Construction has stopped. All the signs and sales trailers have been hauled away. No sod has been laid; the yards are made of mud. The farther you travel into the neighborhood, the more unfinished it becomes. Some houses are missing windows and doors. Some houses are naked, without siding, and the sheets of felt paper stapled to their exterior come loose and flap in the wind like rotten skin. Some houses are nothing more than a skeletal frame and some lots are nothing more than an excavated hole, a muddy cavity collapsing inward.
The neighborhood backs up against a pine forest. And it isn’t long—after the payloaders and bulldozers and trucks stacked high with lumber drive away—before the animals begin to creep from the shadows, to explore the houses and consider them a kind of nest or burrow.
A barred owl sails into an attic—through the octagonal hole cut for a gable vent—and makes it his roost. Crows blacken the rafters of an unfinished frame. A bear claws open a garden shed and roots into its bare floor. Feral cats wander the streets. Wasps and swallows mud over the eaves.
Beyond the subdivision’s pillared entryway—Eagle Ridge, reads the gold lettering with etched cattails rising around it—stands a model home, a design known as the Apex IV. Four thousand square feet of hardwood flooring and enameled woodwork, formal and informal dining rooms, study, great room, and a kitchen bigger than most restaurants’, with quartz countertops, a center island, and custom maple cabinetry throughout.
Months ago, a real-estate agent left the back door unlocked, and tonight it comes unstuck when a hard wind sucks it open. It chirps and swings on its hinges, as though beckoning the forest. And the forest answers. From between its trees steals a pack of coyotes that noses through the door and into the kitchen, where they sniff the air. No one has been here for a long time: the house is theirs. They yip and whine and set off through the many rooms. Their paws whisper across the carpet, and their claws click the tiles and hardwood. They pee in the corners. They gnaw at the legs of the dining room table. They leap onto the beds and leather couches and snap playfully at one another.
One day a teenager in a Ramones T-shirt with nothing better to do hurls a brick through the Apex IV’s picture window. It shatters inward, a gaping hole framed by fangs of glass. The teenager holds up his fists, charged up with music of destruction, the crash and tinkle of broken glass still biting the air soon replaced by snarls and yaps that come from inside the house and that merge into a terrible howling, the howling of a dozen coyotes, growing louder and louder. The teenager drops his hands. The smile on his face fades. He stumbles back, into the street, where his bike lies on its side.
He climbs onto it and kicks at the pedals to get them turning, to get the bike moving, just as the pack of coyotes pours through the broken window, a heaving gray wave of them, all jabbering and clacking their teeth as they pursue him for his trespass.
9.
Sammy can’t dwell on the sad stories. The family that moved into their van. The man who says his store has been empty ever since the second Walmart opened up. The woman who says her husband has cancer, says their insurance dropped them, says they had to put all their medical expenses on their credit cards. The sour piles of laundry in the corners, the stained pizza boxes and crumpled soda cans decorating the floor, the child wearing a T-shirt as a dress, clutching a one-armed teddy bear.
Sometimes she wishes she lived in a world without doors. There’s too much hurt out there, and every time she opens a door, she opens herself to it, their collected voices, their collected failure—all powered by voices that scream and whine and blame and beg and reason—punctuated now by a gunshot on a summer afternoon.
She should cry out, Sheriff’s office! and kick the door until it splinters from its hinges. She should pound up the stairs. She should check one room after another until she finds the red stain on the wall. She should lean over the body and check for a pulse. Maybe, for once, she can help. Maybe she can actually do some good.
But this is a door Sammy can’t bring herself to open. There is a body waiting for her inside and she can’t face it. Because that would feel too much like murder.
She drops the eviction notice and it flutters to the porch and she stares at it for a long time before stepping out of the house’s shadow and into the sun. She heads back to the car, where she will radio an ambulance before cruising off to the next neighborhood, the next address, the next door to bang her knuckles on, dreading what waits for her.
The Balloon
The sickness begins with a cough, a needling itch at the back of your throat that grows worse until it feels like your lungs are sleeved with burrowing ants that you must expel, barking raggedly into your hands until they are spotted with blood. Accompanying this is a fever so powerful that a wet washcloth steams when placed on your forehead. Your brain cooks. Your vision twirls red. And all this time you are coughing, coughing, until it feels as though your guts might uproot and push out your throat.
Among the people of River Falls, Oregon, its first victim is Geoff Meyer, a roofer with tarry fingers, a bowed back, and a loping gait from all his time spent cobbling shingles together, clambering across gables and hips and valleys. One day, he comes home from work hacking into his fist, and when his wife asks him if he is all right, he nods through his coughing and pushes past her to the bathroom, where he runs a hot shower and curls up at the bottom of the tub, hoping the steam will help. But his chest continues to convulse, his throat continues to scream, and eventually his wife comes to check on him, and by that time the water has gone cold and she is in a panic, shaking him, taking in big gulps of the air he has infected, calling out, “Sara, Sara—come—you’ve got to come.”
Sara, their daughter, is densely built—mostly torso, with tiny, delicate feet. When she goes out to eat, she orders chicken fingers, Philly cheesesteak sandwiches, iceberg lettuce salads drenched in Western dressing. She is in her thirties but still lives with her parents in a room that had not changed much since she was in high school: the same posters, the same stained purple carpet, the same fantasy novels lining her bookshelves, the same white wicker hamper overflowing with sweatshirts and jeans, the same comforter with a shaggy-maned unicorn on it.
She has a four-poster bed and to each post she ties a balloon. She has been doing this ever since she received the bed as a gift, on her sixteenth birthday. When she climbs under the covers every night, she likes to imagine she is floating away, out the window, into the night sky, above the moonlit table of clouds, where dreams wait for her. She refreshes the balloons every week, when they begin to wilt. Her desk, situated beneath the window, was her mother’s old sewing table. She rests her feet on the ironwork pedal when she sits there and scribbles in composition booklets, crafting stories about princesses—not the kind who fall asleep from cursed spindles or poisoned apples, but the kind with golden armor and a sword called Oathmaker that can slay dragons and lop off troll heads with a single swing. She writes so often that the desktop carries the design of a half-formed triangle from the oils of her arms. People often say to her, “Sara? You there?,” and when she smiles and nods, they say, “For a second, you seemed to be someplace else.”
She works as a receptionist at Greeley Chiropractic—answering phones through a headset, greeting every patient by name, arranging the magazines in the shape of a fan on the glass-topped table in the waiting area, refilling the triangular-paper-cup dispenser for the water cooler that burps every time someone gets a drink—until her father and then her mother fall ill, and she takes her vacation time to nurse them. She brews tea, helps them back and forth to the bathroom, packs bags of ice into their armpits and elbows, around their necks, over their wrists, and then refills the bags when they melt into warm-bellied jellyfish that slosh and roll off her parents’ bodies when a coughing fit seizes them.
Sara goes to Walgreens to buy cough syrup and cough drops and ibuprofen and cold packs. She goes to Food 4 Less to buy chicken soup, chamomile tea. She goes to the gas station to fill up her hatchback. She has not w
ashed her hands. Her fingers are sticky with the spit and sweat of her parents. Everywhere she goes, so does the infection, on the cart with the wobbly wheel she pushes, the apples she fondles and then replaces in their bin, the twenty-dollar bill she pulls from her purse, the counter she taps as she waits for her receipt.
It isn’t long before the hospitals are full, before the schools are closed, before the sidewalks grow crowded with reporters. Three people die. And then, in one night, three hundred. Everyone rushes the grocery stores and pulls off the shelves cereals, pastas, granola bars, canned fruits and vegetables, bottled water, whatever will last even after the electricity snaps off. The worst is happening, they are saying. The worst is here.
When parents say, “You’ll catch your death,” they mean it, grabbing their children as they race out the door to hand them a jacket, yes, but also a surgical mask. “Stay in the yard,” they say. Don’t breathe, they want to say.
Sara imagines the sickness as the fluffy spores that float off a dandelion—or the cloth-winged moths that swarm the lamps in the Walmart parking lot—and she keeps her eyes sharp on the air around her as if she could see the sickness coming, maybe dodge it. This is October and the leaves on the aspen and the cottonwoods turn a shimmering gold and come loose from their branches. You can see the shape of the wind in them, the leaves that wend and eddy in the streets, lawns, ballparks, making a skittering, clattery music, like skeletons softly dancing.
Everyone buys masks. Not just surgical masks—because the stores go empty of them almost immediately—but carpenters’ masks, gas masks, even Halloween masks. Anything to choke away the germs.
Hank Haines is balding. What little hair he has left is a frizzy black halo. His thighs rub together when he walks and he can fit his fist into his belly button. He works as a deputy sheriff in Deschutes County. Most of his days are spent in a rust-speckled squad car parked behind a pine windbreak. He waits for speeders to hurl by as he aims his radar gun out the window and imagines it into a rifle that would take out the tires of a Mustang with ten kilos of black tar heroin in the trunk. His real gun, a Glock 35, he has never actually drawn, though he dreams of doing so every day.
He has always imagined himself a hero. Not for anything he has done, but for what he is capable of doing. When he stands in line at the credit union, he knows exactly how he will react when the robbers in black ski masks rush in and say, Anybody moves and you’re dead meat! When children bumble too close to the road, he carefully eyes them and readies to rush out and snatch them from the path of an oncoming semi. He always sits at the back of restaurants, facing the door, ready for the unexpected. His entire life is made up of moments like this, sewed together like a bunch of hypothetical merit badges.
When he was a boy, Hank was constantly afraid. He would run past the graveyard on his way home from school. He would sleep with his desk lamp glowing all night. He would wrap his sheets around him tightly, a blowhole the only part of him exposed. One night, he was so convinced that a pale skinless creature waited for him under his bed, ready to seize his ankle with a long-fingered hand, that he held his bladder until he pissed himself and lay in his bed whimpering until morning, when his mother found him.
He would never tell anybody this, God forbid, but he always felt a little jealous of Rapunzel. Because she was safe. No one could get her and no one expected anything of her. If he was her, he would have cut off all that hair and called it good.
Now the old fears are washing over him again. He sits in his squad car, the windows sealing him in a protective bubble. He imagines the ground rumbling beneath him and knuckling upward into a spire—higher and higher still—until he is balanced two hundred feet in the air. The Crown Vic will become his tower, and there he can wait all of this out. Because people want him to do something, but he doesn’t know what.
He watches the cars stream out of River Falls. Occasionally he flashes his lights at speeders, but doesn’t pull anyone over, for fear that they are sick. He buys a gas mask from the Army Surplus and wears it at all times except when sleeping. Sometimes, when he hears the radio squawk and the dispatcher call out his name, he wants to snap it off, afraid of what he might be asked to do, ashamed that he hasn’t changed at all, that he is still that boy in the piss-soaked frog pajamas.
Hank remembers what his high school counselor once told him—to control his fears he must control his breathing, to imagine the air around him as a humored essence. What was his favorite fruit? Peaches. He loved canned peaches. And what was the color of illness? Green. That’s the color people turned in cartoons when they felt sour in the guts, wobbly-kneed. “Good,” the counselor told him. “Now imagine those colors moving in and out of your body. Breathe in peach, breathe out green. Peach in, green out.” All the ugly feelings will leave him, making room for the good, purifying him. And now, with his gas mask snugly fit around his face, as long as he thinks about his breathing, as long as he controls what goes in and out of him, he is hopeful he is safe. In with the peach, out with the green.
It takes Sara’s parents five days to die. During that time, their chests seem to collapse inward with every hitching cough. Their throats rasp. Their lips bruise. The blood vessels in their eyes burst, and they weep blood, and because they are propped up on their pillows, the blood runs down their cheeks in paths that seem raked by claws. The doctor prescribes medicine, but it does not help. When they die, within hours of each other, their bodies go slack. The sudden silence makes the air feel brittle.
In a kind of trance, Sara stumbles to the kitchen to turn on the radio—for the noise, something to distract her from what has happened—then kills it when the music breaks for an update on the sickness the scientists are now calling H3L1, or Hell, the nickname goes.
A Budweiser delivery truck pulls up to Food 4 Less and an hour later pulls away. A Greyhound grumbles back and forth to Portland, its tailpipe coughing along with its gray-faced passengers. A charter plane. A station wagon. A bicyclist passing through on his way across the state. And all those letters licked shut. The sickness spreads. However many hundred become however many thousand become however many million in a matter of days. There isn’t time for quarantine. There is barely enough time to utter the word pandemic.
And by then the sickness has extended across the state, the country, the continent, the world. There is no difference between good and bad, young and old, not that the sickness recognizes. Everyone is eligible for death.
For a few days, the world blames River Falls—calling it ground zero—so that the town feels like the eye of a black whirlpool with clotted lungs and broken bones swirling through it. And in turn River Falls blames Sara’s family. It feels good to have someone to blame. They gather together on the sidewalks and in the pews of churches, speaking hoarsely to one another, peppermints and cough drops clicking between their teeth. When they talk, they look in the direction of her house, the brick ranch with its shades pulled and its lawn busy with weeds, and they whisper terrible things about the Meyers, damn them for what they’ve done, and damn Sara for not falling ill like the rest of them—what is she, some kind of witch? Is this the devil’s business, then?
Sara keeps waiting for the sickness to take her. She plugs a thermometer into her mouth every hour on the hour. She pays close attention to her throat, waiting for the itching, and every now and then gives a tentative cough just to see what will happen. One afternoon, when she drives to the grocery store to fill her pantry, as the television advises, a half dozen people rush her in the parking lot. They wear masks and they grab her wrists and pull at her clothes.
“Thanks,” they say. “Thanks a lot.”
“They’ve run out of coffins? Did you hear that, Sara?”
These are voices she knows—from school, from work, from the neighborhood—voices muffled by masks and soured with venom.
A woman in a bird mask says, “Look at what you’ve done.” This is Maggie Meyerhofer, whose eyes are a startled blue and stare out from holes in her mask.
>
And then a man, Chuck Wilson, who came into the chiropractor regularly with lower back pain and who always wore flannel shirts even in the height of summer and whose face is now hidden by a zombie mask with an eyeball hanging from its socket, says, “Why aren’t you dead? Why aren’t you dying?”
His voice is overrun by that of a girl Sara went to high school with, Lauren Stott, who snatches a fistful of Sara’s hair to bring her close and whisper harshly, “My boy is dead because of you.” Her head is encased in a yellow rubber ball with a smiley face printed across it.
Their mouths are like dark furnaces. The words come between coughs, struggling to be heard.
“I’m sorry,” Sara says. She doesn’t know what else to say except, “Leave me alone,” when a voice yells over all the other voices to say that maybe her blood is an elixir, that maybe if they drink it they will be cured.
She wishes she had her sword, Oathmaker. Not to hurt them. Merely to show them. All she would need to do is slide the blade from its scabbard—and its steel would glow and its keen edge would sing when she swung it one way, then the other. And they would shrink away from her.
Their eyes are sunken. Their skin the gray of rotting fence posts. They cough at her—yes, at her—trying to infect her, despite what they already know, that she can’t be infected, that she will outlive them all.
As she rushes back to her car, they chase her and yell after her as if their words are pliers and hammers and duct tape, instruments of torture, tools that might interpret their rage and helplessness.
Hank has spent most of his life waiting for trouble, and now that trouble has found him, he isn’t sure quite what to do with it. He drives the streets of town. He spots a corpse on a porch swing, another in the park, a woman splayed out in the shape of an X, as if she has fallen from a building that isn’t there. A man runs by carrying a television set. Fire rises from the roof of a two-story Victorian and a column of smoke rises from the fire, hazing into the far reaches of the sky. He drives by all of this and stops only when he sees something manageable, seemingly safe, an old woman lugging a twenty-pound sack of rice. She wears a gray cotton sweat suit and a surgical mask. White hair spills down her shoulders. She takes small shuffling steps, clutching the bag of rice to her chest, leaning backward at the hips to manage the weight.
Suicide Woods Page 10