The Night Parade(7)

His thoughts returned, not to Kathy and his final moments with her, but of what had occurred only hours earlier back in the Oldsmobile, as he drove frantically down the highway, his mind a kaleidoscope of nightmarish thoughts, his heart speed-racing in his chest. Ellie had been in the backseat, and had leaned forward at one point and placed a cool hand against the nape of his neck. She had— It gave him chills.

After a time, he got up and fumbled around in the darkness until he located what he was looking for: Ellie’s stuffed elephant. He crawled back into bed with it, pressing his face against it. There was Ellie’s smell on it, a soft and breathy smell he associated with summer mornings spent lazing in bed. But there was another smell on it now, too—the stink of Kathy’s hospital room, and all the horribleness that had happened there. It was a harsher and more specific smell than Ellie’s, rounded and full in its terribleness.

I should sleep with the gun instead, he thought, burying his face in the stuffed toy.

After a time, sleep claimed him.





5


Twenty-one months earlier


“Well,” said Kathy, rolling off of him. They were slick with sweat and David’s heartbeat thumped in his ears. He grazed his wife’s buttocks with one hand as she rolled off her side of the bed. “I’m going to the kitchen for some water. Want some?”

“Yes, please.” He smiled demurely at her from his side of the bed.

Kathy folded her arms over her bare breasts, cocked a hip. “What?” she said.

“You’re pretty.”

“Charmer. But you’re supposed to say those things before getting lucky. You know that, right?”

“I’ve been out of practice.”

“Making love?”

“Being charming.”

She laughed as she tugged on her robe and went out into the hall.

David got up and went to the bathroom. He urinated, washed his face and hands at the sink, then returned to bed with a Robert Ludlum paperback. He was readjusting the pillows against the headboard when Kathy returned. She handed him a glass of ice water, then climbed into bed beside him.

“Ellie did the strangest thing today,” Kathy said, fluffing up her own pillows against the headboard. “We were walking through Target, picking up a few things, when she disappeared down one of the aisles. You know how she does.”

David nodded, smiling to himself. Ellie was prone to wandering off when something interesting caught her eye.

“She came running up to me at one point and asked for some money. She said she’d pay me back with her allowance when we got home, but that she saw something and had to get it right then and there. When I asked her what it was, she said she couldn’t tell me, and that it was a surprise.”

“Oh boy,” he said, sliding an index finger between the pages of his book. “Did you give her the money?”

“Yes. It was only five bucks, and she was true to her word, paying me back as soon as we got home.”

“What’d she buy?”

“You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.”

“So tell me.”

“She said it was a present for the baby.”

“Whose baby?”

“Ours,” Kathy said.

“We don’t have a baby.” But then he looked at her, leaning over on one elbow. “Or is this your way of telling me something?”

Kathy’s eyes went wide and she shook her head, laughing. “Christ, no. I’m not pregnant.”

“So what’s the deal?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was wishful thinking on her part. Or maybe she was trying to tell us something.”

David sat up straighter in bed. He set the book down on the nightstand. “Are you saying you want to have another kid?”

She looked at him, the sweat from their lovemaking still glistening on her face, and smiled. “You know, I just don’t know. I mean, I think about it from time to time, but never really seriously. And it’s not like we’ve talked about it or anything.”

“Is that what we’re doing now?” he asked. “Talking about it?”

“Would you want another baby?”

He thought about it for a second. “I’m forty years old,” he said. “And not to point out the obvious, your highness, but you’re just a few years younger than me. Is it even safe?”

“Women are having babies later in life now,” she said. “There are risks, but then there are risks with any pregnancy. There were complications with Ellie at the end, remember?”

The umbilical cord had gotten wrapped around Ellie’s neck during labor. They’d had a monitor on her, and with each contraction and subsequent push, David had watched his unborn daughter’s blood pressure drop on the computer screen beside Kathy’s bed. In the end, the doctor had to take Ellie out via emergency cesarean. Even more terrifying was that she came out in silence, not making a sound. It wasn’t until she was aspirated that she started to cry, but even then it had been a few short bleats, and she quieted right up to the moment she was placed in Kathy’s arms, those deep obsidian eyes surveying them both from beneath a pink and furrowed brow.

But those complications hadn’t just been at the end. They’d spent nearly two years trying to get pregnant, had visited countless fertility doctors. Kathy had been on a strict regimen of prenatal vitamins. There had been no medical reason why they shouldn’t be able to conceive, yet conception eluded them for the longest time . . . until that one morning when both pregnancy tests turned up positive and a visit to the obstetrician confirmed it. Ellie—their Miracle Baby.