out of the car. They pounded down the sidewalk, oblivious to the deadness around them. They skirted a leafless bougainvillea that should have overhung the entryway with masses of scarlet brilliance but now grew more like the wall of thorns from Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty than anything else. They were knocking excitedly on the front door before Jay and Linda were even out of the car.
Ellen’s oldest, Thad, opened the door. He’s grown up, Jay thought as he glanced up and saw the fifteen- year-old towering over his girls, his hair long and greasy and blond and unkempt, and the glint of something gold dangling from his left earlobe.
“Hey, it’s the insects,” the boy called over his shoulder, his voice a vibrant bass.
He’s only grown up physically, Jay amended. Mentally he’s as immature as always. A nasty little boy squashed in an almost-a-man’s body.
The girls filed by their cousin, their enthusiasm dampened by his crude welcome. The incident didn’t bode well for a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend.
8
Abraham Morris met his younger child and the boy’s family with a slow smile. He spoke little, beyond a soft, “Good to see you, Jay.” He gave Linda a brief peck on the cheek, but seemed unusually aloof around the girls. Elizabeth looked worried and disappointed when Grandpa virtually ignored her, but Anna squatted in a corner and watched Ellen’s two younger boys fighting over a PlayStation console that couldn’t have been out of its box for more than a couple of hours. The Styrofoam packing material lay scattered across the living room like stark white bones in a desecrated graveyard.
Jay shuddered at the image.
Josh and Colin tugged simultaneously at one joystick; a second lay unnoticed in the middle of the floor. Jay picked up the joystick and held it out.
“You don’t need to fight over that one. There’s another one right here.” He thought nothing of the action, but Ellen shot him a vicious glance that clearly said keep out of my family affairs, I don’t tell your kids what to do, do I?
Jay and Ellen hadn’t gotten along well for a long while now, but even he was startled by the vehemence implicit in her expression. He dropped the joystick and turned away from the squabbling boys.
The rest of the day quickly disintegrated into family quarrels over trivialities that left Jay exhausted by the time he finally got to bed late Wednesday evening. He and Linda shared a three-quarters width rollaway bed Abe kept in the closet of the back corner bedroom. Ellen and Mitch had apparently decided-as always-to act on a first- come, first-served basis. Jay had not been the least surprised to see their suitcases already laid open on the queen-size bed in the middle bedroom, between Abe’s and the one Jay and Linda inherited by default. Jay’s girls were sleeping in the first bedroom, just across from the master bath and next to their Grandfather’s room. Ellen’s three boys had finally sacked out in the family room, their bulky sleeping bags and stacks of clothing cluttering most of the floor space.
The remaining bedroom-tucked between the corner room and the living room-was too tightly packed with the bulkiest and most cumbersome of Grandpa Abe’s books and collecting equipment for anyone to sleep there. Jay had glanced in earlier that evening and noticed with increasing alarm the thick coating of dust on the dead-grey filing cabinets, on the microscope, on the taxidermy table, on the ends of the thick books that had served his father for a lifetime of identifying the specimens of rocks and plants and animals and insects he had collected from nearly every part of the Western United States.
The sight of that thick layer of dust had bothered Jay much more deeply than the usual snips and quips from his brother-in-law, whose law practice in San Diego was admittedly far more lucrative than Jay’s work with Compu-Corps, or from Ellen’s usual (but this time unusually flawless) impersonation of the massive iceberg that gutted the Titanic.
“Are you feeling all right?” Linda asked, abruptly breaking him out of his dark silence.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t act like it.”
He glanced at her and smiled. “It’s just…it’s just that I don’t really like sleeping in here. I always feel half- dizzy when I walk in.” He gestured with one hand around the room that was originally designed as a bedroom but was now functioning more like a branch specimen room of the Ventura County Museum of Natural history.
Birds of all sizes-ranging from tiny hummingbirds to a huge Great Horned Owl-clung with needle-sharp claws to stumps of wood that seemed to jut from the very substance of the sandy tan walls. Small birds like wrens and sparrows seemed to flutter on invisible wires hooked into the ceiling. Abe’s collection of western birds created a sensation that Jay found intensely claustrophobic. There were too many birds, too close together, their arced wings almost touching, their glass eyes sharp and too reflective, their beaks and claws angled threateningly.
Most of the floor space around the edge of the room was filled with glass-fronted display cases and small, narrow tables containing collections of pinned butterflies and insects, minerals and rocks, and mounted samples of the smaller wildlife of Montana, Nevada, Arizona-including ground squirrels, chipmunks, two skunks, a mole, and a full-sized rattlesnake coiled like an oversized ashtray on the top shelf of the bookcase just inside the door. Hundreds of leaves and seedpods and blossoms lay desiccated and crumbling and pressed beneath protective plastic sheets collected in thick ring-binders that stood blackly along the desk top underneath the window.
Even the closet was open and crowded with parts of Abe’s collections. The original hardwood folding doors had been removed, and on homemade shelves rising above the blank space where the rollaway had been stored- now eerily apparent as the only empty, uncluttered stretch of wall in the entire room-were stacked case after case of slide carousels that Jay knew contained the life history of the Morrises as well as a pictorial, encyclopedic natural history of every area Abe had worked in during his decades with the Bureau of Land Management.
The room was reasonably large, Jay thought, especially for the fifth bedroom in a five-bedroom tract house. But it was so crammed with boxes and files and specimens along every wall and in every corner that it seemed crowded, breathlessly cramped. He felt as if the walls were inching nearer, as if the birds and animals were not dead and stuffed but merely caught helplessly in some weird half-living stasis, waiting for the right moment to break loose and flutter creep scuttle crawl insinuate themselves into his life.
“This stuff always gave me the creeps,” he said finally, “even when I was a kid. I hated show-and-tell because Dad always insisted that I take one of those.” He gestured toward the birds. He shuddered. “I hated them.”
Linda reached across the low bed and touched his hand with hers. “I know. I don’t especially like it in here, either. But the girls would have absolute screaming fits.”
He nodded. Then he grinned. “I’d like to see those three little heathens in the family room stay in here for a night. Maybe I could rig up something with flashlights and batteries and a few wires, so the hawk and eagle would appear to attack…”
“Jay!”
“He shrugged, the grin lingering on his face. “Hey, everyone’s entitled to a fantasy. After the way those boys treated Anna and Elizabeth…”
“I don’t think the girls ever got to play with the video games, not once,” Linda said, tacitly agreeing with Jay. The evening had been rough on the girls.
And it was even rougher, Jay knew, because Grandpa Abe had spent most of the time sitting silently in the old bentwood rocker Grandma Matty had bought as a young mother. He hadn’t even rocked very much; he spent the evening staring at a spot on the wall opposite, six inches under the faded, antique-framed photograph of his own grandparents-Jay’s great-grandparents-stiffly postured for a formal wedding portrait. He had sat and stared and spoken very little
Jay sighed. Obviously things weren’t going as well here as he had been led to believe through Abe’s telephone calls. He reached over and flicked the light off. Moonlight streamed through the curtainless window, striking him full on the face. The light cast the stuffed animals and birds into sharp relief. He rolled away, covering his eyes with his forearm.
Linda nestled close against his back, her arm over his side. “Try to get some sleep,” she whispered in his ear.
