Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 12 HOURS AND 12 MINUTES

ALL AROUND THE WORLD , everyone stopped to hear if the mission to fix the pool had been a success.

A family loading up their car in Iowa paused to watch the president on their teenage daughter’s cell phone. Lawyers in a Chicago high-rise crowded around the conference-room TV. Surfers suiting up in LA turned up their truck’s radio, exactly like a group of fieldworkers in Guatemala did. In London, the after-work pub crowds were wall to wall; in Greece, families allowed the TV to stay on during dinner. Antinuclear activists in Central Park stopped their chants as, a few miles downtown, the stock exchange trading floor slowed to a standstill.

And at a hole-in-the-wall bar tucked into some forgotten coastal fishing village, the bartender whistled at the crowd, then pointed the clicker at the small, 2000s-era TV hanging in the corner. As the volume went up, the chatter of thick New England accents quieted down.

The bar was packed, much of the crowd the same people who’d watched that first COVID press conference. Years prior, they’d all sat at the bar trying to figure out what the hell a subprime mortgage was. Not long after that, they were there shaking their heads as they watched oil pour out of a rig in the Gulf. It was there they’d felt closure as they listened to details about SEAL Team Six’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, and it was there they’d watched that horrible black smoke slash across a perfect blue September sky.

They’d been there for Buckner; they’d been there for the bloody sock. Olympics, elections, scandals, and storms—they’d been there for all that too. The bar hadn’t been around when Armstrong first walked on the moon, but it was for the Challenger, and with that, as with every other tragedy and triumph, they’d watched together with elbows resting on a beer-sticky bar, waiting to find out what came next.

“Bobby!” the bartender cried. “Shut the fuck up!”

Bobby, drunker than usual (which was saying something, but who could blame him?), held his hands up in surrender just as President Dawson appeared on the screen.

“Good evening, my fellow Americans.”

Carla turned up the volume on the school bus’s radio, then retook her seat. Principal Gazdecki glanced over from behind the wheel. They exchanged a look as Marion continued relaying the update from the plant.

“… and as we speak, President Dawson is addressing the nation. He just received the same update I did from the R2 control room and the update is—the mission was a success.”

Carla dropped her head in relief. Gazdecki slapped his hand against the wheel.

“The flow of water leaking from the pool has been stopped and it is being refilled. Once Clover Hill gets equipment that can reach high enough, they will reinforce the repairs from the outside. But to reiterate: The emergency stopgap measure was a success. The water in the pool will remain cool enough. A meltdown has been averted.”

“Does that mean we can stay home?”

Carla turned around to answer Mr. Wright, the ninety-three-year-old man clutching his cane tightly, but before she could, Marion continued.

“The worst has been avoided—but there are still unhealthy levels of radiation in the air. The evacuation order remains in effect. As we have done all day, we will continue to err on the side of caution.”

“There’s your answer, Mr. Wright,” Carla said as the bus turned and headed for a double-wide at the end of the lane. The trailer’s front door opened, and Mr. Lupinsky began the struggle to get his wife’s wheelchair out the door and down the ramp to meet them.

Once all the schoolkids had been shuttled to the docks, Carla and Principal Gazdecki took the bus into the community to pick up some of the residents that might have fallen through the cracks—the elderly, the disabled, those with mobility issues, and anyone else simply in need of a ride.

“But even if they had lifted the evacuation order,” Gazdecki said to Mr. Lupinsky, eyeing him in the rearview mirror, “this is the biggest thing to ever happen to Waketa—you wouldn’t want to miss the excitement, would you?”

Mr. Wright harrumphed grumpily. “Seems like a whole to-do about nothing.”

“I promise you,” Carla whispered to herself while looking out the window in the direction of Clover Hill, “it doesn’t seem that way to everyone.”

Steve was laid out flat on the stretcher. A clean Clover Hill sweatsuit covered his body, concealing pink skin and blotchy red spots. His hair was still wet. His eyes were still closed. But he was breathing.

He moaned, the kind of sound so soft that you froze, unsure if you’d heard something or not. But a few seconds later, he began to stir, his fingers, wrapped in clean white gauze, slowly feeling their way around, searching in a manner that asked, Where am I?

Across the room, George got up from his chair and came to the bedside. He peered down, watching, waiting, until finally, Steve’s eyes fluttered open. Squinting into the harsh fluorescent ceiling lighting, Steve’s eyes now moved as his fingers had: What happened, what’s going on? As his gaze made its way over to George, the familiar face seemed to anchor him.

“Did it work?” Steve asked, his voice raw and gravelly.

George smiled.

As George reported the results and gave a status update on the pool, Steve laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, exhaling loudly in relief. It wasn’t for nothing. It was for everything .

“We did it.”

“ You did it,” George corrected.

Steve attempted a smile. “Well. It’s done.” He grimaced, becoming more aware of his pain. “I remember losing my air. I remember taking a breath. I remember starting for the surface.”

“And that’s it?” George prompted when he didn’t say anything else.

“That’s it.”

George drew a hesitant breath, then filled him in on what had happened after that. He was direct and devoid of emotion, as if he were giving a press conference, pausing only once to ask Steve if he should keep going. Steve nodded, feeling the tears slip across his face.

When George finished, Steve opened his eyes and asked simply: “How long do I have?”

George looked everywhere but at Steve while making the kinds of sounds you make when you stall, when you don’t want to say what you’re about to say.

“You know, there’s no real consensus,” he finally got out. “Once we get you to the hospital, they’ll have a better idea.”

“Bullshit. No doctor at Minn General will know better than the medics here. What are they saying is the best case scenario?”

There was a pause. A long pause.

“A year.”

Steve shut his eyes, a physical rejection of the possibility that he could be dead in a year. Best case, a year. The full-body pain intensified as death shifted from an abstract idea to an acute situation with those two words. “And worst case?”

“A couple months. A month.”

A month ! Steve took that in. A month was a handful of weeks. One full moon. One billing cycle. He could be gone before his library books were due.

Steve asked, “Does Matt know?”

“He knows there was an accident. He knows you were exposed. He doesn’t know how bad.”

Steve didn’t say anything for a while.

“Do you want someone to tell him?” George said. “I can if you want me to.”

Steve shook his head. No, he would.

The tension in the control room had eased.

There was still so much to be done. They were nowhere near out of the woods—but they were no longer in crisis. Now they could simply do the work.

“I’m going outside,” Joss said to Ethan. “I’m going to start measuring radioactivity on the crash debris for the cleanup teams.” She held up a walkie-talkie. “If you need me.”

“Sounds good,” he said, poring over a readout Vikram had just handed him.

Joss turned back. “Hey, do you want to use my sat phone to text Kristin? Better chance it’ll get through.”

“Ah, thanks. That’s okay. Until she hears my voice, she knows to just keep going.”

Joss cocked her head. “Okay. Well. It makes calls too.”

Ethan waited a beat, shuffling the papers. “Yeah, thanks. Definitely in a bit.”

Joss watched the way he didn’t look up, the way he refused to make eye contact.

“Right,” she said. “I’ll be outside.”

Matt felt glued to the floor, unable to will himself into the room where his dad lay motionless.

It’s not contagious, you know.

His mother’s words came back to him with the memory of her on a hospital bed, one like the bed his dad was on now. Her bald head, her pale, emaciated face then. His bandaged hands, his red, blistered skin now.

“See?” Steve said without turning his head. “This is why we don’t do stupid dangerous stuff.”

Matt forced himself into the room. As he got closer, the familiar smell of soap and antiseptic got stronger, making him nauseated. He knew what those crisp, clean medical smells were covering up. He’d been here before.

His dad’s blotchy red skin looked exactly like the first picture. Next, Matt knew, would come the blisters, like in the second picture. He blocked out the thought of the third and fourth and final pictures from the chapter on acute radiation poisoning in the Clover Hill safety manual he’d found in the break room. Those images had looked just like the man he’d seen in this same room earlier in the day—the man Matt later saw rolled out with a white sheet covering his body. Knowing it was all going to happen to his dad made it too much. Knowing how it ended made it unbearable.

“Are you going to die?” Matt said.

He’d meant it to sound tough but it came out scared, and when his dad’s eyes flashed a sadness he hadn’t seen since the day his mom died, Matt regretted it.

“Yes” was all Steve said.

Matt fought the lump in his throat. He fought the urge to hit him. He fought the urge to climb up in the bed and hold on. “When?” he asked instead.

Steve managed a small shrug. “Too soon.”

They stayed there together like that for some time. Matt didn’t know what to say or what to do. Neither did Steve. So they just were. Together, they just witnessed the moment.

The concept of time had changed for Steve. He was suddenly so aware of its passing, of its existence at all. He thought he understood after he ran out of it with Claire. But now, he realized he didn’t get it at all. If he truly had understood what that meant—that time runs out—he would have done it all so differently.

Maybe you can’t understand until you’re the one standing on the brink. Maybe we’re not meant to. Maybe it’s some biological trick designed to keep us safe from the saber-toothed tiger, only now it keeps us building big cities and worrying about deadlines. Maybe we’re not supposed to get that it will all be gone, we will all be gone—until it’s too late to do anything about it. If life’s a joke and death’s the punch line, in any good setup, you never see it coming.

Because if we did understand, we would spend it all in the sun with the grass between our toes. What else was the point? We’re here, then we’re not. And before that and after that, the mountains stay put and the waves keep crashing and the storms come and go and none of any of that is aware that for a brief, fleeting moment, we were here too. We were a part of it too.

It’s a relief to know you don’t matter, Steve realized. And understanding that brought him the first moment of peace he’d known since Claire had passed. Surely she must have seen that too. After all, she’d walked ahead; he was the one just catching up. None of it, none of us, matter. And once you see it, once you get it, once you’re free from the false belief that you think you have time, you can just enjoy it for what it is.

And it is all so, so beautiful.

“What you just said, I never could,” Steve told Matt. “I never said that with your mom. I never said she would die. Even after she did. I didn’t want to face it. I ran. And I thought I was running from it . From the sickness. From death. From her dying. But it didn’t change it. And I realize now, all I did was run from her. I was so scared, Matt. So I hid. I hid in all the treatments and all the things we did to fight it. I told myself that if we had a plan, if there was something to do, then it was just the plan we had to deal with. Not what was happening. The plan was real. The protocols were real. The cancer wasn’t. Then suddenly—it was too late. She was gone.”

Matt kept glancing from his dad to the floor and back, trying not to let the welling tears fall. Steve sat up in bed with a grimace.

“I never let you in. I never let you be a part of it. Even today, I kept you back. Away from me, away from everything that was going wrong. I pushed you away. I did it then, I did it today. I did it to keep you safe. I did it because I didn’t know how to get through it with you there too. But it kept you—us—from dealing with what was happening. What was actually happening. It wasn’t fair to you. And it didn’t help you, me, or your mother. But I’m not making that mistake now.”

Steve paused; his voice was starting to shake. Any other time he would have turned around, walked away. He would have stopped. But the time for that had passed.

“I am going to die, Matt,” he said, giving himself over to the vulnerability. “This is happening. If we got a year, a month, a week—I am here. I am with you. There are no lists. No protocols. It’s just us, living the moments we got. You and I know what most people don’t. That they’re just that. Moments. So we’ll spend them together. And it won’t be long enough. But it never is.”

Matt didn’t say anything as he traced the edge of the bed with his finger over and over.

“What are you thinking?” Steve said gently.

Matt’s bottom lip quivered until he bit it to keep it still. Eventually, he mumbled something that Steve couldn’t understand. Steve didn’t ask him to repeat it, though. He just took Matt’s hand in his bandaged one and waited.

“We have to fix my fishing pole,” Matt said finally, again, letting himself be scared too. “We have to fix it.”

Steve reached for his son, and Matt crawled into the bed like the little boy he still very much was and let his dad hold him. They both cried as Steve promised his son that they would fix the pole. Together. He promised.