Underdead (4 page)

“American history—the colonial era. Actually, more like pre-colonial. I’m interested in how the diseases Europeans brought over—not just the human diseases, but the ones their livestock transmitted to the native animals—may have decimated the native populations, making it easier for Europeans to gain a foothold…”

“How interesting,” I said, cutting him off. The man spoke in run-ons. I hoped his writing was more concise or he was going to need that taxi job, and I didn’t think he was going to last long in that profession if he pulled stunts like this.

I handed back his ID in silence, not wanting to say anything that might trigger more conversation. I wasn’t scared of him anymore and my thoughts were shifting to more pressing concerns, like my head. It had begun to throb in earnest and I desperately wanted to stick it in a bucket of ice water. I also wanted my coffee and my breakfast, but what I wanted, most of all, was for Gavin to go away.

“Well, I’ll be on my way, then,” he said, as if reading my mind. “And, um, I’m sorry if I startled you.”

I followed him to the door. “It’s okay. It was…” I paused to choose my word—
weird
came to mind. “Considerate of you to stay until I could lock the door myself.”

“It was no problem, really.” He stood awkwardly at the door. “Well, goodbye.”

I squinted my eyes painfully against the near blinding brightness of the clear December morning and scanned the street. “Where’s your cab?”

“Just over there.” He pointed toward a blue Jetta with a black Yakima bike rack strapped to the top.

“That’s a cab?”

“I have one of those removable lit taxi signs for the roof—it plugs into the cigarette lighter and hooks onto the bike rack. I took it off last night—regulations say we can’t park taxis overnight in residential areas.” He shrugged at the strangeness of city regulations, flashed another quick, sweet smile and jogged across the street toward his car. As he drove off, he stuck an arm out the window and gave me a cheery wave.

I held up a hand in a more subdued response and as I watched him turn the corner, something niggled the back of my brain. I didn’t bother trying to get a fix on it, knowing from experience it would be a waste of time. It would come out on its own if I focused on something else for a while. I went back inside, my head pounding anew with each step, and headed for the coffee maker.

It was five minutes after he’d left that I remembered my car was still parked downtown. Under normal circumstances, I’d walk, run or bike the five miles. But today? “Ain’t happening,” I said aloud. Kicking myself and sighing, I hauled out the phone book and called a cab.

I’m a chatty person on the phone; more than once my father has chided me for getting too personal with strangers. But I can’t help it. I get nervous when I can’t see someone’s face when I talk to them, so I babble. I must not be the only person to do this, for the dispatcher listened patiently as I explained, in more detail than was strictly necessary, why I needed my car.

“And of course I didn’t think to ask your driver, Gavin Raines, for a ride—”

“Who?” said the dispatcher.

“Uh, Gavin Raines?”

“We don’t have any drivers by that name, miss. You sure you have the right cab company?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He’s new—he and another driver are sharing a cab. A blue Jetta? With a bike rack?”

“Sorry, miss, you must have the wrong cab company. Our drivers all use the company’s yellow minivans.”

“Oh.”

“Miss? You still there? You still want a cab to pick you up?”

“What? Oh. Uh, yes, thanks.”

When the taxi came it was, as promised, a yellow minivan. Not to be confused with a blue Jetta.

The driver and I had a very interesting chat about taxi regulations. I learned that the city of Long Beach authorizes a finite number of the medallions that permit a taxi to work. I even got a rundown on the cars used by the city’s cab companies, lots of Fords and Chevys, mostly large sedans and minivans. Not a German compact in the bunch.

I didn’t know who Gavin was, but I did know who he wasn’t. He had lied to me, this stranger who had spent the night in my apartment while I lay passed out in my room. It gave me the creeps all over again, enough that I stopped by the emergency room on the way home after all. I leveled with the doctor and got the full work up, including tests for any of the diseases that might have spawned the vampire myth and AIDS. It might have been a little late in the day for me to start worrying about strangers and strange diseases, but better late than never.

It’s a myth that teachers never get sick. What people really mean is that teachers
shouldn’t
get sick. Because when they do, it means they’ve succumbed to some super virus, something that has passed from student to student, mutating along the way into something truly hellish. And that’s what I had—the flu from hell.

After I’d gotten back from the emergency room and inhaled the supremely large meal I’d promised myself, I’d gone back to bed and stayed there, huddling under my covers with the lights low and the blinds tightly drawn—for three days—getting up only for
the necessary
or to choke down a few crackers or some ginger ale.

I felt so terrible that I would have thought I’d contracted something nasty from Will—except the hospital lab results had all come back negative. So it was either the flu or a particularly gnarly hangover, and I went with the first option. I mean, I can make a case for a two-day hangover, but three? No, I’d gotten whatever had been going around school. Once again, my evil students had found a way to suck the joy out of my life.
Some vacation!
I bit down a wave of nausea that left me weak and shaking. When I could muster up the energy I pulled the covers up over my head and lay there feeling miserable and very, very sorry for myself.

I might have stayed that way indefinitely but for my mother, who called around ten in the morning to inquire why I hadn’t yet arrived. “Why weren’t you at Mass?” she demanded, reminding me I had been expected to meet my parents for church the night before and then go home to stay with them through Christmas day.

I explained I had caught a nasty flu. “I’m going to have to miss the festivities this year,” I concluded, pulling the receiver under the covers with me. “I’m too weak to drive.”

“You are
not
missing Christmas,” she insisted.

“I’m probably contagious. I don’t want to get anyone else sick.”
Call me Martyr Jo.

“Nonsense. I never get sick,” she said firmly, “and your father’s as strong as an ox.”

“I’ll try to drive over Christmas morning,” I said, closing my eyes tightly against another wave of nausea.

“I will not have my daughter driving around town sick on Christmas morning.” I heard the faint but unmistakable sound of car keys jingling. “I’ll come get you. You can rest here. I’m sure you’ll get better with someone to take care of you.”

I groaned in protest and got a dial tone in response. I pushed the phone, a cheap holdover from college, back on its duct-taped cradle and fell back asleep.

A hand shook me gently awake. I cracked open an eye, saw something glowing and red and shut it again. I was having that nightmare again, the one where I’m in the castle with Bugs Bunny and that furry red monster.

The hand shook again, more forcefully this time. I opened both eyes.

“Mom?” I croaked, narrowing my eyes against the brightness of her hair, which an errant ray of light peeking through a gap in the blinds had turned to fire.

“Why aren’t you packed yet?” she asked. “Let me feel your forehead. You’re not running a fever, in fact, you feel cold. Did you put a compress on it?”

“Huh?”

“And why it is so
dark
in here?” She threw open the blinds.

I cringed against the bright light. “Hey,” I protested.

She clicked her tongue. “No wonder you’re not getting better,” she said, opening a window. “Fresh air, that’s the ticket. Didn’t you learn anything at all in those biology courses?”

“God, have you always been this cheerful?” I muttered crankily, watching helplessly as she bustled around the room automatically tidying as she looked for luggage and clothes, like a whirlwind, only better coiffed. A full scale tornado wouldn’t have the ability—or the temerity—to disturb my mother’s hair, presently dyed a virulent red. I’m not kidding. You should see what they can do with hair dye these days. I don’t know if it’s her or her hairdresser, if it’s boredom or creativity. Someone needs to rein someone in, that’s all I’m saying.

I should explain a little better—you might be getting the wrong impression. My mother is beautiful. I mean really stunning. She’s tall, fashionably lean and fashionably clad, perfectly manicured and has cheekbones to die for. Even without the
very
red (actually, it was more magenta), perfectly styled hair, she would stand out in a crowd.

Despite the same general build and a certain obvious family resemblance, we look nothing alike. But we could. My sweats could be exchanged for formfitting designer duds. My long, gold-red hair could be fashionably cut, colored, and styled. With contacts, I could even change my eye color from the hazel-green I’d inherited from my father to my mother’s vivid blue.

Part of me lives in mortal fear that some day her bevy of beauticians will hijack me off the street and submit me to the plucking, pulling, cutting, coloring, and lord knows whatever else it takes to “be seen in public” these days. My mother, on the other hand, lives in hope for such a day, and I’m not sure she is above engineering it should my “outdoorsy” phase go on much longer.

“Did you say something, dear?” She was arm-deep in my underwear drawer. She held up a thong and looked at it with a quizzical frown before tucking it quickly back in the drawer.

She moved on to my closet. “I’ll put together a few things. Now, where’s that sweater your father and I got you last Christmas?”

Back at Macy’s, where I had traded it for a great new pair of khakis. “I dunno, Mom,” I lied.

“Well, surely you have
something
appropriate in here
somewhere
.” Apparently I did, for soon she was packed—I was packed—and it was time to go.

I pushed myself to a sitting position. “God, I feel horrible,” I said, slumping against the headboard.

My mother came over and tilted my face up. Her face was creased with concern. “Oh, Jo dear. What happened to your face?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s all red!” She touched a finger lightly to my cheek. “And you have scaly patches!” Her pitch rose at the horror of it.

Then her eyes widened and she sucked in a breath in sudden understanding. “Oh, honey, you’ve been victimized by a cut-rate chemical peel, haven’t you? It’s scandalous, the way
anyone
can open a shop these days. Honey, if you wanted a facial, why didn’t you ask? I’m sure Johnny would have made time for you. Is this why you didn’t come to Mass?”

“I did not get a chemical peel,” I said, jerking my face out of her hands. “I’m sick,” I said. “Sick. You know, with the flu? I can’t eat, I have a raging headache, I’m so exhausted I can hardly sit upright and my whole body feels as if someone hit me with a baseball bat while I was sleeping!” I glared at her, as if she herself had crept in during the night and done the whacking.

She ignored my outburst, eyes intent on my face. She looked both curious and horrified, like a specialist confronted with a rare disease. “Have you been moisturizing properly?”

“I have been moisturizing with abandon,” I lied. I hadn’t washed my face in two days. “My face is fine. I’m fine, or I will be. I’m just sick. A few more days’ sleep and I’ll wake up fine, you’ll see.”

I wondered, as I said this, if I should have gone along with the horrible skin problem scenario after all. Flu couldn’t keep her away but maybe she’d leave me in peace if I had nice, contagious facial fungus?

It was too late. Through sheer power of will, she had me bundled, head and face wrapped in a scarf (“You’ll get permanent scarring if you go in the sun like that. The UV rays are strong in LA, even in December. And with your fair skin…”) and in no time, I was back at my parents’ house, tucked into the twin bed in my old room.

Despite my dad’s repeated threats to turn it into a gym, my room hadn’t changed since I’d last inhabited it, aside from being scrupulously clean. The same lightly flowered blue and yellow wallpaper adorned the walls, the same mix of childhood favorites and textbooks filled the bookshelves, the same well-worn antiques passed down from my great grandmother furnished the room. Even my bedspread was the same, a cheery hodgepodge of bright colors that looked like something Andy Warhol might have designed after some major partying. It goes without saying that my mother hated it.

Next to me on the bedside table lay a steaming tray of soup and toast triangles. The food remained untouched until my mother came in and started spooning chicken soup down my throat. I gagged and tried to push her away, but she was relentless, and stayed until I had finished the lot. Only then did she let me sleep, promising—threatening?—to wake me up in an hour or two for hot chocolate.

“You look like a crushed insect,” she said, brushing away my feeble protests to be left alone. “If you don’t eat, you’ll get even sicker. And you are not ruining Christmas for the rest of us because you are too stubborn to eat a little soup.” Soothing, almost, my mother’s particular brand of love and guilt.

Almost before she turned off the light and closed the door lightly behind her I fell back asleep, but it was not the peaceful, dead-to-the-world sleep I usually had when I came home. I dreamt of darkness, of long passageways, and oddly, since I had forced him out of my thoughts, of Will. Actually, that part of the dream wasn’t so bad. Not so bad at all.

By the day after Christmas, I had chicken soup coming out my eyeballs and was feeling well enough to be anxious that school was starting up again in less than a week. I had a scant six days left of my two-week vacation, at least three of which would have to be devoted to catching up on grading and prepping the last topic of the semester—
moon phases
, the highlight of every thirteen-year-old’s life. A little voice in the back of my head reminded me I also had the semester exam to write, but I managed to ignore it.