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There was the clink of bottles and jars. The boy was piling things up on the stretcher, between Evelyn’s arms and legs, around her ears.

“What are you doing?” she said, or thought she said, but he didn’t answer.

There were times when he seemed to leave the kitchen completely, or perhaps he just went beyond the edge of Evelyn’s senses. Then he would return and give her water and food—bread and beans and vegetables that tasted earthy and slightly rotten. Still he added to their supplies. Jars, tools, clothes, shoes, blankets, most heaped on top of her, some collected in Lily’s shopping bag. She felt the pages of the book flutter against her forearm.

“What are you doing?” asked Evelyn again. Her heart ached more when she tried to speak, but only when it hurt did she know it was still there, still beating.

“We’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?”

He leaned over her and put a finger to his lips. She heard the voices of the man and the woman again.

“We have to be quick,” said the boy. “And very quiet.”

“There are seeds in one of the drawers,” said Evelyn.

“What?”

“There are seeds in one of the drawers.”

The boy went back to the cupboards and drawers, and she could hear him opening and shutting them, but she didn’t know whether he had heard what she had said.

At some point the boy decided they were ready and closed the sides of the stretcher around her like a cocoon, leaving only her head and shoulders free. He attached a rope to the head-end of the cocoon and began to pull it out of the kitchen.

The procession moved down the hallway, and Evelyn watched the dead bulbs of the electric lights pass overhead. She felt as if she were resting on her funeral bier. The boy dragged her past the opening to the staircase. The woman was tending to the man’s injuries behind the piled ruins of the stairs and did not see him pass with his strange sledge piled with trophies.

They came to the entrance to the cellar and passed this, too. The boy moved slowly and with great effort, pausing after each step. Evelyn’s bier slid and stopped, slid and stopped, slid and stopped. They reached the back stairs. The boy started to haul the tarpaulin up to the second floor. He seemed to rest for hours on each step, gasping for breath. The provisions he had loaded into the tarpaulin along with Evelyn’s body began to spill out and down the stairs, and he had to run back and forth collecting them. Some he put back in the bier; some he stuffed into the pack on his back. She witnessed this, too. She did not remember him having a pack like this.

Eventually they came to a set of ragged curtains that pooled on the floor next to Evelyn’s head. The boy opened them and there was light.

Shouting erupted from the floor below. Only the woman’s voice, though. The boy hissed and swore, and from somewhere in the depths of Evelyn’s head rose Mama’s voice telling him to wash his mouth out with soap.

The boy strained at the window. It would not budge. More shouts and footsteps on the stairs, on the landing. The frame gave a little, and he opened it to the world beyond. He had to unload everything from the bier and pass it through the window, then pull Evelyn through afterward. She was aware that he was panicking but found it hard to panic herself. She felt herself being passed through the gap and then laid to rest softly in the dust. It was piled up to just beneath the windowsills of the second floor. Ten feet deep, maybe twenty. The boy placed her back on the stretcher, then continued pulling and did not look back.

The day was golden. Morning or early evening, Evelyn wasn’t sure which. The sun was not far from the horizon, but she didn’t know if she was looking east or west. It seemed large and kindly and it warmed her bones. She turned her head slightly. The pain in her chest waxed and waned.

There was a beauty in the emptiness. A wondrous calm after the noise and violence of the house. The dunes rippled and glittered like the surface of the lake they had replaced, punctuated with treetops. Their leaves had shrugged off a good deal of the dust and showed muted green above the surface of the desert. Evelyn thought she recognized the arrangement of them. Chestnuts and cedars mostly. They were facing west then, and it was evening.

For some reason she thought she might see their chickens scratching in the dust. She looked for the tops of the beehives. The rough dome of Mama’s grave. All her years caring for these things, and it was as if they had never existed at all.

The boy took a route that was not directly west, but more southwest, and Evelyn soon saw dry leaves and branches passing above her. These were not evergreens, but beech and oak and sycamore, the trees that had lined the burn, and she knew that the boy was taking the old path of the stream toward the edge of the buried garden.

She gazed up at the heavens from her cocoon, and the sky blushed and turned blue and the branches became less and less distinct. Where the trees ended, the boy stopped and sat cross-legged in the dust. He offered her some water and brushed some of the dust from her eyes and nose. She drank gratefully. He opened one of the jars that he had loaded onto the bier and fished out a pickled egg. He ate half of it and gave the other half to Evelyn. The vinegar was so sharp it made her heart ache again.

“I think the sea is this way,” said the boy.

Someone had gone to the coast, the boy had told her, but Evelyn could not remember what he had said. She remembered something else, though, from much longer ago. A memory that had taken firmer root. In the book, people went to the sea to get better. They went to the seaside. Perhaps this was what the boy was thinking.

Mama had always said the sea had turned black a long time ago. But Evelyn did not know how much she believed Mama anymore.

She closed her eyes in assent and the boy didn’t say anything else. He sat beside her through the night as the enormous arc of stars passed silently overhead.

At dawn the boy got up and tied the bier to his waist again and started walking while it was still gray and freezing. The trees were gone and the garden was gone. A world behind them, and a world before them. The endlessness of it all. In the east the sun rose, as it had always done, and its light fell upon them both without judgment.