The Night Parade(107)

“Come home with me,” he said. “Let’s be a family again.”

It seemed like she looked at him, smiling in an emaciated way that made the corners of her mouth protrude, for an unmeasurable amount of time.

“Please, baby,” he said.

Kathy’s face softened. “Yes,” she said finally. Tears stood out in her eyes. “All right. Let’s go home together.”

He closed his eyes and rested his head in her lap. Her thin fingers grazed the nape of his neck.

When he stood up, he was crying a little, but smiling at his wife. She had Ellie’s stuffed elephant beside her in bed, which she picked up and looked at now.

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny, but when Ellie first gave me this thing, I imagined I was getting strength from it. Every time I hugged it, it was like I was hugging our daughter. It even smelled like her, for a while at least, and it was a beautiful thing.”

“That’s nice,” David said.

“But then, after a while, it faded away,” Kathy said, her smile retreating from her face. “And I wasn’t strong anymore.” She held the stuffed elephant out to him. “Might as well bring my things down to the car, if I’m leaving with you, Mr. Arlen.”

“I’ll go right now,” he said.

“Just do me one favor?” she asked.

“Name it.”

“Give me a kiss before you go.”

Smiling, he leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips felt like burlap.

“Love you,” he said.

“Love you, too,” she said, and touched the side of his face.

He carried the elephant to the door, but just before he could exit out into the hallway, she called out to him.

“What is it?” he said.

“Bring the heater closer, would you, honey? It’s so cold in here.”

There was a portable space heater in one corner of the room, attached to an extension cord that was plugged into the wall. David rolled the unit over to her bedside and adjusted the temperature. Kathy had settled back into her pillow, her eyes closed. Tears stood out in the corners of her eyes. He decided not to say anything, and slipped out into the hallway as quiet as a ghost.

He went down the hall and the stairwell, then out into the parking lot. It had grown cold. Darkness crept up over the horizon, and the trees that fringed the parking lot trembled in the wind. What clouds he could see moving across the face of the moon looked malicious and virulent, like a poison descending from the sky.

He went to the Bronco, popped open the door, and tucked Ellie’s stuffed elephant into the duffel bag he’d brought with him. Sometimes he’d stay so long he’d need a change of clothes. A pack of cigarettes were inside the bag, only two smokes left. He lit one and sucked hard. The cold made it difficult to keep his eyes from watering. But he was standing out there alone, and so there was no need to fight them off: He wept freely if silently.

He smoked the second cigarette immediately after the first, wiping his bleary eyes with one hand now. He didn’t want to go back to Kathy’s room looking like he’d been out here bawling. He looked out across the parking lot, watching the sunset just beyond the facility. Most of the vehicles in this lot were black, nondescript, with tinted windows and government plates. There was also a cadre of white vans parked at the far end of the lot along a chain-link fence that appeared to shudder in the strong wind. Something about those vans bothered him.

Maybe Burt Langstrom was right. Maybe it’s time I pick up my little family and we get the hell out of here. Maybe we really should go live in the mountains somewhere, a place where we can’t be bothered, where it’ll just be the three of us forever . . .

After he’d sucked the life from the second cigarette, he tossed it to the ground, then began the campaign back across the lot toward the building. The first-floor lobby was empty. He skipped the elevator and took the stairs to the second floor, where the CDC had set up shop. When he came out of the stairwell, he was aware of a commotion at the far end of the hall. A few voices were raised, and a woman in hospital scrubs rushed down the hall into an adjoining room. A persistent mechanical beeping could be heard somewhere close by.

David picked up his pace. A few more people crisscrossed the hall in front of him, their white lab coats flapping, and a man’s voice shouted something unintelligible but unmistakably urgent. The room they were all going into was Kathy’s.

He broke into a sprint and closed the distance to Kathy’s room in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Nurses crowded the doorway, but he shoved them aside and entered the room.

His first thought was that she had fallen out of bed, coming to rest half propped up against the steel legs of the bed itself, her legs folded Indian-style on the floor. But, no—her legs weren’t on the floor, and she wasn’t propped up but held upright, and unnaturally so, with some strange orange band around her neck—

(Bring the heater closer, would you, honey? It’s so cold in here.)

The horror of it struck him all at once, a tidal wave of electric madness that siphoned the color from the world and caused his body to go numb.

(so cold)

Two large men were attempting to remove the extension cord from around her neck, while a third was hastily trying to untie it from the hook on the wall above the bed. She had tied the heater’s extension cord to the hook, noosed it around her neck . . . and had simply rolled off the side of the bed, hanging herself.