CHAPTER 18
1
Frank expected another heaping helping of bullshit from Elaine when he returned to the house, but it turned out to be a zero-bullshit situation. Like nothing else that day—or, for that matter, in the days to come—his problems solved themselves the easy way. So why didn’t he feel at all cheered?
His estranged wife lay asleep in their daughter’s bed with her right arm looped over Nana’s shoulder. The cocoon around her face was thin, a tight first coating of papier maché, but a complete coating nonetheless. A note on the bedside table read, I prayed for you, Frank. I hope you will pray for us.—E.
Frank crumpled the note and threw it in the trashcan beside the bed. Tiana, the black Disney princess, danced across the side of the bin in her glittering green dress, followed by a parade of magical animals.
“There are no adequate words.” Garth Flickinger had followed him upstairs and now stood behind Frank in the doorway to Nana’s room.
“Yeah,” said Frank. “I guess that’s right.”
There was a framed photo of Nana and her parents on the bedside table. Nana was holding up her prize bookmark. The doctor picked up the photo and studied it. “She has your cheekbones, Mr. Geary. Lucky girl.”
Frank didn’t know how to reply to that, so he said nothing.
The doctor, untroubled by the silence, set the photo back down. “Well. Shall we?”
They left Elaine in the bed and for the second time that day Frank took his daughter into his arms and carried her down the stairs. Her chest rose and fell; she was alive in there. But braindead coma patients had heartbeats, too. There was a good chance that their last exchange, the one Frank would take to his own death—whenever that might come—would be from the morning, him barking at her in the driveway. Scaring her.
Melancholy overtook Frank, a ground fog devouring him from the boots upward. He didn’t have any reason to expect that this dope-fiend doc would actually be able to do anything to help.
Flickinger, meanwhile, spread towels across the hardwood floor in the living room and asked Frank to lay Nana down on them.
“Why not the sofa?”
“Because I want the overhead lights on her, Mr. Geary.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Garth Flickinger settled on his knees beside Nana and opened his medical bag. His bloodshot and red-rimmed eyes gave him a vampiric look. His narrow nose and a high, sloping forehead, framed by auburn curls, added an elfin hint of derangement. Nonetheless, and even though Frank knew he was at least somewhat fucked up, his tone was soothing. No wonder he drove a Mercedes.
“So, what do we know?”
“We know she’s asleep,” Frank said, feeling singularly stupid.
“Ah, but there’s so much more to it! What I’ve picked up from the news is basically this: the cocoons are a fibrous material that seems to be composed of snot, spit, earwax, and large amounts of some unknown protein. How is it being manufactured? Where is it coming from? We don’t know, and it would seem to be impossible, given that normal female extrusions are much smaller—two tablespoons of blood in a woman’s normal menstrual period, for example, no more than a cup even in a heavy one. We also know that the sleepers appear to be sustained by the cocoons.”
“And they go nuclear when the cocoons are breached,” Frank said.
“Right.” Garth laid out instruments on the coffee table: scalpel, trimmers, and, from the black case, a small microscope. “Let’s begin by taking your daughter’s pulse, shall we?”
Frank said that was fine.
Flickinger carefully lifted Nana’s encased wrist and held it for thirty seconds. Then he lowered it just as carefully. “Resting heart rate is slightly muffled by the cocooning material, but it’s in the normal range for a healthy girl her age. Now, Mr. Geary—”
“Frank.”
“Fine. What do we not know, Frank?”
The answer was obvious. “Why this is happening.”
“Why.” Flickinger clapped once. “That’s it. Everything in nature has a purpose. What is the purpose of this? What is the cocoon trying to do?” He picked up his trimmers and clicked the blades open and shut. “So let us interrogate.”
2
When she had no one else to talk to, Jeanette sometimes talked to herself—or rather, to an imagined listener who was sympathetic. Dr. Norcross had told her this was perfectly okay. It was articulation. Tonight that listener was Ree, who had to be imagined. Because Officer Lampley had killed her. Soon she might try to find where they’d put her, pay her respects, but right now just sitting in their cell was good enough. Right now it was all she needed.
“I’ll tell you what happened, Ree. Damian hurt his knee playing football, that’s what happened. Just a pickup game with some guys at the park. I wasn’t there. Damian told me no one even touched him—he just pushed off, going to rush the quarterback I guess, heard a pop, fell down in the grass, came up limping. ACL or an MCL, I always forget which, but you know, one of those. The part that cushions between the bones.”
Ree said Uh-huh.
“At that time we were doing okay, except for we didn’t have the health insurance. I had a thirty-hour-a-week job at a daycare center, and Damian had a regular off-the-books thing that paid unbelievable. Like, twenty an hour. Cash! He was working as sort of the sideman for this small-time contractor who did cabinetry for rich people in Charleston, politicians and CEOs and stuff. Big Coal guys. Damian did a lot of lifting and so on. We were doing great, especially for a couple of kids with nothing but high school diplomas. I was proud of myself.”
Ree said You had every right to be.
“We got the apartment and it was good, nice furniture and everything, nicer than anything I had when I was a kid. He bought this motorcycle almost brand new, and we leased a car for me to drive myself and our boy Bobby around in. We drove down to Disney. Did Space Mountain, Haunted Mansion, hugged Goofy, the whole nine yards. I loaned my sister money to see a dermatologist. Gave my mother some money to get her roof fixed. But no health insurance. And Damian’s got this fucked-up knee. Surgery was the best option, but . . . We just should have bit the bullet and done it. Sold the motorcycle, let go of the car, tightened up for a year. That’s what I wanted to do then. I swear. But Damian didn’t want to. Refused. Hard to get around that. It was his knee, so I let it alone. Men, you know. Won’t stop and ask for directions, and won’t go to a doc until they’re just about dying.”
Ree said You got that right, girlfriend.
“ ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I’m going to stick it out.’ And I must admit we did have a party habit. We always partied. Like kids do. Ecstasy. Weed, obviously. Coke if someone had it. Damian had some downers hid away. Started taking them to keep his knee from hurting him too much. Self-medicating, Dr. Norcross calls it. And you know my headaches? My Blue Meanies?”
Ree said I sure do.
“Yeah. So one night I tell Damian my head’s killing me, and he gives me a pill. ‘Try one of these,’ he says. ‘See if it don’t sand the edge off.’ And that’s how I got hooked. Right through the bag. Easy as that. You know?”
Ree said I know.
3
The news became too much for Jared, so he switched to the Public Access channel, where an extremely enthusiastic craftswoman was giving a lesson on beading fringe. It had to be a pre-recording. If it wasn’t, if this was the craftswoman’s actual current mien, he wouldn’t have wanted to meet her on a normal day. “We are going to make something bea-utiful!” she cried, bouncing on a stool in front of a gray backdrop.
The craftswoman was his only companion. Molly had fallen asleep.
Around one he had ducked out to use the john. When he returned three minutes later she was passed out on the couch. Clutching the can of Mountain Dew he’d given her, her poor kid face already half-covered in webs.
Jared crashed out himself for a couple of hours in the leather armchair. His exhaustion had swamped his distress.
An acrid smell awakened him, drifting in through the screen doors, the sensory alert of a distant fire. He drew the glass doors shut and returned to the armchair. On the TV, the camera focused tight on the craftswoman’s hands as they wove a needle in and out, over and under.
It was 2:54 on Friday morning. A new day according to the clock, but it felt like the previous day wouldn’t be letting them go anytime soon, if ever.
Jared had ventured across the street to requisition Mrs. Ransom’s cell phone from her purse. He texted Mary on it now:
Hey, it’s Jared. You ok?
Yeah, but do you know if something is on fire?
Think so, but I don’t know what. How is your mother? How is your sister? How are you?
We’re all fine. Drinking coffee and baking brownies. Sunrise here we come!! How’s Molly?
Jared glanced at the girl on the couch. He’d draped her with a blanket. The covering on her head was round and white.
Great, he wrote. Chugging Mountain Dew. This is her granny’s phone I’m using.
Mary said she’d text him again soon. Jared returned his attention to the television. The craftswoman was inexhaustible, it seemed.
“Now I know this’ll upset some people, but I just do not care for glass. It scratches up. It’s my true conviction you can do just as well with plastic.” The camera went tight on a pink bead she held between her thumb and forefinger. “See, not even an expert eye’s likely to tell the difference.”
“Pretty good,” Jared said. He had never been one to talk to himself, but he had never been alone in his house with a white-swathed body while the woods burned, either. And there was no denying that little pink fucker looked like glass to his eye. “Pretty dang good, lady.”
“Jared? Who are you talking to?”
He hadn’t heard the front door open. He leaped to his feet, wobbled four or five steps on his aching knee, and threw himself in his father’s arms.
Clint and Jared stood, locked together between the kitchen and the living room. They both wept. Jared tried to explain to his father that he had only gone to pee, he couldn’t help it about Molly, and he felt awful, but dammit he was going to have to go sometime, and she seemed all right, he was sure she’d be okay, chattering away like she was and drinking her Mountain Dew. Everything wasn’t okay, but Clint said it was. He repeated it over and over, and father and son held tighter and tighter, as if by force of will they could make it so, and maybe—maybe—for a couple of seconds, they did.
4
The trimming that Flickinger had taken from an area of Nana’s hand resembled, as Frank peered through the lens of the small microscope, a finely threaded piece of fabric. The threads had threads and those threads had threads.
“It actually looks like a plant fiber,” said the doctor. “To me, at least.”
Frank imagined snapping a celery stalk, the stringy bits that hung loose.
Garth pressed and rolled the piece of white fiber between his fingertips. When he spread his fingers apart, the stuff stretched between them like bubblegum. “Adhesive—incredibly tensile—fast-growing—somehow distorts the chemistry of the host—fiercely distorts it—”
While Garth continued, talking more to himself than to Frank, Frank considered the reduction of his daughter to the word host. It didn’t make him happy.
Garth chuckled. “I don’t like the way you behave, Mr. Fiber. I really don’t.” He grimaced as he squished the material onto a glass microscope slide.
“You okay, Dr. Flickinger?” Frank could accept that the surgeon was eccentric and stoned, and he seemed to know what he was doing so far, but the guy did have a bunch of sharp implements around Frank’s incapacitated daughter.
“I’m peachy. Wouldn’t mind a drink, though.” Flickinger dropped back on his haunches beside Nana’s prone figure. He used the point of the trimmers to scratch beneath the rim of his nostril. “Our friend Mr. Fiber here, he’s contradictory. He ought to be a fungus, but he’s so busy and so aggressive and at the same time only interested in the XX chromosome. Then, you snip him from the rest of the mass and he’s nothing. Nothing. He’s just some sticky shit.”
Frank excused himself, rifled around in the kitchen, and settled for the crap on the top shelf between the baking powder and the cornmeal. There was enough to pour them each an inch. He brought the glasses back to the living room.
“Unless my eyes mistake me, that’s cooking sherry. We’re roughing it now, Frank.” Garth didn’t sound disappointed in the slightest. He accepted the glass and tossed it off with a gasp of satisfaction. “Listen, do you have any matches? A lighter?”
5
“Okay, Ree, the next part won’t be news to you. Little habit became big habit, and big habits are expensive. Damian stole stuff from a rich guy’s house and got away with it once, but not the second time. They didn’t arrest him or anything, but he got his ass fired.”
Ree said Why am I not surprised?
“Yeah. Then I lost my job at the daycare. That was when the economy was really going bad, and the lady who owned the place, she had to make some cutbacks. Funny thing is, there were a couple of girls that hadn’t been working there as long as me, weren’t as experienced, she kept them on. You’ll never guess what the difference was between me and those girls.”
Ree said Oh, I might have a guess, but go on and tell me.
“They were white. Hey, I’m not making an excuse. I’m not, but you know, that’s how it was. And it was fucked up, and I got a little depressed. A lot depressed. Like anybody would. So, I started taking pills even when my head didn’t hurt. And you know what made it especially bad? I understood what was happening. It’s like, oh, so this is the part where I become a stupid fucking junkie just like people always thought I’d become. I hated myself for that. Fulfilling this destiny people gave me for growing up poor and black.”
Ree said Yeah, tough.
“Okay, so you get it. And what Damian and I had, it probably never would have lasted anyway. I know that. We were the same age, but he was way younger on the inside. Guys usually are, I think. But he was young more than most. Like, going off to play football in the park that day while our baby was home sick. That seemed normal to me then. He went off all the time like that. ‘I’ll be back,’ he’d say, or ‘Just going over to Rick’s,’ or whatever. I never questioned it. It didn’t seem like questioning was allowed. He’d butter me up. Flowers and whatever. Candy. New shirt from the mall. Stuff that’s nice for a second. But there was a part of him that was supposed to be funny, and it wasn’t. It was just unkind. Like, he’d pull up beside a lady walking a dog, and yell, ‘You look like twins!’ or he’d be strolling along and feint at some teenager going the other way like he was going to punch him, make the kid cringe. ‘I’m just playing around,’ he’d say. And the drugs, they soured him. He still did whatever he wanted, but it wasn’t happy-go-lucky anymore, the way he went about it. And his meanness got loose, like a dog off its chain. ‘Look at this stoned bitch, Bobby,’ he says to our son, and laughs like it’s hilarious. Like I was a clown in the circus. That kind of thing. I finally slapped him for it, and he punched me back. Then, when I punched him for that, he broke a bowl over my head.”
Ree said That must have hurt.
“Not so much as the feeling that it was what I deserved, me getting my junkie face beaten in by my junkie husband. I hate myself for that. I remember lying on the floor, seeing a nickel in the dust under the fridge, pieces of this blue bowl all around, and figuring that the next thing that would happen would be social services taking Bobby. And sure enough, they did. A cop carried Bobby out of my house, and my baby cried for me, and it should have been the saddest thing that ever happened, except I was so out of it, I didn’t feel anything.”
Ree said That’s sad.
6
Ten minutes had passed and Terry still hadn’t come out of the house next door to the Elways. Zolnik, read the mailbox. Lila didn’t know what to do.
Earlier, they had gone into the Elways’ house, making a wide half-circle around the blood-spattered area where the bodies had been, and entering through the front door. The baby, named Platinum by the Elway brain trust with typical care and understatedness, had been in her bassinet, peaceful as could be inside the kidney-bean-shaped cocoon that had formed all around her. Lila had been able to feel the shape of the infant’s body by pressing her hands against the cocoon. There had been something hilariously ghastly about that; it was like testing a new mattress, gauging it for firmness. But her smile had dried up on her face when Terry started to sob. It was after two in the morning. That made it twenty hours deep into the crisis, give or take, and thirty-five hours since her last shut-eye. Lila was blitzed, and her best deputy was drunk and maudlin.
Well, they were doing the best they could, weren’t they? And there was still all that cat litter spread over Mountain Road.
“No, there’s not,” she corrected herself. That was months ago. Maybe a year?
“There’s not what?” They were outside again, moving to the cruiser parked out in front of Roger’s house.
Lila, cradling the cocoon, blinked at Terry. “Was I talking out loud?”
“Yeah,” said Terry.
“Sorry.”
“This sucks so much.” He sniffled and started toward the Zolnik house.
Lila asked him where he was going.
“Door’s open,” he said, pointing. “It’s the middle of the night and their door is open. Need to check it out. I’ll just be a sec.”
Lila sat down in the passenger seat of the cruiser with the baby. It seemed like only a moment ago, but the digital readout said 2:22. She thought it read 2:11 when she had sat down. Twenty-two and eleven were not the same numbers. But eleven plus eleven made twenty-two. Which meant . . .
Eleven tumbled through her thoughts: eleven keys, eleven dollars, eleven fingers, eleven wishes, eleven tents in eleven campgrounds, eleven beautiful women in the middle of the road waiting to get run down, eleven birds on eleven branches on eleven trees—regular trees, mind you, not imaginary trees.
What was that tree? If things kept going like they were going, someone was going to hang that Evie woman from a tree, Lila could see that as clear as day, because it had started with her, somehow or other it had started with her and the Tree, Lila could feel it like the warmth of the cocooned infant in her lap, little baby Silver. Eleven babies in eleven lima bean cocoons.
“Platinum, Platinum,” she found herself saying. The baby’s stupid name was Platinum not Silver. Silver was the name of the judge. If Lila had ever known the name of the judge’s dead cat, she didn’t now. Clint’s daughter’s name was Sheila Norcross. Of course he hadn’t admitted it, what a disappointment, the worst disappointment of the whole thing, to not even admit it, that Platinum was his kid. Or that Sheila was his kid. Lila’s lips were dry and she was sweating even though it was cool in the car. The door to the Zolnik house hung open.
7
Whether Terry could have done anything for the guy or not, he wasn’t sure; it never even occurred to him to try. Instead, he sat on the bed and put his hands on his knees and took a few slow, deep breaths. He needed to try to get his poor old shit together.
The sleeper was on the floor. Webs covered her head and her hands, as well as her lower body. There was a pair of slacks, knotted together with a pair of underwear, tossed off in a corner. She was small, around five feet. From the pictures on the wall and on the bureau, she appeared to be in her seventies, perhaps older.
Terry figured that the man who had tried to rape her must have yanked her from the bed and onto the floor in the process of removing the slacks.
The rapist was on the floor, too, a few feet away. Actually, he didn’t look like a full-grown man; there was a teenage leanness to him. His jeans bunched around his ankles, stopped by a pair of sneakers. CURT M, read a Magic Marker label on the side of one of the sneaker soles. His face was a red slick. Breath stirred the bloody spit around his mouth. Blood continued to stream from his crotch area, adding to the swamp that had already formed in the rug. A stain colored the far wall of the room and below, on the floor, was a wad of flesh that Terry assumed were Curt M’s cock and balls.
Curt M had probably figured the woman would never notice. To a son of a bitch like this, Aurora must have arrived looking like the opportunity of a lifetime, Easter morning in rapist heaven. There were probably a lot of others like him and, boy, were they in for a nasty surprise.
But how long before the word got out? If you tore the webs and tried to dip your wick, they fought back; they killed. Which seemed perfectly fair to Terry. But it was awfully easy, from there, to imagine some half-assed messiah like that batshit Kinsman What’s-His-Name who was always on the news pissing and moaning about his taxes, coming along with a brand new plan. He’d announce that it was in everyone’s best interest to go around shooting the cocooned women in their web-wrapped heads. They’re ticking bombs, he’d say. There were men out there who’d love that idea. Terry thought of all those guys who’d been having wet dreams for years about being able to use the ridiculous arsenals they’d amassed for “home defense,” but would never have had the guts to pull the trigger on a person who was awake, let alone armed and pointing a gun back at them. Terry didn’t believe there were millions of those guys, but he’d been a cop long enough to suspect there were thousands of them.
What did that leave? Terry’s wife was asleep. Could he keep her safe? What was he going to do, put her on a shelf in a cabinet, store her like a jar of preserves?
And he knew his daughter had never awakened that morning. It didn’t matter that the phone lines were scrambled. Diane was a college kid. She slept in whenever she could. Plus, she’d sent them her spring semester schedule, and Terry was pretty sure she didn’t have morning classes on Thursdays.
Was it possible that Roger—stupid, stupid, stupid Roger—had made an astute choice when he took those webs off Jessica? Roger got it over with before having to see anyone he loved shot in her sleep.
I should kill myself, Terry thought.
He let the idea float around. When it didn’t sink, he grew alarmed and told himself not to rush into anything. He ought to get a drink, or a couple, really let himself work through it all. He thought better when he’d had a few, always had.
On the floor, Curt McLeod—the third-best player on the Dooling High School varsity tennis team, behind Kent Daley and Eric Blass—was making hitching noises. Cheyne-Stokes respiration had begun.
8
Terry’s request that Lila drop him off at the Squeaky Wheel hardly jarred her. It made as much sense as anything at this point.
“What did you see in there, Terry?”
He was in the passenger seat, holding the cocooned baby between wide-open, flattened palms, like a hot casserole. “Some kid tried to—ah—get with a lady in there. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“That woke her up. She was asleep again when I entered the premises. He was—pretty much dead. Dead all the way now.”
“Oh,” said Lila.
They rolled through the dark town. The fire in the hills was red, the smoke cloud that rose from it a shade deeper than the night. A woman in a neon pink jogging suit was doing jumping jacks on a lawn. Crowds of people—predominantly women—were visible through the big windows of the Starbucks on Main Street, which was either open exceptionally late or (perhaps more likely) had been forced open by the crowd. It was 2:44 AM.
The parking lot at the rear of the Squeak was more packed than Lila had ever seen it. There were trucks, sedans, motorcycles, compacts, vans. A new row of vehicles had begun on the grass embankment at the end of the lot.
Lila cozied the cruiser up to the back door, which was ajar and sending out light, voices, and a jukebox blare. The current song was a clattering garage band tune she’d heard a million times but wouldn’t have known the name of even if she had been operating on a full night’s rest. The singer’s voice was iron dragged over asphalt:
“You’re gonna wake up wonderin, find yourself all alone!” he wailed.
A barmaid had fallen asleep sitting on a milk crate beside the door. Her cowboy boots were sprawled out in a V. Terry got out of the car, put Platinum on the seat, then leaned back in. Neon from a beer sign washed over the right side of his face and gave him the acid green visage of a movie corpse. He gestured at the cocooned bundle.
“Maybe you should hide that baby somewhere, Lila.”
“What?”
“Think about it. They’ll start wiping the girls and women out soon. Because they’re dangerous. They wake up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak.” He straightened. “I have to get a drink. Good luck.” Her deputy shut the door carefully, as if afraid he might rouse the infant.
Lila watched Terry walk in through the back door of the bar. He didn’t spare a glance for the woman asleep on the milk crate, the heels of her boots planted in the gravel, toes pointed up.
9
Officers Lampley and Murphy had cleared off the crap on the long table in the janitor’s supply room so that Ree’s body could lie in peace. Taking her to the county morgue in the middle of the night was out of the question, and St. Theresa’s was still a madhouse. Tomorrow, if things settled down, one of the officers could transport her remains to Crowder’s Funeral Home on Kruger Street.
Claudia Stephenson sat at the foot of the table in a folding chair, holding an ice pack to her throat. Jeanette came in and sat in another folding chair, at the head of the table.
“I just wanted someone who’d talk to me,” Claudia said. Her voice was husky, hardly more than a whisper. “Ree was always a good listener.”
“I know,” said Jeanette, thinking that was true even though Ree was dead.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Van said. She was in the open door, her muscular body looking slack with weariness and sorrow.
“You should have used your Taser,” Jeanette said, but she couldn’t muster any real accusation. She was also weary.
“There was no time,” Van said.
“She was going to kill me, Jeanie.” Claudia said this in a tone of apology. “If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I was the one who tried to get the webs off her.” She repeated, “I only wanted someone to chat with.”
At rest, Ree’s uncovered face was both slack and stunned, lids low, mouth open; it was the in-between expression—between laughs, between smiles—you wore in the photograph that you threw out or deleted from your phone. Someone had scrubbed the blood from her forehead, but the bullet hole was stark and obscene. The tattered webbing hung loose around her hair, lank and wilted instead of fluttering and silken, as dead as Ree herself. The stuff had stopped growing when Ree stopped living.
When Jeanette tried to picture the living Ree, all she could find that was solid was a few moments from that morning. I say you can’t not be bothered by a square of light.
Claudia sighed or moaned or sobbed, or maybe did all three simultaneously. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said in her choked wheeze. “I’m so sorry.”
Jeanette closed Ree’s eyelids. That was better. She let her finger graze a small portion of the patch of scar tissue on Ree’s forehead. Who did that to you, Ree? I hope whoever did that hates himself, and punishes himself. Or that he’s dead, and it almost certainly was a he. Ninety-nine percent. The girl’s eyelids were paler than the rest of her sandy skin.
Jeanette bent low to Ree’s ear. “I’ve never told anyone what I told you. Not even Dr. Norcross. Thanks for listening. Now sleep well, honey. Please sleep well.”
10
The fragment of burning web rose into the air, twisting orange and black, blooming. It didn’t flare. Blooming was the only word for the way it opened, the fire becoming so much bigger than the fuel.
Garth Flickinger, holding the lit match that he’d used to test the trimming of web, reared back against the coffee table. His medical implements skidded across it and a few clattered to the floor. Frank, watching from near the door, lowered himself to a crouch and moved quickly toward Nana, to shield her.
The flame formed a swirling circle.
Frank pressed his body over his daughter.
In Flickinger’s hand, the burning match had reached his fingertips, but he continued to hold it. Frank smelled the burning skin. In the glare of the fiery circle that hovered in mid-air above the living room, the doctor’s elfin features appeared to separate, as if they wished—understandably—to flee.
Because fire did not burn this way. Fire did not float. Fire did not make circles.
The last experiment on the web was delivering a conclusive answer to the question of “Why?” and the answer was: because what was happening was not of this world, and could not be treated by the medicine of this world. This realization was on Flickinger’s face for anyone to read. Frank guessed it was in his own face, as well.
The fire collapsed into a rippling brown mass that jittered into a hundred pieces. Moths spilled into the air.
Moths rose to the light fixture; they fluttered to the lampshade, to the corners of the ceiling, through the entryway to the kitchen; moths went dancing to the print of Christ walking on water on the wall and settled on the edges of the frame; a moth tumbled through the air and landed on the ground close to where Frank was draped across Nana. Flickinger was scrambling in the opposite direction on his hands and knees, toward the front hall, yelling the whole way (screaming, actually), his poise shattered.
Frank didn’t move. He kept his eyes on one single moth. It was the color of nothing you’d notice.
The moth crept forward across the floor. Frank was afraid, terrified really, of the little creature that weighed roughly as much as a fingernail and was a living shade of mute. What would it do to him?
Anything. It could do anything it wanted—as long as it didn’t hurt Nana.
“Don’t touch her,” Frank whispered. Embracing his daughter like this, he could feel her pulse and her breath. The world had a way of spinning from Frank’s grasp, of making him wrong or foolish when all he wanted was to be right and good, but he wasn’t a coward. He was ready to die for his little girl. “If you have to have someone, you can have me.”
Two spots of ink on the brown chevron of the moth’s body, its eyes, saw into Frank’s eyes, and from there into his head. He felt it flying around in his skull for God knew how long, touching down on his brain, dragging its pointed feet along the canals like a boy on a rock in the middle of a stream, drawing a stick through the water.
And Frank huddled closer to his child. “Please take me instead.”
The moth darted away.
11
Claudia, she of the Dynamite Body-a, left. Officer Lampley had offered to give Jeanette a moment alone. Now she had the actual Ree to talk to. Or what was left of her. She felt she should have told Ree these things while Ree was still alive.
“What happened—I’m not sure if it was morning or afternoon or early evening, but we’d been on the nod for days. Didn’t go out. Ordered in. At one point, Damian burned me with a cigarette. I’m lying in bed and we’re both looking at my bare arm and I ask, ‘What are you doing?’ The pain was in another room from my mind. I didn’t even move my arm. Damian says, ‘Making sure that you’re real.’ I still have the scar, size of a penny from his pressing so hard. ‘Satisfied?’ I asked. ‘You believe I’m real?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but I hate you more for being real. If you’d let me get my knee fixed, none of this would have happened. You are one vicious bitch. And I’m finally onto you!’ ”
Ree said That’s pretty scary.
“Yes. It was. Because Damian said all that with an expression like this is great news, and he’s delighted to get it and pass it on. It’s like he was the host of some late night radio talk show, playing to his crowd of insomniac nutbags. We’re in the bedroom and the curtains are drawn and nothing’s been washed in days. The power’s off because we didn’t pay the bill. Later, I don’t know how long, I find myself sitting on the floor in Bobby’s room. His bed’s still there, but the other furniture, the rocker and the bureau, they’re gone. Damian sold them to a guy for a little cash. Maybe I was finally coming down, maybe it was because of the cigarette burn, but I felt so sad, and so awful, and so—like I was turned around and in this foreign place and there’s no way home.”
Ree said I know the feeling.
“The screwdriver, now—the clutchhead screwdriver. The guy who bought the rocker must have used it to take the base off and then forgot to take it with him. That’s all I can figure. I know it wasn’t our screwdriver. We didn’t have any tools by then. Damian had sold them off long before the furniture. But this screwdriver is lying on the floor of Bobby’s room and I pick it up. I go to the living room and Damian’s sitting in the folding chair that’s the last seat in the house. He goes, ‘You here to finish the job? Well go ahead. But you better hurry up, because if you don’t get to killing me in the next few seconds here, I think I’ll choke you until your stupid fucking head pops off.’ Says it in that same late night host voice. And he holds up a little bottle with the last couple of pills we have, and then, he gives it a shake, like for a special punchline, ta-da! He goes, ‘Right here’s a good spot, plenty of meat,’ and he pulls my hand that’s holding the screwdriver over to his upper thigh, and puts the point against his jeans, and says, ‘Well? Now or never, Jeanie-baby, now or never.’ ”
Ree said I guess he wanted it.
“And he got it. I drove that bastard all the way down to the handle. Damian doesn’t shout, he just gives a big exhale, and goes, ‘Look what you did to me,’ and he’s bleeding all over the chair and the floor. But he doesn’t make a move to help himself. He says, ‘Fine. Watch me die. Enjoy it.’ ”
Ree said Did you?
“No. No! I huddled in the corner of the room. How long, I couldn’t tell. Police said it was twelve or fourteen hours. I saw the shadows change, but I didn’t know how long. Damian sat there, and he talked. And he talked. Was I happy now. Had this been the plan from the beginning. Oh, and how had I rigged the ground in the park so he’d hurt his knee in the first place. What a great trick, Jeanie-baby. Eventually, he stopped talking. But I can see him—real clear, I can see him, right this minute still. I used to dream about telling Damian I was sorry, about begging his forgiveness. In those dreams he’d just sit in that chair, looking at me and turning blue. Too-late dreams, Dr. Norcross says. Too late for sorry. Score one for the doc, right, Ree? Dead men don’t accept apologies. Not once in the history of the world.”
Ree said Got that right.
“But, oh, honey, oh, Ree. What I wouldn’t give to change everything now just this one time, because you were too good to end up like this. You didn’t ever kill anyone. It should have been me. Not you. Me.”
To this Ree said nothing.