Michael R Collings (8 page)

Under any other circumstances, the action would have struck him as unbearably if not idiotically romantic, but tonight it just seemed the best thing to do.

“Wait,” Catherine said as they passed the open bathroom door. “Let me take a shower before I get back into bed.”

Willard started to argue, fully aware of how late it was, how soon he would have to get up and head into LA. But he thought better of it and nodded.

Catherine waited outside in the brightly lit hall while Willard stuck his head into the bathroom and checked things out.

“Just a minute,” he called to her as he yanked a wad of toilet paper from the roll and used it to trap an inch-long roach skittering around the bottom of the tub. He cringed as he felt the horny carapace crush beneath his fingers, and again he felt a shudder of empathy for what Catherine must have experienced.

He flushed the wad of paper—and the remains of the roach—down the toilet and turned the hot water on in the shower, drawing the curtain enough across the tub to prevent water from spattering onto the floor.

“Okay, everything’s ready.”

Catherine entered without speaking and, even though the bathroom was really too small for two people, said nothing as Willard waited just inside and watched her undress. He wanted to reach out and touch her body—her breasts and thighs and stomach, the cool softness of the skin along her shoulders. But he knew instinctively that it would be a mistake. Instead, he watched as she ducked around the half-drawn curtains and disappeared.

He returned to the bedroom and waited, his head propped on the pillow. It was a long time before Catherine finally reappeared, her hair matted against her head and her skin red and flushed. Apparently unconcerned that the door was still open and one of the kids might conceivably rouse and come in at the wrong moment, she dropped the towel she was wearing and pulled on a fresh nightgown from her drawer. As she got into bed, Willard noticed that the skin on the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands was roughened and inflamed as if it were just this side of bleeding.

He reached up and turned the overhead light out. The light from the hall spilled into the room. Catherine shivered—whether from cold or a residue of her terror, he couldn’t tell. He circled her with his arms and held her without speaking until the smoothness of the rise and fall of her breasts assured him that she was finally asleep.

Only moments after that, Willard was asleep as well.

Briiinnnggg.

Briiinnnggg
.

Willard slapped at the alarm button and stared groggily at the luminescent face confronting him.

Five o’clock.

He sat upright in bed, staring from side to side, wondering why five o’clock seemed so much earlier than it ever had before. Then he remembered. All told, he had gotten maybe four and a half or five hours of sleep.

He groaned.

That wasn’t enough any more. When he was in college, he had thought nothing of staying up until two or three a.m. shooting the bull, then rousing at six to head out for a full schedule of classes. And when he and Catherine were first married, they might have gotten to bed by eleven or twelve each night, but that didn’t mean that they went right to sleep—and somehow he had made it up each morning, bright and ready.

But now....

He groaned again. I’m too old for this kind of thing, he thought as he forced himself out of bed and into the bathroom.

Half an hour later, showered, shaved, dressed for the office, he stuck his head into the bedroom to check on Catherine.

“Willard?” Her voice sounded ghostly and thin as it emerged from the relative darkness. He switched on the lamp by the door—it was far enough away and low enough wattage that it shouldn’t bother Catherine’s eyes.

“I’m just getting ready to head in to work.”

“Don’t.”

“But....”

“Please don’t. I need you here today. Please.”

He wanted to refuse. There wasn’t really anything he could do to help her, other than stand around and reassure here that everything was all right. And he did need to get going on a couple of projects that had come his way over the past couple of days.

“Honey, I really have to....

“Please.”

The third
please
did it. There was an unfamiliar note of pleading in the word that Willard could barely connect with his mental image of his solid, competent wife. Catherine rarely asked for anything; she never begged. But that was what her voice was doing now. Begging. The sound made Willard feel even more uncomfortable

“But....”

“Please.”

He had no choice.

“Okay, I can call and say I’m sick or something. Okay.”

“Hmmmm,” came Catherine’s voice, dulled by sleep and now incoherent.

He crossed the room and looked down at here. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed much paler than usual, even in the dim light. He pulled the covers tighter over her, remembering her constant joking whenever he did that with one of the kids.

More covers cures all sickness, huh? Well, this time it might.

He slipped out of the room, turning off the lights and shutting the door behind him. He stood for a moment, then walked a few feet toward the kids’ bedrooms and shut off the hall light, too. The hall was lit only by a reflection from the bathroom, where he had left the light over the sink burning.

The house was silent.

He listened intently but could hear nothing beyond his own breathing and the beating of his own heart.

After a long while, he went on into the living room, switching on lights and turning up the furnace as he went. To all appearances, the living room was unchanged, except for a used tissue lying in a lump a few feet from the sofa.

He picked it up, feeling his back creak as he bent over. He checked to make sure that there were no roach-remains embedded in the folds—that it was just damp from Catherine’s hysterical tears—then he wadded it more tightly in his fist and went into the kitchen to toss it away.

As soon as he turned the light on, he saw the bodies. There must have been two dozen roaches lying feet up on the tile floor. The smallest was a field roach, barely more than half an inch long and thin, looking more like a large grain of wild rice than anything else. The largest, half hidden in the shadow cast by one of the dinette chairs, came close to measuring an inch and a quarter—maybe an inch and a half, but Willard was in no mood to worry about particulars.

Grimacing, he gingerly crossed the kitchen, cringing when he inadvertently stepped on one of the corpses. The dry crackling crunch seemed to echo throughout the room. He noticed that not all of the things were dead. Maybe every fourth or fifth one was flailing its legs wildly, as if trying desperately to right itself and scuttle for the safety of cracks and darkness.

He grabbed the broom from its niche between the refrigerator and the wall by the family room—formerly the garage—and began disposing of the remains. Usually a sloppy housekeeper on the rare occasions when necessity called on him to fill that role, this time he took sedulous care to sweep beneath all of the counters, to remove the trashcan and push the bristles into each corner. He swept the debris to the center of the room and, masking his disgust at the pile of quivering husks, brushed the roaches into the dustpan and dumped them into the trash. Before the last one hit the bottom of the plastic garbage can, he had the Hefty-bag liner out, cinched at the top, and tied with a connected twist-tie. And a moment later, the bag—only half full of Huntley garbage, with a thin sprinkling of roach-remains scattered throughout—was stuffed inside one of the big brown outdoor garbage cans that lined the fence between the backyard and the garage.

Only then, when Willard stepped back into the kitchen, his nose frosted by the January chill and the sudden discovery that he had forgotten to put on a jacket—only then did he breathe easily.

He gave the counters and tables a quick once-over with a steaming hot washcloth, then looked over at the clock.

Six-fifteen. Time to get the kids up.

Waking Will and Burt was every bit as frustrating as he had feared it would be. They were deeply asleep, and when they finally sat up in bed, they were cranky and sullen.

“I don’t feel good, Daddy,” Burt whimpered, trying vainly to slip back between the inviting covers.

“Are you bleeding or throwing up?” Willard asked, echoing his mother’s litany, remembered from almost three decades before.

“No,” came Burt’s reply.

“Then up and at ‘em. Breakfast in fifteen minutes.” He swatted Will, Jr.’s rump and yelled out a final, “Out of bed, right now,” before he left the boys’ room and went into Suze’s.

Suze always woke more easily than the boys—Willard didn’t mind trying to get her out of bed on the rare days that the duty devolved onto him. This morning was no exception.

Apparently he had made enough commotion that when he opened her door a slit and stuck his head in, she was already sitting up.

“I’m awake, Daddy,” she said quietly

“That’s my girl,” he answered. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes. Don’t forget to make your bed.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

Just as a matter of course, Willard retraced his steps and glanced into the boys’ room.

Will was up and staggering around the room, his eyes half closed as he struggled to pull on shirt and pants in the crisp air. Burt was snuggled back in bed. Willard yanked the blankets off the bunk bed, pulling so hard that they ended up a mash of rumpled blankets and quilts at his feet.

“Up and at ‘em, I said.”

Burt sat up groggily and rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles.

“If you’re not out in fifteen minutes, you go to school without breakfast.”

Willard surreptitiously monitored the progress in the back bedroom for the next few minutes and was not particularly surprised to see how slowly his second son could move when he wanted. But somehow, miraculously, Burt actually made it up within the required time. Even more amazingly, from Willard’s admittedly biased perspective, all three of the older kids managed to get through breakfast, get dressed, instruct him in the intricacies of making lunches—“ya gotta put the peanut butter first, Dad, then the jelly,” that was Burt’s contribution to fine cuisine—do a lick and a promise cleanup job on their rooms, and present themselves ready for his inspection beside the front door by twenty minutes after eight.

In spite of the frequent flurries of “But Dad, Mom never does it that way” and “Why do we have to do that?” the kids were finally ready, buttoned into heavy coats and scarves, each carrying a thin plastic raincoat just in case the volatile January weather decided to shift before the end of school.

“Now you keep a good eye on your little sister, Burt,” Willard instructed as the younger two shuffled through the front door to confront the wide outside world once more. Burt and Suze went to Charter Oaks K-6 Grammar School less than three quarters of a mile away. Catherine had walked the route with them for the first weeks after Christmas vacation ended; today they were on their own for the first time.

“Go straight to school and no playing around. You’ve only got twenty minutes to get there.”

“Yes, Dad,” Burt said. His voice was low and muffled, as if he were still upset that his father had had the temerity to insist that Burt actually smooth out the wrinkles in his bed. After all, the whole thing would just get wrinkled again as soon as he slept in it tonight, so why waste the time. Willard grinned to himself at a recurrent memory—that had been precisely his attitude toward bed-making when he was about eleven.

“Bye, Daddy,” Suze chimed.

Willard leaned over and kissed the top of her head.

“Bye. See you this afternoon.”

“Are you going to stay home today?” she asked, her eyes wide in surprise. “Are you sick?”

“No, hon, I’m just staying here so Mommy can get some rest after last night.”

“What happened to her?”

For a long moment, Willard was stumped. He didn’t want to mention the dead roaches he had swept away this morning, for fear that he would reinforce Suze’s incipient fears of the vermin. He noted that Will and Burt were watching intently as well, as if his answer to that question were the single most important event of the day.

“She probably just had a bad...dream,” he said finally, aware of the weakness of the excuse.

“Just like me,” Burt said.

“Yeah, after you watch one of those monster movies,” Willard said, tousling the boy’s hair. Burt ducked his head and escaped; Willard knew how the boy felt about that kind of display of parental affection and reminded himself to watch it in the future. The kids were growing up. They weren’t all that little any more. Still, his answer seemed to satisfy Suze, who took off across the damp lawn, her plastic
Toy Story
lunchbox thumping heavily against her legs. Burt followed, shoulders slumped, as if he were marching on his way to certain execution.

Will, Jr., stood just inside the doorway. He walked a mile or so to the junior high—a squat stucco structure bearing the highly original name of Ronald Reagan Junior High. Still, it had a good reputation in the district and so far Catherine reported that Will was doing all right—working hard, and not too far behind from the trauma of starting mid-year at a new school and settling into new routines. Classes there started twenty minutes later than at the elementary school, so Will’s departures had gradually become more leisurely as he became familiar with the way.

Willard noticed a pack of five or six kids Will’s age gathering on the front yard of a house several doors down.

“Those guys look like they’re about your age. Do they go to Reagan?” Willard asked, motioning toward the knot of giggles and laughter.

Will, Jr., glanced down the street. “Yeah,” he said noncommittally.

“Do you know any of them. From classes or anything.”

“A couple.”

“They seem like fun kids?”

“I guess.”

“Have you talked to them at all.”

“Some.”

“Why don’t you catch up with them and walk with them to school?” Willard was growing impatient at the boy’s apparent inability to take a hint any faster.