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The light streaming in through her small bedroom window was a gorgeous shade of orange, bathing the whole room in its glow. Katy could feel its warmth against her skin as she was lying on her bed, back turned to the window, and staring at the opposing wall.
She had never been an early riser, and so a window seat on the changing skies in the early morning would have been entirely lost on her. But sunsets – oh, she’d been happy to have even the sliver of them she could see through her little window.
She had loved the way the light reflected in her Waipo’s grey hair, turning it a stunning, metallic gold when she would come in to call Katy to dinner, had liked watching the shadows of their maple tree moving on her walls, the kaleidoscope of colors where the light hit the crystal bowl Soo had given her for her thirteenth birthday.
Just a few months ago, on her nineteenth birthday, the whole family had watched a montage of old videos Ruihua had made, featuring little Katy trying to reach up to the golden patch of light reflecting on her bedroom wall, as if she were a cat chasing after a torch beam. It was followed up by another scene of her, a few years older, sitting on her knees, and teaching the game to Ruihua, who was still too small to reach.
Katy used to love sunsets. Now half her family was gone and all she could see was the coming darkness.
She should be with them – the ones who were still here. But her mother and her Waigong had gone downstairs into the shop, making sure everything was secure, taking inventory of what they still had, because no one had any idea how the next few days would go down. Katy couldn’t bear thinking about it. Too much had happened in the past few hours that she couldn’t even start processing.
She’d been helping out in the shop when her father, along with half their clients, had vanished right before her eyes. She had barreled right into her mother on the steps up to their house, both of them unable to put into words what they’d just witnessed, and so they’d jut clung to each other until Waigong had ushered them inside, where there were no Ruihua and no Waipo waiting for them. There was no way of knowing who else was dead or alive, because all the lines had gone down almost immediately after people had started turning into dust.
And so Katy just kept staring at the slowly fading light on her wall, losing all sense of how much time had passed, until a knock pulled her out of her paralysis.
There weren’t many people left that it could be, and she knew that her mother used a knock on her door more as a split-second warning of her imminent entry than asking for permission to be allowed in, so she didn’t bother responding. It took a few seconds longer than usual for the door to crack open, but then it was only to be expected that today had also bereft her mother of some of her usual promptness and efficiency.
The voice that said her name from the doorway and the shadow projected on her wall by the dying sunlight, were, however, decidedly not her mother’s.
Katy had never heard him say her name like this before; more an incredulous breath of air with a crack in the middle than a word, splitting the syllables in two, like their entire world had been today.
She sat up and whirled around in one hasty motion, and there he stood in her doorway, chest heaving, a strand of sweaty hair falling onto his forehead, eyes panicked and wide.
Before she even knew what she was doing, Katy was first robbing on her knees over the mattress, then stumbling over the floor to get to him. Shaun had entered the room to meet her just quickly enough that he could catch her before she fell down, and so they both ended up kneeling on the floor in front of her bed.
She could feel the way her shoulder ached where she’d collided with her mother, but it didn’t keep her from pulling Shaun even closer to her, her arms snaking around his neck. His grip tightened around her middle as he buried his face into her shoulder. She could feel the sob bursting out of him more than she heard it, and it sent her own grief welling up in her again, although she’d thought she’d reached the limits of what she could feel in one day hours ago.
She tried to wrestle it back down, lest she got lost in it, tried to focus instead on nothing but the relief that had flooded her when she'd seen his shadow on her wall, the fact that he was solid and here, that he was safe, that at least she hadn’t lost him, too.
Eventually Shaun lifted his face from her shoulder and she let him retreat just far enough that she could see his face. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at her. The light had disappeared from the room during their embrace, dipping it in an earie shade of grey. Still, she could read the fear on his face plain as day.
“Who?” he asked, and again his voice didn’t manage to carry the word. Katy still understood him perfectly.
It took her a few seconds until she could get the three names out, and she watched as Shaun’s face crumpled a little more with each one, because they were his family, too.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his voice now down to a pitiful croak, and Katy saw tears glistening down his cheek, “I should’ve been here sooner.”
Katy shook her head in denial, hair flying wildly around her face, because she knew why it had taken him this long. She knew he’d been volunteering at a youth community center across town, because she had texted him to accuse him of dodging box-schlepping duty at the family shop only minutes before things had started going to shit. She knew that he wouldn’t have left the surviving kids until the last one of them would’ve been safe and cared for. She knew that he’d run home, run to her, as soon and as fast as he could. It was what let her hope, even as the time went by and the sun descended lower and lower into the sky, that he was still alive.
“You couldn’t have left them. And you couldn’t have done anything here, either,” she said, her fingers pressing down against the side of his neck as if to bring the point home by pushing it directly into his skin.
The utter powerlessness was the cruelest thing about it all. No matter what they’d done, how much they’d begged or cried or prayed, people had just disappeared. There was no logic to it, no pattern, no way to protect the ones you loved from the brutal randomness of the dust; no way to bring them back.
Shaun ducked his head, as if he were trying to shield himself from that reality. She could feel his trembling hands balling into fists where they were now lying against her thighs, his breathing that had just evened out turning labored once again.
Katy let her hands fall from his shoulders to put them gently over his closed fists, just leaving them there until he opened his hands up against her legs.
He looked up at her a few seconds later, his eyes still suspiciously wet and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
The silence didn’t unnerve her. They had passed the need to always be talking in each other’s presence a long while ago, could communicate without words and just exist alongside each other. She knew that this was what they needed right now, to just breathe and find whatever comfort they could together.
She let her forehead fall against his, let their breaths synch up until his trembling stopped.
“Where are the others?” Shaun asked eventually, not making any effort to move.
“In the shop, making sure everything’s in order,” Katy told him, moving back a little to brush a strand of hair that had gotten into her mouth back behind her ear, “I think it’s their way of coping.”
“Yeah,” Shaun said, now straightening up a little as well, mirroring Katy by running his hand through his own hair. “Heard anything from the others?”
Katy shook her head, less energetically before.
“Lines are still down,” she stated, glancing at her phone, lying still and useless on her bedside table.
They sighed in unison, and Shaun’s nails started digging into his jeans again.
“Is there something – anything I can do?”
Again, Katy shook her head no.
“You’re here,” she said, “that’s more than –“
She halted in the middle of her sentence, because to say it was more than enough would’ve been a lie. Of course this wasn’t enough, as glad as she was that he was alive. She wanted her little brother, her father, her grandmother back, she wanted to know that Soo, her college roommate, all her friends were alright. Her mother had always told her that she had no idea how hard life had been for her grand-parents and great-grand parents, during wars and famines and deprivation. Katy had an inkling that was about to change.
God, she was exhausted. All she wanted to do was sink into blissful oblivion, to forget about their stark new reality for at least a couple of hours.
Shaun gave her a long, understanding look.
“You should try to sleep,” he said gently.
He stood up in an uncharacteristically jerky motion, but the hand he extended to help Katy up was sure and steady as always.
“We should try to sleep,” Katy corrected him as she took his hand and let him pull her off the floor.
Shaun turned around, looking towards the hallway. Katy knew that he was thinking about the sofa in their living room that he’d spent many a night on in the past. She could also tell by the way his hand tightened around hers that he was reluctant to leave her.
“You should stay in here,” she said, squeezing his hand back in solidarity
“I’m all…,” he grimaced and gestured at his dusty, sweaty, stinking self.
Usually she would've joked about it and playfully pushed him in the direction of the shower, but she couldn’t find any humor inside her. Even her must trusted defense mechanism had been disabled by the terror of today.
“I don’t care,” she said bluntly.
She waited until he’d kicked off his shoes, not letting go of his hand for even one moment, and pulled him towards her bed. She ignored the slight tug on her hand that indicated a coming argument about him sleeping on the floor, shutting him up with a sharp look over her shoulder.
It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to make them both fit into her bed that was only barely larger than a twin, but they managed, and Katy found it oddly comforting to be cramped in like this.
The room was dark, but the feeling of his breath against her neck might just be enough to give her the strength to face the coming day.