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OUTSIDE
I RUN FROM the office. The hallway stretches out before me and it is endless. I’m in the
air lock and it is windless. I’m outside and my breath is soundless.
My heart is beatless.
I vomit all the nothing in my stomach. Bile burns the back of my throat.
I’m crying and the cool morning air chills the tears on my face.
I’m laughing and the cold invades my lungs.
I’m not sick. I’ve never been sick.
All the emotions I’ve held in check over the past twenty-four hours crash over me.
Hope and despair, anticipation and regret, joy and anger. How is it possible to have an
emotion and its opposite at the same time? I’m struggling in a black ocean, a life jacket
across my chest, an anchor on my leg.
My mom catches up to me. Her face is a ruin of fear. “What are you doing? What are
you doing? You have to get inside.”
My vision tunnels and I hold her in my sights. “Why, Mom? Why do I have to go
inside?”
“Because you’re sick. Bad things could happen to you out here.”
She reaches out to me to pull me toward her, but I jerk away from her.
“No. I’m not going back in.”
“Please,” she begs. “I can’t lose you, too. Not after everything.”
Her eyes are on me, but I know without a doubt that she’s not seeing me at all.
“I lost them. I lost your dad and I lost your brother. I couldn’t lose you, too. I just
couldn’t.”
Her face crumbles, falls completely apart. Whatever structures were holding it up give
way in a sudden and catastrophic failure.
She’s broken. She’s been broken for a long time. Carla was right. She never recovered
from their deaths.
I say something. I don’t know what, but she keeps talking.
“Right after they died you got so, so sick. You wouldn’t breathe right and I drove you to
the emergency room and we had to stay there for three days. And they didn’t know what
was wrong. They said it was probably an allergy. They gave me a list of things to stay away
from, but I knew it was more than that.”
She nods her head. “I knew it was more than that. I had to protect you. Anything can
happen to you out here.”
She looks around. “Anything can happen to you out here. In the world.”