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. “Tomorrow will be better.”
9
It wasn’t.
The girls woke at seven, before anyone else was awake, and crept into the family room and turned the television on. They dialed the volume knob so far down that the sound emerged as little more than a blurring murmur. They sat three or four feet from the screen, neither moving, neither making a sound. But something woke Thad up anyway, and when he sat up in his bag and saw the two girls staring intently at a cartoon he had grown tired of when he was ten, he yelled, “Hey, get out of here, bugs! We’re sleeping.” Thad yelling full-voiced was in itself an interesting phenomenon, one capable of waking everyone else in the house.
It did. It jerked Jay from a tangle of hateful dreams that had kept him tossing and turning all night on the narrow bed. For her part, Linda had not dreamed, but Jay’s restlessness had perforce communicated itself to her. Jay was up and out the door before Linda was fully awake.
Within five minutes, the only person still asleep was Grandpa Abe. The door to his bedroom was closed, and Jay heard no movements behind it as he hurried down the hall to see why the girls were crying. He rounded the entryway only a few steps in front of Linda, who was followed closely by Ellen. Elizabeth was whimpering, but Anna was screaming full volume. Thad had her by the upper arm, his fingers gripping so tightly that even Jay could see the bloodless white of the boy’s knuckles. Anna was almost off the ground, only one toe brushing the carpeting. The television screen was black, and Thad clutched the on-off button in his other hand.
“ Hey!” Jay yelled, forgetting for an instant that the six-foot-one, straggly-haired ape wearing only a pair of drooping boxers hanging from his bony hips was his own nephew. “What’s going on?”
Thad let go of Anna instantly-so fast, in fact, that the girl almost fell. Elizabeth grabbed her and steadied her. Thad spun around to face Jay.
“Uh, Uncle Jay,” he said, as if that flicker of recognition were deserving of special notice. “Uh…we were sleepin’ and the bu… the girls came in and turned the TV on and woke us up and…”
Jay crossed the room, stepping deliberately over the cocoon-like lumps that were Josh and Colin-both of them sitting up breathless, wide-eyed, and tousled. When he was less than a foot from his nephew, he spoke in a voice that was so low and calm and controlled that he barely recognized it as his own. “You touch her again, punk, and I’ll break every bone in your body.”
Thad stared down at his five-foot-nine uncle and started to say something.
“I mean it,” Jay said before the boy could speak. “Every bone in your fucking body.”
‘“Jay!” Linda’s voice registered disbelief. Jay never cursed.
Jay whirled to see Linda at the entry to the family room, Ellen pressed close behind. For an instant, it was as if a thick red curtain had parted from before his eyes.
He blinked.
When he looked back at Thad, he was shocked. There wasn’t a wild-eye, hippie-type hulk towering over him. It was his nephew, the boy he had dandled on his knee. A skinny, fifteen-year-old boy whose emotional growth had not yet caught up with his body. Jay remembered vaguely his own teenage years, how difficult and rare it was to wake feeling like anything other than a temperamental grizzly on the constant prowl for mayhem.