Sunlight, Vicki had decided, must have been created by the devil.
Mostly, she said that because she knew her parents would hate it, and it would start another argument about using heresy in this kind of household, and she would smirk and laugh to herself and continue to believe that a loving God would not create sunlight so it could shine through the slats on her window to wake her up after one hell of a bender the night before.
The sun hurt more than it typically did after a night like the one she'd had, but maybe the alcohol was stronger than usual or the marijuana was made to take a bigger hit. Hell, she could have been drugged last night and she would have been fine until the recovery period. It wasn't like any of them had done anything they hadn't wanted to do.
Regardless, the sunlight tried to wake her up, and Vicki just groaned and covered her head with a pillow to block out the offensive light.
Thinking typically hurt after a bender, but this morning, she couldn't help but think. She kept it to short sentences, short thoughts, so that her head wouldn't pound anymore, but she could still only hear the hum of the radiator. There was no noise in the bedroom, not the sound of Jeannie's breathing, not the shuffle of her dad's socks against the floor outside, nor the whistle coming from the teapot her mom always put on. They were quiet, for once, and Vicki reluctantly lifted her shirt and sniffed it.
Okay, yep, she could smell the booze on her person.
She flopped back against her bed, pulling the pillow more tightly around her head and fell back asleep. When she woke up for the second time – once again, against her will – it was not because of the sunlight, which was brighter and harsher, but because of the primal panic instinct stirring in her gut.
Vicki knew that instinct. She typically didn't listen to it, but the smell reached her nose, her brain screamed Fire! at her despite her hangover, and she practically tripped out of bed as she tossed her pillow to the floor and crashed to the ground. The teapot hissed at its contortion, black smoke curling, flames licking at the bottom of the pot, and Vicki didn't have much time to think, she grabbed the hem of her shirt, wrapped her hand around the handle, and yelped when the pot made contact with her skin.
Her hands shook from the pain, and she blinked back tears, ripping open the drawer that held the potholders. She bent down, hissing as her burn spread across her stomach, and picked the pot, this time with a potholder, and threw it in the sink. The teapot hissed but quieted down.
Vicki lifted her shirt to examine the damage. It wasn't anything too bad, she didn't think it would be, but it hurt like a bitch, so she grabbed a towel, doused it in cold water, and held it to her stomach. She sighed in relief when the cold cloth touched her skin.
Now that her burn was being taken care of, she wondered why in the hell no one noticed, "Hey, maybe the trailer is going to catch on fire and we'll all die, maybe someone should put it out."
She rolled her neck and glanced out the window and nearly dropped the towel when she saw her dad's beat-up old pickup truck still in the driveway. At closer glance, as she stepped closer to the window, she saw her mom's car, and she knew for a fact that the only day her parents ever took off from any of their jobs was Sunday.
"Goddamn, what time is it?"
She would have believed exactly three different times: eight in the morning, nine in the morning, or seven in the morning. You could have told her any of these, and she would have believed you, would have nodded and said, "Seems right," before she continued on her merry way back to bed.
Except at seven in the morning, a few people were waking up to disaster. At eight in the morning, most everyone knew about it. And at nine in the morning, everyone – sans Vicki Byrne – knew what was going on. At nine in the morning, Vicki was still passed out in bed.
So when she saw that it was fifteen past noon, she swore and threw the towel onto the counter. "Mom! Dad! Where are you?" She hurried past her parents' bedroom and shook her head when she found it empty at first glance.
No one had cared to wake her up, and regardless of what was going on, it didn't matter to her.
Except when Vicki stepped back into the room she shared with her little sister, she stopped cold. Jeannie was supposed to go to the pool with that kid from church today, and she had been so excited for the past month that she was counting down on her calendar. Her clothes had been set out yesterday morning, before Vicki woke up for school. Jeannie should have been at the pool, and that was where Vicki expected their parents to also be.
But Jeannie's clothes were still folded on her chair.
Vicki's heart stopped. "Oh, God, Jeannie, are you okay?" She ran to her little sister's bed, but upon finding that her sister wasn't there, she ran back into the living room. "Mom, Dad, where's Jeannie? What's happened to her?"
Again, the only sound was the radiator and the teapot slowly cooling down.
Vicki shook her head. "Fuck this, I'll figure it out myself."
She had intended to grab her dad's keys and drive around the city to find where they'd taken her little sister and why they hadn't used his car – and part of her was terrified that Jeannie had gotten seriously hurt the night before while she was out on a bender and that was why everything was so quiet – but she stopped on the way down her steps.
The entire trailer park was going crazy. She had never seen so much booze, never seen as much crying as she had now. Zack sat on the tree stump outside his trailer, staring a thousand yards in front of him. He was high, she knew, fucked up beyond measure, and she almost wanted to laugh at him for the hangover he was about to suffer, but he grabbed a bottle and smashed it over his hand.
She screamed.
Vicki stumbled down the rest of the steps, her eyes fixated on Zack's hand, bleeding profusely, shards of glass sticking out of his skin, drops of blood dripping onto the grass beneath him. When his other hand moved to grab the glass, she turned her head and ran into Shelly.
Shelly stumbled, off course, but she was about to keep walking. Not wanting her to see Zack in his state, Vicki grabbed Shelly's arms and gently shook her.
"Shelly? Shel, I'm glad to see you." Vicki licked her lips and cupped her friend's cheek. "What's wrong? Why is everyone freaking out?" Shelly, while nearly as pale as Vicki, looked whiter than her today. Her face was so devoid of color that she almost looked gray, that she looked like a shell of herself. Vicki tilted her head. "Shel?"
Shelly blinked once. "Haven't you heard?" There was no emotion in her voice anymore. Shelly was steady, her skin cold, and Vicki's heart stopped when the thought of Shelly doing hard drugs crossed her mind. Her free hand slipped to Shelly's wrist and she pressed two fingers to the pulse point and sighed in relief when she felt a steady throb. Nothing faint or thready.
Vicki pressed her lips together and shook her head. Zack wailed eight yards away, and she saw one of the burlier men rush towards him. To fight him or keep him from killing himself, Vicki didn't know, nor did she want to know. "Heard what? I- I'm sorry, I've been asleep for the past several hours."
A breath blew past Shelly's lips, almost like a departing sigh. "People are gone, Vick. Dis- disappeared. Right out of their clothes."
Where's Jeannie? Vicki wanted to scream, but she simply swallowed past the knot in her throat and held Shelly's eyes. "What do you mean 'disappeared?' That doesn't– that doesn't happen, Shel."
The faintest trace of a smile flickered on Shelly's lips.
"Let me die!" Zack shouted, kicking against the burly man. Vicki knew his name. She didn't want to remember it.
"I watched it happen, Vick. I felt it happen. People are gone. Some of the adults here, but all of the little kids." For the first time, tears sprang into Shelly's eyes, and she lifted a shaking hand to her lips. "All –"
Vicki's hand fell from Shelly's face. "What do you mean?"
Shelly shoved her, and Vicki stumbled back. "People are gone! They're not coming back! I can't spell it out for you!"
"No one just disappears –"
"Yeah, well, they did. Look around, Vicki. The Grants, the Forsters, the Fishers, they're all gone."
Grants.
Her parents' friends, they hosted the Bible studies that converted her mom and helped her dad get better.
Forsters.
The only Catholic family in the park, but they would join with Mom, Dad, and the others on occasion to study the Bible.
Fishers.
The youngest Christian family in this park, the ones Mom and Dad had decided to mentor while watching their kids.
Vicki ran back up her steps and threw the front door open. "Mom?! Dad?! Jeannie?!" She pushed her hands through her hair, not realizing they were shaking until she pulled her hands away and they felt too charged with energy, like they wanted to fly away from her, away from this hellscape. Taking a deep breath, she curled her hands into fists and uncurled them, blowing a breath of cool air past her lips. Her mom's favorite chair was right there. She could confirm or deny Shelly right now.
She didn't want to look.
She looked.
Her mother's robe lumped across the back and armrest of the chair, book in the lap of her robe. The sleeves of her pajamas poked out from the edge of the robe sleeves, and her pajama pants splayed at the bottom. On top of the book, in the middle of the pages, Mom's wedding ring reflected against the sunlight.
Vicki slowly stepped forward, one foot crossing in front of the other, and her eyes remained fixated on the light glinting against the wedding ring. That was all she saw. Her hand shook as she knelt in front of her mother's clothes, but she still refused to move her eyes away from the wedding ring, and she lifted it with her index finger and thumb, holding it up to the light.
(She used to play with this ring, all the time, when her parents were having problems. She would slip it onto her ring finger and twirl around the tiny bathroom and imagine a knight in shining armor coming to save her. He would kiss her hand and declare his undying love for her, and he would ask her to marry him.
And she would tell him that marriage was destructive, a hurricane, and his eyes would sparkle as he would kiss her and tell her that marriage was a storm, but it was no hurricane. He would lean close and brush his lips against her hair and tell her that he would not hurt her, that he would respect her and believe her, that marriage was a fairy tale waiting to happen.
She used to believe in happy endings.)
Her fingers still shaking, Vicki took the wedding ring and slipped it onto her ring finger. It fit perfectly, and she wondered if Mom would have given it to her if she had ever approved of a man she brought home.
It felt wrong to take it off, but it felt just as wrong to keep it on. Slowly, Vicki slipped it off her finger and pressed the cool metal to her lips before tucking it into her pocket.
Slowly, Vicki stood and grabbed the remote. Her mom didn't typically watch the news, preferring to watch Lifetime movies. Once, Eddie asked why, and Mom said that the news was depressing, and it made it seem like there was no hope left in the world. But there was hope.
"Jesus is coming again," she would say with a smile, and Vicki wanted to barf.
(Hope, Vicki thought, was useless. What hope was there left to hold onto? The world was ending, the news was more depressing than ever, and happy endings didn't exist.
Jesus coming or not, happy endings weren't real.)
She pressed the power button, expecting to click through the channels until she found the news, but even though it was last on a Lifetime movie, reporters stood in front of rubble and car pileups, fires blazing in the distance.
"…airplanes cannot land, and pilots are now forced to use roadways or fields to land safely. For those just now tuning in, there have been mass disappearances across the entire globe. Authorities are still investigating the reason behind these disappearances."
Reports of disappearances. Shelly, pale as death. Zack, begging to die. Mom's clothes.
Maybe Shelly and Zack were right. Maybe they had the right idea.
She could fuck herself up right now. Her mom had sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, and all Vicki would have to do was scramble over to the bathroom and dump the contents of the bottle into her mouth and swallow, and then everything was done, she was done with all of this.
Don't you dare.
She felt sick to her stomach and pressed a shaking hand to her stomach, where her skin still felt sensitive from the teapot.
All she knew was that her mom was gone and disappeared, and they had something in common with the Forsters, Fishers, and Grants. The only common connection was their faith in God, and if that was it – if this fucking merciful God had taken them away from her – then her entire family would be gone, Eddie included.
But she had to know.
Vicki tossed the remote onto the coffee table, and in her haze, she pushed open the door to her parents' bedroom. Her mom's side was made up, but her dad's side was unmade, the covers were bunched, but even from the door, Vicki could tell that there was nobody there.
Instead of squeezing into the space between the wall and her dad's side of the bed, she crawled onto her mother's side and gently pulled back her father's sheets.
(When something good happened, she pinched herself to make sure it was real. When something bad happened, she numbed herself to make sure it wasn't.
This was one of those bad moments, but she knew that if she started the process of numbing herself, she would never stop, and she would lie in the middle of the trailer, dying, dying, and then she would be dead and there would be no one left to miss her, no one left alive to save her before then.
So she pinched herself.)
Her father's leather cross lay on his pillow. Vicki had only known him to take it off when he was in the shower, but he would wear it every other moment of the day. He would hold it whenever they were in the middle of a fight, and he would look at her with all the love in the world, and Vicki used to hate it, but all she wanted was to see him roll over onto his back and hold that necklace between his fingers and tell her that he loved her. He wouldn't have to say he forgave her, wouldn't have to say anything at all, really, as long as he was here, as long as she wasn't left alone in this entire world.
She took it from the pillow and held it in her shaking fist, watching the cross swing back and forth, and she closed her eyes against the heartache. Her body felt like it was shattering from the inside out, starting with her heart. The pieces of her heart stabbed her lungs, descended into her gut, and she sobbed, crumpling onto her father's pajamas.
Her parents were gone.
(She didn't want to miss them, never thought she would, but she remembered how young she was, and the life in front of her was unforgiving.
All alone, a ward of the state, and no one to love her.
Unlovable, except she was loved by a love she could never know.)
Jeannie.
According to Shelly, Jeannie would be gone, and she was probably right, but Vicki needed to know. She pushed herself off her parents' bed and barged into her own room, scrambling over her own bed to rip off Jeannie's covers.
Her little duckie pajamas lay flat against the mattress.
Vicki sunk to the floor, holding her fist to her mouth, pressing the cross against her lips, and through the blur of her tears, she just saw that her little sister – the very sister she had worked so hard to protect – was no longer there, was no longer around, might as well be dead for all Vicki really knew.
If it was God…
She grabbed the first thing she could and threw it at the window. The textbook shattered the glass. "Fuck You, God!" she screamed, turning her face to the sky. "Did You hear that? I said fuck You! You're a fucking dickhead, You took my family away! I want them back! I'm too young for this, and I–" she choked on her tears and coughed.
Instead of the cold whisper of grief, much like what Vicki imagined Zack heard, she felt the sunshine upon her face. She leaned into the embrace of an invisible person next to her, her father, and she turned her head as if to cry into his shoulder. "I want them back, I want them back, I didn't mean any of this."
As her eyes were closed and as she cried with all the strength she had left, she felt a whisper speak into her heart. The fragments of her heart lifted from her stomach, unwedged themselves from her lungs, and they placed themselves back together.
This will hurt, the whisper said to her, and it will take time.
Before she could object to even more pain, her heart began to stitch itself together.
And then she remembered Eddie.
She crawled away from the embrace, away from the sunlight, and towards her cellphone, where she had just enough sense of mind to plug it in last night, and she unplugged it and pressed Eddie's contact.
It kept ringing, and she kept thinking.
(In the past two years, she had seen everything: A man turning his life around. Love. Becoming better, a man crying, rehab, loving parents, movie nights. Bible studies, crosses, prayer, true love that transcended all understanding.
Her father, a changed man.
Her mother, a strong woman.
Her sister, a child who found hope.
Her brother, feeling like he could breathe for the first time in his life.
But she drank, smoked, did drugs, slept around, and she made everything worse to make things worse. Life would have been better if she had never woken up.
But the voice that whispered to her heart never let her believe that. Only her mind believed it at all.)
"Hey, it's Eddie! I don't know why you're calling instead of texting, it's not the 90s anymore, but, um, I'm not here. Leave a message, I won't check it."
"Dammit, Eddie," she gritted. Vicki didn't have time to try his cell again, so she scrolled again until she found the contact for his apartment. She leaned against her bed frame, phone pressed to her ear, and she looked to the sky again and said, "Please, please, please, let me have just this one."
"What's up?"
"Eddie?" Vicki shot up, reaching for the wall to steady herself. Maybe this wasn't the end of the world.
(It sure felt like it, though.)
The voice on the other end scoffed. "Nope, this is his roommate. It's Tristan."
Vicki collapsed onto her bed. "Oh." She licked her lips and swiped at her eyes. "Where– is Eddie there?"
"Who is this?"
"I'm Vicki. I'm Eddie's little sister. Is he there?"
"Uh…" Vicki could picture Tristan scratching his head or his eyebrow. "No. No, he's not here."
Her fingers twisted in her sheets. "Have– have you seen what's been going on?"
At this, Tristan laughed. "Jesus, kid, who hasn't?"
"Then you know what I want to know."
She could hear the sound of a fridge door closing. "How do you know that definitively? I could just say I simply don't know where he is."
"Don't give me that bullshit. I need to know where he is."
Tristan sighed. "Is your mom or dad around? I think it would be better –"
"They've disappeared." Her bottom lip, like her voice, trembled, but she took a deep breath. "And I'm guessing Eddie did, too."
There was a long enough pause that Vicki pulled the phone away from her ear to see if he was still on the line. Finally, he sighed again. "Yep. He disappeared. I didn't see it firsthand, but I got a call from the cops. They found his car smashed against a tree, and the car had been registered to Eddie. I went to go check it out, get ready to tell your family about it, but all that was there was a pile of his clothes. He's gone. I'm sorry."
Vicki took another shaky breath and draped her free arm over her eyes. "It's– I get it. It's just…"
Tristan set something down on a countertop. "You know, he bragged about you all the time. He really loved you, Vicki. He loved your other sister, too, but he had a different kind of connection with you. He would always tell me about you, about the fact that you were in high school and you were thinking about going to college someday. He'd– he really did love you, Vicki."
She wiped her eyes. "I know he did, Tristan. I know he did."
"He always felt so bad. Blamed himself for a lot of stuff."
(Pot. Alcohol. Sending her an allowance that encouraged her to self-destruct.
Eddie was self-destructing, and he was helping her the only way he knew how.
He blamed himself for messing up her life.)
"Well…" Tristan huffed. "Do you need anyone there to take care of you? I know you mentioned that you're by yourself…"
Last night, she would have jumped on that train, but she shook her head. "Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. I'll be just fine."
"Before you go, Vicki…" Tristan paused, trying to think of the words. "What do you think it was?"
She still held the cross necklace in her hand. "I don't know," she finally said, "but I think I have an idea."
Aside from the little kids who disappeared, there was only one thing that connected the families who had disappeared. She'd never heard of it, beyond a joke at school, but now it wasn't a joke and she needed to know. Vicki crawled back to the living room, back to her mom's favorite chair and grabbed her mother's Bible. Mom liked to write in the margins of things, of books, receipts, anything she could. She didn't take notes like her dad did, and right now, Vicki was hoping for that.
Her mom highlighted 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and wrote in the margins: ? Is this biblical proof of the Rapture?
Vicki sobbed.
Tears streamed rapidly down her face, her skin was splotchy, and she leaned her head against her mom's clothes, Bible still in hand. She lifted it to look at the verse, to read it, understand what people thought before all this happened, but the sight of her mother's handwriting pushed her over the edge again, and she buried her face into the Bible and wept.
Really, she was glad that her family had disappeared. If it were this or the alternative, she wouldn't want them to be in the same pain she was in, but more than that gladness, more than anything, she wished they were here. She wished she could turn to her father and walk into the safest arms she knew; she wished that she could have heard Eddie telling her that everything was going to be okay, that she just needed to stop the life she was living; she wished she could tease Jeannie about her crush on the boy from church; and she wished that Mom were here to rub her back and braid her hair and tell her everything would be okay again.
Everything would be okay again, but she didn't want to go through life without the people she loved.
(And it was in this moment that she realized that she loved them. Despite the fighting, rebelling, screaming matches, despite the ignorance and smoking and drinking, despite all of this, she loved them.
She knew they loved her, too.)
And numbing herself would have been easier, she would have admitted that in a heartbeat, but it was the numbing of herself that cost her her family, and she was not willing to make that risk again. Withdrawals, so be it, she was not going back to the life she had lived, the life that turned her into a shell and emptied her every day.
She wanted to live, even if it would hurt. Especially if it would hurt, because there were still people in this world to see and meet and love, and she needed a little bit of love in her life, a little more than the warm embrace of the sunlight.
Today, her life had ended, but it also began again.
Vicki knew that Clarice was no longer on the planet anymore, raptured by God – whatever that meant – but surely, there was someone in her family who was still around. Chances were high, right?
Her family.
Clarice's home number would be in the school directory, in the yearbook. She could call and see.
Vicki knocked over the books on the end table, grabbed her yearbook, and flipped all the way back to Washington.