced people were housed after the storm. He spent the time curled up on a cot, trying not to be noticed by anyone. A couple times, grown men came up to him and asked him to come over to stay with them, promising protection, but he could tell in their faces that protection was the last thing they had planned for him.

  His mother tried, in her own way. She cared for him for about six months before he always saw her looking over her shoulder wherever they went. It wasn’t long after that when she told him she was sending him off to a very prestigious, very expensive boarding school. “You’ll love it there,” she had told him. “They have basketball, and tennis, and a bunch of the other sports you like so much.”

  He’d never played a sport in his life.

  As his mother drove away from the front steps of the boarding school, he vowed that when he had a family, he would never have to depend on anyone else to protect them. When she died, she had left him all her money, which he had been surprised she hadn’t burned through. Maybe she thought it would make up for leaving him on the front steps that day. If he had believed in an afterlife, he would have shouted at her about how wrong she was.

  When he had a family, they would rely on themselves alone, making their own means of food, shelter, and anything else they needed to survive, and to Hell with anyone who thought that was strange. To Connor, anyone who didn’t do whatever they needed to do to care for the people they loved were the strange ones.

  There would never be any reason, emotional or otherwise, for him to leave his own children on the front steps to fend for themselves. His children would always know that even when the world stopped spinning, they would be fed, and they would be loved.

  ***

  A week after the party, he went to the hardware store to pick up some parts for their vegetable gardens. A tiny speck of a bird, fast with a little sharp beak, had been picking at them through a hole in the netting that normally protected them, and he knew if he didn’t get it covered soon, the cucumber harvest would be lost, and there would be none to can for the winter. As he walked down the lane, he noticed each person he passed seemed to be staring at him for just a second too long. He passed the coffee shop, and glanced back subtly enough that he could see several people follow him with their eyes as he moved past the window. Even the people in the bookshop that he had frequented for years sneakily glanced up from their books to look at him. The one place in town where he felt safe didn’t feel that way any longer.

  Something had changed.

  He had planned on puttering around the hardware store for a while. Since it was a Sunday during church hours, he knew it would be virtually empty. It was the only time during the week when he would make a point to go there, a time where he knew he wouldn’t be bothered. He enjoyed going aisle by aisle and seeing which new gadget caught his eye. All the shiny metal tools lining the shelves made him think of wandering Santa’s workshop at the North Pole: new toys ripe for the picking. The idea always gave him a sense of giddy anticipation, sometimes settling over him as early as the night before his trip out. But instead, he grabbed exactly what he needed, and paid with cash, crisp new one dollar bills to be exact. “How’s it going?” he asked the pimple-faced cashier who he had seen dozens of times before. Usually, the question would be followed by a quick running of his fingers through his hair, and some comments about his wife never cleaning up the house, or his baby daughter keeping him up at all hours.

  But that’s not what happened. Instead, Connor got a short, quick, ‘Fine’ in response. He even tried to follow the question up with one more, which he thought for sure would leave the cashier unable to give him a one-word answer. “I heard the shop has been open now for ten years. That’s wonderful. Charlie must be excited. What do you think he will do to celebrate?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.” Three additional words, Connor thought.

  He decided to walk back to the bookstore and go inside. If there was anywhere in town that would make him feel comfortable, it was there. He would just ignore the customers inside and go sit in the big brown leather chair at the back of the store like he usually did anyway. He could feel safe there again; he would just have to wor
k at it a little harder. But on the way in, a woman was coming out, and in his overzealous desire to get inside, he bumped into her. He glanced quickly at her, muttered an apology and thought that would settle it, until he felt the hard snap of her palm against his cheek. “Stay away from me, you pervert! We’ve heard all about you and your people up there. You can’t just do whatever you want. Not here!”

  “What are you talking about, lady? It was an accident.”

  “You touched my breast! That was no accident.”

  Connor took a couple deep breaths and tried to remain calm. “If I did, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

  As he was apologizing for a second time, a man with over-gelled hair and a tattered leather jacket joined the woman, standing at her side like a guard dog. As the man looked around at the other patrons, he said, “He just said he was sorry. He did do it.” He pushed Connor in the chest. “Get away from my sister, asshole.”

  Of course, Connor pushed him back. But before things could escalate, one of the employees came out of the back room and stepped between them. “You both need to leave now. Figure this out on your own time.” He ushered Connor and the other man out the door and closed it loudly behind them.

  Connor glared at the man and his sister, and assumed the fight would continue. But instead, the man said loudly, “Come on, Holly. Let’s get away from this guy. Obviously he’s not right in the head.”

  Somehow, even after the incident, Connor thought since they had walked away without throwing punches, that would be the end of it. He would be able to go back inside the bookstore and his life would continue on as normal.

  He was sorely mistaken.

  When he walked back through the door, after the little bell on the doorknob stopped shaking, he heard a voice from behind the counter. “I’m sorry, you can’t shop here anymore.” The clerk was staring at him with her arms folded. Her blonde hair hung in her face, and Connor recognized her by her distinctive chomping on her gum. If he remembered correctly, her parents owned the store.