Lainie trots up the stairs. It’s not to escape Richard’s opaque glower. It’s to find Timmy, the one person around who doesn’t show proper fear—respect, she corrects herself—to the head of the family. This is troubling, though not as troubling as Richard’s indulgence of it. Some days it seems like Richard is encouraging his son to denigrate his sister and challenge his mother, as if Timmy, at eight years old, is already superior to the household’s females.
“Timmy,” she sings. “It’s breakfast time, young man.”
A good wife doesn’t think such thoughts, not about her son and not about her husband. She understands the use of pharmaceuticals. Six weeks after Richard disappeared into the Amazon, she’d been a disaster, face puffy from lack of sleep, throat raw from weeping. At the urging of a Washington secretary forced to listen to her sob over the phone, she’d gone to the family practitioner and, staring at her lap, asked him if it was true there was a drug that could make lonely wives stop crying. The doctor, made fidgety by her sniffling, dropped his just-lit cigarette in his rush to prescribe her Miltown—“mother’s little helper,” he called it, penicillin for your thoughts. He’d patted her hand and reassured her. All feminine minds were fragile.
The Miltown had worked. Oh, how it had worked! The snowballing panic of her every dire day smoothed into a drowsy disquiet, nudged even closer to calmness by an afternoon cocktail or two. She had an inkling she might be overdoing it, but when she saw fellow army wives at the mailboxes or grocery store, they too were slurring and butterfingered. But then Lainie had pulled herself together and tossed the tranquilizers into the toilet. On her way to Timmy’s room, she catches carnivalesque reflections of herself in doorknobs, vases, picture frames. Is the independent Orlando Lainie entirely gone?
Lainie’s relieved to find Timmy sitting with his back to the door at his table, a darling replica, she likes to imagine, of his father’s workplace desk. She lingers at the door frame, chiding herself for having any misgivings about this cherub. He’s his father’s son, but he’s also his mother’s baby, a bright child with a voracious thirst for life, and she is lucky to have him.
“Knock-knock,” she says.
He doesn’t hear and she can’t help but smile. Timmy is as focused as his father. Lainie comes forward, her bare feet silent on the carpet, feeling like an angel floating down to check on one of the world’s saints, until she’s directly above him and can see the lizard pinned through its four legs to the tabletop, still twitching, its abdomen an open slit that Timmy explores with a knife.
27
THE GASH IN the creature’s side is healing. Each time Elisa visits, in the deadest of hours, she sees a lesser moil of blood following his glide across the pool. Only his eyes are visible, lighthouse beacons casting searchlights across a black sea. He swims right in front of her, and this is progress; no more hiding underwater. Her pulse rabbits. She needed this. She needed him to remember her, trust her. She shifts the heavy garbage bag she carries to the opposite hand. Not a surprising thing for a janitor to carry, though this bag carries anything but garbage.
To die for Chemosh is to live forever! The movie’s muffled cry has become a second wakeup alarm she doesn’t need. She’s awake long before needed, thinking of him, the magnificence no thickness of chain can diminish. Julia’s silver shoes are the only thing to distract her. She’s never late for the bus these days and has plenty of time to cross the street and put her palms to the window glass. She used to feel glass on all other sides of her, too, invisible walls of the maze in which she was trapped. No more: She believes she sees a path out of that maze, and it leads through F-1.
The jungle field recordings aren’t rolling tonight, and she’s done enough tabulating of the lab’s activity, in tiny hash marks at the bottom of her QCCs, to know this means no scientists have stayed late to reset the tapes. Occam is empty, Zelda is busy across the facility, and Elisa toes the red line and holds up the evening’s first egg.
The creature sharpens his arc to drift closer, and Elisa has to resist smiling—that’s giving him what he wants before he earns it. She stands firm, holding the egg upright. The creature floats in place by magic; if he’s kicking to tread water, she can’t see it. Slowly his large hand rises from the pool, water fluming between his forearm spines and through his chest’s etched patterns. The small flexings of his five fingers are like five arms wrapping her in a tight embrace: E-G-G.
She’s breathless behind her grin. She places the egg on the ledge and watches him take it, not with last week’s savage swat, but with a grocer’s discernment. She’d like to watch him peel it, see if he’s improved at that task, but the weight of the garbage bag makes her impatient. Holding as much eye contact as possible, she walks backward until her hip knocks the table of audio equipment. She slides the reel-to-reel player back, moves aside the radio, and opens the lid of the record player.
Elisa is certain the player’s presence is incidental. The gear likely came from a single scientist’s closet, all of it knotted together by tangled wires. She withdraws from the bag the dusty relics of a forgotten young life that she’s kept stashed inside her locker for days: record albums, the ones she quit playing around the time she quit believing she had any reasons left to hear them. She’s brought too many, ten or fifteen, but how was she supposed to know in advance what kind of music this moment would demand?
Ella Fitzgerald’s Songs in a Mellow Mood—would he find the low rumble distressing? Chet Baker Sings—is the beat too sharklike? The Chordettes Sing Your Requests—might he think the room had suddenly filled with other women? Lyrics suddenly seem like a bad idea. She selects the first instrumental album she finds, Glenn Miller’s Lover’s Serenade, and slides it from its sleeve onto the player. She looks back at the creature and makes the sign for “record.” Then she turns on the player, drops the needle, and only then realizes it’s unplugged. She finds both cord and outlet, brings them together—
—and the band swings to life in blasting brass syncopation, knocking Elisa to her heels. Piano, drums, strings, and horns dive down and soar up, catching the rhythm before a trumpet is let loose above it all like a tossed dove. She looks at the pool, certain that the creature will think she’s betrayed him with an ambush. Instead, he is as still as if the water itself has frozen. The shells of his half-peeled egg float outward, a physical expression of his widening awe.
Elisa lurches to the table, takes the needle from the spinning circle. The trumpet dissevers with a squelch. She musters a smile to convince the creature that everything is fine. But everything is fine. It’s beyond fine: The grooves in his scaled skin are glowing. She recalls a fragment of a news article regarding bioluminescence, a chemical light emitted by certain fish, but she’d imagined it like lightning bugs, soft bulbs in a distant night, not this dulcet simmer that seems to boil from the creature’s center and steep the entire pool from ink black to a radiant summer-sky blue. He is hearing the music, yes, but he’s also feeling it, reflecting it, and from that reflection Elisa can hear and feel the music as she never has before. Glenn Miller has colors, shapes, textures—how has she never noticed?