The Night Parade(99)

52


Tim had given them two bedrooms at one end of the farmhouse, across the hall from each other. The door to Ellie’s room was cracked open, and David poked his head in while on his way to his own room. Ellie stood before an open window, absently flicking large beetles off the screen.

“Hey, you,” he said, coming in.

“Hi.” She didn’t turn away from her bug-flicking exercise.

Folded at the foot of the bed were some clean clothes, as well as the Nike shoe box containing the bird eggs. David moved them aside and sat down. Bedsprings squeaked.

“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk about what happened today,” he began.

“Isn’t much to talk about,” she said. The screen vibrated as she flicked a beetle the size of a quarter off it.

“How did you know you could . . . ease that girl’s suffering?” He didn’t know how else to phrase it.

“Just something I felt.”

“Can you look at me, please?”

She turned around and he saw that the reason she hadn’t wanted to face him was because she had been crying.

“Hey.” He got up and went to her. Put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”

“I wanted to save her. I thought maybe I could.”

“Why did you think that?”

She looked down at her feet. “I don’t know.”

“You brought her peace,” he said. “In the end.”

Ellie looked up at him. “When I touched her, I saw what was in her head. I saw her hallucination.”

“What was it?”

“It was terrible. It scared me. She wasn’t just seeing things, Dad. She was hearing them, feeling them. Like her mind was someplace else and only her body had been left behind. And for a second, I was there, too, seeing and hearing and feeling all those things.” She looked down at her hands, so small and pale, the fingers pink and thin. “I took all that bad stuff out of her and let the good stuff in. I tried to make her sleep.”

David remembered. When he’d grabbed Ellie around the waist and tried to pull her free from the girl, he had been greeted with a shock from just touching Ellie’s flesh. He recalled something about sleeping and birds flying—it had been more of an emotion than an actual image, an emotion that somehow translated into thoughts, into ideas—but he found he couldn’t remember the details of it— (calm perfect calm you can even sleep now if you want it’s so calm it’s so perfect it’s living up here in the cool grass) —now.

“I just wish I could have been there to do that for Mom,” Ellie said.

David hugged her.

“Whatever it is inside me,” Ellie said, “it’s getting stronger.”

“Are you scared?”

“No,” she said, “but you are.”

He offered her a sad smile. There was no use arguing the point. “I’m just worried about you,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” she said. “I think it’s supposed to be this way.”





53


Three weeks earlier


He first noticed the van approximately two weeks prior to Kathy’s death. At the time, he didn’t think much of it. It was parked right there across the street from their house, a white-paneled van with no windows and PVC pipes tied to the roof rack. There were no logos on the side, and it had nondescript Maryland plates. Someone had placed a sunshade on the dash, so it was impossible to see through the windows into the cab.

David had just picked up Ellie from Mrs. Blanche’s house, having spent the afternoon at the Greenbelt facility with Kathy. He turned onto Columbus Court, the daylight already draining from the sky. The trees beyond the houses had started to shed their leaves. As he always did, he glanced at the remains of Deke Carmody’s house. When he looked up, he found that the otherwise inconspicuous white van was crowding the left-hand side of the street. David steered around the van, not thinking much of it . . . yet it was his first conscious sighting of it, and it would come to nestle itself into the recesses of his brain in the days to come, as things with Kathy took a quick turn for the worse.

That evening, before tucking Ellie into bed, they called Kathy on her cell phone. She answered, and despite sounding cheery for Ellie’s sake, David knew she was wiped. Kathy gave the obligatory responses to all of Ellie’s questions. Yes, she was fine. Yes, she would be home with them soon. Yes, this was something very special that she was doing. Yes, of course she missed her very much, but she had been too tired lately for visitors.

After they hung up, David ushered Ellie into bed. He turned off her light and kissed her good night. In the half light, he watched her roll onto her side and hug her pillow.

Before he got up from her bed, she reached out and laced her hand inside one of his. He smiled at her . . . then closed his eyes. It felt good to hold her, to touch her, just as it had when she was an infant and he’d walk the floorboards with her all night while she gazed up at him with those wide, impossible eyes. He felt calm, serene. Strangely at peace.

Once she had fallen asleep, he kissed the side of her face and got up off the bed. He closed her bedroom door, then wandered aimlessly about the house—a house that now seemed impossibly large and mazelike, a turreted castle with countless dark corners and unending corridors. He could feel his anxiety creeping slowly back into him. Since Kathy’s stay at the Greenbelt facility had become permanent, David had stopped sleeping in their bedroom, opting instead for the living room couch. In fact, he found himself limiting his time spent in the master bedroom altogether, as the scent of Kathy’s perfume lingered in the pillowcases, the sheets, the curtains over the windows, the clothes in their shared closet. The hairbrush she’d left on the bathroom sink made him melancholy. The unfinished Wally Lamb novel on the nightstand, propped open with its spine in the air as if it were doing push-ups, made him restless and caused his mind to wander in the direction of dark things.