The Night Parade(82)

“They would have hurt you to get to me,” she said. It was Kathy talking now: Ellie’s face looked so different in the dark.

“I’m not sure the local police know exactly how important you are,” he said.

Ellie turned her head away from him.

Western Kansas had given way to the lush switchbacks of Colorado. The trees that flanked the highway were enormous black pikes driven into the earth. At the horizon, the sky continued to darken as the sun settled beyond the western hills. They were roughly two hours from Funluck Park, according to the road map he’d found in the glove compartment and the calculations he’d worked out in his head.

“How exactly did those doctors kill Mom?” she asked, still not looking at him.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Explain it to me.”

“I’m not sure if it’s the best thing for you to know, honey. You don’t need to think of your mom that way.”

“I want to know.”

He considered this. Finally, he said, “Mom was okay at first. The doctors were just drawing blood. But then Mom started to get worried that she might get sick. She stopped eating and grew weaker. And the doctors, they just kept taking more blood.”

“Why did you let them?”

It was like an arrow thwacking into the center of his chest. When he opened his mouth, he found it difficult to speak at first. He cleared his throat and said, “Your mother didn’t want to leave at first. She was afraid of getting sick if she left the hospital.”

This was close enough to the truth that he didn’t feel like he was telling a lie, although it wasn’t the complete truth. Ellie didn’t need to hear the complete truth.

“In the end, she’d just grown too weak. Her body just gave out.”

Enough silence passed between them that he thought he’d answered all Ellie’s questions. But then she said, “Would I die like Mom if we gave up and went back home? If they took me to some hospital to study me and take my blood?”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I’m just asking a question. Would I die, too?”

He slammed a palm down on the steering wheel. “I don’t know, El! I can’t predict the goddamn future. I’m just trying my best to keep them away from you.”

“It makes me feel sick,” she said. “It makes me feel like what we’re doing is wrong. It makes us no different from those people back in Kentucky. Those people with the skull . . .”

“I told you already, it’s not the same thing.”

“Yes, it is. You can’t even tell me why it’s not.”

“Because we’re not actively hurting anyone. Those people, they were going to shoot us, kill us. Don’t you see?”

“You’ve got a gun right now. You’d shoot somebody, too, if they tried to get me. How is that different?”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“But if I could help all those people who are sick—”

“Enough!” he shouted at her. “Okay? Enough. I’m your goddamn father and you’ll do what I tell you.”

She said nothing, just kept staring at him. He could feel her gaze on him, an icy javelin pressing against his flesh until it cooled his entire bloodstream. Another glance at her and he saw she had the shoe box’s lid open. She was caressing the eggs inside the nest.

He turned back to the road, feeling as if he’d just sprinted a mile. He forced his breathing to calm down. When the yellow lines on the highway began to blur, he rubbed his eyes and wished he had a cup of coffee or maybe some pills to keep him awake. For whatever reason, the image of Ellie’s stuffed elephant jumped into his head then—the elephant that had been her favorite toy that was now lost forever since they deserted the Oldsmobile. For whatever reason, the damn thing seated itself in the center of his brain, as if there was something vitally important about it. The more he concentrated on it, trying to figure out its significance, the more texture it took on in his head. And then it was there, a dinosaur-size elephant undulating beyond the trees at the horizon, its thick hide pink in the waning dusk, its tremendous bulk toppling trees and causing the earth to shake, its massive face turning, tusks like lances severing the treetops, the gleam of a single melancholic eye, brown-yellow, agonized, a pupil as black as ichor, as deep as space, and as it charged them, David could make out its every detail, down to the minute blond hairs in the creases of its knees, the fat white mites scuttling through the caverns of its ear canals, the dried black mucus pressurized into a pasty gruel at the corners of its mouth— David cried out. He jerked the steering wheel sharply to the left and felt the car fishtail. He overcompensated, spinning the wheel to the right. The tires screamed and gravel peppered the windshield. Ellie screamed.

There was a loud pop then a shushing sound. The Monte Carlo canted to the left and the steering wheel began to vibrate. The shushing sound followed them as they bucked along the road—shhh-fump, shhh-fump, shh-fump.

Ellie sat up straight. “What happened, what happened?”

“Flat tire,” he said. He slowed the car down and eased it to a stop on the shoulder.

“Now it’s your nose,” Ellie said, pointing at his face.

He glanced at himself in the rearview mirror and saw a fine thread of blood dribbling out of his left nostril.