Peanut Butter Road

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Mutually, over the weeks, everyone seemed to have agreed that if they simply didn’t discuss it, it would never come. 

But it did. Those clouds and the ticking clock, the hot stars sputtering to life with the gusto of a thousand old Harleys. That day, late January, when our time was finally up. Here it was: the epilogue of humanity.

The final hours dwindle into hazy sundown, the sky turning to a nihilistic set of drapes, twisting and twirling. What will happen to it tomorrow? I wonder childishly if the gasses will just separate, or if they’ll go off and find another planet to consume. I wonder if they’ll miss each other, the oxygen and the nitrogen and the others; if they would write. The misery is contagious I imagine, the dread and the other rancid emotions wafting up like smell from a carcass. The clouds can surely feel it.  

I stare out the window this final day, my stomach wrenching, my mind dropped dead at the end of my story.  By this time, most everyone who was left to look, to wait, had completed their stories, too. Theirs had ended somewhere along the timeline, somewhere along these sixty agonizing weeks. No one has carried their bundle of words to the bitter end: by this last week, we are all puppets, lifeless. The lights of our eyes have been ditched along the sides of the highway. I suppose that by this finale, there are two types of people left: those who ended satisfied, who glowed with pride and acceptance, and those who dragged their hearts through the mud.

I had fallen into line with the latter ones. 

Here, the painted cement turned to grade, and the grade turned to mud. We trampled through the forest on a path no longer identifiable, left with nothing but guilt and tainted memories. Our names have been painted on us superficially. Nothing but skeletons of letters. 

For me, the conclusion came six days before now, where the words poured down on me; me, the moon, and my private meteor shower. I’d been blasted with craters from head to toe. 

So the day, a little less than a week from the end and a little more than fifty-eight weeks since I met Andy. Fifty-two weeks since we started chasing a nonsensical vagary. How far from myself I was , when I dragged my ancient bones through the front door at 4 AM. My hair was an aerie of bloody straw, sweat, and dandruff, clinging to ripped scalp and knuckle-dents. My clothes were threatening to strike; they were the only thing binding my skin to my bones, and they demanded compensation. I’d lost my hat, that godforsaken flat-cap. 

Pathetic as I was, at least I had managed to make it back to the woods. 

Home.

Our little house, buried.

A deplorable vagrant, returning from both Metro Detroit and an aimless, pitiful quest, where I had acquired nothing but an oboe mouthpiece and the truth about my mother. Andy sulked home in a similar fashion, though the only pain he felt was inherited. He’d won, in terms of his side of the deal. He’d mastered every item on his Impossible Bucket List. He’d even kissed a pretty girl. And that morning, he’d be returning to his newfound bond with Sam, as well as the open arms of his mother, Doctor Bianchi, who had spent the day staring at the cream-colored walls of the Elizabeth County Hospital. There had been no nurses or patients. 

The nurses had given up. 

The patients had killed themselves. 

There were so many suicides, they had to close the bridge. 

We parted on the dirt road. He thought he was miserable as I was, but I knew his devastation was temporary. A large part of me resented him for having the audacity to carry the weight of satisfaction. His back practically bowed beneath it. 

I limped through the door and saw Ham, looking terrible, staring at a black void of a television screen. There she was, that little girl, named by our vile mother just like I was. I skipped hello and asked her how many times she had seen Pearl Harbor that day. She told me five. 

Her voice belonged to the gravel. 

That DVD set us even with our town. It was our one physician. Our one school. Our one abandoned mine.

Harmony, that poor girl. Not even on the street- a year ago when we were evicted on the North Side- did she look so pathetic and weak. She was vacant, sorry; a rape victim on the living room floor, staring solemnly at the only piece of furniture we owned. She gave me a look that crushed my heart. Her eyes were set like fire in the kiln. I was not at all surprised that she was awake. We had all been awake for weeks. Bedtimes were for the living. 

Nothing mattered anymore, not to us zombies.  

Stupidly, I saluted her. She looked away. There, a ghost fled through the cracks in the wall, the ghost of my Harmony: my Private First Class. The Scout to my Jem. She was gone. Drained of blood and spirit, like the rest of us but worse. 

It occurred to me that she was my weight: the back-breaking bale of failure that I would be forced to carry for the last week of our lives.  

It hit me hard; one of my meteors:

I should have spent the weeks with her.

Instead of living like I always had, through the roughest times with my dad and my precious little sister, I had spent the time with Andy. I’d set out for dreams, for nothing. For weeks of chasing a forgotten past, I was left with nothing but a piece of dry cork.

 I wished I could be like Andy who- in a flash of football games and late night dinners at Applebee’s -had built a relationship with his sister. He’d etched it from scratch, and even though his goals were written on a list of ten, he managed to put his family together flawlessly. 

I was overwhelmed with envy because I already had the family. The soft-spoken father and the love between me and my sister. But I pushed it aside for nothing. An unfinished bucket list and an unfinished childhood, and Harmony had suffered. I promised I would spend every last hour with her, but I knew that no amount of time in a dark, suicidal world could make up for fifty-nine weeks of damage. I realized then that it was too late. I had forfeited everything.

We looked at each other then, as a rabbit would look at a fox, their coats blood-stained. We were both the killer and the killed. She managed to scrape out a few words from the back of her throat, and as she explained what was going on in the next room, I knew she was speaking her last sentences to me. There would be no cowering the dark. As soon as I turned away from her, she would get up and leave me behind. She knew not where she was going, just that it would kill me to see her go. The painful intelligence of that stupid kid. 

So the words.

Her voice had deepened, if only slightly.

She told me he was one of them, or would be soon.

That he was in the bedroom with a gun. 

That he said, “I want to speak with Lyra-Grace when she gets home.”

I did not hesitate to approach his locked door. When I walked past Harmony, I ruffled her knotted, blond hair. 

I had told him I was going to Detroit, but it didn’t matter. He never heard anything anymore, not even the Ukulele Chords. Us, C and G. I went to his room and found the sweetest father a young girl could ask for sitting on his bed with a gun. The future, then, as I crossed through his bedroom door, dissipated, a meteor in the stratosphere. A normal one, at least.

I sat down next to him, pole-stiff.

His eyes were medium rare.

Seaweed, in a sea of blood.

His love just out of focus.

He told me he wanted to kill himself.

He asked if he should take me and Ham with him. 

There he was, a man who, even in humanity’s dying days, would ask someone if they wished to be murdered.

Painfully, stupidly, I asked him why. 

Simply put, and the words of a simple yet vastly complicated man. “I don’t wanna be here when everyone dies.” 

That was it. I understood. But hadn’t everyone already?

I thought about it. The fire, the smithereens. How fast would it be? Would we even know? Why did any of these questions matter if no one would be left to answer them?

I kissed him on the cheek, reminding me that I was a Cocciarelli. I thought about my quest for Ellie not Ella and wondered how many Italian dinners she’d eaten. More than her father for sure, the old sea captain. The man responsible for the knuckle-dents in my head. One of the crazier folks along the winding trail. Yet, in the entire adventure, he was the only member of the lost family I actually enjoyed speaking to. From the second I told him I was looking for his daughter, my mother, and the second after when he grabbed my head and squeezed it into his xylophone of a chest. 

I looked at my dad. He curved his face from mine, racing around the track, digging in. Tears snuck out of the corner of his eyes. Barely noticeable, but I noticed. I put my hand over his. Both so small. I never realized how small he was. On the outside, anyway. 

“I don’t want to go with you.” I said. “I don’t want  you to go, either.”

When I had confronted Jayne, I hadn’t cried. I was so used to it by then, and my anger had taken the controls. But up against my dad, a man who’d never bouted with me so long as I lived, I broke down. I kissed him again. I told him six days, I told him we could do so much together in six days...look how much I had done with Andy in just a few weeks. We did ten things, I said, ten major things that he’d always wanted to do. We’d made a deal, that if I helped him with his Impossible Bucket List, then he would help me find Mom. And in fifty-nine weeks, we’d traveled the world and found Ellie, fat and washed up, dying with the rest, lost in time. I told him six days, so much longer than all my fourteen years, all the eleven years without Mom. I told him they’d mean so much more, and we could really make the best of it. Me and him and Harmony and the final hours. 

I pleaded to reverse my failure.

I opened my palm and handed him the mouthpiece. 

He was an old, dry fruit. He squeezed out the words, his peel wilting away. 

“I didn’t want you to find her.” 

I ignored the steaming, bitter truth. I tried to kiss him again, but he turned to the floor. My lips touched nothing but cold linoleum. I knew there was no place for me in his heart, and I left the room. It had been shallow before, but now it was completely empty.

I stood in the living room. The rental house on Peanut Butter Road.

Ham was gone.

She had probably gone off to meet a boy and find our mother.

I look now at the charcoal sky, trying to fall asleep before it all ends. My own little story wrapped up with a crooked bow; at least I’d be unconscious when it happened. I remember the last sound I really heard, the last anything I felt, when I stepped out of my father’s bedroom six days before. When the epilogue began. 

As soon as I closed the door, he pulled the trigger.

I laid down on the floor and remained.

Peanut Butter Road

by Nick Lusardi