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At some point, Carly looked up from her book to see Justin struggling with his own. He closed one eye. He tried bringing the book closer and then holding it out further away. Carly watched his eyes drift over the page. He blinked hard then tried to focus again.
Carly got up and went over to her pack. She was hesitant knowing Justin didn’t like to talk about his dyslexia. When she’d seen these in one of the stores they’d visited a while back, she had grabbed this item, wondering how she might approach it and if it might work for him.
Carly walked over to where he lounged with his back against a tree. Justin glanced up at her. “Hey, what’s up?”
She gnawed on the inside of her cheek. “I wanted to see if you felt like trying something.”
“Trying what?”
Carly held up the report cover. It was light blue, transparent plastic. “My mom used to volunteer to help tutor kids in summer school. This was one of the tricks they used to help the dyslexic kids with reading. If you’re willing to try it, we’ll start with the blue one because blue was the color that worked for most of the kids.”
Justin arched both brows in skepticism. “I never heard that.”
“It’s worth a try, right? We can just throw it away if it doesn’t work.”
He took the report cover from her and opened it. He laid the top layer over his book and held it up again to read. He was silent for a long moment, and then he looked up at Carly in astonishment. “It really does help. It’s not perfect, but this is amazing, Carly. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Carly grinned and barely restrained herself from skipping as she went back over to her own spot on the other side of camp. She lay down on the sleeping bag on her stomach and propped the book she was reading on the pillow in front of her. Her legs were bent up behind her, ankles crossed in the air. She didn’t know Justin was watching her until she looked up. His expression was strange, indecipherable. When he caught her eye, he quickly looked back down at his plastic-covered page, a small frown on his lips. She thought she detected a hint of a blush and wondered why.
God, she hoped she hadn’t offended him in some way. People could be really sensitive about that sort of thing.
Later, as Justin cooked, that small frown returned. Carly couldn’t contain her curiosity any more. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Nothing important.”
“You seem to be concentrating on nothing rather intently.”
“I’m sorry, Carly. I just have... some things on my mind. Don’t let it worry you, all right? And thanks for the plastic idea. It really helped me.”
“You’re welcome.” Maybe that was what was bothering him. Who knew? She could never figure out men’s thinking patterns.
After dinner, Carly took their dishes down to the beach to wash them, and she sat there afterward, looking out over the water at the mountains. She was leaving behind everything she knew and trying to shape herself into the kind of person this new world required. Struggling to adapt, just like in evolution, to develop the traits she needed to survive. Then, maybe, Justin wouldn’t see her as a helpless little pest. Maybe he would see her as...
Carly didn’t finish the thought.
Their days soon fell into a comfortable pattern. Justin was careful not to rush them. Every day, Carly got stronger, and they were able to cover more ground. They traveled with the sun. Justin woke her each morning at dawn, and they’d have breakfast before tearing down the campsite and reloading the wagon. They were usually ready to start moving again by the time the sun broke over the horizon. When it began to set in the evening, they would stop and set up the camp again.
Justin showed her how to purify water, using bleach or iodine, and then how to make various distilling devices, and how to capture water from the earth itself through evaporation if she couldn’t find a creek. He showed her how to make a snare to trap game, though Sam brought them a rabbit or squirrel almost every night. Sam appeared to be proud he was feeding his “pack.”
Justin seemed to enjoy teaching her survival skills and Carly worked very hard to remember it all. She needed him to know she wasn’t dumb; she just had never learned these things. Once she learned them, she would be just as capable as he was.
While they traveled along, they chatted companionably. They discovered they both had a taste for British comedy, and Justin declared she was the sole woman under forty he knew who liked Monty Python. That led to both singing the songs from the movies and television shows, and Carly discovered his singing voice really was as off-key as it had been when he sang Come Sail Away while he washed their clothes. He seemed to know every single love ballad from the 1980s, and to hear him belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart in his awful voice made Carly laugh until tears streamed from her eyes.
Whenever they passed a house, Justin would go in to scavenge, replacing the supplies they’d used. His goal was to have enough for them to survive for at least six months if they were trapped somewhere, unable to move on or replace what they used. Carly knew he was thinking of winter. It was unlikely they’d make it to the South before the snows came.
If the house was empty, they would sometimes stay the night, but Carly was always a little uncomfortable about it. She looked at family photos, clothes left behind in closets, toys scattered in small bedrooms, the artifacts of the prior owners’ lives, and felt like she was violating a shrine left to them. This would be their only mark left on earth. The sole memorial to their lives since no tombstone would ever be erected to mark the place where they lay.
Justin didn’t seem to be troubled by the same thoughts, which became quite obvious when she found him tearing up a white silk wedding dress one evening.
At her cry of horror, he stopped. “What?”
“Why are you doing that?”
“Making bandages.”
“Out of silk?”
“If the wound doesn’t need absorbent padding, silk bandages are gentler. They were working on modified spider silk bandages when I was in the service. It promotes healing, because of the proteins in the silk. I’ll boil them and then store them in an airtight container.”
