“He’s growing up, isn’t he,” Willard said quietly as he shouldered his youngest son and made a second trip down the hallway to deposit Sams on his bed.
By then the other two boys were fast asleep also. Willard paused for a second outside Suze’s door, his hand poised over the switch for the hall light. His first inclination was to turn the light out; even Sams was used to sleeping without a night light, and there was enough filtered light from the full moon and cloudless skies should any of them wake.
Then he dropped his hand without shutting off the light. The kids had been startled from sleep once tonight. Best not to take any chances.
His shadow preceding him like a sentry, he headed out for the living room. Catherine was almost asleep as well. For a second time, he was tempted to leave things as they were, to cover her with an additional blanket or two and let her finish the night on the couch. It was comfortable, she would be warm enough, and she really needed the rest she was already getting.
But after a couple moments of thought, Willard crossed the room and gently shook her shoulder.
“What!” she yelped as she startled awake. Her voice was midway between normal tone and scream, and Willard immediately took her in his arms to calm her. “Hey, hon, it’s okay. The kids are in bed. Everything’s all.”
“The bugs!” Catherine’s eyes were wide open and darting around the living room as if they could penetrate the solid patches of darkness behind and beneath furniture. “There were thousands…”
Willard patted her shoulder. His back ached from the awkward position he found himself in, neither standing nor kneeling but halfway between, his arm around Catherine’s shoulder and supporting much of her weight. He dropped to one knee and shifted his arm. “They’re gone, too. Don’t worry.”
She sat upright and turned her glance on him. He was startled by the depth of fear in her eyes.
“But…”
“Shhhh. Don’t think about it.”
She relaxed against his arm.
“I was so frightened, Willard,” she said finally. Her voice sounded hollow and lonely in the echoing room. A moment later, the furnace flicked on with its usual low whuump. He felt her body tense beneath him. Her breathing stopped, held, then finally resumed-ragged, shallow, and much faster than normal.
“Look,” he said, “give me a minute and I’ll take care of things.” He got up, aware of her hand trailing along his arm, as if unwilling to relinquish his physical presence. He turned on the light over the kitchen table, waiting in the living room until the glare flooded through the open kitchen door. He thrust his head into the kitchen and made a clear show of looking it over.
“Nothing here now,” he said over his shoulder. Catherine breathed a sigh of relief. “Just to be on the safe side, though,” he continued, “I’ll give the place a shot of Raid.”
He crossed to the pantry and took down an aerosol can from the top shelf-carefully stored out of reach of the children, and as far away from foodstuffs as possible. Chattering all the time-not saying much of anything but fully aware of how important it was to Catherine that she hear his voice-he sprayed the baseboards in the kitchen.
He glanced around. A body or two remained on the tile floor, and a couple more were squashed on the counter where Catherine had apparently pressed her hand down on them. He shuddered, knowing the intensity of her fear of roaches and how she must have felt when she realized that she had actually crushed several beneath her bare hand and feet.
“No wonder she freaked out,” he said under his breath. “A few would seem like a hundred to her under those conditions.”
He ran hot water over a cloth and washed down the counters and the table, then threw the cloth in the garbage.
“Okay, now for in here” he said, returning to the living room with the can of Raid. As much as a precaution as to further reassure Catherine, he sprayed around the baseboards there as well.
By the time he was finished, Catherine looked more her normal self. Her color was better. She was sitting up, her feet squarely on the carpet. Still, Willard was taken by the sheer magnitude of her terror and horror and, doing something he had not even though of trying since the first year of their marriage, he leaned over and gently picked her up. She curled her arms around his shoulder and allowed him to carry her down the hall toward their bedroom.
Under any other circumstances, the action would have struck him as unbearably if not idiotically romantic, but tonight it just seemed the best thing to do.
“Wait,” Catherine said as they passed the open bathroom door. “Let me take a shower before I get back into bed.”
Willard started to argue, fully aware of how late it was, how soon he would have to get up and head into LA. But he thought better of it and nodded.
Catherine waited outside in the brightly lit hall while Willard stuck his head into the bathroom and checked things out.
“Just a minute,” he called to her as he yanked a wad of toilet paper from the roll and used it to trap an inch- long roach skittering around the bottom of the tub. He cringed as he felt the horny carapace crush beneath his fingers, and again he felt a shudder of empathy for what Catherine must have experienced.
He flushed the wad of paper-and the remains of the roach-down the toilet and turned the hot water on in the shower, drawing the curtain enough across the tub to prevent water from spattering onto the floor.
“Okay, everything’s ready.”
Catherine entered without speaking and, even though the bathroom was really too small for two people, said nothing as Willard waited just inside and watched her undress. He wanted to reach out and touch her body-her breasts and thighs and stomach, the cool softness of the skin along her shoulders. But he knew instinctively that it would be a mistake. Instead, he watched as she ducked around the half-drawn curtains and disappeared.
He returned to the bedroom and waited, his head propped on the pillow. It was a long time before Catherine finally reappeared, her hair matted against her head and her skin red and flushed. Apparently unconcerned that the door was still open and one of the kids might conceivably rouse and come in at the wrong moment, she dropped the towel she was wearing and pulled on a fresh nightgown from her drawer. As she got into bed, Willard noticed that the skin on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands was roughened and inflamed as if it were just this side of bleeding.
He reached up and turned the overhead light out. The light from the hall spilled into the room. Catherine shivered-whether from cold or a residue of her terror, he couldn’t tell. He circled her with his arms and held her without speaking until the smoothness of the rise and fall of her breasts assured him that she was finally asleep.
Only moments after that, Willard was asleep as well.
2
Briiinnnggg.
Briiinnnggg.
Willard slapped at the alarm button and stared groggily at the luminescent face confronting him.
Five o’clock.
He sat upright in bed, staring from side to side, wondering why five o’clock seemed so much earlier than it ever had before. Then he remembered. All told, he had gotten maybe four and a half or five hours of sleep.
He groaned.
That wasn’t enough any more. When he was in college, he had thought nothing of staying up until two or three a.m. shooting the bull, then rousing at six to head out for a full schedule of classes. And when he and Catherine were first married, they might have gotten to bed by eleven or twelve each night, but that didn’t mean that they went right to sleep-and somehow he had made it up each morning, bright and ready.
But now…
He groaned again. I’m too old for this kind of thing, he thought as he forced himself out of bed and into the
