THE FIRST TIME MY FUTURE VANISHED was July 19, 2034.
I was still at the Way Station animal shelter thirty minutes after I'd planned to leave—the tomcat who'd been brought in the month before had finally dared approach my lap and I hadn't wanted to scare him off. Mom wouldn't have dinner ready and Iris wouldn't be home yet, anyway, so it didn't matter what time I left.
I gently stroked the tomcat's fur. A hesitant purr rattled under my hand.
"That's good," I whispered. "Hey. You're fine. See? Humans aren't so scary." I kept whispering until the door behind me opened with a creak. The tomcat was off my lap before I even turned my head.
"Denise!" John said, stricken. "You're still here?"
I pointed at the tomcat's cage. There was no sign of the cat himself, though I bet he was in the box in the corner of the cage, flat against the bottom and safely out of sight. "He was on my lap. We're making progress." John was near my age—a fellow volunteer, not my boss. Still, I hesitated and said, "Should I not be here?"
"I thought you'd gone home for the announcement."
"The announcement." I blinked. "Right. The announcement was today."
I don't keep track of the news as well as I should, but the date of the announcement had been plastered all over for days, on billboards and nonstop online tickers, to the point where even I had picked up on it.
I'd remembered at lunch. After that, I'd had cages to clean out.
"Yeah, yeah, it just ended. Well, they're still talking about it. But the announcement itself—you really didn't see anything? Didn't you get a reminder on your tab?" John wasn't normally this flustered.
"I took my tab off. It scares some of the cats." I rose from my chair and gestured at the bracelet dropped on the corner table. "I can watch at home."
My back hurt from sitting still for so long. I hadn't wanted to move a muscle for fear of scaring off the tomcat. He'd been tense the whole time, his feet poking into my legs, ready to jump. I wondered if I could lure him back to my lap tomorrow.
"It's …" John reached toward me, then thought better of it. His hand fell to his side.
"It's important," I said, part statement and part question.
He said nothing.
"It's important," I repeated. I'd never seen John like this. I knew how the tomcat had felt: tense, waiting.
"There's a comet," John said.
In the distance, I heard the dogs bark. I knew I had to say something, so I said, "Oh?"
I didn't understand yet.
But thirty minutes later I sat by Mom on the couch and heard the announcement myself, and then I went online and read and read and read. I understood, then, and felt myself shrink with every word.
This is the second time my future vanishes: it's January 29, 2035, and I give up.
I stand by the same couch I sat on for the announcement half a year ago. My gaze follows Mom, who slips from room to room, opening this drawer and digging into that cabinet.
"We're late," I say.
"We still have an hour!" Mom calls from the kitchen.
"Forty minutes."
Forty-one, I want to say. We're late either way. We may still have forty-one minutes until the earliest possible time of impact, but the temporary shelter we were assigned to is well outside Amsterdam, a forty-five-minute ride, and Mom made us skip every bus sent to take us there.
Even if the roads are clear, even if the car doesn't break down on the way, we're late.
My cheeks have already dried after my panic attack. My heart has slowed; my throat no longer feels raw from screaming at Mom that we have to go and we have to go now and the world is ending and we're doing to die and how can she act so normal—
And now we're late.
"We'll be fine!" Mom says. "They wouldn't lock us out. And the comet might come later. They'll have given us an early ETA, honey. We'll leave in—in ten minutes."
She promised me that half an hour ago.
"Ten minutes," Mom says again. "I want to wait for Iris a little longer."
Mom flits toward the pantry. We emptied it already. I'm not sure what Mom is doing in there now. We traded or ate everything that was close to expiring—finishing up the very last crackers, the very last imitation Nutella, which had so little flavoring it might as well have been hazelnut butter—and the rest is either tucked into our backpacks or secure in the safe in Mom's closet. We can bring only one backpack each into the temporary shelter.
After the shelter closes, we'll return here and hope the safe survived whatever is coming, because otherwise we won't survive. In truth, I'm not sure we will anyway. It's not a large safe. It holds only so much.
That shapeless after is just a few days away, and I still don't know what it will look like except for "bad." No one does. The government can outline possibilities, Iris and I can theorize, but we won't know until it happens.
The not knowing burns me.
I do know this, though: the government assigned us a temporary shelter; we're supposed to have arrived there already; we're supposed to survive the initial comet impact. I shouldn't let my thoughts go past that.
I sink into the couch. I've been standing next to the massive pack by my feet and wearing the winter coat that swallows me whole, hoping that remaining standing might make Mom hurry up. If I sit, she'll think I'm not waiting for her, and she'll take her time like she always does. I learned that trick from Iris.
But we're late. It no longer matters whether Mom hurries.
I lean forward, my elbows on my knees. Iris should be here. Whenever we're waiting for Mom, she'll either yell at Mom to go or she'll roll her eyes at me behind Mom's back, make a joke out of it. She'll send tracks to my tab and ask my thoughts on the Suripunk musicians she booked for her next festival.
I keep my eyes on my feet. I know these boots, but I no longer know this room around me. Too much is missing. We've traded what we could. We've packed what we'll need. The clock on the wall is silent, the batteries long since taken out. The heater is silent, too. The lights on what few electronics we have are all off, because the electricity was finally disconnected this morning. The power plants were shut down along with everything else. There's no one left to run them, anyway—all the employees must have fled by now. Fled the continent, fled the surface, fled the planet, in boats and underground shelters and interstellar arks, if they were lucky enough to win a lottery or be deemed indispensable.
My fingers pick at the edge of the couch. It's old. The thread unravels in a way that's almost satisfying. I say what has taken me days to say: "Mom. Iris isn't coming."
Mom is silent for two seconds. "She knows about the evacuation order, honey. She'd do everything she could to come home on time."
Arguing with Mom never works. She gets this smile that makes me feel like I'm silly for even trying. The smile says, Mom knows best, and it says, Let me explain, honey. No, I don't mind. I'm patient. I'm so glad I can teach you these things. You can't help not understanding.
But I gather my words and push them out, keeping my eyes trained on my boots. "Iris was supposed to come home two days ago, and you kept telling me she'd be here before we evacuate, but she's not. If she was fine, she'd be here. We had the time to …" I'd begged Mom to drive to Belgium to find Iris and bring her back. Mom refused. She said she trusted Iris; she said Iris was fine; she said we didn't have enough gas for the car. We've had these arguments, and I lost them. I don't want a repeat. "Something happened to her," I mumble. "She couldn't make it back on time. She might've found a different shelter in Belgium. She's not coming."
I'm smarter than to suggest that she may be dead, since that would make Mom give me that look that tells me how wrong I am, and that would only anger me because I'm not, I'm not wrong; it's possible there have been riots and violence and looting worldwide, and it would explain why Iris isn't here, and I don't see why Mom won't even consider it. If she considered it she wouldn't be so calm. I consider it. I'm not calm. I panic every time.
We're late, and Iris may be dead.
I go from picking at the couch to digging into the fabric, fingernails hooking into frayed strings. I don't want to panic. It makes Mom sit by my side and whisper soothing words that don't help. I need her to focus on getting out of here. Late or not, the shelter is our only plan.
The door to the pantry creaks. Mom stands there, half-shielded by the door. With the electricity shut off, there's no light. It's mid-afternoon, but it's midwinter, too, and there are thick clouds outside with no sun. The little light that comes in through the window barely illuminates Mom's pallid skin. I hear the crinkle of plastic in her hand. She talks quickly to cover it up: "But what if we leave now and Iris shows up two minutes later? What if …"
She shakes her head. Her hair swishes over her shoulders.
Iris knows where the shelter is, I want to point out. She'd pass it on her way here. She might wait there for us. It would be smarter than going home first.
Mom shifts her weight from foot to foot so that it looks like she's swaying. I check her eyes out of habit, but they're clear. They're not red or that painful-to-look-at kind of shiny that makes me close my bedroom door and wait it out. Mom's not high. Whatever this is, it's just her.
I avert my gaze before she realizes I'm looking.
"Ten minutes," she says hoarsely.
I nod, because it doesn't matter anyway.
The plastic crinkles in Mom's hand again as she sits by her backpack and slips the baggie in. She thinks she's being stealthy. She thinks I don't notice.
I pretend that's true.
