The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Back at his house in Littleton, he checked the photoelectric panels’ gauges inside the front door. It had been sunny for the last week, so the system was full. The water tower showed only four hundred gallons though. He’d have to go water scavenging again in the next few days.

“I’m home,” he called. His voice echoed off the tiled foyer. “Tillie?”

The living room was empty, and so were the kitchen and bedrooms. Carson stepped into the bathroom, his hand on his chest where his heart beat fast, but the sleeping pills in the cabinet looked undisturbed. “Tillie?”

He found her sitting in the backyard beneath the globe willow, still in her robe. The nightgown beneath it was yellowed and tattered. In her dresser he’d put a dozen new ones, but she’d only wear the one she had in her suitcase when he’d picked her up, wandering through the Denver Botanical Gardens two years ago.

He sat on the grass next to her. She was fifty or so. Lots of gray in her blond hair. Slender wrists. Narrow face. Strikingly blue eyes that hardly ever focused on anything.

“How’s that cough?” he asked.

“We never play bridge anymore, Bob Robert.”

Carson stretched out. A day with binoculars pressed to his face and his elbows braced on his knees hurt his back. “Tough to get partners,” he said. Then he added out of habit, “And I’m not Bob Robert.”

She picked at a loose thread in the robe, pulling at it until it broke free. “Have you seen the garden? Not a flower in it. A single geranium or a daisy would give me hope. If just one dead thing would come back.”

“I’ve brought you seeds,” he said. “You just need to plant them.”

She wrapped the thread around her fingertip tightly. “I waited for the pool man, but he never came. I hate skimming.” She raised her fist to her mouth and coughed primly behind it twice, grimacing each time.

Carson raised his head. Other than the grass under the tree, most of the yard was dirt. The lot was longer than it was wide. At the end farthest from the house a chicken wire enclosure surrounded the poultry. A couple hens sat in the shade by the coop. No pool. When he’d gone house hunting, he’d toyed with the idea of a pool, but the thought of trying to keep it filled and the inevitable problems with water chemistry made him decide against it. The house on the other side of the privacy fence had a pool as did most of the houses in the neighborhood, now empty except for the scummy pond in the deep end. In the spring he’d found a deer, its neck bent unnaturally back, at the bottom of one a block over. Evidently it had jumped the fence and gone straight in.

“Are you hungry?” Carson asked.

Tillie tilted her head to the side. “When will the garden grow again?”

He pushed himself off the ground. “I’ll fix eggs.”

Later that evening, he tucked Tillie into bed. The room smelled of peppermint. From the bulge in her cheek, he guessed she was sucking on one. In a little-girl voice, she said, “Can you put in my video?” Her expression was alert, but her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. He smiled. This was as good as she got. Sometimes he could play gin rummy with her and she’d stay focused for an hour or so before she drifted away. If he asked her about her past, she’d be unresponsive for days. All he knew about her came from the suitcase she carried when he’d found her. There was a sheet of letterhead with a name at the top: “Tillie Waterhouse, Marketing Executive,” and an athletic club identification card with her picture and name. But there was no Tillie Waterhouse in the Denver phone book. Could she have wandered away from the airport when air travel was canceled? The first words she had said to him, when she finally spoke, were, “How do you bear it?”

“Did you have a good day?” He turned on the television and pressed rewind on the VCR.

Her hands peeked out from under the covers and pulled them tight under her chin. “Something magical is going to happen. The leaves whispered to me.”

The video clicked to a stop. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. The television flickered as the tape started, a documentary on the 2001 New York City Marathon a decade earlier. It opened with a helicopter flyover of the racers crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. The human crowd surged forward, packed elbow to elbow, long as the eye could see. Then the camera cut to ankle level. Feet ran past for five minutes. Then it went to face level at a turn in the course. The starting crush had spread out, but the runners still jogged within an arm’s length of each other, thousands of them. Carson had watched the video with her the first few times. The video was a celebration of numbers. Thirty-thousand athletes straining over the twenty-six mile course through New York City’s five boroughs.

“Here’s the remote if you want to watch it again.”

“So many American flags,” she said.