The second match managed to burn him. He dropped it and put his thumb in his mouth. She took his wrist, pulled the hand to her, and inspected the damage.
“Do you want me to get some ointment?”
He shook his head and she released his hand and he wiped the thumb on his pants leg and nodded toward the logs.
“I don’t think it’s going to catch,” he said.
Alice hugged her knees. “There’s something wrong with the flue. It’s never worked right. I guess my mother was the only one who could make a fire in here.”
“How old were you when she died?”
“I was about Danny’s age,” she said. “About six. I’ve got a few memories.”
“Was it sudden?”
He watched her look down on her knees.
“It was to me,” and she let out a small and awkward laugh. “She spent a year stockpiling Valium. And then she took them all in a single night.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and thought of all the times he’d heard the same, feeble words.
“I guess she had a problem with it. I was a child. I didn’t know anything. She went away once for treatment. But it didn’t take.”
“In my family,” he said, “they called it the creature.”
Her face lightened. “The creature,” she said. “I like that.”
Sweeney nodded. “It works,” he said. “I had a couple of uncles. They were legendary.”
“It’s a genetic malady,” Alice said. “People like you and me need to be careful.”
He wondered if she’d smelled the beer off him this morning. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s never done much for me one way or the other.”
She gave him a long look that he thought was going to evolve into another lecture. But then she smiled and turned her body and stretched out on her back on the floor next to him. It would have been a surprise move had there been a fire burning before them. Without the blaze, he found it just short of bizarre. She closed her eyes for a second, opened them, reached out, and put a hand on his knee.
That it made him feel like an adolescent was off-putting. But the sight of her, in the tight skirt and the silk blouse and the thin gold chain around the neck, was making him hard for the first time in a year.
And so, before he could think, before he could remind himself that he planned on running home in the next week, he leaned over and kissed her. Her eyes closed again and her hand found his head and the fingers plowed through the hair over his ears and he kissed harder, leaned lower, and brought a hand to the side of her waist. And then her tongue was easing into his mouth and they were like high school kids, panicked and thrilled by the rush of enzymes and hormones, sweat breaking, noises building in the throat. He swung a leg over her, straddled her, and came down chest to chest. He felt her wedge a hand between them and grab at his crotch through his pants.
He reared up in a kind of amazed fear, born of both the realization that he was still functional and the lack of control that he’d never before known. His hand pushed down her thigh, found the hem of her skirt, and started up again and the sensation of touching the warm, silken skin brought him, almost instantly, to the verge of coming. He began to clench and something changed and she began to push him off her body. Then he heard the car door slam in the drive outside and understood that her alarm had nothing to do with his hesitation and everything to do with the return of her father.
“You’ve got to go,” she was saying, a panic in her voice that made her sound like a teenager. “It’s Daddy.”
She shoved him off and stood up, began straightening her clothing and hunting down her shoes. He looked around the room, helpless, infected by Alice’s alarm. She was hopping on one foot, storklike, an arm behind her trying to jam toes into a shoe.
“Up to the study,” she said, trying to yell through a whisper. “Leave the way we came in.”
He ran for the stairs and on the second landing heard the front door open. Then he stopped running and walked, small steps, balls of his feet, to Dr. Peck’s study. He let himself in and moved for the opposite door that led back to the Clinic. But before he stepped into the hallway, he took another look at the portrait of the doctor’s wife, then helped himself to a copy of the doctor’s book.
He closed the door to the study and looked out on the long, narrow corridor stretching in front of him. In that instant, the booze coupled with his exhaustion, and the hall began to tilt and expand. Sweeney placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. And as he did, the doctor’s text fell open and the comic book pressed inside dropped to the floor.
Going down on one knee, he picked up the comic and stared at its cover, which featured the strongman, Bruno Seboldt, lying on a patch of straw and dirt, in a vast puddle of his own scarlet blood. The issue was in pristine condition, as if it had never been read. Used only, perhaps, as a place marker in the fat medical tome.
The surprise of finding the comic inside Dr. Peck’s book gave way almost immediately to that reflexive fear, that compulsive desire to check in on Danny. As if the discovery of the comic were an omen. Sweeney stood up slowly and placed the issue back where he had found it, tucked the text under his arm and hurried down the corridor. And, in seconds, he was lost.
The route that Alice had taken from hospital to residence had been relatively short and direct, and Sweeney was certain that he had retraced it correctly. But at some point, he’d gotten himself turned around and ended up in a dim and narrow passage that dead-ended in an eaves that was crowded with dusty file boxes. He reversed direction and tried to work his way back to familiar ground. In minutes, he was completely disoriented and fighting a small panic.
And just when he was beginning to consider heading back to the Peck home, he found what he knew was the correct hallway and jogged to the door at its end. He pulled it open to find Romeo, the janitor, standing like a statue, his hands tight around a mop handle and a smile on his face as if he’d been expecting Sweeney.
“You out exploring again?” Romeo asked.
Sweeney stared at him for a second and then ran past him, sprinting all the way to Danny’s room.
He found his son in his bed, clean and warm and safe. Sweeney sat down on the ward’s empty middle bed and tried to breathe normally and stop his hands from shaking. After a time, as if it were the only way to calm himself, he pulled the issue of Limbo from Dr. Peck’s book, lay back, and began to read.
LIMBO COMICS: FROM ISSUE # 8: “To Flee the Rising Moon”
The chicken boy waited in the corridor of the county clinic, a blanket wrapped around his blood-soaked feathers. Nothing, however, covered the protruding beak, and the few doctors and nurses and aides who passed by couldn’t hide their shock and revulsion.
It was hours before the surgeon came. He was a tall, stout man who did not offer his name. He had the bearing of a sadistic policeman, though he was still dressed in yellow surgical garb that was stained about the midsection.
“You’re the one who came in with him,” the surgeon said.
Chick roused himself and let the blanket slip to the chair as he stood and nodded.
“You’re both with the Jubilee, I take it?”
Another nod.
“I ask,” said the surgeon, “because I’ve never seen you before.”
“How is my friend?” Chick asked.
“He lost a considerable amount of blood,” the surgeon said. “I’m afraid I had to amputate the arm.”
Chick again nodded his understanding.
“He’s stable,” the surgeon continued. “You can go in and see him in a few minutes.”
“Thank you,” Chick said.
“Don’t thank me,” the surgeon said. “It only makes this more difficult.”