Don't Be Afraid by Steven Hayward

Author:Steven Hayward [Hayward, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37397-7
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2011-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

FALLOUT

I don’t know—I still don’t know—how long I was unconscious after Frank stepped out through the smoke toward me, thinking I was Mary. It must have been six or six thirty in the morning and the sun was coming up. By that time the area around the library had been cordoned off and there were police and firefighters everywhere. I could taste blood, and when I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror I saw my lip was bleeding and there was a cut over my eyebrow. My father must have found me, carried me here to the back seat, then run back and tried to find Mike.

After a moment I got out of the car and started looking for my father. Only in the morning light was it possible to see the devastation, the paper everywhere, the books that had been torn up and cast into the wind, the startling look of the collapsed library. It had been decimated, the walls fallen in, the wires exposed, distant alarms still going off everywhere. It looked like something out of The Road Warrior, like Mel Gibson was about to drive up and start siphoning off gas from our tank. Somehow, the phone booth across the street from the library, the one just in front of Simon’s Photography, was still intact.

I don’t know why I called my mother.

“It’s James James,” I told her, as if she might not recognize my voice.

“Thank God,” she said.

I remember looking at the pay phone, thinking the metal cradle where the receiver had been sitting shone with an odd brilliance and wondering if that meant I had a concussion. “I hit my head,” I said. “But I’m all right.”

“Who hit you?”

“I don’t know,” I tried telling her. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Where’s your father? Let me speak to him.”

“He’s busy,” I said. I still had no idea where he was.

“What happened?”

“What happened?” I repeated. The question made no sense. I began to ask her about Mike, but stopped. I’d have to tell her everything, and she’d never forgive me.

I said, “Let me talk to Vivian.”

“She’s asleep—do you know what time it is?”

I didn’t know what else to say.

“James James,” she said, “what happened? Is your father hurt?”

I tried telling her to not worry but the words caught in my throat. I began to cry, as quietly as I could, clutching the receiver. Farther down Lee Road, near where the front door of the library had been, I could see my father. He was with a pair of firemen, the three of them standing atop a mound of rubble, an urgent look on his face. He was getting desperate, gesturing toward the rubble, giving instructions.

“He’s hurt his head,” said my mother, though not to me. “It’s James James, and he’s fine,” she went on, talking to someone else. “Michael,” she said, “come and speak to him yourself.”

“What did you say?” I asked her. “Who are you talking to?”

“Michael just came in.”

“Put him on,” I told her, “I need to talk to him.

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