The trimming that Flickinger had taken from an area of Nana’s hand resembled, as Frank peered through the lens of the small microscope, a finely threaded piece of fabric. The threads had threads and those threads had threads.
“It actually looks like a plant fiber,” said the doctor. “To me, at least.”
Frank imagined snapping a celery stalk, the stringy bits that hung loose.
Garth pressed and rolled the piece of white fiber between his fingertips. When he spread his fingers apart, the stuff stretched between them like bubblegum. “Adhesive—incredibly tensile—fast-growing—somehow distorts the chemistry of the host—fiercely distorts it—”
While Garth continued, talking more to himself than to Frank, Frank considered the reduction of his daughter to the word host. It didn’t make him happy.
Garth chuckled. “I don’t like the way you behave, Mr. Fiber. I really don’t.” He grimaced as he squished the material onto a glass microscope slide.
“You okay, Dr. Flickinger?” Frank could accept that the surgeon was eccentric and stoned, and he seemed to know what he was doing so far, but the guy did have a bunch of sharp implements around Frank’s incapacitated daughter.
“I’m peachy. Wouldn’t mind a drink, though.” Flickinger dropped back on his haunches beside Nana’s prone figure. He used the point of the trimmers to scratch beneath the rim of his nostril. “Our friend Mr. Fiber here, he’s contradictory. He ought to be a fungus, but he’s so busy and so aggressive and at the same time only interested in the XX chromosome. Then, you snip him from the rest of the mass and he’s nothing. Nothing. He’s just some sticky shit.”
Frank excused himself, rifled around in the kitchen, and settled for the crap on the top shelf between the baking powder and the cornmeal. There was enough to pour them each an inch. He brought the glasses back to the living room.
“Unless my eyes mistake me, that’s cooking sherry. We’re roughing it now, Frank.” Garth didn’t sound disappointed in the slightest. He accepted the glass and tossed it off with a gasp of satisfaction. “Listen, do you have any matches? A lighter?”
“Okay, Ree, the next part won’t be news to you. Little habit became big habit, and big habits are expensive. Damian stole stuff from a rich guy’s house and got away with it once, but not the second time. They didn’t arrest him or anything, but he got his ass fired.”
Ree said Why am I not surprised?
“Yeah. Then I lost my job at the daycare. That was when the economy was really going bad, and the lady who owned the place, she had to make some cutbacks. Funny thing is, there were a couple of girls that hadn’t been working there as long as me, weren’t as experienced, she kept them on. You’ll never guess what the difference was between me and those girls.”
Ree said Oh, I might have a guess, but go on and tell me.
“They were white. Hey, I’m not making an excuse. I’m not, but you know, that’s how it was. And it was fucked up, and I got a little depressed. A lot depressed. Like anybody would. So, I started taking pills even when my head didn’t hurt. And you know what made it especially bad? I understood what was happening. It’s like, oh, so this is the part where I become a stupid fucking junkie just like people always thought I’d become. I hated myself for that. Fulfilling this destiny people gave me for growing up poor and black.”
Ree said Yeah, tough.
“Okay, so you get it. And what Damian and I had, it probably never would have lasted anyway. I know that. We were the same age, but he was way younger on the inside. Guys usually are, I think. But he was young more than most. Like, going off to play football in the park that day while our baby was home sick. That seemed normal to me then. He went off all the time like that. ‘I’ll be back,’ he’d say, or ‘Just going over to Rick’s,’ or whatever. I never questioned it. It didn’t seem like questioning was allowed. He’d butter me up. Flowers and whatever. Candy. New shirt from the mall. Stuff that’s nice for a second. But there was a part of him that was supposed to be funny, and it wasn’t. It was just unkind. Like, he’d pull up beside a lady walking a dog, and yell, ‘You look like twins!’ or he’d be strolling along and feint at some teenager going the other way like he was going to punch him, make the kid cringe. ‘I’m just playing around,’ he’d say. And the drugs, they soured him. He still did whatever he wanted, but it wasn’t happy-go-lucky anymore, the way he went about it. And his meanness got loose, like a dog off its chain. ‘Look at this stoned bitch, Bobby,’ he says to our son, and laughs like it’s hilarious. Like I was a clown in the circus. That kind of thing. I finally slapped him for it, and he punched me back. Then, when I punched him for that, he broke a bowl over my head.”
Ree said That must have hurt.
“Not so much as the feeling that it was what I deserved, me getting my junkie face beaten in by my junkie husband. I hate myself for that. I remember lying on the floor, seeing a nickel in the dust under the fridge, pieces of this blue bowl all around, and figuring that the next thing that would happen would be social services taking Bobby. And sure enough, they did. A cop carried Bobby out of my house, and my baby cried for me, and it should have been the saddest thing that ever happened, except I was so out of it, I didn’t feel anything.”
Ree said That’s sad.
Ten minutes had passed and Terry still hadn’t come out of the house next door to the Elways. Zolnik, read the mailbox. Lila didn’t know what to do.
Earlier, they had gone into the Elways’ house, making a wide half-circle around the blood-spattered area where the bodies had been, and entering through the front door. The baby, named Platinum by the Elway brain trust with typical care and understatedness, had been in her bassinet, peaceful as could be inside the kidney-bean-shaped cocoon that had formed all around her. Lila had been able to feel the shape of the infant’s body by pressing her hands against the cocoon. There had been something hilariously ghastly about that; it was like testing a new mattress, gauging it for firmness. But her smile had dried up on her face when Terry started to sob. It was after two in the morning. That made it twenty hours deep into the crisis, give or take, and thirty-five hours since her last shut-eye. Lila was blitzed, and her best deputy was drunk and maudlin.
Well, they were doing the best they could, weren’t they? And there was still all that cat litter spread over Mountain Road.
“No, there’s not,” she corrected herself. That was months ago. Maybe a year?
“There’s not what?” They were outside again, moving to the cruiser parked out in front of Roger’s house.
Lila, cradling the cocoon, blinked at Terry. “Was I talking out loud?”
“Yeah,” said Terry.
“Sorry.”
“This sucks so much.” He sniffled and started toward the Zolnik house.
Lila asked him where he was going.
“Door’s open,” he said, pointing. “It’s the middle of the night and their door is open. Need to check it out. I’ll just be a sec.”
Lila sat down in the passenger seat of the cruiser with the baby. It seemed like only a moment ago, but the digital readout said 2:22. She thought it read 2:11 when she had sat down. Twenty-two and eleven were not the same numbers. But eleven plus eleven made twenty-two. Which meant…
Eleven tumbled through her thoughts: eleven keys, eleven dollars, eleven fingers, eleven wishes, eleven tents in eleven campgrounds, eleven beautiful women in the middle of the road waiting to get run down, eleven birds on eleven branches on eleven trees—regular trees, mind you, not imaginary trees.