the night with a friend, she had borrowed the friend’s car and driven to Salvation City, beating Cole and PW by about two hours.
“I didn’t give any warning because I was afraid to,” she told Cole. “How could I be sure they wouldn’t run off with you or send you away somewhere? Once I found out they were fundamentalists, I knew I had to be extra careful. To people like them I’m the enemy. An atheist expatriate Jew—what rights do I have? These fanatics will use religion to justify anything—especially the ones who believe in the imminent rapture. You do understand, don’t you? That’s what these monsters were counting on? The Messiah was supposed to show up before I did.”
Addy told the story of her own bout with the flu. It had struck while she was away from home on a business trip. She had ended up in a hospital in Geneva. Almost the last thing she remembered before getting sick was that Cole’s father had died. “It was one of the last things your mother and I ever talked about. I knew that you were getting sick, too, and that she was going between your bedside and the clinic at the college where she was helping out. But she never said anything about being sick herself.”
When she was well enough, Addy had tried but was unable to reach her sister by any means. “I thought the worst, of course. I knew that the flu had hit its peak then in the Midwest.”
The first official information she was able to obtain about the Vinings in Little Leap was partly wrong. “They told me that all three of you had died.” It had not occurred to her that this might be a mistake. “Everyone said you couldn’t trust anything you were told. There was way too much confusion everywhere, accurate records couldn’t possibly be kept, and lots of mistakes were being made. In your case, things were even more complicated, I guess, because the hospital where you were treated had shut down. But since I hadn’t heard anything from you or from anyone else about you, I didn’t even think to question it. It’s like everything played right into these damn liars’ hands.” (Think of all the things that had to happen in order for you to end up here with us.)
It gave Cole a funny feeling to learn that the hospital that had helped him survive had not itself survived the pandemic. He thought about Dr. Hassan and Nurse Asparagus. What had happened to them?
“As soon as the doctor said I could travel, I got myself back to Berlin. It took quite a while, though, before I could function again. I knew I had a responsibility to take care of your mom’s affairs, but I didn’t know where to begin. By then I knew your house had been looted—the computers and the other valuable stuff were taken first, and over time the place had been pretty much picked clean. Your parents were never the most practical people in the world, and they hadn’t exactly done the best planning. I had a copy of your mom’s will but no power of attorney. I didn’t have access to her accounts, let alone to your father’s. I didn’t have any of her passwords. It was all extremely complicated. I had to hire a lawyer, of course, and he said to begin with, we should try to get hold of the death certificates. He was the one who discovered that you’d actually survived. He told me all the financial business was going to take a long time, and I’d have to be patient. But it turned out there was a database with photographs of missing children, state by state, and Cole Vining of Little Leap, Indiana, was on it.”
When Cole saw the photo himself, he would barely recognize that pinched, mournful-looking child, unmistakably about to start crying. He remembered the day it had been taken, by the kindly chubby lady who’d reminded him of his bear, Tickle, and who’d asked him all those questions about religion.
Addy did not believe PW’s story about the mysteriously missing cardboard box. No one she’d talked to at the orphanage had remembered anything about Cole’s things being lost. “And if you believe that box just disappeared,” she said, “you might as well believe in the rapture.”
She took out a cigarette. “I’m sure this is a smoke-free house, but I don’t give a damn.”
Had she always been a smoker? Cole