Fever (16 page)

The clang of hard shoes on metal, the truck shuddering with someone’s weight.

“—could make it to West Virginia by morning to drop off the rest if we drive straight through.” A young man’s voice.

Boxes are being lifted, carried out.

Another voice says, “We could stop for the night.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“One of us could sleep in the front, and the other could sleep in the back.”

A riot of laughter, fading as it gets farther away.

I crane my neck over the boxes and see the sharp yellow of the sun setting behind bare trees. The drivers have disappeared into a building with a pink neon light that reads
FLAMINGO SIX
in cursive letters. Below that a handwritten sign reads
OPEN
.

“Come on,” I whisper, shuffling Maddie ahead of me. Gabriel is so out of it that he has to crawl after me on all fours. I try to be careful about helping him out of the truck, but I wind up pulling him a little harder than I mean to, worried the drivers will be back before we’re out of sight.

Maddie is holding her mother’s bag, stuffed full now with bags of Kettle snacks. I don’t know why Madame thought this child was stupid; so far she’s been a step ahead of me at every turn.

We wind up hiding behind a Dumpster while we watch the truckers unload box after box of Callie’s Kettle Snacks & Soft Drinks. It’s a good thing we got out when we did, because the boxes that were hiding us are gone. One of the men slides the back of the truck shut, and the other gets behind the wheel.

Gabriel stares blankly at his lap, heavy-lidded, not minding the fly that’s buzzing around his face. Maddie offers him a can of warm soda, and he brushes her off, muttering something I can’t understand.

The graying light matches his skin, and dark bags are sagging under his eyes; his lips are chalky and pale; there’s a ring of perspiration around his collar.

I don’t want to allow myself to think about just how bad this situation is, but I have to face it. Though there’s no snow on the ground here, it’s cold. And nearly dark. We have no place to stay. I have a very sick person and a child to think about. Our only possible ride from one town to the next is about to leave. I squint and can see the hand gestures of one driver talking to the other.

“We’re getting back into the truck,” I say.

“You’ll have nightmares,” Gabriel says, so softly and with such a slur that I have to replay the words in my head before I understand them. “You . . . In your sleep you told me.”

“I’ll be fine. Come on.”

Gabriel doesn’t fight me when I pull him to his feet, but we don’t move fast enough. The truck is gone before we even get close to it.

Maddie huffs indignantly, her hair fanning up around her forehead.

The door to the Flamingo Six opens, bursting with a laughing crowd of first generations who then scatter into cars. We must be near a wealthy area if people own cars, because only first generations can afford them. They seem to colonize in places, as though the rest of society is too difficult for them to face. There are those that boycott the birth of new children, pro-naturalists who intend to carry out the rest of their own lives without trying to bear or save us new generations, who are dying the day we are born.

Sometimes I envy them, to have lived seventy years already, to be so at peace with death.

I can hear distant city noise, and for the first time I look at what’s around us. The Flamingo Six appears to be a type of restaurant, and we’re standing in its parking lot. Farther off, down a little slope, there are buildings and streetlights and roads. “Look,” I tell Gabriel. It is the first hopeful place we’ve encountered, and I want him to see that there is life worth living outside of the mansion.

But his eyes are unfocused, his hair jagged and a deeper brown with sweat. He leans against me, and I can actually smell the illness on him. I frown, murmur his name sympathetically; he closes his eyes.

“What are you kids doing, standing there?” a woman calls out to us from the open doorway. She is surrounded by warm light and the smell of sweet things. A man comes up behind her, and Maddie darts behind me, clutching at my shirt hem.

The man, Greg, and his wife, Elsa, drew the conclusion that Gabriel is sick with the virus, and I didn’t correct them. I suppose the symptoms could look the same, and they probably wouldn’t have been so generous about feeding us if they’d known about the angel’s blood working its way out of Gabriel’s veins. Some first generations are opposed to our existence enough without thinking we’re all addicts.

They take us through the kitchen, which is bursting with steam and wonderful aromas, and they let us sit at a small foldout table in the break room, and give us bowls of chicken noodle soup and grilled sandwiches. Gabriel doesn’t eat. I can tell he’s trying to stay alert, but his shoulders erupt with spontaneous convulsions and his eyelids are so heavy.

“We started this restaurant thirty years ago, if you can believe it,” Elsa says, bringing us glasses of lemonade. Maddie gulps hers eagerly. “What a sweet thing,” Elsa says. I suppose she wants an explanation, because Maddie clearly is not my or Gabriel’s child.

“She’s my niece,” I say simply. Elsa doesn’t ask for more than that. In fact, she seems more interested in Gabriel. “You should eat something, sweetheart,” she tells him, sadness all at once filling up her dark eyes. “Tastes good. It’ll give you strength.”

“He just needs to rest. We’re trying to get home to West Virginia,” I say, thinking of what one of the truckers said. I’m assuming we rode as far as Virginia in the back of the delivery truck. “His family’s up there. We thought it’d be best if—you know, if he’s with them.”

I immediately feel bad about my lie when Elsa’s eyes fill up with tears and she excuses herself from the room.

“You’re too good at lying,” Gabriel murmurs, nuzzling his head against my shoulder. “You didn’t even flinch.”

“Shh,” I tell him. “Try to eat something.”

But a few seconds later he’s snoring.

When Elsa checks in on us, she frowns at Gabriel’s sleeping form. “Don’t you have anyone you could stay with tonight?”

Maddie, mouth full of sandwich, looks at me inquisitively.

I weave a lie, and I’m so tired and my mind is so muddled that I’d be surprised if it makes any sense. Something about a bus breaking down, and there not being another ride out until morning, and no, we have no place to stay. But Elsa believes it, which is when I truly begin to suspect that something is a bit off about her.

And when she invites us to stay the night in the home she and her husband have above the restaurant, I’m sure of it.

As Gabriel rests against me, in some worrisome twilight that has him mumbling and twitching his leg (which only stops when I rest my hand on his thigh), Elsa pulls up a chair to talk to me. But while her words are for me, her eyes are on Gabriel. Thoughtful, even adoring. “Poor thing,” she coos. “He hardly looks twenty-five.”

This is because Gabriel is eighteen, but I don’t say that. In fact, that might not even be true. I have known him for nearly a year, and perhaps he let his birthday slip quietly by, the way Jenna did. The way I did. One year closer. I tighten my grip on him, knotting the fabric of his pants in my fist.

I open my mouth to say that he’s managing it, that he’s holding on longer than I’d expected, but I stop myself. I no longer want to carry on this lie. There is so much death in the world, everywhere, every day, looming over this lovely new fake generation that Gabriel and I were born a part of, that I don’t want to contribute.

In fact, out of nowhere, I feel like crying.

But I don’t. I finish my soup and listen to Elsa talk about a boy named Charlie. “My Charlie.” As in, “My wonderful, sweet, poor Charlie.” I guess he’s her son. Or was her son, because now Elsa is saying how much Gabriel looks like him, and how hard it was in his final weeks, and how she can hear his ghost in the halls. His words, she says, got trapped in the wallpaper, and they leap between the little blue flowers of it, echoing, playing with one another.

Maddie is transfixed by this woman’s words, her head canted all the way up, watching Elsa’s lips move. I wonder if Elsa and Maddie are on the same wavelength. If Maddie could speak, would she tell of laughter in clouds, or ghosts in her hair?

Elsa assumes Gabriel is my husband when she sees my wedding ring, says her son never married. She says she’d love to find a girl for him, one day, who can reach him in death. And then she asks me if I know how to sing.

But she doesn’t ask about my eyes, how I got them or if I’m malformed, which I appreciate. Maybe because in her world everything is out of sorts.

Greg, who heard Elsa speaking, comes and leads her away, saying, “Come on, dear. There are tables to bus.” His presence breaks whatever magical spell Maddie was under, because she freezes when he approaches, and slinks under the table when he goes. She won’t come out, no matter how many times I ask, so I give up. I make a game of tapping my foot against the floor in the rhythm of a song I remember from one of Linden’s parties, and then, without warning, I’ll tap Maddie’s leg instead.

She likes this. I can hear the bubbling breaths that, I come to realize, are her way of giggling.

“Important,” Gabriel murmurs into my neck, too far gone for me to reach him. I know it’s going to be a difficult night.

“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Greg says, returning and wiping his hands on a dishrag. “She has a hard time discerning people from stray kittens.” I suppose this is supposed to be a joke, because he laughs. Maddie is clinging to my leg under the table, and when Greg crouches down and waves at her, I can feel her nails digging through my pants like talons, and I’m sure she’s drawing blood.

“We do have a spare room she likes to rent out,” he says. “We’ll expect payment, but that’s something we can work out in the morning.”

He has a kind face. Sad, dark eyes like his wife has. Laugh lines. Gray-brown hair and a close shave. But when he smiles at me, something about it makes me want to climb under the table myself. Not to hide with Maddie but to protect her.

A
FTER
the restaurant has closed, sometime after ten p.m., I rouse Gabriel from where he’s been slumped over the table for hours, spluttering in a lake of drool. I coax a little of someone’s leftovers into him as we wash dishes. Maddie, standing on a lemon crate, dries them with surprising care. Something tells me that the sound of shattered glass would set her off and that she knows it.

Elsa skips her way up the steps to their upstairs apartment, which consists of two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a small bathroom on one long hallway that sections off into a tiny seating area with couches and a television.

The wallpaper in the hallway is patterned with tiny blue flowers, and Elsa taps them with affection as she shows us to our room. Gabriel raises his eyes to me, and I shake my head.

The bedroom has only one creaky twin bed, and I’m about to suggest we let Maddie have it, when she takes her mother’s bag, yanks a pillow from the pristinely made-up covers, and climbs under the bed. Used to the perpetual state of hiding that Madame forced on her, I guess.

I let Gabriel shower first, thinking the hot water might help him come out of his torpor a little. I leave the bedroom door open, listen to the odd splashes of the water falling off his body. Maddie scuttles around under the mattress, and then she pokes her head out at me.

“We need to get you cleaned up,” I say.

Using the first aid kit from under the kitchen sink, Elsa re-dresses Maddie’s broken arm. Maddie lets her, sitting on the edge of the pale blue counter that’s a shade darker than her eyes. She holds her little arm up in offering, starry-eyed while Elsa hums and smiles at her and says she always wanted a granddaughter. She washes Maddie’s smooth dark hair over the sink, and then she even takes a pair of scissors to it, fixing all the mismatched angles Lilac must have cut herself. She scrubs the layer of grime from Maddie’s arms and face, humming, sometimes singing in a language I’ve never heard. Perhaps she made it up. Maddie moves her lips, and I almost think she’s going to sing too, but of course she doesn’t.

I stand in the doorway all the while, arms folded, knowing that as long as I’m in this place I won’t allow myself to sleep. Not while Gabriel is too beat to keep watch.

Back in the bedroom Elsa has laid out some clothes for us to sleep in, all the clothes of a young man—a baggy T-shirt that swallows Maddie whole, and a shirt for me that falls off my shoulder, and sweatpants that don’t quite stay on my hips even with the drawstring pulled taut.

Gabriel is still showering, and when I sit on the bed to wait for him, Maddie climbs up beside me with the book from her mother’s bag. It’s a children’s book, dog-eared, the brittle pages barely clinging to the spine. I check the copyright date and see it’s almost as old as my parents. And in a child’s unsteady handwriting, in blue crayon, is the name Grace Lottner. Maddie points to it, sweeps her fingers along the roller-coaster path of angles and edges. Then, her eyes watching me, she turns the page. The title page blooms with erratic flowers and scribbles and what I think is meant to be the drawing of a bird. But then, in all that chaos, there’s something else. Something I am just barely able to read, it’s so faded and messy.