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Joel is old, like was-grown-up-before-the-world-went-to-shit old, would-have-a-grown-up-daughter old, knee-pain-and-back-pain-and-all-over-pain-old, deaf-in-one-ear old. Joel is old, and tired, and sad. A lot tired. A lot sad.
Mostly old.
Ellie watches him, curious and calculating in the way only 14-year-olds can be, like when they’re gearing up to ask you a wildly intrusive question without a thought as to why it might be lacking a bit of tact.
Joel notices. He lets her ask her questions and mostly responds with non-committal hums. Lets her answer for him (correctly or incorrectly) based on what she decides to be the tone of his grunts. It’s certainly a flawed system, but it works. Well, it works for her, at least.
She trails behind him as they walk, skipping occasionally, dragging branches she finds behind her, humming to herself. It’s nice to hear her again. She was quiet, way too quiet, after Sam. After Henry. Joel is pleased to see some color coming back to her cheeks, even if most of it is probably from the chill of the air as winter rapidly approaches.
Joel’s bones ache and ache and ache.
They stop in a little neighborhood probably in Kansas or Nebraska and Joel barricades them in a basement with no windows. Only one exit, but that also means only one entrance. It’s cold but as safe as they’re going to get. It was once probably a really nice basement, carpeted and with a big leather couch. They’re lucky; it’s been relatively sealed off until now so the rot and water haven’t seeped in as much as Joel has seen twenty years do. Or what twenty years can undo.
He’s hurting badly and it takes almost everything in him not to cry when he sees that the couch is intact and a sectional, large enough for Ellie to sleep on the short end and Joel to stretch out on the main portion. They eat a meager dinner of cans of corn and beans scrounged from the kitchen upstairs, illuminated only by Ellie’s flashlight resting on the ground next to her shoes.
“Do you believe in God?” Ellie asks suddenly, her spoon scraping the bottom of her can.
Joel blinks hard. Puts his spoon in his own can. “No,” he decides. “Not anymore.”
“Why not?” She’s looking at him with those huge brown eyes, head tilted like a dog’s. Her hair is frizzy, the strands in front that tend to fall out of her ponytail fluffy and wavy.
Joel shrugs. “Not a lot in this world that makes me think of God.”
Ellie hums, carefully using her spoon to get out the last few kernels of corn.
“I guess I used to believe in a merciful God,” Joel continues, and Ellie’s head snaps back up; clearly she had taken the conversation to be over. “But I don’t think anyone has been shown mercy in a long, long time.”
Because the God Joel’s parents and grandparents taught him to love and rely on cannot be the one that created the current world. Cannot be the one who took his daughter away from him, cannot be the one that forced Joel’s hand to take lives in order to survive. There is nothing holy about this world, nothing sacred. Nothing but death and destruction and agony and sadness.
He tries to look for mercy where he can.
He finds none.
Joel stares down at his can of beans. It’s empty already, and he tries not to sigh. He tosses the can into the corner and licks his spoon clean. Ellie does the same. Normally he’d insist on staying up and taking watch, but the basement is as secure as they’re going to get. There’s no way to get into the room without shoving over the massive TV shelving unit they’d moved to cover the door.
So Joel gets situated on the couch, Ellie curled into a ball, her head by his feet.
He doesn’t sleep.
—
They hole up in a church to escape the downpour outside. Joel stares and stares at the shattered stained glass high above them, the rotted cushions of the pews, the ivy and moss creeping over the altar. Rain still trickles in from various holes in the roof, but they’re at least somewhat protected from the weather. He takes out a few clickers that remain, one still dressed in the shreds of a priest’s robe. Joel crushes its skull with his boot, blood pouring all over the stone floor, seeping into the cracks, melting into the earth.
Ellie is examining the altar when Joel returns, eyes wide and curious. One of the pews near the front of the room has escaped the damp over the years so Joel sits there and stares at the massive cross at the head of the church, the figure of Jesus nailed to it. Ellie is already bored from her exploration, moving away from the rusted skeleton of the organ and coming to sit next to Joel. For a while she’d kept looking at him like she wanted to ask questions, but ultimately decided against it.
Joel is grateful.
Ellie reads for a bit and then naps on the pew as the rain pours on and the sun slowly goes down. Joel drapes the extra blanket he stuffed in the bottom of his pack over her and takes to pacing. Moss squishes under his feet. The slate floor is slick and cold.
Joel finds himself in front of the altar. There are no more candles, all of them probably taken by scavengers a long, long time ago. The statue of Jesus on the cross is barely illuminated by the cloud-covered dying sunlight. It’s falling apart. One of the arms is gone, the wood long since swollen with water and cracked and split like a rotten melon. Joel kneels.
He hasn’t prayed in a long, long time. He doesn’t even remember any of the prayers his family used to say, or any of the other ones in the Bible.
So he makes something up, asks for forgiveness even though he knows he does not and will not ever deserve it, asks for a safe place for Sarah’s soul to rest.
Rainwater drips from a hole in the roof onto the statue. Raindrops run down over its cracked cheekbones.
—
“Were you praying? In the church?” Ellie asks abruptly, decidedly not looking where she’s going in favor of watching the mud squelch around her shoes.
Joel swallows. “I don’t know what I was doing. Doesn’t matter.”
Ellie hops over a rock and squeaks at the spray of mud that results. Joel wants to scold her because the cuffs of his jeans didn’t escape said splash, but she’s having so much fun that he can’t bring himself to tell her to stop.
“I’ve never prayed,” she states. “What does it do?”
“For me, nothing,” Joel says, adjusting his backpack again. His back and shoulders ache and ache and ache.
“Then why do you do it?”
Joel shrugs again. The motion is quickly becoming his favorite means of response. “I haven’t in a long time. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Okay,” Ellie says, because she’s 14 and how she decides what deserves needling and what she accepts immediately is a complete mystery to Joel.
Ellie hops again, delighting in the sound of the mud.
“You’re gon’ slip if you’re not careful,” Joel warns, and Ellie scoffs.
She ends up face down on the ground a few minutes later, and Joel lets himself smile.
—
Jackson is alive and bustling and he and Ellie have a house where sunlight pours in through the windows on warm mornings and where Joel’s coffee mugs are in the cabinet and Ellie’s friends come over and sit on the living room carpet and where Joel picks up Ellie’s dirty socks from the bathroom floor.
They cook together in the evenings and Ellie goes to school while Joel goes to work (carpentry and building, something known, secure, true). He works in the garden despite the ache in his knees and soon there are butterflies and bumblebees and fresh vegetables for them. Maria brings him a rubber pad to kneel on while he plants and weeds, and he’s grateful. Ellie can’t go on patrol yet so she gets into trouble with her friends and gets way too drunk at a bonfire one night like the teenager she is and Joel holds her hair and pats her back in the upstairs bathroom while she retches and begs for death.
“Does this happen every time you drink?” she slurs once he’s finally gotten her face out of the toilet and leaned her up against the wall. Joel wets a washcloth with warm water and crouches next to her once again. His knees crack and ache and ache and ache. He wipes her face and neck gently. Moonlight sprays over her closed eyelids from the slats between the blinds, her skin pale and glowing.
“Yeah, honey, when you drink like this, it does.”
She loudly declares the next day that she’s never drinking again and based on the state of her, Joel’s inclined to believe it. He doesn’t punish her, she’s learned her lesson all by herself.
“Why did I do that?” she moans, her forehead resting on her hand at the kitchen table, her other hand poking listlessly at the lightly buttered toast Joel put in front of her.
“You’re a teenager. Your brain ain’t fully developed yet. You’re gon’ do stupid things every once in a while. Everyone does.”
“Oh yeah? What stupid teenage things did you do?” she tries to demand, though it just sounds more pitiful than anything.
Joel smiles at her softly. “Well, for one, I got someone pregnant when I was 16,” he says.
She snaps her head up, wincing like she regrets the movement but still wanting to see Joel’s face, to see if he’s serious.
“Really? You mean- Sarah, when you were-?”
Joel nods. “Please don’t get pregnant any time soon,” he tells her. “You’re already enough for me to deal with, you little varmint.” He puts his Texas accent heavy into that last word, and she laughs.
“No way. Boys are gross,” she says, sticking out her tongue at Joel and making a “blech” noise.
“That they are. But seriously, if you wanna start having sex, come talk to me and we’ll talk about how to do it safely. So you don’t end up with a kid while you’re still a kid yourself.”
She nods, serious. “Do you regret having Sarah so young?” she asks, pulling a piece of crust off of her toast and nibbling on it.
Joel doesn't have to think. “No. I mean, it was a pretty stupid decision to have unprotected sex, but it turned out okay. It led to one of the best things that ever happened to me, so… I would have liked to have been more prepared though, older and with more stability.”
It’s true. While the way Sarah came into Joel’s life wasn’t ideal, he still liked to think that she was a gift from God, given to him when he needed her the most, whether or not he knew it at the time. Now, he mostly tries to thank the universe for his daughter, and the earth for welcoming her back into its arms when her time here was done. He thanks the earth for a lot of things, for the rain on their garden, for Ellie’s immunity, for the materials that built their house, for horses and yeast to make bread, for this other daughter, this stupid, brilliant little girl he has in front of him.
Ellie smiles sadly. She takes a small bite of her toast.
“Do you think it was God’s plan, or something? For you to have her when you did?” she asks suddenly, her uncanny ability to always know what Joel is thinking ringing true once again. “Or, did you before, at least?”
Joel shrugs. “Before, probably. Not so much anymore. But,” –he stands and moves over to Ellie’s chair– “whatever is out there, the universe or God or something else, also brought me to you, so whatever it is, I’m grateful.”
He presses a kiss to the top of her head, breathing her in for just a second. Ellie stares at him like he’s the thing she loves most in the world, and he lets himself believe, for a second, that he very well might be.
“You can’t say something like that to me and then just walk away!” Ellie calls after him as he goes to the stairs to get dressed. “Joel!”
Joel can hear her smile through the words. He smiles too.
Life goes on.
—
Summer comes and brings with it heat and bugs but fresh fruit. Joel shows Ellie the best way to peel an orange and helps her turn the garage behind his house into a little apartment. Clearly someone had been working on it before the outbreak and put a bathroom in, so all he had to do on that front was get the pipes hooked up to the main system. Tommy helped and stole some of their strawberries for his trouble.
Ellie spends time with her friends most days but always comes back to spend time with Joel too. He tries not to be surprised that she wants to be around him. She brings him treasures like a crow, cool rocks or bottle caps or beads that she finds. He puts them all on the windowsills and shelves around the house.
She comes over to the back porch one morning while he’s sitting on the steps and scrubbing a pair of his jeans on their washboard over what probably used to be a trough for some farm animal. It works great for laundry purposes, though, so Joel’s not complaining. Heather McDonald down the road makes soap for everyone in the community, and this batch smells like lavender.
Ellie comes next to him, holding a bundle of clothes in her hands.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says smiling up at her.
She smiles back. “So, uh. I have a question.”
Joel grunts in acknowledgement and reaches behind him for the knob on the side of the house that turns on the hose to rinse the soap from his jeans.
“How do you get blood out of fabric? I never really thought about it because you’ve always done all the laundry, which is really nice of you by the way, but-”
Joel’s head was snapped up to look at her by the fifth word she said. “Why? Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head. “No, no. I just got my period and I bled through my pants.”
Joel breathes. “Alright, that’s okay,” he says, instinctively, because he doesn’t want her to be embarrassed even though she doesn’t seem to be at the moment. “Go rinse out the blood as much as you can with cold water, not hot, hot will set the stain in, and then use a little bit of soap to scrub it out. If you can’t get it all the way out with your hands, bring it here and I’ll use the washboard.”
“Okay! Thanks!” she says brightly, and disappears back into her garage.
Joel thinks that maybe he was always meant to be a father to daughters, to wash blood out of their clothes and tell them it’s okay, to be patient and to brush hair and kiss foreheads and to listen. Because, he thinks, if there is anything sacred left in this world it’s the love that he has for his girls.
“Love is patient and kind,” his mother recites in his head. He doesn’t remember what Bible verse it’s from, but he remembers her saying it. He doesn’t really remember her voice, though, which puts him in a slight funk for the rest of the day. He realizes, too, that he doesn’t quite remember her face, the face of the woman who brought him into this world.
He is desperately grateful, again and again and again, to Tommy for bringing him that picture of his daughter, lest her memory meet the same fate. Perhaps the fact that he has the photo at all is a mercy itself. He remembers telling Ellie, once upon a time, that he used to believe in a merciful God. He still looks for mercy, for love, despite everything, despite despite despite.
—
“What does the word ‘holy’ mean?” Ellie asks one day while they’re out on patrol together. She’s riding on his left side so Joel can hear her.
“It’s like… something sacred. Relating to the church. People used to say that churches were holy because they felt the presence of God inside.” Joel’s horse snorts loudly as if in agreement.
“Hm. So it’s not, like, something with a lot of holes in it, like the cheese Mr. Donovan makes.”
Joel actually laughs at that in a way that can only be considered a guffaw.
Ellie grins.
The horses walk lazily down the path. No Infected stalk the trails today; the sun and mosquitos are their only enemies.
“Have you ever felt something holy?” Ellie asks. She’s been teaching Shimmer to neck-rein, and so far it’s been going well. Her free hand rests easily on her thigh.
“Mm,” Joel thinks. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure what constitutes as holy.”
“I mean,” Ellie starts. “I guess ‘holy’ can be anything you want, right? Like, it doesn’t always have to be religious.”
“You’re too smart for me, kiddo.”
She swats at him playfully, even though Shimmer’s too far away from Joel’s mount for her to make contact.
A creek burbles in the distance.
There was a creek near where they buried Sarah, tucked her between the trees in a thicket where the branches would watch over her, where the roots would keep her bones safe. Where the deer and the wind would be her visitors, because Joel and Tommy would likely never be able to come back.
“When I die,” he says suddenly, and Ellie looks at him like he’s insane. “I want you to bury me somewhere out here. Don’t need a coffin or nothin’, just put me in the thicket and let nature do its thing. The earth’ll take care of me and that’s all I need.”
Ellie softens, then. “Okay.”
The creek rushes on.
—
Perhaps it is unfair for Joel to search for mercy when he himself is not a merciful man, not a good man, not a selfless man. He shot Marlene in the face while she begged for her life, he’s killed hundreds of people, tortured some too, all for this teenage girl, who’s sobbing on the ground in front of him because he lied, he lied he lied he lied he loves her so much but he lied. He loves her so much that he lied.
“We’re done,” Ellie says, and her eyes are red and tears are running down her cheeks like raindrops on a wooden face and Joel wants to beg for her forgiveness, for her mercy. He wants to fall to his knees on this bruised earth and weep.
But he gets on his horse and follows Ellie home.
—
He’s playing his guitar when Ellie comes to the porch, looking awkward and gangly and strong and beautiful. Joel sits up quickly. His guitar takes its place leaned up against his chair.
“Hey,” he murmurs.
She asks about the coffee he traded for recently. He indulges her even though he knows she’s just stalling.
“I had Seth under control,” she states, suddenly.
“Yeah, I know.” And he does know, of course he knows, of course , because she’s grown up into the most remarkable woman he knows and has ever known, because she is capable and smart and kind even though she can be brusk and rude at times.
Because she is everything sacred left in this world.
“And you need to stop harassing Jesse about my patrols.”
“Okay,” he says, because there is nothing else to say. And then, because he has to ask, even though they don’t talk like this anymore, even though he lost the privilege of being privy to what’s going on in her life, even though she’s so angry with him– “Dina. Is she your girlfriend?”
“No!” Ellie says, way too quickly. “No. She– That was just one kiss, it doesn’t mean anything, she just… I dunno why she did that.”
Joel doesn’t remember her ever getting embarrassed like this. “But, you do like her,” he prompts gently. Ellie says something to herself that he can’t hear, so he continues. “Look, I have no idea what that girl’s intentions are, but… I do know that she would be lucky to have you.”
And Ellie breaks. “You are such an asshole!” she snaps, and her voice is breaking and Joel’s heart is breaking along with it.
“I’m not trying to-”
“I was supposed to die in that hospital,” Ellie cries. “My life would’ve. Fucking. Mattered. But you took that from me.”
And Joel thinks and thinks and thinks. He thinks of Ellie and her stupid fucking pun books, her laughter, the way she let Joel teach her guitar, the way she still stayed in his backyard even though she can’t stand to be in the same room as him, the smell of her hair when he gave her hugs, the feeling of her body pressed against his side when they watched their shitty movies together and she curled up under his arm, her head on his chest. The way she cared for him when he was stabbed by that fucking broken baseball bat, the way she screamed at him to shut the fuck up and refused to let him die. The way he once called her babygirl and honey and sweetheart .
He thinks of God, and the earth and the universe and whatever else, and he straightens up, sets his mug on the railing, and looks Ellie in the eye.
“If somehow the Lord gave me a second chance at that moment… I would do it all over again.”
Ellie stares at him.
Joel is a selfish man. He is a broken one. But if there is one kind of man that Joel Miller is, he is loving.
Ellie is quiet for such a long time that Joel thinks she might not say anything at all. But then, “Yeah… I just. I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that.”
And Joel presses the side of his palm into the wood of the porch railing until it throbs. But Ellie’s not finished.
“But… I would like to try,” she murmurs, and it sounds like she’s about to cry.
“I’d like that,” Joel breathes, his voice breaking in the middle.
And here it is, here is mercy, here are the beginnings of forgiveness.
Here is a patient and kind love.
When she’s gone, Joel cries until the sun unfolds itself from behind the mountains.
—
Joel is old, like was-grown-up-before-the-world-went-to-shit old, has-a-grown-up-daughter old, knee-pain-and-back-pain-and-all-over-pain-old, deaf-in-one-ear old. Joel is old, and tired, and for the most part, at peace.
Spring is finally coming to Jackson, the crocus buds peeking out of the thawing ground, the birds returning, the sky blue and Ellie’s hair already lightening into a nice auburn like it always does from the sun in the summer. The horses graze in their paddock, tails swishing aimlessly. Joel sits on the fence even though he’s entirely too old to be doing so and watches them.
He hears Ellie’s footsteps on the gravel behind him. She comes to the fence and presses her face to Joel’s side, right where the long scar from the bullet that killed Sarah lies. He wraps his arm around her, his big hand on the back of her head, and holds her to him.
“Hi, baby,” he murmurs, stroking his hand through her hair, down and wavy around her shoulders for once.
“Hi,” she says into his shirt, and he can feel the vibrations of her voice all the way down to his bones. “You know how much I love you, right?” she says then, gently pushing Joel’s hand away with her head so she can look up at him.
“Of course I do. I love you so much, too, baby.”
She buries her face in his ribs again, and Joel thinks about the earth or God or universe that gave him Sarah, that gave him Ellie. The earth that took Sarah so gently in its embrace, that held her until she turned to bones and dust and back into earth once more. That will hold him the same way someday. He thinks of the bees in his garden, in the music of guitars and banjos in the night, of water in the creeks and his washtub, of the warm brown of Ellie’s hair and eyes.
He thinks about the word ‘holy’ again, and its meanings. He thinks, maybe, there’s something holy in the way Dina holds Ellie’s hand, in the way laundry soap smells, in the kneading of fresh bread dough, in the scars all over Joel’s body, all over Ellie’s. In the way Ellie rested her head on Joel's back for the first time when they were riding tandem to Colorado so long ago. In her trust in him. Something holy and holy and holy about the stars Ellie so wishes she could visit and the earth and this sacred, rare, beautiful girl he has with him.
There is something holy about this life, something sacred. Here there is mercy, there is warmth.
Here there is love.