Hornets and Others

and Carl together, but this only brought a chill to her bones. She never went into his room now; but sometimes, when the door lay open a crack or when he ran out to his bus, leaving it open, she would walk slowly past, as though in awe, and steal a look at the icy blank screen within. Carl.

She and Tanny hardly spoke; their meals were silent eating times with only the setting out of plates beforehand and the cleaning of dishes afterward to frame them. When the yellow bus disgorged him after school he went to his room, and when he finished his supper he went to his room again. On Sunday he stayed in his room all day. It finally came to her, through the thick, gauzy layers of her isolation, that his bond with the machine was becoming too strong.

'School will be over soon, Tanny,' she said one Sunday, when the sunlight was so warm and close it seemed to heat the food on their plates.

He nodded distractedly.

'Would you like to go away for the summer, just you and me?'

He looked up, as if seeing her for the first time in a long while. 'Where?' he said. There was discomfort in his voice, as if he wasn't sure he was really speaking with her.

She took a long slow breath, fighting the demons within her.

'We could go to the mountains.' Again a measured, practiced breath. 'To the cabin.'

He looked at her so hard her composure began to crumble, but then she realized that he was trying to comprehend what she had said. 'You mean it?'

Fighting the paralysis that wanted to overtake her, she nodded, and tried to smile. 'I thought we could fish, get the old boat out—though we might have to work on it a bit to get it in shape.'

'Really?' There was a trace of excitement in his voice; but it disappeared as he saw the suddenly terrified look on her face which she was unable to hide any longer.

'I guess not, Mom.' Again he looked down at his plate, getting ready to dismiss her from his thoughts.

With great effort she froze a smile on her face.

'I really mean it, Tanny. Just like old times. I can watch while the two of you—'

She was unable to control herself then. The trembling began in her hands and soon her whole body was shaking. Then she was sobbing into her hands. She couldn't stop shaking, and the tears wouldn't stop. 'The... two... of... you...' she sobbed.

When she did stop crying, and looked up to see that it was dark in the house and that the warm May sun had gone away leaving only night, leaving her alone in a pool of darkness, she heard, down the hall from behind the closed door the sound of laughing voices, and she knew that now there really were two of them again.

May bloomed into June. The yellow bus drove quicker these days, hurrying toward the end of school and summer rest. The bus seemed almost angry, impatient for these last few school-days, these days of tests and short-sleeve shirts and the abrupt and rude opening of windows by shouting girls and boys calling to friends on the sidewalk, to be over.

She passed these mornings in the kitchen, at the table before her cold cup, or in the living room, sunk deep in a chair in the one dark corner where even spring and coming-summer had not penetrated. She felt as if she were wasting away; as if, within her cocoon, the time for blooming had passed and now all that was left was slow and inevitable decay. Each day the cold chair swallowed more of her; and in her mind, as if she were chained to a seat in a movie theater, or strapped before Tanny's machine, she endlessly reviewed scenes of Tanny and Carl doing things together while she watched. Her nightmare became a constant day and night visitation which always ended with the same scene of blood and loss. She thought of Tanny recreating these same scenes with his father in front of his machine, and these thoughts made her even more helpless in the face of the mounting dread and weakness she felt.

Tanny avoided her. He walked from the room if he stumbled on her quiet, shade-like figure. They ate their meals at the same table but there might as well have been a wall of brick down its center; and, when he took to leaving his meals uneaten, to go back to his room, putting a more material wall between them, she said nothing. Only her body spoke then, and the shuddering and the sobs it gave her filled her with nothing.

As the month wore on the noises from Tanny's room grew strangely quieter. Suddenly there was little of laughter from behind the closed door, only great frightening silences punctuated by sullen words or assent and approval. She wanted to move from her clinging bed when this happened, but her body would not let her.

When he came down to eat his silent breakfast on the last day of school something moved deep within her. There was something there, a small and violent flame that burned still in a place where there was no grief or fear, and it suddenly kindled and pushed her to action.

'Tanny,' she said weakly, and she had to rise in painful stages from her living room chair. She could hear him in the kitchen, hurrying to finish, hurrying to be gone before she could face him.

'Tanny,' she cried, and as she stumbled to the hallway he was past her and out the front door, slamming it (scream!) behind him. She rushed to the window and as he stepped on the bright yellow bus he looked fleetingly back at her. There was an odd look, of surprise, almost, on his face, and something else strange about him... And then the bus was gone.

For hours she hovered around his room like a lost bird. She tidied the room next to it; the room behind it. The rugs in the hallway she brushed and then vacuumed and then brushed again. The laundry closet across the way she cleaned from top to bottom. The chair in the living room beckoned but she blocked it from her mind, knowing that by what she was doing that tiny flame within her was pushing her toward the place she had to be.

Finally, late in the afternoon, she pushed open the door to Tanny's room.

The flame within her almost died at that moment. She fought to control the shivering that began with her hands, the thing that would destroy her and make her unable to go on. The room was... different. There was no laughter left. There was a sense of defeat—of death—in the air. Suddenly, she knew the worst that would happen, what the dread and chill and weakness of the past months had been leading her toward.

Please, Carl, no.

She now saw that the machine was on.

As she closed the door behind her and turned, she saw its blinking Christmas-color display and her heart gave a skip as that something, that red formless shadow, moved back and away from her on the screen.

She moved closer, and the screen remained perfectly flat to her, glowing soft ruby.

Again the shadow moved toward her, away.

'Carl?' she said, barely controlling her voice. 'Carl, can you speak to me?'

That shadow again, an outline with a dark nebulous center, there and gone.

'You have to talk with me!'

Leaning over, she hit a gem-like button.

Nothing happened, and she hit another and another.

The screen abruptly changed, showing an out-of-focus outline of a figure that wavered and then broke up into static.

'Carl, talk to me!'

The ruby screen returned. The shadow moved across from right leisurely to left, then disappeared.

Suddenly in her mind she saw Tanny get on the bright bus that morning again and she knew what had been strange about him: He was wearing his red and white checked sport shirt, the one he had been wearing the day of the accident; in her mind's eyes she saw the torn fabric on the arm falling open as he stepped up into the bus, looking back at her with that odd look...

She knew what Tanny was going to do. A boy without a father. 'Carl!'

She hit the gem-filled console with her fists.

The screen went gray, and then green, and then as from down a long tunnel, moved closer to her and became large and then became defined. The edges filled in, replacing green with the hardness of bones. Around the bones wrapped muscle, and then the fine lines of vessels carrying pumping red blood, and then a fine taut layer of skin and clothing and fine features.

The figure began to laugh, a fine, low, melodious sound impregnated with sadness and sharing.

It was her own laugh, her own face.