Chapter Text
Lesson 1: Expect everything.
The year Soul’s grandma died, construction began on the highway extension connecting Shibunsen Spings to the sprawling web of concrete and asphalt slowly encroaching upon the entire state. With it would come the flood of oversized superstores and never-ending development of row after row of suburbs until Shibunsen Springs became nothing but concrete and asphalt, too. It was a topic that dominated every other topic in town meetings, even the closing of the mines, considering most of Shibunsen Springs residents’ livelihood was now tied to the local stores and shops, and then rapidly became the only subject discussed in town at all.
Occasionally, Soul would choose to bike down to the edge of the construction site instead of going to homeroom (sometimes with Black Star or Maka, but mostly by himself) and watch the construction workers trucking materials and equipment back and forth, veiled by the forest bordering the town. The swarm of workers flitting between the cement trucks and mixers looked nothing like the apocalypse, which was the view that most of the town had taken on the extension, but then again, his family managed the mall in the neighboring, and much larger, town of Eibon, so his parents didn’t speak of the construction in the same way as the rest of Shibunsen Springs did.
His family’s concern laid with his grandma, the only grandparent Soul had ever known and his favorite person among his extended relatives. She recently moved up from Florida at the insistence of Soul’s father, who was concerned about his eighty year old mother living alone. Instead of taking up her son’s offer to fly her out, Grandma Evans drove the eight hour car trip to Shibunsen Springs in six hours and arrived at their house in a cloud of gravel and dust, the rickety truck bed attached to her decades-old convertible nearly plowing over the family cat in the process.
Equal parts eccentric and proper, she settled into their lives the same way a hurricane made landfall, living on her own schedule, joining the local choir and band, and staying out far longer than Wes or Soul did. She threw a fit whenever Soul’s parents tried to convince her to go out in anything less than her Sunday best and regularly practiced the trumpet at five in the morning, despite being waylaid by the occasional fainting spell and suffering from a perpetual hacking cough. In her closet, she kept a crate of books that were more dust than paper, most of them ghost stories. She often invited Wes or Soul into her room to listen her read in the afternoons, though with Wes commuting to the university in Eibon everyday, it was mostly Soul she looked for until it became a habit for him to visit her room first when he came home from school. Grandma Evans’ voice bordered on abrasive, worn thin from years on the stage, though the way she spoke gave every story the cadence of a song. In the beginning, she read every day, with bright eyes and a dramatic gusto that spun her words into something living and breathing, even on the days when she was continually short of breath.
However, by the end of the school year, her cough started to grow into daily fits of epic proportions. She emerged from them red-faced and winded, beginning to sleep in longer and longer, quietly falling out of the activities and clubs she joined when she first moved in until she rarely went out at all. The number of times she called for Soul or Wes slowly dwindled away into nothing; it wasn’t until just before the end that Soul realized he’d stopped pausing at the top of the stairs to see whether her scratchy voice would follow after him or not.
Still, Grandma Evans insisted to anyone who suggested otherwise that she was at the peak of health, right up until the moment she lost her balance and tumbled down the stairs.
What was meant to be an overnight stay at the hospital for a broken ankle evolved into three days, then a week. Ten days into her visit, the doctor stopped giving a direct answer to Grandma Evans whenever she demanded to know when she’d be released. Two weeks after she was admitted, the doctor gathered Soul’s family in Grandma Evans’ room to announce that the cough that she insisted was nothing more than the result of playing the trumpet for forty years turned out to be what was most likely the final stages of lung failure.
Grandma Evans barely blinked at the announcement. “Trying to escape death is about as productive as squeezing lemonade from rocks.” Her words were muffled by the respirator mask, and her voice was little more than a scraping rasp, but her gaze was sharp and owlish as she looked over at her son. “If you don’t take me out of this place, I’ll be walking home.”
It was only after she attempted to rise from her bed that Soul’s father took her seriously. He convinced her to stay in the hospital for another day while her things were moved from her bedroom upstairs into the office below.
When they arrived home, she insisted on walking from the car into the house on her own, although Wes had to carry the oxygen tank she was connected to up the porch steps. There were bright red patches in her cheeks by the times she made it up the last stair, and her breaths were punctuated with heavy wheezing, but the bright gleam in her eyes was the same that she had when finished playing the last note of a particularly difficult composition.
“I suppose there aren’t many better places to die,” she said matter-of-factly. Soul’s parents blanched at her words, but she only shrugged, causing the mask on her face to tilt lopsided. “What good is there in denying the truth?”
In spite of her apparent acceptance of the inevitable, Grandma Evans tried to live like she wasn’t slowly dying. She no longer went out like before, but she still put on her best outfits to go sit out on the porch, although that stopped when the rain started.
The storm struck nine days after she was released from the hospital, though the clouds had been gathering for nearly a week before the water finally fell; it came down as a steady rainfall at first, but rapidly deepened into a relentless downpour that felt far more insidious. The streets began to overflow and flood after two days of constant rain, but it was the violent rage that accompanied the storm that made people uneasy, even the old-timers who weathered the flood of ‘86. The wind made the cold immediately sink into their bones, catalyzing the flooding streets and sharpening the rain until it felt less like being drenched with water and more like being pelted with tiny knives. On the news, the meteorologist called it “a freak storm” and predicted it would move on or begin to lessen in a few days, though his assurances became feebler and feebler as the rain continued to fall and the damage to the town worsened.
For a week, the more daring of the town residents braved going out into the storm, most of them the owners of the small businesses that lined along the main street of Shibunsen Springs who were resolute in staying open, despite the storm. Black Star made the evening news when he had to be rescued after trying to surf down the length of the town using only a plank of wood and an oar and a particularly violent gust of wind swept him up into a tree. But when a teenage girl drowned in the middle of Hollow Square and the lightning came rolling in, even the most stubborn people in Shibunsen Springs were forced to concede defeat, and the town shut down in a way that had never been seen in its over two hundred years of existence, save for when the mines caved in forty years ago. Construction on the highway extension screeched to a halt, though the bright yellow trucks of workers building the Gorgon Supermart even as the storm worsened.
“This reminds me of hurricane season back in Florida,” Grandma Evans said to Soul shortly after he finished reading aloud the last sentence of The Tell-tale Heart and began searching for another story to read. He didn’t read nearly as well as she did, but he couldn’t stand being stuck in his house and doing nothing while she coughed the last of her life away in her room. “Except we threw parties when the storm hit-it wasn’t all of this doom and gloom.”
Her voice, which had dimmed since she returned from the hospital, was nearly inaudible between the constant thud of the rain outside and the hum of the respirator hooked next to her bed. “It’s a shame your town doesn’t have one of those big siren systems.”
Soul glanced towards the window-it was raining so hard that it was impossible to see more than ten feet outside. “Do you think it will stop soon?”
“Everything gets extinguished or extinguishes itself eventually,” she answered. “Look at me, for example.”
Soul moved his gaze back down to the book, staring at the page without seeing anything. An uncomfortable anxiety swelled up in his chest whenever Grandma Evans spoke about death, especially when he was in her room. It was where the rain was the loudest, where he was overwhelmed by the horror that even the most permanent of things (like her and the drowning town) became temporary, where he couldn’t ignore the voice in the back of his mind that whispered that she was going to be replaced by empty space soon, that she’d be nothing but a ghost in his memories.
And even that, the experiences of her life here and of the summers he spent with her, would fade with time, until there was nothing left, until he was nothing, too.
“You’re supposed to laugh at jokes.” Her voice pulled his eyes back to the bed. If he hadn’t seen the way she’d transformed over the past two weeks, he wouldn’t have believed that the frail old lady lying on the bed, struggling to breathe even with the respirator, was the same Grandma Evans who arrived seven months earlier.
He closed the book. “My laughter is silent.”
“I see you’ve inherited my sense of humor, at least.” She patted the space on the bed by her. “Come sit over here for a moment.”
Thunder rumbled in a low growl above the house as Soul rose from the rocking chair, sharpening into a whiplike crack as he perched on the edge of the bed. Up close, he could see the way she battled to breathe, so he directed his gaze down to the bed, even if it means he’s looking at her hands, which now tremble so much that it’s impossible for her to even hold her trumpet.
A wrinkled finger tapped the back of his hand, breaking the chain of thoughts. “Your grandfather played the piano before he became a miner.”
He lifted his head. Grandma Evans’ stories rarely stretched to the days before she and his grandfather settled in Shibunsen Springs. “Really?”
“When he was building this house, a post fell on his hands and he broke his right hand in four places,” she said after a violent cough. “Never played again, except on special occasions, but I see a bit of his spirit in you when you play.”
For a moment, Soul was quiet. “Did he resent having to go work in the mines?”
“We wouldn’t have had your father if we had both stayed musicians, so I don’t think so.” Her finger tapped against his hand again. “You can’t take what the universe gives or takes away from you too personally.”
“I think it would be easier to turn into a tree.”
She gave a weak chuckle, which soon transformed into another cough. When she caught her breath again, she adjusted the mask of her respirator. “Well, maybe you can take comfort in the fact that bad things come in fours.”
Soul frowned. “I thought bad things come in threes.”
“The fourth often sneaks itself in the aftermath of the first three,” she said. Her fingers wrap around his, and gave a squeeze. “But with this storm, my lungs, and that damned extension, I think it’s safe to say that you’re safe.”
A faint tingling feeling prickled on the nape of Soul’s neck as he nodded, though it wouldn’t be until months later that he realized he signed up for the recital right after Grandma Evans’ death.