Wormwood

36

Candles were burning on either side of the bed, and by the faint smell of sulfur he guessed that she’d just lit them. The glow they created was soft and warm, tranquil and welcoming; not at all like the hungry blaze of the pyre. Here in this room, with her, he found he could almost forget about the world outside.

“How long have you been waiting up?” he asked, pleased with the way the candlelight attached itself to her. The bedcovers were folded neatly across her lap, her back resting lightly against a pillow and the headboard. She was wearing a sleek, satin robe the color of ripe plums, the front of it open to the waist, exposing her small and shapely breasts.

“Not long,” she answered, shifting slightly so the shadows across her changed. “I was getting dressed when I heard you come in.”

“You don’t look very dressed,” he said approvingly, checking the shotgun behind the door and turning back to her. “You look beautiful.”

She smiled shyly, moving her legs. “Do you think so?”

He kicked off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes drawn to the dark “V” between her thighs. “Yes,” he nodded, his voice a low purr. “I do.” His shirt dropped behind him and he unbuckled his belt, his penis arched and erect, already imagining himself inside her.

He crawled into bed and sent his imagination elsewhere. Its services no longer required.

37

In the afterglow, the candles extinguished and the room given back to the starlight, he asked her how the children were coping.

“They each have their own ways,” she answered, her voice soft and forlorn beside him. “After Helen left I tried to keep them downstairs so they would be safe from bullets and couldn’t see out the windows. I let Denise go up to her bedroom to get her colored pencils, though, and she looked very pale and upset when she came back down. She didn’t even have her pencils. I asked her what was the matter and she acted like she hadn’t even heard me. She seemed very concerned about you… asking when you were going to come inside and if you’d remembered to take your gun. Every shot that went off afterward made her jump like a cat. I’m sure she saw something when she went up to her bedroom, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

Rudy frowned at the ceiling, guessing it must have involved Zack or Brian or Larry. From her side window, standing on her bed, she could oversee portions of the Hanna’s back yard. Some noise must have caught her attention while she was searching for her pencils.

“Sarah clung to me all afternoon like a frightened shadow,” Aimee went on. “Every time I turned around I’d stumble over her. After the fourth or fifth time I lost my temper and she started to cry.” A deep sigh floated up in the dark. “John’s the one I’m worried about. These last few days he’s been sleeping through everything. I was grateful at first because my hands were full with the girls, but I don’t think it’s a healthy sleep.”

“How so?” Rudy asked.

“It’s too deep. More like nighttime sleep than a nap, and he’s been sucking his thumb.”

Rudy’s frown deepened. “He hasn’t done that in months.”

Aimee nodded. “Almost a year now; a year come July.”

Rudy was silent for a while, so long that Aimee finally asked what he was thinking.

“Nothing,” he lied. “It just occurred to me that these are very small worries in light of everything that happened today. I’m certain that Larry and Jan would gladly trade places with us. Or Helen, or Keith…”

“Shhh,” she hissed, her face cross as she put a finger to his lips. “Don’t say things like that. It invites bad luck.”

He laughed softly in the dark.

“I just burned the bodies of ten of our neighbors, burned them down to blackened skeletons.” He laughed again, more harshly this time. “Your bad luck is already here.”

She turned away from him. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said to the wall, her hands over her ears like a frightened child, wishing the monster away.

He wondered if she thought of him as a monster…

The thought sent up a bright flare of anger inside him. Everything he’d done today he’d done for her. For them. For the survival of his family. A maddening impulse came over him to pull her hands away and shout at her the horrors he’d seen that day, most especially the thing under the baby blanket in the Navaro’s nursery. Tell her how the larger pieces had slid down the wall after he’d pulled the trigger. If he had to live with it, why shouldn’t she?

The impulse left him. It flapped its evil wings and flew away.

Exhausted, he reached out and touched the trembling curve of her spine. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

She turned, sobbing, into his arms.

38

“How’s Dad doing?” Shane asked, surprised to find his mother still awake, curled up with a blanket on the couch. It occurred to him as the question left his mouth that the situation could not have improved. That she was afraid to sleep with him in case the fever or the infection took over and he died during the night.

It reminded him of the poisoned days before their separation, except then it had been his father who had been banished to the couch, the television flickering late into the night.

Pam sat up, squinting against the flashlight, and he turned it away, toward the same television, which was only gathering dust these days. “You should be sleeping,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“I’m too wound up,” Shane said, sitting down beside her. She touched his hair, combing it back from his face, and he asked her again about his father.

“He’s sleeping,” she answered, as if this were the best they might hope for. “I took his temperature a while ago and it’s come down a little. Not much, but enough for him to sleep.”

A drowsy quiet settled over them, like falling dust. Each lost in their own thoughts.

“I’ve been thinking about what Mr. Cheng said,” Shane confessed, his face troubled and upset.

“Mr. Cheng said quite a bit,” Pam agreed, smiling at him wanly. “He gave us all something to think about.”

“What he said about the antibiotics,” Shane frowned, “about them not working.” He looked at her. “You don’t think that’s true, do you?”

She opened her mouth to tell him no, of course not, but the words wouldn’t come. The truth, now that she’d had time to think about it, was that she didn’t know, and that’s what she told him. Not out of a selfish desire to keep him at home, but because he was her son and he deserved the truth, not a mother’s comforting lie, however well-meaning. “This disease,” she told him, “may be affecting all of us; not just the people who die, but everyone, right now; and since we don’t know anything about it, it’s hard to say how it will affect healing drugs like antibiotics. They may work fine… or they may not. We won’t know for sure until we try.”

He nodded, seeming to understand and to accept this.

The next worry on his mind was even harder to speak.

“What if Dad dies while I’m gone?” he said, hitting her own fears squarely on the head.

“He’s not going to die,” she told him, her expression changing, cracking and hardening like flowing lava.

Shane pressed his lips together. “He might,” he said softly.

She wanted to tell him to stop being ridiculous, that the loss of two fingers was by no means a life- threatening injury, but again she couldn’t. The words got caught in her throat. The days of modern medicine were