NOTE: The following is fan fiction. It was not written or posted for profit. It has not been read, endorsed or authorized by anyone connected with the film “The Mist” or the Stephen King novella of the same name. A Third Chance Three days after the attack, young Mattie Lee Allen became a symbol of survival. Ten years later, her nightmare is finally over. By Teddy Gold, Special Correspondent for Time Magazine Chapter I : The ‘Dead Look.’ Sometimes a single photograph can explain an entire historical event, put it in the human context, showing how it affects ordinary people. There is, for instance, the famous Eddie Steinsaltz photograph of the sailor kissing the nurse on V-E day, for instance. Or Buzz Aldrin’s photograph of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon. Or the grainy black-and- white photograph of the migrant mother with her two kids symbolizing the Depression. The photograph that exemplifies the experiences of the three hundred thousand survivors of the terrorist attack that became known simply as The Mist is Mike Berger’s black-and-white photograph of Mary Magdalene Allen, the young single mother looking down from atop an uncovered flatbed truck with her two young children Wanda and Victor. It was taken as the small family arrived at the FEMA refugee camp on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut on the fourth day after the terrorist attack. Everyone, by now, is familiar with the picture. It appears in children’s history books; in late-night television broadcasts as the Star Spangled Banner is played just before sign-off; in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and in the recently dedicated Ground Zero memorial outside of the ruins of the small town of Castle Rock in Maine. The image has been used time and again for political purposes – by survivor’s groups, charities, Democrats and Republicans alike. Everyone, it is said, sees something a little different in the woman’s eyes: Shock, anger, grief, judgment, compassion, perhaps madness – but never fear. Despite instantly becoming the living symbol of survivors of The Mist, the young woman promptly disappeared from the public eye, returning to her small hometown in Missouri. She testified, behind closed doors, at a Congressional investigation of the Arrowhead Project a few months later in St. Louis; gave one brief interview, on the first anniversary of Day One, for Time Magazine; and has subsequently refused any further comment. So it was a daunting task when my boss, Time’s Human Interest editor, Sam LaMasa, told me that he had obtained her contact information from a confidential source, who told him she was interested in talking to the press on the tenth anniversary of Day One. He says he has heard that Ms. Allen – known as “Mattie Lee” to her friends – has long been unhappy with the coverage of The Mist; that she objects to some things that were said by politicians and religious leaders and wants to set the record straight. “What does she want to say?” I ask. “Why don’t you contact her and find out?” I was told to follow a peculiar ritual when calling, which her household apparently used to screen calls from the curious. Let the phone ring five times; then hang up and call again. “Who’s calling, please?” asked a woman’s voice, nasal and with a thick, broad Southern twang. I explained that my name was Teddy Gold; that I was with Time Magazine; and that I would please like to speak with Ms. Allen if she was available. The woman – who turned out to be Mattie’s lifelong best friend, Rose Sullivan – immediately began to reproach me about respecting other people’s privacy, but she grudgingly admitted that Mattie was interested in telling her story. “I guess you know Mattie Lee wants to talk to y’all again,” she said slowly and with some frustration, “I’ve told her and told her, it’s a bad idea, that she’ll have the whole press corps bothering her again, or TV crews on our lawn, but-“ I could hear another woman’s voice – higher-pitched, livelier, and laughing – in the background. “Here she is,” Sullivan said, after telling me not to tape the conversation or to say anything that might disturb her friend. Ms. Allen was indeed eager to talk. She insisted, however, that I call her Mattie Lee – the contraction of her own middle name she has used since childhood, when she was unable to pronounce Magdalene. After apologizing for isolating herself for so long, she invited me to visit her and her family in her hometown of Rubidoux, Missouri (population 863). At this point, her friend Rose broke in: I could bring a notepad, a tape recorder, and one photographer. Nothing and no one else. At Sam’s suggestion, I called Scott Ressler, the retired journalist who had done the original story on Mattie, nine years earlier, to ask if there was anything he could tell me. “Be prepared for some unpleasantness,” he warned. “The woman’s more than a little nuts - at least she was when I interviewed her. Also, the whole thing was very sad. Not just her mood. Her whole life down there.” I asked him to elaborate. “There’s nothing I can tell you that you won’t see for yourself. She’s dirt poor, for one thing. She lives in this tiny old trailer in the middle of the Ozarks, about an hour’s drive from Salem, with only her two kids and this other woman-“ “Was her name Rose Sullivan?” “Yeah. Supposed to be her oldest friend, and kind of a nurse or caretaker. I think Rose might have been her girlfriend, too. Rose was pretty obviously gay, though I don’t know if Mattie was, what with those two kids. Rose was hovering over us the whole time, following us from room to room, making sure I didn’t do or say anything that would upset Mattie. At one point I asked some question or other – I can’t even remember what it was. Mattie started to answer, and Rose told her, really sharply, ‘don’t you answer that, honey.’ Then she told me to ask her another question.” “She may just have been protective of Mattie.” “Yeah, but other things were wrong there. Really wrong. Mattie didn’t seem to know who I was or why I was there. She hadn’t gotten dressed for the interview; she was wearing this dirty white bathrobe, these socks that didn’t match, no make-up. She was pale and thin. I remember thinking how much her cheekbones and collar bones stood out. And her head was almost shaved – kind of like in that picture but shorter, and uneven, like she’d done it herself. I remember her hands were dirty, with some cuts on them and the nails all broken, covered with soil, like she’d been digging in the garden or something. She looked like a corpse. “And she was pretty obviously stoned. Some kind of tranquilizers or antidepressants or whatever. Or maybe something else. I went to use the bathroom at one point and I looked in the medicine cabinet. It was full of painkillers – OxyContin, Vicodin, you name it. And it was a hot day and the whole house reeked of marijuana – the smell was coming up from the carpet, off the drapes, all over. “I think she was trying hard to answer the questions, trying to be cooperative, but she just seemed out of it, like she was sedated. I’d ask a question, she’d be silent for like a minute and a half, and then give this long rambling answer.” Scott paused, as if debating whether to tell me something further. “And then, at some point, I think as she began to put herself back in time to when it all happened, she began to get this…look on her face.” Like in her picture on the truck? I asked. Everyone who has seen that picture seems to read something different into her strange, muted expression. “Yeah. But worse. And at one point, for emphasis, she made this little gesture, spreading her palms out, and I…I could see these old shiny scars running down her wrists.” “And after about a half-hour or so, Mattie began to cry. She kept telling me she was sorry, she wanted to answer my questions, but she just couldn’t, it was hurting her too much to remember. And her friend Rose looked at me like I’d stabbed her, told me it was time for me to leave. She hustled me out the door and drove me back to the Salem airport. She was glaring at me for the whole trip, but didn’t say a word. “The last I saw of Mattie, she was seated on this shabby old couch where we’d done the interview, in her darkened living room with all the blinds drawn, head buried in her hands, weeping; with these two beautiful little children of hers trying to comfort her and crying themselves because they knew they couldn’t help her.” There were, I remarked, a lot of people who came out of The Mist in as bad shape or worse. “This was different,” countered Scott. “I’ve interviewed other survivors, and some of them are in terrible shape – they saw things they couldn’t forget, or are still reliving the deaths of their friends and family, or just can’t believe what happened up there. But most of them are trying to get their lives back. Mattie…it was like she’d given up long ago; it was like being in a room with someone who was dead. I had bad dreams for two nights.” After finishing up with Scott, I called Sam LaMasa and told him I didn’t think the story would be a good idea. He wouldn’t hear of it. “Ted, this woman went through a terrible experience – and in any event she’s famous for being difficult – but from what I hear, she wants to talk now. When Ressler interviewed her, it was just a year after The Mist. She – and three hundred thousand others - were still out of their minds with horror. Now she has a job, her kids are growing up, I understand she went away for some sort of treatment that worked out real well. She’s ready to tell her story. And if you don’t interview her, as punishment I’ll have you interview that stupid lawyer who also survived The Mist – you know, Brent Norton, the guy who ran all those ads talking up his class action suit and ending them by saying, ‘I’m a survivor – just like you.’” Sam hung up before I could make any further objections. I made the final arrangements with Rose later that day (Mattie, she said, was at work at the Rubidoux Public Library) and booked a flight to Salem, Missouri, via Jefferson City, for the next morning. Rose Sullivan picks me and my photographer, Marshall Levine, up at the Salem airport as promised. An energetic, athletic-looking, thirty- something woman in jeans, cowboy boots, and an old, unbuttoned plaid shirt worn over a white T-shirt, I was struck by how much she resembles Mattie herself. Rose’s carrot-red hair is cut in exactly the same style as Mattie’s had been in the famous photograph; and they both had the same pale Irish skin and irrepressible freckles. But Rose seems a bit taller than Mattie had appeared in her photos, with broader shoulders, and she wears wire-rimmed spectacles. And she is far nicer and funnier than the surly woman Scott Ressler had described. “Mr. Gold,” Rose drawls as she saluted me. “Staff Sergeant Rose Sullivan, U.S. Army, retired.” She has served in Afghanistan and then Iraq with the 2033rd Military Police Battalion – one of the units that had returned to the United States to restore order in New England. “Let’s get going. It’s an hour’s drive to town, and by noon it’s gonna be a hundred and twenty degrees.” “I’m sorry if I wasn’t nice earlier,” Rose says as she quickly and effortlessly lugs all of our bags into her old jeep, leaving us struggling to keep up with her, “but I have to protect Mattie Lee. I’ve known her since she was five years old. She’s had a very hard life – not just the mist, but other stuff, too – and she’s just not very strong. When she moved back home with me ten years ago, there were all these people – government people, reporters, religious nuts, weirdos – trying to get ahold of her. People writing her, or calling her, or just showing up at our door. There was this one guy, a minister, who brought his whole flock onto our front yard, calling her a witch and telling her to begone. I took out my thirty-ought-six hunting rifle and told them to begone. I love her, I love her like she was my sister and I’d do anything to protect her.” I tell Rose she is a very good friend to Mattie – and then ask, cautiously, if she is Mattie’s “partner.” To my surprise – I am prepared for her to be angry or defensive - Rose claps me on the back and roars with laughter. “I wish,” she said. “Mattie Lee and I grew up here together. We have everything in common – the same dumb sense of humor, same taste in music, booze and drugs, same haircut – we even got tattooed together when we were fifteen.” She pushes up her left sleeve, then her right, showing me detailed Celtic knotwork bands and telling me Mattie has two just like them. “But she’s always liked guys and I like girls. I can’t understand where she went wrong.” She pauses, fighting down another wave of laughter, and then turns to me. “Now, you like girls, don’t you, Teddy?” Rose asks me a conspiratorial voice. “Beautiful girls with long hair and-?” She cups her palms out several inches in front of her chest. I allow that I do. Rose claps me on the back again as we peel out of the parking lot towards Mattie’s home town. “Well, you’re right! Maybe you and me can talk some sense into Mattie Lee.” I ask about Mattie’s children, Wanda and Victor Allen. Rose smiles at the mention of their names. “They’re wonderful kids. Wanda Lee just graduated high school – you know, Mattie Lee and I never made it. But Wanda was at the top of her class and they made her the…uh…the speaker-?” “Valedictorian?” “Thank you,” Rose says, faintly embarrassed. “Well, she’s going to Lincoln University in the fall. She could’ve gone back East if she’d wanted, but she’s staying in Jefferson City so she can be near her mama. And Victor’s fifteen. He’s just like his mama used to be when she was a kid – he’s just so kind to everybody, but he likes to daydream and pick at his guitar, and he’s not as bright as Wanda Lee.” She pauses. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it through school.” Do her kids remember The Mist? I ask. “Wanda Lee does, yes. She remembers how Mattie Lee got back to their tiny little house, even after it was surrounded by the mist and by all those – things – for miles around. She tells me Mattie Lee hid them in that house for two whole days, with those things crawling and flying all around the house and trying to get inside. And she remembers how at the end, the house began to fall apart. Some of them things got into the attic and down the chimney. She can remember holding onto her mama’s hand while Mattie Lee dragged them into the car and drove them for a hundred miles down South until they were rescued by the National Guard. “Victor Lee says he doesn’t remember anything. He was only five at the time. But every now and then, he’ll wake up with these nightmares. He can’t remember what he was dreaming about but we all know. Five years ago, some bees built a hive in one of our trees. I got rid of it right away, but that boy was afraid to go outside for two days. He said he didn’t know why. And what about Mattie herself? “Mattie Lee’s doing better every day. She’s been fine, almost normal, for several years now. And it’s about time. But before you meet her, I have to tell you a few things, and they’re not pleasant. How much do you know about her, about what happened when she was young?” I don’t know anything about that, I admit. “Well, I told you I’ve known Mattie since we were little kids. She was the happiest little girl, never got pissed- never got mad for more than two minutes at a time, almost never cried. She loved exploring, and acting, and drawing these cartoons, and writing. She and I once wrote a whole Shakespeare play, all about King Arthur, did you know that? Everyone in town loved her. “But then, when we were both sixteen, this…thing, this terrible thing, happened to her. To all of us. We were in a car crash – her, me, and her boyfriend Kyle. God, she loved him…” Rose’s voice becomes soft and her expression wistful as she speaks the boy’s name, and she is silent for a moment. I tell her she doesn’t have to talk about it; and ask whether Mattie would even want her to. Rose smiles sadly. “You’re so sweet. Mattie told me it’s okay. She wants me to tell you about this. You can’t understand Mattie Lee unless you understand what happened that day. “We were sixteen, and we did a lot of dumb things. We had this…ritual where we’d get drunk and drive up and down the highways at night at a hundred miles an hour. I was driving at first – it was my car - but then I got sick. Mattie took over the driving, Kyle was in the passenger seat, and I was in back. We were going maybe a hundred and twenty. At some point, I looked up and saw Mattie Lee kind of slumped over to the side. She’d fallen asleep, or maybe passed out drunk. Looking back on it, I should’ve grabbed the wheel, maybe gotten into the front seat, but I-I was too drunk to think of anything like that. I just tried to shout her awake, or shout to Kyle. And then I just blacked out. I never felt a thing. The next thing I knew, it was two hours later, and the car was lying in a six-foot ditch. I had a few cuts and bruises, but I was fine. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, seeing as it was my car and I was supposed to be driving.” Rose, the strong, confident soldier, takes a deep breath, wipes her eyes, and pauses again, maybe waiting for the strength to continue. “The…the front part of the car was crushed, but especially the passenger side where Kyle’d been sitting. Kyle was dead. They said he’d died right away; that he probably never even knew what was happening. He was lucky. They…they had to cremate him.” I tell Rose to take it easy, to take a few more deep breaths. She does so, then apologizes to me, and continues. “Mattie was a little luckier, but she was never all right again. She was alive – she’d had her seatbelt on and the driver’s side wasn’t banged up as bad. But she’d gone all the way into the steering column. Her ribs were broken and her left knee was crushed. They had to replace her knee, she still walks with a limp – every time that knee acts up it reminds her of what happens to Kyle. “Mattie blamed – blames – herself. After she got home from the hospital, while she was waiting to be arraigned, she tried to kill herself twice in two weeks – first these pills they gave her at the hospital – I’ll tell you more about her pills later - then by cutting open her wrists with her daddy’s razor. “She pled guilty, to vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. They sent her to jail, this place for young women, for a year and a half, where the judge said they’d help her. I guess they did, in a way. I visited her every week. My own mom and dad – my dad’s not alive anymore – visited her once a month. They brought her things and we told her how much we loved her. But it wasn’t enough. Her mother – she’s also dead now – stopped visiting her. Basically disowned her. She’d get homesick; one of the guards told me she kept crying for her mom at night, her mom who was never going to come for her again, or crying for Kyle. And then, when she was in that place, she started taking these painkillers, some kind of codeine, for her knee and she…she just never stopped. It’s been twenty years now and she just takes more and more.” I suggest that there are places that could help her with that. Rose waves me off. “She won’t go there. We got her off for two weeks and she became depressed. Wanda and Victor and me worried that she might try to kill herself again, so we let her go back on. I just try to limit the number of those pills she takes. Four a day. I figure she can work all right with that, and she’s basically okay these days, and after all she really is disabled, with her knee and all, so…” Rose shrugs. “So, where was I? They let her out of jail and my folks and I took her in. She was still the same old Mattie – very sweet, we still had all our private jokes and interests and stuff in common – but it was like she was haunted. Haunted by Kyle, haunted by her mom, by the year and a half she’d lost. She’d cry at night and all I could do was hold her and try to comfort her. On top of everything, she knew I’d be going into the Army pretty soon – before the accident we’d planned to join together – and she was afraid of losing me. Maybe we should have taken her to a doctor, but there was no money. Her mom’d gone bankrupt with all the hospital bills – I think that’s part of the reason why she turned on Mattie Lee. “And then things got worse. She met this college guy from Jefferson City named Tim – at least that’s what he said he was and what his name was – at a party. The son-of-a-bitch looked kind of like Kyle, and he started telling her he loved her. Whatever she said, he’d agree with it; if she said she was interested in something he’d read up on it and tell her he was interested in it too; and-” Rose paused, and reached for the first time for a pack of cigarettes her shirt pocket. “I’m too pissed off to go on. While I’m calming myself down, you tell me what you think happened.” I suggest that Mattie fell in love with Tim, maybe thinking all the time of Kyle. “You’re right,” Rose said as she takes a drag on the cigarette. “She wanted to believe she’d been given a second chance. She’s such a sweet girl, but when she wants to believe something, she’s just so…fucking… dumb. And do you know what happened next? He got her pregnant; and a week later he was gone. His cell was disconnected; the E-mails bounced; I drove her all the way out to his place in Jefferson City and he was gone. We never saw him again. “And Mattie Lee went crazy again. First she insisted Tim was coming back – that wasn’t so bad because it was in line with what she’d believed about him all along. But then, after a couple months, she started insisting the baby was really Kyle’s. That scared me and my folks. I told her to stop it and we had our first fight in twelve years of friendship. She accused me of trying to kill her and Kyle’s baby, and the next thing I knew she’d taken my favorite chair and broken it against the desk in my room.” Rose smiles faintly at the memory and shakes her head. “Then she realized what she was doing and she broke down crying.” “Wanda Lee came along six months later,” Rose is smiling broadly now. “She was the one good thing to come out of all that. Mattie loved her. They put her out during the delivery – what with all the painkillers she had no tolerance for pain – but I can remember how happy she was when she woke up the next morning and they put this cute, blonde-haired, chubby little baby in her arms. I was there with my folks. Even Mattie’s mom came along, to see her granddaughter. They both went back to live in our house. She was such a smart little baby – she still is. She smiled, she loved to grab my finger in her hands, she almost never cried. “I enlisted right after Wanda Lee’s first birthday. I couldn’t leave Mattie behind until I knew she had the baby thing under control. They sent me to Germany, and I was thinking about her and Wanda Lee all the time. I called them once a week and E-mailed them whenever I could. I had their pictures with me. And then one day, I got a call from Mattie Lee. She said she was going to Maine, to take care of her Aunt Judy there, who was dying of cancer. She was crying again, and she thanked me and my folks for taking her in. Rose shakes her head again. “That was a big mistake. Aunt Judy turned out to be crazy. From what Mattie’s mom and my folks told me later, she’d been all right once. Maybe it was the drugs she was taking for the cancer, or maybe just the knowledge that she was dying. She’d scream at Mattie Lee for no reason at all, throw her food on the floor and make her clean it up, wake her up in the middle of the night to tell her wash the floors, that kind of thing. She didn’t like Wanda Lee, and Wanda knew it. Wanda began to cry, and then Aunt Judy would scream at Mattie Lee for that. One winter night, Judy locked her out of the house when it was about two fucking degrees outside. She tried to get back in but that bitch had locked all the doors and windows, one by one. Mattie begged her to let her back but she wouldn’t. So Mattie Lee wandered up and down the street until she found one of the neighbors, who took her back and got Judy to open up. She was barefoot when it happened. There was snow and ice on the ground. She left blood in the snow. The skin on her feet was all cracked – she still has the scars – and the doctor told her it was a miracle she hadn’t lost two or three toes. “When I heard about that, I told her to call the police. She wouldn’t do it. She was afraid of Aunt Judy but she was also afraid they’d take her away. She’d been locked up herself, and she didn’t want to send a dying woman, who’d taken her in when she had nowhere else to go, to jail or to some hospital. So I called my folks and asked them if she could move back there. I said I’d pay her rent – I was sending them almost all my pay anyway. But they said no. They said they loved Mattie but they couldn’t handle her. The crying, the baby, the drugs, all that. I got real mad and told them she had no place else to go. My mom reminded me of the time she’d cut her wrists in her mother’s bathtub asked me how I’d feel if she did that in our home. I slammed down the phone and didn’t talk to my own parents for a month. “Things just got worse and worse for her. She felt so guilty when Aunt Judy finally died – she thought she’d caused it by not caring for her right. She even thought that was why Judy’d hated her. Can you believe that? Judy was dying of cancer - probably trying to kill Mattie Lee first or make her take her own life first – but Mattie blamed herself. Judy left her the house – she was decent enough to do that – but left her no money to pay the bills. She couldn’t hold a job, either – she had to care for Wanda Lee and in any case, she didn’t know how to behave in a job, didn’t like being told what to do. She’d yell at the boss or break down crying and they’d fire her. Half the time she was on welfare. And all the time she was on drugs – not just her pain pills either. She was starting to have problems with the police. She had no friends except for these…men coming in and out of her life. That’s how Victor Lee came along. She doesn’t even know who the father is. And that was Mattie Lee – sad and angry and homesick and getting older all the while. “I made up my mind that I was going to take care of Mattie Lee and her kids. I’m an only child, but she was always like my sister. I don’t really get along with other people, but she’d always been my best friend. And no one else would look after her. But she was over there in Maine, and I was in Germany first, then Afghanistan, then Iraq. All I could do was send her some money, E-mail her and calling her whenever I could – sometimes every night, as soon as I got off guard duty. I visited her whenever I had enough leave. And we began to talk about how, when I got out of the service – in another year after my second term of enlistment was up - I’d move to Castle Rock, that I’d get a job there waitressing or whatever, and look after her and those kids. I only had six months left to go, and we were starting to make plans, E-mailing each other about it. “Turned out, I got down there sooner than I thought, because of The Mist. I was with my unit in Baghdad at the time, inspecting cars at the airport to make sure there were no bombs in them, and all of the sudden we got these orders to get ready for immediate deployment to New England. When they mentioned Maine, first I figured it was a joke – all my friends knew how much I loved Mattie Lee, who lived there. But then they issued us these NBC suits-“ the military abbreviation for ‘nuclear, biological, chemical’ suits; “-these special antitoxins; and they wouldn’t tell us what had happened or even what to expect when we got there. I knew right off there’d been some kind of terrorist attack. Turned out I was right about the terrorist part – but I figured it had just been anthrax. No way could I have imagined what they’d attacked us with. But then, when we were airborne, this captain from the Chemical Corps showed us pictures and films of what we’d find when we got there – these…snakes with legs, these things that were all teeth and claws, these things like walking skeletons with six legs. They even showed us a picture of a dinosaur. A real live dinosaur. He said they were these germs that started out small and just grew and grew and grew.” Rose’s voice has slowed down with wonder and horror. “None of us believed him. Some of us even laughed. So then he takes out this big glass jar, and there it was – this dead, red-and-white striped thing, kinda like a beetle, but the size of my head and with a hundred legs. We all stopped laughing real quick. All the way over there, I kept imagining Mattie Lee trying to protect little Wanda and Victor from those things. When I went to sleep I dreamt of all three of ‘em, covered with things like that, dying, dead. “We nearly couldn’t land because of the smoke. They were burning all the forests for a hundred miles. Someone told us the bugs – wherever they came from, nobody’s ever been able to explain that one – were laying eggs in the forests and they couldn’t find them all. So they evacuated everyone they could find and just set the whole area on fire.” I ask Rose – who looks tough enough to take down even the biggest creature with a single shot - if she had a chance to do any hunting. She laughs again. “Thank God, no! I’m not brave like Mattie Lee – I’m a big coward. Most of the…six-legged monsters were dead by then. We had to deal with the four-legged ones.” Having seen the camps at Hartford and East Hartford, having talked firsthand with some of the survivors and read the accounts of others, I think I know what she means, but I ask her anyway. “They sent us to a refugee camp outside Meriden to watch over the people there.” As she talks, her smile fades. “So many of them were savages, crazy with fear, or loss, or…” Rose shrugs. “Some were running off into town stealing food, jewelry, stuff like that. That was the least of it. Some were tearing their own skin off trying to get rid of the bugs they thought were crawling on them – like the DT’s. Others were killing people they thought were big bugs. And others were just killing people for the hell of it. Or raping them. “But the worst ones-“ Rose’s voice has been steadily rising, and she pauses to reel herself back in “-were the people outside the camp – you know, the locals. Most of ‘em didn’t want the refugees there. Remember, no one really knew what happened, and there were all kinds of rumors. Some guys started saying that everyone in the camps were infected from the mist, and that the infection could be spread through the air. Others said the gateway to Hell had opened up and the refugees were the damned. So one evening, six days after the mist came, about two hundred people from Meriden showed up at the camp – to kill the refugees. Some of them had automatic weapons, others had Molotov cocktails, that kind of thing. One asshole even had a flamethrower. They were led by this crazy guy in some kind of uniform and holding a Bible. Thank God we were there. The camp was open-air – just a bunch of tents in a field, and this shitty little chain link fence around it. We told ‘em to disperse. I figured they’d just fall back. But no. They opened fire. Can you imagine that? Americans shooting at other Americans – and at American soldiers? It was like the God-damn Civil War. No; it was worse. A group of armed crazy people come to kill a group of unarmed crazy people.” What did you do? I asked – again knowing the answer to my own question. Rose asks me if I was ever in the Army. I tell her no. “When you’re a soldier, you follow orders,” she explains, “especially when there’s shooting. “We had orders to shoot to kill anyone who pointed a gun in our direction. So we returned fire, and they just kept coming and shooting. They killed three guys in my unit – and two civilians, including a little girl no older than Wanda Lee. We killed ten of those motherfuckers before they finally fell back. I killed at least one.” For the first time, her voice becomes unsteady. “If I hadn’t…if we hadn’t returned fire…they would have stormed the camp, killed the people inside, even the children, and burned the place to the ground. It would have been like a program.” “Program?” “You know – like what the Nazis did with Jewish villages during World War Two.” “You mean a pogrom,” I say. For the second time that day, Rose apologizes for not knowing the proper word. “I’m just a dumb girl from the Deep South,” she says, “I still haven’t learned English.” I assure her that’s she’s doing fine – and then tell her the word is originally Russian, and that it means “destruction.” “Then it’s the right word.” Rose is silent for a while, and I see her knuckles turn white as she clutches the steering wheel. It reminds me of something an elderly veteran once told me about his experiences in Vietnam: No one else feels my pain. I ask her if she saw Mattie Lee while she was in New England. She immediately brightens at the mention of her friend. “I hooked up with her about a week later. But from the second I landed, I was trying to find out where she was and trying to figure out a way to see her. It was a lot easier than I thought. Whenever someone arrived at one of the camps, they asked them a bunch of questions – name, address, emergency contacts, that kind of thing. Of course, some people were so out of it that they couldn’t remember their own names. But Mattie Lee could. I found some guy who had access to the database, typed in her name and her kids’, and five seconds later I knew they were alive; with no injuries; in the main camp at Hartford.” Rose remembers something else and brightens. “And can you believe, there was a note saying she’d told them to please contact a Staff Sergeant Rose Sullivan stationed over in Iraq. She’d even given them my serial number. “After we’d been there about three weeks, as things were beginning to calm down just a bit and more and more of us were arriving from Iraq, I asked my CO for three days’ leave to go to Hartford. He asked me why. I thought real quick and said my sister was in the camp up there, with my eight-year-old niece and my five-year old nephew. I showed him the pictures I keep in my wallet, one of Mattie Lee; one with the two of us side by side with our matching skinhead haircuts and tattoos; and one of her, Wanda and Victor in Aunt Judy’s house. “So when I got to Hartford and explained who I was – I told the people there that I was her sister, too, in case he checked with my C.O. - the guy in charge says something like, ‘you’re here to see our celebrity.’” I didn’t know what he meant. Then he showed me the front page of the New York Times from Day Five – and some local paper, and the cover of Time Magazine. And on each one of ‘em, there’s Mattie Lee, looking down from the back of a flatbed truck, her arms around Wanda Lee and Victor Lee, with that…look on her face.” I tell Rose that the man was right - that Mattie had indeed become famous – and I ask her how that made her feel. Her answer is astonishing. “I wanted to run away.” She says it without any humor or irony. “It was that look on her face, that terrible look. People always talk about that, or they ask about that. Let me tell you what it means. She and I call it ‘the dead look.’ I tried to tell you what she was like after the accident when she was sixteen, but that’s hard to do and I didn’t tell it right. I can tell you something that happened, or something she said or I said, but I can’t really tell you what those things mean, not unless you grew up with us and were there when they happened and lived with those things afterwards. “I was trying to say that…Mattie Lee lost her mind after the accident. She fell asleep at the wheel of my car after sixteen happy years. She was right where she wanted to be: With her two best friends, doing something we all loved to do, her favorite music was on the stereo. We were headed back to the town she’d grown up in - back to the house she’d lived in all her life, to her other friends, to all her stuffed toys in her room, and to the mother she thought loved her. “Then she fell asleep – and when she woke up, she’d lost all those things and people she loved – except for me. Mattie woke up in a strange bed, she was cold and in pain, and she couldn’t move. She couldn’t even open her eyes at first – she’d been out for two days and they were gummed shut. She told me she thought she’d died – and that her next thought was that she was in Hell. “It turns out she was right. Kyle – who she’d talked about marrying and having his babies – was dead because of her. She was crippled. Her own mother hated her. She was a criminal – handcuffed to that hospital bed. “I was there, sitting in a chair next to her bed, when she woke up, and I saw her change. At first, after her mother and her doctor and this idiot policeman they’d stationed in the room told her what happened, she cried. She was trying to say something – I think it was about Kyle’s mother and brothers, maybe about wanting to tell them she was sorry – but she was crying too hard for me to make it out. She screamed, and I ran over to her and hugged her. She tried to hug me back but her arms stopped in midair. At first we didn’t understand why. Then we saw they were handcuffed to the rails of the bed. “Mattie looked from her arms to me, and back again. And then, she - they say she went into shock but I don’t think so. I think she had a stroke, or part of her brain died, or she just went mad. She looked away from me, away from all of us, just stared straight ahead. She was crying, but much more softly than before. The head of her bed was elevated – I guess they’d done that so she could talk to us – and she was kind of faintly rocking back and forth. I said her name – we all tried to talk to her – but she didn’t seem to hear us, didn’t look at us, just kept looking straight ahead. And for the first time, I saw that dead look on her face. I stayed there for an hour, trying to get her attention, trying to get to her to say something or to smile or even to frown. But she just kept staring straight ahead. “I visited her every day after that, for as long as I could. Some days, all she did was lie in bed – or later sit on the edge of her bed as her knee got better – gazing out with that dead stare. Maybe she’d mutter a word or two – “yes,” “no,” or maybe my name, or Kyle’s. After a few days, she got a little better. She began to look at me again, and we’d talk, watch TV or read these comic books together – she and I had always liked to read them aloud. Sometimes I got her to laugh a little bit but more often she’d break down crying for Kyle or her mom. That would last for ten or twenty minutes. And then she’d go back into a trance – and her face and her eyes would always go back to…what you saw in that picture. Sometimes it would happen while she was talking. I remember once, we were talking about one of our old teachers – a guy who’d gotten fired because he had problems with anger. She was in the middle of a sentence – I think she’d actually been laughing – she stopped talking, stopped smiling, and said, in this very quiet voice, ‘I drove off all of my little friends.’ And her face settled back into the dead look. I ask Rose what she did at times like that. “I’d asked her doctors about it. They just reminded me she’d been through a terrible trauma, emotional as well as physical, and that she was still recovering. I asked one doctor if they thought she’d had a stroke – how sometimes those guys’ faces will droop – and he said he didn’t think so. ‘Give her time,’ he said. “That was the same look she had on her face when they sentenced her – there wasn’t a trial, only a sentencing hearing, because she insisted she was guilty. She just sat there while the judge read the sentence, with that look on her face. The only time she broke through it – and then just barely – was when the judge asked if she had something to say. She stood up. She stood up and told the judge and Kyle’s mom and her own mom and me that she was sorry. She had the dead look on her face as she said it, and her voice was kind of faint and murmury, but she made sense. She was perfectly, perfectly, uh- clear-?“ Lucid? I ask. “Yes. Thanks. Perfectly lucid. And then she fainted and they had to carry her out. “I visited her for three hours, every weekend, for the whole time she was in prison. For almost the first year, she’d spent about two of the three hours fixing me with that look and saying over and over again that she was sorry and how much she loved me and Kyle and her mother. And for the rest of the time, her face would relax and she’d talk about more normal things – our friends back home, things she was learning in her GED classes at prison, the movies, that kind of stuff. She’d go back and forth between the two. Once we were talking about my plans for the Army and she went into a trance and said ‘this was a tragedy and a love story.’ I broke down crying myself. Because she was right. “Bit by bit, it started to go away. I’d see her with a normal look – maybe happy, maybe sad or angry, but normal – for five or ten minutes and then she’d look haunted again. After a while – maybe because she knew she’d be released soon – she’d look that way at first but then loosen up for twenty or thirty minutes. The day she was released, and my mom and dad and I picked her up and drove her back home, she looked OK for several hours. The dead look didn’t come back until she found out her mom didn’t want her back. “And over time, even as things went wrong for her – Tim leaving her, fighting with everybody in Castle Rock, her kids getting the flu and passing it on to her – I saw the dead look less and less. The last time I saw it – before I saw that photo – was for a few minutes on a visit two years earlier, as we drove back from spending the day in Canada. I thought that maybe if part of her brain had switched off, maybe it had turned itself back on. “So now maybe you understand how I felt when I saw those pictures of her. She’d spent ten years losing that deadness in her eyes and her face and I was just beginning to think it was gone. Of course she’d never forget what happened to Kyle, and she couldn’t go back to the life she’d had before that. But she wasn’t a zombie anymore. And then came The Mist, something enough to drive anyone crazy, just a few miles from her new home. When I saw the picture, I thought she’d had another stroke or whatever it was, had gone back to where she was on that day in the hospital bed. She could never recover from that twice. “And that’s what it means when Mattie Lee gets that look in her eyes. She’s gone away someplace.” Rose pauses. “And I don’t want her to go away again. I’m not much better off than her. I’m in better shape physically, that’s for sure; and I don’t use drugs and I don’t mess around with strange men. But so what? That’s not a life. Life isn’t what you don’t do. It’s what you do – and I’ve done nothing. I’m poor. Unlike her, I’m dumb. My dad’s gone and my brother’s rotting in prison. I get lonely but I can’t seem to keep any friends except for her. She and her kids are my life. When I saw that picture, I thought I’d lost her again and all I wanted was to go away too.” CHAPTER 2 : LIFE GOES ON. And what was Mattie like in the camp? “She was almost gone, almost as bad as I’d thought she would be. She’d saved her babies, all right, but it sent her over the edge. She’d lost everything and everyone except them and me. She’d only had a few friends in town – all dead. She lost her home and everything she owned, and she didn’t have no insurance. And anyone would lose their mind in that camp. Nobody’d planned for how many people would be in the Hartford camp or what they’d need when they got there. The whole place smelled bad. There weren’t enough tents. There wasn’t enough food. You had to walk a quarter mile to get to the latrines, which were at the edge of the camp. Imagine having to go all that way if you had the runs. Showers were out in the open. I saw people in Iraq who were living better than that. And nobody’d thought to separate the crazy people from the sane ones. And once in a while some…thing…they hadn’t been able to kill – usually these things that looked like foot-long darts - would come flying out of the woods, buzz right by the tents, scare the shit out of everybody, and then go back into the woods before anyone could do anything. “She and her kids were living in a big old tent with about twenty other people. The tent smelled bad, really bad, and I could hear someone coughing and someone else crying. All everyone had was a cot, a few feet of space, and a curtain for privacy. Some people had radios on; and I knew where she was because I could hear Lynyrd Skynrd – that’s her all- time favorite band – playing on one side of the room. This corporal told me to wait, and he went behind one of the curtains. About ten seconds later, she and Wanda and Victor come charging out toward me and we all hugged. It had just been a couple of weeks since…the thing…happened, but they were all so thin. Especially Mattie Lee. And her hair was turning gray on the sides and back; and her hands were shaking, and…” Rose trails off. “At first we were all crying; happy and sad at the same time. Finally, when Mattie could speak, she said, ‘we’re hungry, there’s bugs in the food, Victor stepped on a nail and it won’t heal, a man here likes little children and he’s looking at my babies.’ And then she went back to crying. And Wanda Lee said, ‘Mama’s in trouble again, she’s been trying to hurt herself.’” Rose pauses. “You’ll meet Wanda today. She was always so grown up, even then. Someone in that family had to be. I love Mattie Lee, but there’s so many things she can’t handle.” What did you do? I ask her. “What could I do? She was going to be dead in three weeks. I had to get them out of there. But how? My first idea was to go AWOL, steal a jeep and drive them to an airfield, and somehow get them on a plane to Missouri.” She laughs. “I told you, I’m dumb! But then I remembered all those front-page pictures of Mattie Lee and her kids. They’re famous. So I start thinking that maybe someone – maybe even several someones - will want to do them a favor. “The first thing I did was take care of the hunger problem. I’d thought she might need something so I’d taken some food – breakfast bars, that kind of thing – with me. I gave it to them and told them to eat it right away, while I was there and could take care of anyone trying to steal it. “After they did that, I found a phone and called my folks. I told them – I didn’t ask, I told them – that Mattie Lee and her kids were coming to stay with them for a while. I didn’t ask if it was OK. Like I said, I’d asked them once before and they said no – I didn’t want to make that mistake again, not when it could mean Mattie Lee and her kids dying or being hurt in that hellhole. My mom said she’d seen the pictures of Mattie Lee on the truck; that she was proud of her; and blah blah blah, but they couldn’t afford to let her stay there. I told her it was a matter of life and death; that there was no place else they could go that was safe; and that if she didn’t take them she’d never see me or hear my voice again. I told her to let them have my old room; that I’d make all the arrangements; and that she and my dad could have the rest of my pay – the little part I wasn’t sending them already - for their rent. I thought of also promising them I’d stop sleeping with other girls, but they’d know there was no way I could keep that promise.” She laughs again. “My mom said okay. And after a pause, she said, ‘you’re right, Rosie.’ She also said she’d tell Mattie’s mother that her daughter and her grandkids were finally coming home.” “I told her I loved her; hung up; and then I called Monsignor Hurley – I mean, Monsignor Brian Hurley. He’s like our town mayor, and he was our priest when we were all kids. You’ll meet him today too. He told me that ever since he’d opened up the papers and seen Mattie’s picture, he’d been trying to reach her. I told him Mattie Lee was in the next room. He got all excited and wanted to speak to her; after all, he hadn’t seen her in more than ten years. I was tempted to get her, to put her on, but she was already overloaded. I didn’t want to blow her mind. So I just told him we had to get her home, that she’d be there in a few days and she needed help. “He asked, ‘what kind of help?’” He knew just a little about what had happened to her, that she was living in New England with her two little kids, and that she was homesick. But he didn’t know about what her Aunt Judy did to her; how she’d spent ten years going crazy; how lonely she was; and how she’d lost everything and was living in that dirty tent. So I told him. “And he was horrified. He has this way of looking at people, of knowing who they really are. He said something like, ‘a Catholic girl, one of my students, the daughter of a war veteran, is sick and starving in the cold?’ Then he asked me for my number. “’Number?” I thought he meant my serial number. So he said ‘no, no, no, the number of the phone you’re calling from!’ As soon as I gave that to him, he told me to get her and her kids, not to let them out of my sight, and to stay by the phone. Then he hung up on me.” “I got Mattie and Wanda and Victor. She got all excited when I told her I’d just got off the phone with Monsignor Hurley. It was the first real smile I’d seen on her face. She started telling her kids all these funny stories about him, the stuff he’d taught us in school, the times he’d lost his temper, all those things – except-“ Rose shakes her head and laughs, tries to bring herself under control, and fails, “-except that she was telling all the stories at once, mixing them all up, and she was talking way too loud and way too fast. Her kids are looking at me, wondering what I said to send their mama over the edge.” “Father Hurley called back about an hour later. It turns out he’d called our Congressman, and FEMA, and the Department of the Army, saying he was Mattie Lee’s parish priest and asking if they could help bring her back. Later, he told me he’d even called the White House, and they hung up on him because they figured it was a joke. “Meantime, I called my CO and explained that I’d located my sister – I’d told Mattie and Wanda and Victor to back me up on that one – and that she was very sick and we were trying to get her home. They gave me a ten-day pass, and I flew home with them on a military transport.” I remind Rose that she kept describing Mattie Lee as homesick. How did Mattie feel to finally be back home? “It was too much for her. But she had to go back home. It was the only place she belonged, the place she dreamed about, that she cried herself to sleep thinking about every night for the past ten years. But it was painful for her all the same. We landed at the Salem Airport, the same place I picked you up. My folks were there. So was Monsignor Hurley along with the Bishop and the whole City Council; and some of our old friends from high school – mostly old soldiers like me. We welcomed her back, we hugged her, we gave her flowers. It almost worked. But...but her mother was there too. Her mom’d blamed Mattie for the drinking and the drugs, for what happened to Kyle. When they let Mattie out of jail she wouldn’t let her come back home. She’d sent her to go to New England to live with Aunt Judy. Sent her to live in the mist and with the monsters, just two miles from where it all started. She didn’t know it at the time, but she’d cast her own daughter into Hell. When she saw her daughter get off the plane – what was left of her daughter, all skin and bones, limping on her bad leg, and with the dead look on her face – she turned white. I was thinking, she finally understood what she’d done wrong, finally understood how much she hurt her daughter. She walked up to Mattie, stood real close. I was standing right next to them when it happened, and I heard what Mattie’s mom said to her then. And you just guess what she said. I tell Rose that if I were Mattie’s mother, I would tell her I loved her and that I was sorry. “She said, ‘This ain’t your fault, Mattie Lee, but it ain’t mine either. So don’t you bad-mouth me.’” Rose imitates Mattie’s mother in a cruel, mocking tone. “And she didn’t say nothing to Wanda or Victor.” “Mattie was just staring at her mother, shaking her head no, like she couldn’t believe this was happening. She started to say something to her mom – she was pointing to Wanda and Victor so I guess it was about them – but I pulled her away. Mattie wanted her love, and her mother wouldn’t give it to her. When Mattie was a kid, and her mom got angry with her, they’d go through the same thing. Mattie would follow her from room to room, trying to hug her or cling to her or at least get her mom to say something kind to her, and her mother would just pull away. It was sickening, this fat old woman turning away from her own daughter and her own grandchildren. “I didn’t want her to hurt Mattie any more. So I told Mattie the same thing I’d said when her mama wouldn’t come to see her after she was out of jail: She’ll come around, she’ll come around. But Mattie couldn’t believe it anymore. Maybe she’d hoped that her mother would come around, that she would love her again. Now she was that it wasn’t true. She had her little babies, she had me, she had Monsignor Hurley – but no one ever takes the place of your own mother. She knew her kids and her old friends were there, and so were some reporters, so she kept it together until we got out to Monsignor Hurley’s car. Then she hugged us all – so hard I thought she was going to crush me – and she began to cry. She was apologizing to us all the way back to my folks’ house. “She seemed to be doing better that night. We had a good dinner at my folks’ house, I drove her around the town so she could see what had changed – not much, really, no one wants to build anything where we live – and she even started to ask about schools for Wanda and Victor. She kept asking me if I would take care of them if anything happened to her. I thought it was a little funny that she’d ask me that again and again, but I kind of wrote it off. After all, she’d almost lost her kids to the mist; and that camp turned out to be pretty dangerous too. But I should have remembered what Wanda Lee told me in the camp. You remember what that was, don’t you?” “She said her mama tried to hurt herself?” Rose nods solemnly. “That’s right. You remembered it, but I didn’t. So you’re a lot smarter than I am.” “Two days later, my folks and I took her to a doctor – she’d been quarantined at that camp, disinfected and all that, but she looked so thin and she was limping pretty bad. There was a little clinic in town – we don’t have a hospital. She was in this examining room, waiting for the doctor to come in, and she started to play with the drawers – opening and closing them to see what was inside. I thought she was just bored. I had just walked out of the room – I figured the doctor would be coming in a minute anyhow – when I heard a crash. I pulled the door open and ran back inside. And there’s Mattie Lee, crouching in the far corner of the room, with a big silver knife, like a scalpel or something, in her left hand, slashing away at her right wrist. I got the knife out of her hand, but she was fighting me all the way – she was amazingly strong for someone who was that skinny – and I’m calling for help while she’s crying – then screaming - at me to let her alone, please let her alone. “She was locked up in a hospital in Jefferson City for two whole months. I got a hardship discharge – that was the end of my military service, it meant a lot to me but nowhere near as much as Mattie Lee – and my parents and I took care of her kids. I visited her every week, just like I did when she was in prison. By the time they let her out, they figured out how to give her enough drugs that she didn’t scream anymore or cry anymore. But that was even worse; she just slept all day, or zoned out on the couch watching TV, or stared at her kids, or sat out back in the garden pulling up weeds and rocking back and forth. Sometimes she wouldn’t recognize us. Other times she’d just cry and cry over nothing at all. She’d remember the people in New England and tell me how sorry she was that she wasn’t nice to them, that she never gave herself a chance to fit in there. Now I felt like I was the one going crazy. I felt guilty, and sad because I thought my friend, the girl I’d known, was gone. There was this stranger instead. I loved her and I loved her kids, but I couldn’t talk with her anymore, and every day she looked less and less like the girl I’d grown up with. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to her, or to her kids. And…no, I don’t want to tell you this. It’s awful.” I tell Rose she doesn’t have to say anything she doesn’t want to. After a few moments of silence, she tells me anyway. “I began to wonder if this was even my problem. I thought that maybe I’d been friends with someone who…who didn’t exist anymore. There was this new…stranger. This new, empty person I couldn’t talk to, couldn’t relate to. Every time I looked at her she reminded me of the person I’d lost. I began to think that maybe…I’m sorry…maybe I didn’t want her in my home anymore.” “Finally, after about two years of this nightmare, our Mattie Lee starts coming back to life. I came home one day – I work as a bartender now – and I saw her sitting on the couch, watching TV with my mom and Wanda and Victor Lee. It was some children’s TV show about a plumber who had a heart attack – can you believe, they’d show that to little kids? – and all of them were just laughing like crazy. I ran up to her and put my arms around her and all of us spent the whole evening together. She began visiting Father Hurley, and some of her old neighbors. She even had a few last visits her mother. That wasn’t so bad, for either one of them, and she was glad she did it because her mom had a heart attack – her last heart attack - a few months later. I thought she might blame herself, or become depressed again. But she took it pretty well. I think she’d had enough of being sad. And things got even better. One day, she says she’s tired of sitting around the house and that she wants a job. She’d worked as a children’s librarian up in Castle Rock, and we got her a job in the local public library. Easy stuff; just putting books back on shelves, that kind of thing.” “Did anyone ever recognize her?” “Sure. Rubidoux is her home town. Some people remembered when she was born, how her daddy went around giving out these stupid little cigars and bottles of booze to everyone whether they wanted them or not. How she and I used to draw comic strips for the kids at school. How she and the other kids used to drive drunk down the Interstate at night when it was deserted. But we knew she wanted to be left alone. So no one ever called the newspapers or TV to say she was here. Me and Father Hurley and some of her other friends made it clear she didn’t want that kind of attention, that it could affect her health, and that anyone who spilled the beans would get in trouble with us. But one day, about five years ago, our State Senator showed up at the Civic Center for some reason or other. He was going from building to building, introducing himself to everybody, and he found Mattie Lee in the library. He got real excited, wanted to have his picture taken with her, wanted to call up the papers and tell them, wanted her to come to St. Louis with him and meet the Governor, all that. He told her she was a legend.” Rose pauses. “And you know what, she really is.” “What did she do?” “She was real nice about it. She doesn’t get angry much anymore. I think she knows now that it doesn’t work, and she feels guilty about what she put Wanda Lee and Victor Lee and everybody else through before she got herself under control. She thanked him but said she just wanted to be left alone, that she didn’t want to go back to getting all these calls from reports and weirdos. He said he understood. But he gave her his card and said that if she ever wanted anything at all, to please call him. “But he must have said something to somebody about her. About a year later, old Ralph Allen Chesney – he was the city librarian for about thirty or forty years, one of the few people in town who actually reads – retired. She was told to apply for his job. She kept saying she had no experience running anything or looking after anyone except for Wanda Lee and Victor Lee. They said, no problem. She couldn’t even figure out how to fill out the application forms. I tried to help her but we did it all wrong. But two weeks after that, she was the town librarian. And every time someone bigger than us came down from Jefferson City or St. Louis or whatever – not that often, mind you – they’d stop in and see her, ask how she was doing. And they’re always very respectful. That’s really something, when you consider how often Mattie Lee and I used to get rousted by the cops. And a couple years ago, someone on the City Council suggested she run for City Clerk, but she said no thank you. She said she never wanted to see her name in print again.” Hearing this, I become concerned once more. Didn’t she contact, or have someone contact, Time Magazine? “Mattie Lee says she’s ready to talk now. She doesn’t want to hide anymore. She knows people are curious about her – who she was, how she survived, that kind of thing. And she’s not a political person, you know, but she says she doesn’t like some of the things people have been saying about The Mist – some of the politicians, some of the religious leaders. “So, ask her whatever you have to ask. Just please go easy on her. I’ll be there. I won’t get in the way, but if it looks to me like she’s getting upset, I’ll have to tell you to back off – or even break it up. Okay?” I assure Rose that I regard Mattie as a hero and that I will treat her with the greatest respect. Rubidoux, Missouri, Mattie Lee Allen’s tiny, working-class home town, was founded by a hundred and fifty Irish Catholic immigrants on October 20, 1866. Most of them had arrived in the early 1860’s, from County Cork, just in time to fight for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Almost all of the town’s present inhabitants are descended from its founders; Both Mattie Lee and Rose have records of family members fighting in the First Missouri Confederate Brigade at the Battle of Champion Hill in Mississippi. The town flag, displayed outside the small Civic Center where Mattie works, features a green and gold Irish harp superimposed over a red, blue and white Confederate battle flag. The current Mayor, a retired Catholic priest named Brian Hurley, notes that the town suffered repeated raids by members of the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan between the 1860’s and the 1920’s. Attacks by the Klan may be a thing in the past but the town continues to suffer; an electronics plant employing most of the men in town closed last year; alcoholism and petty crime have always been rampant. “But this is our home,” Hurley explains, “and most of us don’t want to leave. We won’t leave our ancestors’ bones or our memories behind. And we’re proud of our darling Mattie Lee.” As we enter the town and drive down its scorching main thoroughfares, Pyrite Street and Hewes Avenue, Rose Sullivan points out various landmarks in her and Mattie’s lives: The town library; St. Patrick’s Church, where they went to school; Duke’s Bar and Liquor, at which they illegally hung out as youngsters (and at which Rose currently works as a bartender). “Mattie Lee doesn’t drink,” she notes. “After what happened, with that accident with Kyle, she never drank again. And it’s just as well; alcohol and painkillers don’t mix.” Rose drives me up one street and down another, pointing out various such landmarks, until we turn off onto a small trailer park surrounded by cinder-block walls painted a faded pink. Most of the trailers are in disrepair; many feature small gardens in front. About one in three sports one or another variant of the Confederate flag, hung in windows or on small flagpoles attached to the roofs or the sides of the trailers. Rose notices me staring at all the Dixie flags. “Welcome to the South,” she says. Then she asks me – haltingly, as though she herself is a little embarrassed by the question – if I’m Jewish. I allow that I am. “Well…Mattie Lee is kind of fascinated with Jews. She likes them, but I hope she doesn’t get on your nerves. When she was living in Maine, she said the only two people who were nice to her were Jewish. One of them was this old next-door neighbor of hers, a retired lawyer. We don’t know what happened to him; he wasn’t one of the people they rescued and they ended up burning her whole street – in fact, the whole town. He’s probably dead. She still feels bad about him; said he was the only one on her street who treated her with any respect. He used to protect her from the other neighbors or from the police. They’d come to her door and say she was playing her music too loud or whatever. He’d go over to them, tell them he was a lawyer, and that he’d keep her out of trouble but that she had a right to listen to music in her own house, that kind of thing. They listened to him on things where they wouldn’t listen to her. She also said he was at her house the morning the mist arrived. The last thing he said to her was to warn her to keep out of the mist and keep her doors and windows shut. “The other was this older woman in Castle Rock, who she used to do some cleaning and babysitting for. Her name was Harriet Turman. Mattie saw her for the last time that morning too. Later, she found out Miss Turman had killed herself on the first night, probably after all the bugs started swarming around everything.” That wouldn’t be surprising; the Army had found thousands of apparent suicides – a staggering four percent of people in the affected area – in the wake of the mist. “Anyhow, she really went overboard this one time that Harriet invited her to her house for Past? - Pass…?” Passover, I tell her. “Right. Harriet and Harriet’s dad were explaining to Mattie Lee about all these little traditions that Jewish people teach their kids so they’ll know what life was like in the Holy Land: Their special rules for making food, prayers, songs, whatever. Then those kids’re supposed to teach their kids, and so on. Handing it down. They told her some Jews did this because they hoped they or their children or grandchildren would eventually come back to Israel. Like they were rehearsing. “That gave her an idea. She’s not religious at all, but she liked the idea of people preserving their heritage. She missed the South so much. She always felt like she’d been forced to leave, and she wanted so bad to come back. She kept thinking about all these little things – the music, the food, the manners, the way people talk – that we have down here but that they didn’t have in Maine. And she didn’t like it that Wanda Lee and Victor Lee didn’t know about those things and that they were starting to speak with New England accents. So she figured that if Harriet’s family had all these ways of teaching their kids about how people lived in the Holy Land, she could do the same for Wanda and Victor. So she began feeding them grits and collard greens and cornbread when she could afford it. She began singing them these songs we’d all learned as kids – Johnny is Gone for a Soldier – that kind of thing. And if they started to talk like Yankees, she’d ‘correct’ them. She said if Jews had lived outside the Holy Land for two thousand years and could still teach their kids what life had been like there, she could teach Wanda and Victor to be good Southerners for when they finally went back home.” “Wanda Lee didn’t like it. She loved her mama, but she wanted to be more like the other kids. So she started to fight with Mattie. Mattie put her foot down. She said that they were a Southern family; and that Wanda could just find someplace else to live, someplace else to feed her, if she didn’t want that. One of her teachers finally called in Mattie Lee and asked her what she thought she was doing. I’m guessing that when this teacher thought about the South, all she could think about was the KKK and slavery and maybe some of those jokes about people marrying their sisters. Mattie Lee got angry – she was sick of hearing people telling her she was weird; and she really didn’t like people telling her how to raise her kids. But this time she had a reason for doing something different. So she explained all this to the teacher. She explained her family’d lived in the South for a hundred and fifty years; that that’s the kind of food they ate and how they talked; that she and her kids would still be there if it wasn’t for an accident. She also told the teacher about me, and said she could thank all the Southerners who had died fighting to keep the country safe. She said she wanted Wanda and Victor to learn about reading and writing and math and science – not how to be Yankees. I’m guessing she wasn’t too nice about it, but the teacher backed off. “So Mattie thinks she owes two things to everyone who’s Jewish: They took care of her when she lived in Castle Rock; and they showed her how to keep her own traditions going.” And then Rose, just before pulling up in front of one of the last trailers on the left, points to the other side of the street at one final landmark from Mattie’s past. “Mattie Lee was born right there, in that trailer. Her mama and her daddy waited ‘till the last possible minute to go to the hospital – they didn’t want a big old hospital bill – and Mattie Lee decided she wanted to come out early. Five years later, my family and I moved into the one next door. And two days after I moved in, she and I were best friends. We spent our first summer playing Army – using sticks for guns and climbing up and down these big hills of dirt – they seemed to us like mountains – at this construction site nearby. We had a wonderful time – and in a way, we’ve never changed.” As Rose shuts off the engine, the front door opens and a pale, thin woman in early middle age, flanked by a teenaged boy and girl, emerges. Remembering Scott Ressler’s warnings to me, as well as Rose’s stories, I do not know quite what to expect. Yes, it’s Mattie Lee Allen, now thirty- six, an older version of the woman in the picture: Tall, skinny as a rail but well-muscled, flat-chested, with white skin punctuated here and there by red freckles, particularly on the tip of her long but delicate nose. Her hair, once classically Irish red but now going prematurely gray, is buzz-cut on top and nearly shaved to the scalp on the lower sides and back. She is wearing blue jeans and a white sleeveless blouse, and I can see the intricate Celtic knotwork bands, tattooed in black across her right and left triceps, that match those on Rose’s arms. I also see that she has little bracelets of flowers – on closer inspection they are roses, perhaps in honor of her best friend – tattooed over both of her wrists, perhaps to cover the scars there. But Mattie, who seems content, confident, and fully alive, is smiling. She hugs me (Rose is right; her arms and back are surprisingly strong), welcomes me to their home, thanks me for coming, introduces me to Wanda Lee and Victor Lee (“my babies,” she calls the two teenagers, to their embarrassment), and then insists that I come inside and sample the cornbread she has made for the occasion. Although she seems to be in good physical shape, I notice that she hobbles slightly every time she takes a step with her left leg. The trailer – cluttered, dimly lit, heat held at bay by several noisy electric fans - place is not large enough for the five occupants (Rose’s father, Tom Sullivan, passed on a few years earlier; Mattie, Rose, Wanda and Victor now look after Rose’s mother Joan). “But when I’m home, I’m always within five feet of someone I love,” Mattie explains. Pictures of the Sullivan and Allen families; of Mattie and Rose as youngsters and teenagers; of Rose in full military gear in some desert locale; and of Wanda Lee and Victor Lee are ranged across the mantle. Rose’s old military patches, insignia, and decorations – which include two Purple Hearts for injuries suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq - are framed on the wall. The famous picture of Mattie and her kids, however, is nowhere to be found, and I ask her why. “I suppose it’s silly not to have a copy somewhere,” concedes Mattie. “But it’s not like I need to look at a picture to remember. And I don’t really like to remember that much anyway.” Before we start the interview, Mattie brings in a huge plate of her cornbread - it’s hot, sweet, crumbly and delicious – and then apologizes for the way she treated Scott Ressler during her interview nine years earlier. Rose and I tell her no apology is necessary. “Yes it is,” she insists. “He did nothing wrong. I thought I was ready to talk to him and I guess I wasn’t. He was just asking me what happened and I just went bonkers. I curled up and started crying when there was no reason to. And then Rose – she’s so protective – threw him out. If you see him, please tell him I’m sorry.”