Maura rolled her cart down B Wing, going slow, not wanting anyone to think she had any particular goal in mind.
“Books?” she inquired at each occupied cell—at least at those where the occupants weren’t covered in white shit. “Want to read some scary stuff? I got nine different flavors of boogeyman.”
She had few takers. Most of them were watching the news, which was a horror story in itself. Officer Wettermore stopped her near B Wing to have a look at the titles on her cart. Maura wasn’t that surprised to see him here tonight, because Officer Wettermore was as gay as New Orleans on the first night of Mardi Gras. If he had any womenfolk at home, she’d be astounded.
“That looks like a bunch of garbage to me,” he said. “Go on and get out of here, Maura.”
“Okay, Officer. Going down A Wing now. A couple of the ladies down there, Dr. Norcross has got them in the Prozac Posse, but they still like to read.”
“Fine, but keep your distance from both Fitzroy and the soft cell at the end, right?”
Maura gave him her biggest smile. “Absolutely, Officer Wettermore. And thank you! Thank you very much!”
Other than the new one—the witch—there were only two wakeful women in A Wing, plus the sleeping heap that had been Kitty McDavid.
“No,” said the woman in A-2. “Can’t read, can’t read. The meds Norcross has me on screw up my eyes. Can’t read, no. Been shouting in here. I don’t like shouting.”
The other woman, in A-8, was Angel. She looked at Maura with puffy what-the-fuck-happened-to-me eyes. “Keep rolling, Mo-Mo,” she warned when Maura, in spite of Officer Wettermore’s admonition, offered her a couple of the books. That was okay. Maura was almost at the end of the corridor now. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Wettermore with his back to her, in deep conversation with Officer Murphy, the one the girls called Tigger, like in the Pooh stories.
“Maura…”
It was only a whisper, but penetrating. Resonant, somehow.
It was the new one. Evie. Eve. Who in the Bible had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and gotten both her and her hubby banished into this world of pain and perplexity. Maura knew banishment, knew it well. She had been banished to Dooling for banishing her husband and her two kids (not to mention Slugger) to the vastness of eternity.
Evie stood at the barred door of the soft cell, gazing at Maura. And smiling. Maura had never seen such a beautiful smile in her life. A witch, maybe, but gorgeous. The witch put a hand through the bars and beckoned with one long and elegant finger. Maura rolled her cart onward.
“No further, inmate!” That was Officer Tig Murphy. “Stop right there!”
Maura kept going.
“Get her, stop her!” Murphy yelled, and she heard the clatter-clap of their hard shoes on the tiles.
Maura turned the cart sideways and pitched it over, creating a temporary roadblock. Tattered paperbacks flew and skidded.
“Stop, inmate, stop!”
Maura hustled for the soft cell, reaching around to the small of her back and whipping out the toothbrush shiv. The witch-woman still beckoned. She doesn’t see what I got for her, Maura thought.
She drew her arm back along her hip, meaning to piston it forward into the witch-woman’s midsection. Into her liver. Only those dark eyes first slowed her, then stopped her. It wasn’t evil Maura saw in them, but chilly interest.
“You want to be with her, don’t you?” Evie asked in a rapid whisper.
“Yes,” Maura said. “Oh my God, so much.”
“You can be. But first you must sleep.”
“I can’t. Insomnia.”
Wettermore and Murphy were coming. There were only seconds to stick the witch-woman and end this plague. Only Maura didn’t. The stranger’s dark eyes held her fast and she found that she did not wish to struggle against that hold. They weren’t eyes at all, Maura saw, but gaps, openings into a new darkness.
The witch-woman pressed her face against the bars, her eyes never leaving Maura’s. “Kiss me quick. While there’s still time.”
Maura didn’t think. She dropped the sharpened toothbrush and pressed her own face to the bars. Their lips met. Eve’s warm breath slipped into Maura’s mouth and down her throat. Maura felt blessed sleep rising from the bottom of her brain, as it had when she was a child, safe in her own bed with Freddy the Teddy curled in one arm and Gussie the stuffed dragon curled in the other. Listening to a cold wind outside and knowing she was safe and warm inside, bound for the land of dreams.
When Billy Wettermore and Tig Murphy reached her, Maura was lying on her back outside Evie’s cell, the first strands spinning out of her hair, out of her mouth, and from beneath the closed lids of her dreaming eyes.
CHAPTER 18
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.”