When I Get Back

Winner of the 2020 Googie Goer Prize for Speculative Fiction

Judge’s comments: “‘When I Get Back’ managed, in a few pages, to suture me into its fully formed world and to make me care deeply about both Billy and Helen. I found little surprises in the sentences on every page, and a sort of magic in the generous imagination of the story’s sensitive speaker. This story left me with a rarely powerful and immediate desire to read more from this writer, so I hope this prize will encourage my selfish desire.” – Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

The drive from California to Nebraska took a week because we stopped at every charging station –– wouldn’t want the truck x-ing out on us. Helen asked me if I wanted her to take over. My lack of response resulted in her drumming along to a song in her head. We passed farms terraforming. Stretches that were once dust and ash were now patched like a quilt of trees and crops. 
We passed acres of empty, but even without seeing the house from the highway, I knew which empty was ours. At the end of the driveway was a new charge station; new wind turbines; new solar panels; seed capsules; thresher; tractor; and one old, familiar house. A W.A.S.P. flew overhead –– a drone for water aerospace piloting –– though I think they only came up with the name to match the rattling buzz it makes in the air.
Someone had broken in the door, which, y’know, fine; good reasons had been easy to come by, and Helen said, “Let us forgive those who trespass against us,” in the doorway. Whoever did it used the table leg sitting to the left of the door to nail and bar it shut against his threat. Must have left in a hurry because his hammer wasn’t too far away. Maybe it’s someone else’s hammer because we “found” a lot of things heading out to California. Left a lot of things, too. Mom, for instance. Never a healthy woman. Helen and I must’ve searched half of New Mexico on the way back trying to remember where Dad and I buried her. Helen refused to leave the road because she was afraid to step on Mom’s grave.
The table leg was from her sewing table, one of the few things that remained here. I pulled out the nails in the leg and fit it back to the table with the same nails. Helen set about cleaning. In the dust on the table I wrote: 
1. Fix door.
2. Fix windows.
3. Fix beds.
4. Fix dinner. 
The door’s easy. Our house had these saloon doors between the kitchen and dining room. Having lived that last few years in a tent in California, doors separating two rooms no one slept in was ridiculous. So, I took their hinges. Helen picked up all the glass from the broken windows.
“Do you know how to fix this?” she asked. I shook my head and told her we would just close the shutters at night.
“You think Dad knows?” she said. I told her we’ll know when he gets back. Her hand reached into her pocket for her phone, to reread Dad’s email.
I gave her a hug and said, “C’mon, let’s get this house as ready as we can.” After dinner, I made a sign with that day’s date for the door that said: 
House Occupied 
Need Help? 
Please Knock 
We took the rest of the week to clean up the house. I wanted to get started on planting sooner, but each thing fixed, a sink or a dresser, led to another. But we were assigned a schedule, so the next Monday, I put on the new work pants Helen had sewn for me. I could tell right away that the seam was jagged, and that the left leg was tighter than the right; my sister wasn’t called “Half-Right Helen” for nothing. I smiled, told her she did fine, and decided I’d wait to mention anything until the seam popped that day, which I knew it would. 
I started at the property line, far away from the house. This section was assigned to be an orchard. I brought the seed capsule with the apple logo. I knew the W.A.S.P. flew higher than the drones I was used to, but the engine was bigger, so the buzz sounded like it was right behind my ears. On the other side of the property line, there was an assigned forest –– evergreens with another W.A.S.P. raining across the forest. I drove the cultipacker over the grounds. The instructions said to activate the capsule by pressing my finger against the screen. 
A voice called out from the forest, “Hey, neighbor. How’re you living?” She was in her mid-fifties, wearing one of those bright yellow fisherman’s hats like a fishstick mascot. The voice in my head that grew in the unhoused camps told me to stay quiet. 
“Living enough.” I hopped down and offered my hand. “How’re you living, ma’am?” 
She shook my hand absently and stepped past me to the seed capsule. “Now, see,” she said, “what you gotta do is ––” 
“Ma’am, I got it.” But she didn’t hear me. 
This happened a lot in the California unhoused camps –– older folks raised in a cult of being useful needing to instruct and impart. I smiled and nodded, didn’t notice I was grinding my teeth. The first thing I learned in the camps was: “Be kind when it is and isn’t easy.” 
And yet, I couldn’t. Neighbor Lady chatted my ear off as the seed capsule hopped along its course, depositing seeds and fertilizer along its grid. 
“Ma’am, I fuckin’ I got it,” I said. She just grunted or laughed. I couldn’t tell which.
Once the capsule started its second rep, Neighbor Lady told me to “Keep on living,” and I told her to do the same. She looked at me with such pity, and my hands would not stop shaking. 
If not for those awful pants, the work would’ve gone smoothly. The damn seam pinched my little hairs with every step, and when it finally popped around lunchtime, I breathed a sigh of relief. I ate lunch with my legs pressed tightly together so Helen wouldn’t see. I asked if she saw the woman who helped me. 
“Only her backs. Did we know ‘em from before?” 
I shook my head. “How are things indoors?” I asked. “Did you hear back about the wifi?” When I looked up, I saw she’d “paused.” The closest word to the word we looked for. The mechanism in her right eye was malfunctioning, trying to resync with her left eye.
I knew what people saw when they saw my sister, and I heard what they said. During one of the food shortages three years back, someone threw a brick that broke the bone around her eye. Dad was able to use his connections to get her outfitted with an operational prosthetic. Someone gave her the name “Half-Right Helen” when people realized it didn’t make her ugly, and the nickname spread like wildfire among our pocket of California orange groves. 
Helen wasn’t dumb. If Dad and I were looking for work and one of the hiring men came around, she’d be bright, pleasant, and amiable. But Mom and Dad weren’t strategic manipulators, so Helen and I weren’t raised to be, either. Dad reenlisted when he heard the war was coming so he could set us up growing back in Nebraska. 
That night, I woke up to Helen’s arm on my shoulder. I was covered in sweat, breathing heavy. “What’s going on, Helen? Why is it so quiet?” 
She looked at me, eyes wide. 
“Is something happening in the camp?” I asked. “Have they come around for workers?”
“I just, uh …” Helen looked around the room.
It started to come back to me, where I was. The room, my old room, not the tent. “What –– what time is it?” 
She looked at me blankly. Not blank. Searching. Calculating. “Hm?” she focused back. “Oh, come look at this.” 
Helen led me to the back porch. From there, we could see the start of the orchard, the dancing light from the capsule, and the W.A.S.P., injecting nutrition and water into the soil. The trees were growing at a rate that had to be seen to be believed. 
I sat at the kitchen table. Helen sat across from me. “How’re you living, Billy?” I patted the table. “I’m tired.” 
“Well,” she arched an eyebrow, “it is 3 a.m.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “‘Tired’ is just the closest I can get to the correct word.”
“What is ‘tired’ not communicating?” 
I shrugged. “Emptiness.” Uncomfortably accurate. I cracked my neck. “How about you?”
“‘Tired’ works. But there’s spirit here. Like I’m getting loose energy. It’s not close, it’s filtered. And I don’t know how to tell you how lonely I am here.”
“I’m sorry, Sis.” I swallowed. “I was having a nightmare, wasn’t I?” 
“Was it about, uh …” she trailed off. Her eyes were trained on me. 
“I’ll be all right. It felt, uh ––” I didn’t know what I was going to say but something needed to fill that space. “It felt good to see those plants growing.” I patted the table, stood up, and started for the door. “Goodnight, Sis.” 
The next morning, Helen watched me with the same trained look. We ate in silence, mostly. Like she was waiting. 
She said, “I will be helping you today.” I nodded. We were born about a year apart, both in April, but neither felt older than the other, so we traded authority. Though she just wanted to drive the plow, I was sure. 
The area we were working on bordered the roadside. After it seemed like Helen had a handle on the plow’s controls, I let her drive it on her own. Her dark curls resisting the wind. On top of the red plow, she looked like the tip of a flame turning over the Earth. Eventually, she stopped looking back at me as the novelty faded into work that needed to be done: cultivating our own pine forest. It didn’t belong in Nebraska, but without something new, without the air, nothing could belong there. I didn’t know why she stopped. 
A red emergency light on the hood of the plow started flashing, accompanied by a hollow voice, intoning, “Organic Obstruction. Organic Obstruction. Organic ––” 
As the plow’s blade cut through the earth, it brought up soil and plant roots and weeds. And a hand. And an arm. And a shoulder blade. It was an older woman in a soiled yellow dress. 
During the day, Dad had nightmares like this. Specifically, car accidents where children were injured. I never wanted to understand how he could so completely forget where he was –– not some Bagdadi street but in a camp in El Segundo. I just wanted him to fix it so it wouldn’t feel like I had to. He called it a “heartbreak in his brain.” I never understood what he meant until I began screaming, “Mom! Mom!” over and over again as I ran to the body. 
Helen cut the engine, stopping that horrible voice. She tried to pull me off the corpse. “Billy, let go! Billy, please! C’mon, Billy, that ain’t Momma. Momma’s buried in New Mexico. Let go, please, let go.”  
But I wouldn’t let go. I heard Helen, but I kept screaming, “Mom! Momma!” over and over again until the muscles in my stomach ached. 
“C’mon, Billy boy,” Helen tried to sound calm. “We’re all right. That’s good. Just loosen your grip. Little bit at a time. Thatta boy. Shh, shh. We’re all right. Good, now let go. That’s good. Now, stand up with me. You and I need to go in that house, grab a sheet, go to the barn, grab some shovels, and dig this woman a grave.” She took my face, forced me to see her, eye to eye. “We’ll say a few kind words, and then we’ll get back to work.”

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Philip Jacobsen's stories have appeared in the Write Launch, the Moving Force Journal, and Unlimited Literature. He lives in San Francisco with his partner and their dog.