White Wasteland, Jeff Kirkham [ebook reader with highlight function TXT] 📗

hadn’t thought about politics in months. She needed a bigger emotional toolbox.

Maybe the Bible could provide salve to the psychological wounds that afflicted more than half the Homestead. Maybe the universe was trying to tell her something. Maybe, faith could be her new mental health toolbox.

Her mind wandered. Which Mary had the little book been talking about? Mary Magdalene? Mary, Mother of Jesus? Was there another Mary she was forgetting? Why had there been so many Marys?

She walked out the back door at the end of the stone gallery and stepped into the pool gardens. The limestone columns, arches and fountains of the gardens remained, but the wisteria climbing up the columns had died from lack of water, or maybe the winter had forced it into hibernation.

The fountains had been covered by some industrious soul with enough energy to “winterize” the Ross family sculpture. Jacquelyn wondered, with all the death and destruction of the previous three months, who had taken the time to complete that task? It must’ve been one of the Ross family’s personal assistants or groundskeepers. Almost all of their staff, including the immigrant landscapers, had been invited to join the Homestead after the collapse. That small act—covering the fountains—gave Jacquelyn a lilt of hope. A bright spot in a world of darkness.

Maybe the Bible could be a bright spot in a dim world.

A baby walked around the corner of the ivy-covered pool wing, and tottered under the dead trellis of wisteria. Behind the baby, a woman appeared in a wheelchair, struggling to catch up.

“Hold on, Travis. Wait for mommy,” the woman called out, obviously in pain. Her leg stuck straight out in front of the wheelchair, ensconced in a crude plaster cast from hip to toe. It was the same type of cast Jacquelyn had when she broke a leg riding a skateboard when she was twelve years old. Her friends had written get-well messages or penned funny drawings on it. Nobody had penned anything on this young mother’s cast.

“Oh. Hi, Jacquelyn,” the mother waved a quick hello, one hand working a wheel and the other holding down a diaper bag. Full breasts, roomy hips, and still a tiny bit of baby fat in her cheeks tagged the woman as a first-time mom. It never ceased to amaze Jacquelyn how young Utahans married.

Jacquelyn’s mind raced to remember the girl’s name. “Hi, Tess. How’s your leg?” Jacquelyn hoped she’d remembered her name correctly. It was Jacquelyn’s place in the Homestead to make people feel like they mattered. Her personal mission: to know everyone’s name and to use the names every chance she got.

“I’m hanging in there. Thank you. Doc Erik thinks I’ll be able to walk again. It was touch-and-go there for a minute. They almost took the leg off. But the doctor thinks I’ll be okay. We’re praying for a miracle, hoping I’ll get back to full mobility.” The baby rounded the next corner and the mother, Tess, rolled faster. “Bye, Jacquelyn. See you at dinner.”

“Let me help with the baby,” Jacquelyn fell in line after Tess’ wheelchair. “I can give you a push.”

“No. I’m fine. It’s good for me to exercise, chasing my chubby nugget. Rolling around after him is doctor’s orders. Thanks, though.” Jacquelyn dropped back and let the mother and her baby zig-zag around the next corner of the pool deck.

“Praying for a miracle” Tess had said. Jacquelyn remembered the details of the woman’s injury. She barely knew Tess, but she’d heard. Tess’ husband was killed in the battle against the gangbangers. Twenty-five years old, if memory served.

During the mob invasion a week back, Tess had been caught in a one-on-one fight defending her baby against a male intruder with a baseball bat. The man shattered her femur with the bat and dropped the sweet-faced mama right where she stood between the attacker and her child. It was a miracle Tess hadn’t lost her leg. Someone said it’d been broken in six places. Somehow, the baby came out unscathed.

Anger rose in Jacquelyn and she prayed not for a miracle of healing but prayed instead that the bat-wielding asshole had died in excruciating pain—a jagged knife to the throat, maybe, his blood pouring over his chest, with just enough time to know that he was heading straight to hell; his last sin to maim a young mother defending her baby.

Jacquelyn let the anger and hatred flood her insensate. For a moment, she just seethed. She shivered, then returned from her black-dipped reverie.

Screw the Bible. Screw fantasies about God or Mary or prayer. This world didn’t deserve such beautiful delusions.

She reminded herself that her people needed her back today, balanced and put-together. Her little, mental jaunt into the realm of religion and mysticism had cost her some of that balance. She had to find her answers and the salves for her soul in science, not buried in books or old religions.

She thought about the baby. Not Travis, but the other baby—the one they were hiding in the Schaffer house.

She’d picked up the habit of visiting the baby every day, just long enough to take in the clean baby smell and get it all over her clothes. Washing clothes by hand made clothing stiff and lifeless, more a perfunctory shelter for the body than an enjoyable part of life. Holding a baby reunited her with her clothing, making clothes a happy thing. The baby smell was a time-release drug her heart desperately needed.

Right now, she should check on some patients and make herself seen on Homestead grounds. Inevitably, someone would ask for her to sit and listen to their sadness. Then another person. Then another. She would be lucky to come up for air for three hours. After the people were done pouring their sadness into her, she would reward herself with a visit to the baby. Jacquelyn inhaled at the thought of it.

For whatever deep-seated psychological reason, they called him “Baby.” Just Baby.

Last time she’d been to see him, two new women were there, cooing over