The Night Parade

by Ronald Malfi

  “What ideals are those?” David said. “Aside from raising rabbits and growing ferns, I mean.”

  “We’re not afraid, for one thing,” Gany said, and for the first time since he’d met her, David heard her voice turn serious.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “The end,” said Gany.

  “Hey,” Tim said to her as he dried a plate with a dish towel.

  Gany shrugged. “What’s the big deal?” She turned back to David and said, “We’re resigned to the fact that this is it. The end is nigh, and all that. You’d be amazed at the peace that overtakes you once you surrender to the inevitable.”

  David looked at Tim, who was staring back at him. “You’re Worlders,” David said.

  “No,” Tim said firmly. “We’re not. Worlders are radicalized lunatics, bombing hospitals and praying for the annihilation of the human race. And even then, you’re talking about just a small subset of a larger whole.”

  “But you both believe that Wanderer’s Folly is some sort of penance put upon the human race,” David said. “That mankind is meant to be wiped out.”

  Tim flipped the dish towel over his shoulder like a barkeep. “Not exactly,” Tim said. “I believe that whatever is supposed to happen will happen. There’s no divinity behind anything, no supernatural motive. The goddamn zodiac hasn’t conspired to eliminate the human race. I just don’t see much hope out there anymore, David, and I decided a long time ago not to lose sleep over it.”

  “So we live for each day,” Gany interjected. “It’s better that way. People are losing their minds over this epidemic, and it’s getting so you can’t tell who’s got the Folly and who’s just gone batshit fucking crazy worrying about it.” She nodded toward Ellie and said, “Sorry for the language, sweetheart. But sometimes it’s the best way to get the point across.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ellie said, drying a plate with a dish towel.

  Tim snapped a dish towel at Ellie’s backside. “Yeah, well, you crass ladies are making me uncomfortable,” he said. “Why don’t you gals go play Monopoly or something?”

  Gany stood up with her wineglass and reached out over the counter for Ellie with one hand. Ellie took her hand and Gany gave her a little twirl.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tim grumbled, though not disapprovingly.

  As Gany and Ellie danced out of the room, Tim tossed the dish towel onto the counter, then settled himself back in his chair at the table. He patted one of David’s knees. “You seem a little freaked out.”

  “There’s a bad connotation to what you’ve said tonight and what they say about Worlders on the news,” David told him. “I guess I’m just a little surprised.”

  “I’m not a terrorist, David. I’m just a man at peace with himself.”

  “But you think the Folly shouldn’t be cured,” David said.

  “No, that’s not what I think, not at all. If there’s a cure—if your daughter is the cure, man—then God bless us all. I’m just saying that, until you told me about Eleanor, I didn’t see any way things could get better, and I had to struggle to make my peace with that. Everybody’s got their own way of handling things, and this is mine. You know, it’s no coincidence that we lost touch over the past year and a half or so. It’s easier to convince yourself that you’re okay with the world dying when you don’t have constant contact with your loved ones who’ll just go ahead and die with it.”

  David nodded, his gaze momentarily falling to examine the wood grain of the tabletop. “Am I doing the right thing here, Tim? Hiding her away like this?”

  “I guess that depends on where your greatest moral obligation lies,” Tim said. “Is it to the well-being of everyone on the planet, or to your daughter?”

  “She isn’t some sacrificial lamb,” he said. “She’s my little girl.”

  “Then I guess you’ve already made up your mind on that score.”

  “I guess I have.”

  “What was that other thing you wanted to mention to me earlier?” Tim said.

  David sighed. “I honestly don’t know where to begin,” he said. “And even after I tell you, I’m not so sure you’d believe me.”

  “There are very few things in this world I find hard to believe anymore.”

  David nodded. “It started the night we left Maryland. Well, I guess it started even before that, but I hadn’t noticed it until the night we hit the road. Kathy had just died, and I picked Ellie up from her babysitter’s house. I couldn’t tell her about her mom, not then, not at that moment. There were people at our house waiting for us,” he said, and told Tim about the white van. “Now that Kathy was dead, I knew they would come for Ellie. They wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we went on the run. And I was such a mess that night, so . . . so fucked up . . . and I’m just driving, not knowing where the hell I’m going . . . and Ellie, she just reaches out and touches the back of my neck. And, man, it was like she sucked all the fear and sadness and grief right out of me.”

  One of Tim’s eyebrows arched.

  “I know, I know,” David said. “Just hear me out.”

  He told Tim the rest of it from there—the shock she’d inadvertently given him after learning that her mother was dead and that he’d lied to her; the events that took place at Turk Powell’s house in Goodwin, and how she’d . . . done something. . . to Cooper, which had enabled them to escape; and finally, he told Tim about the scene on the highway, where Ellie had calmed a young girl in the last moments of her life, and then calmed the young girl’s mother, too, while several people, including Gany, looked on.

  Tim listened to the whole story without an expression on his face. Once David had finished, Tim sighed, ran his fingers through his hair, and said, “Well, fuck.”

  “Exactly,” said David.

  “I’m not sure what to make of all that.”

  “Just please say that you believe me.”

  “I do,” Tim said. “Of course I do.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  Tim shook his head. “Buddy, I have no idea.”

  “Whatever it is,” David said, “it’s getting stronger.”

  “Are there side effects?”

  “She says no. But she got sick and threw up a little after the highway incident. She said it was a lot to take in.”

  Tim startled David by laughing. “A lot to take in,” he repeated. “Christ, you’re telling me.” He pitched his head back, a look of consideration on his face now. The sandy bristles along his unshaven chin and neck sparkled like flecks of mica. “So either her immunity has also given her these abilities—”

  “Or these abilities have granted her immunity,” David finished. “Like, whatever that mutated gene in her DNA is, it does more than ward off the Folly. Yeah, I’ve already considered the same thing myself.”

  “In that case, what about Kathy? Did she ever exhibit any—”

  “No, no, nothing like this. Ellie’s special.”

  “Is it something she can show me herself? That touching the neck thing?”

  “Probably, but let’s not go there. In fact, don’t tell her I told you at all. She’s weird about it.”

  “Yet she jumped out of the car in front of a handful of strangers and went straight over to that girl who was dying in the street,” Tim said.

  “She was trying to help her.”

  “Did she think she could have cured her?”

  “I think so. But instead, she just wound up making her last moments more . . . bearable, I guess.” He thought about adding how he had reached out and briefly touched his daughter when Ellie had first grabbed hold of the dying girl, and how he had been overcome by the swirl of emotion flooding through them, the—

  (flying like flying)

  —unmitigated serenity that had come over him by that brief connection with his daughter’s icy flesh. In the end, he decided to keep that part to himself.

  “I won’t say a word.” Smiling, Tim crossed his heart with one finger. “I love that kid. And I love you, too,
man. You’re my brother.”

  David returned Tim’s warm smile. “Stepbrother,” he corrected.

  Tim shook his head. “No, man. My brother.”

  David nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”

  “Listen,” Tim said. “There’s something I want to talk about with you, too, but now’s not the time for it. Let’s do it later tonight, after the ladies have gone to bed. Okay?”

  “Okay,” David said.

  55

  That night, they grilled rabbit on the barbecue, and despite her utter refusal to eat any of it, Ellie seemed comfortable and at ease for the first time in recent memory. Tim regaled them with old folk songs, which he played on a battered acoustic guitar, his throaty singing off-key but jubilant. They lit a bonfire, too, and roasted marshmallows on the ends of long sticks. Tim and David smoked cigars and drank wine—David just couldn’t stomach any more of his brother’s bathtub whiskey—and Gany told a ghost story that she claimed was real and had actually happened to her when she was a young girl growing up in Iowa.

  By the end of the night, as the bonfire started to dwindle and the stars appeared to burn holes in the firmament, Ellie got up from where she’d been sitting cross-legged in the grass twirling a marshmallow stick around in the air, and approached David’s lawn chair.

  “Hey, hon,” he said, running a hand along her arm.

  “I want to do something for Mom. We never did anything.”

  He sat up straighter in the chair. Beside him, Tim coughed in his hand and righted his posture, too.

  “Like what?” David asked.

  “A funeral,” said Ellie.

  David smiled and squeezed her hand.

  Gany got up from her chaise lounge and ran her fingers through Ellie’s shortened hair. “We can certainly do something,” Gany said.

  “Yes, we can,” Tim said, springing up from his chair. “You got it, kiddo. That’s a wonderful idea.”

  “It’s very thoughtful,” David said.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Gany, and she went off into the field toward the rabbit hutches.

  “Is there a song you could sing, Uncle Tim?”

  Tim gathered up his acoustic, which he’d leaned against the arm of his lawn chair, and strummed a few chords. “I sure can. What was your mama’s favorite song?”

  “ ‘Hot in the City’ by Billy Idol,” said Ellie.

  Tim laughed but his face looked sad in the firelight. His eyes appeared to moisten. “Well, heck. Lemme see if I can fumble through it.” He proceeded to strum a few repetitious chords.

  Gany returned with a bouquet of wildflowers clutched to her bosom. She handed them to Ellie. “We don’t have any incense to burn, but I thought maybe you could throw them on the fire. They smell nice when they burn.”

  Ellie thanked her. Then she took one of David’s hands. He stood and let her lead him over to the dying bonfire. In the background, Tim began singing the opening verse to “Hot in the City,” as best he could remember it.

  “Dear Mom,” Ellie said, addressing the fire. “You were the best mom in the world. I think maybe you’re not really gone, because it doesn’t seem real to think of you not here. I know you were just trying to save the world. I think that’s a good thing. I think it was brave. The world is messed up and it needs saving.”

  She began to cry, her hand slipping from David’s. She sank down to her knees and David let her be.

  “I’m sorry for all the times I was bad. I wish I had do-overs for all of those times. But we had a lot of fun, too, and I’m going to miss all of that. I’m going to miss you. So much, Mommy Spoon.”

  She glanced up at David, her face shiny with tears, before turning back to the fire.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. Dad’s doing a great job taking care of me. He’s a good dad. Anyway, I just wanted to say good-bye. I miss you. I love you.”

  She threw the flowers on the fire. The flames flared, and a banner of black smoke lifted up into the air. Gany had been right: The burning flowers smelled like perfume.

  Ellie stood, wiping her nose on her arm. With a hand against his hip, she pushed David toward the bonfire. “You say something now,” she told him.

  I can’t, he thought. I’m afraid to open my mouth. I’ll lose it.

  “I love you, babe. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—”

  He went down on his knees.

  56

  “That was a beautiful service,” he said as he tucked Ellie into bed. Ellie pulled the sheet up over her shoulders, and David leaned in and planted a kiss at her temple. “Will you be okay in here by yourself tonight?”

  “Yes. Dad?”

  “Yeah, hon?”

  “Are you okay?”

  He smiled at her in the darkness. “I’m fine.”

  She seemed like she wanted to say more. Yet in the end, she gave him a brief squeeze around the wrist, then slid her hand away. Even in the dark, he could tell she was studying him, perhaps reading him. Searching his thoughts, his emotions. Mrs. Blanche, Ellie’s elderly babysitter, had called Ellie a deep and contemplative child. “She roots,” Mrs. Blanche had told David once. “The girl, she sinks the deepest parts of herself far down into the soil and soaks up life.” The elderly woman had said this with admiration and tenderness.

  “If you were sick,” she said, “I’d want to help you.”

  For several seconds he could not find his voice. “You’re a sweet girl,” he said finally, a coward’s way of avoiding an actual response. His throat felt constricted.

  “I keep thinking about that girl on the highway. I feel bad for her.”

  “You gave her peace in the end,” David said. “That’s some gift, Eleanor.”

  “You never call me Eleanor.”

  He smiled at her in the darkness.

  “I keep thinking about that boy, too,” she said. “Benny. The truck driver’s son.”

  “Yeah,” David said.

  “I feel bad about him, too.”

  “It’s okay to feel bad. I feel bad, too.”

  “And Mom,” she said. “Dad, what if I was the one keeping Mom healthy while she was at home? What if she got sick when she went into the hospital because I wasn’t there to keep her from getting upset?”

  This jarred him, caught him off guard. He didn’t know what to say. It had never even occurred to him. He smoothed the hair from her forehead and said, “Please don’t be so silly and start blaming yourself for things. You can’t help it.”

  “But I can,” Ellie said, her voice perking up a notch. “I can help everybody.”

  “No one knows that for sure,” he said. “Not one hundred percent.”

  “But we could try.”

  David’s smile faded from his face. “Are we back to this again?”

  “I don’t want to be one of the bad guys. I want to be a good guy. Like Mom.”

  “I know you do.”

  “If I was sick and someone else was the cure, wouldn’t you want them to help me?”

  David exhaled—a long, shuddery, uncomfortable sound. “You think too much. Where do you get off being so smart for an eight-year-old?”

  “I’m pretty much nine.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I keep forgetting.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He tucked the bedsheet around her small body. “Honey, if you were sick or hurt or in any kind of danger whatsoever, I would do anything in the world to protect you. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Then you have to do the same thing for other people, too, Dad. All those other people who have sick kids. Or parents.”

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve got something amazing going on with you right now. What you can do . . . what you did for that girl today . . . that’s a miracle, El. Maybe that’s your gift to humanity. Maybe it’s not that you happen to be immune, but that you can do something great with your ability once you learn what it is. But you’ll be giving all that up if you turned yourself in to some doctors who just want to study your bl
ood. You might be doing more harm than good that way. Do you understand?”

  She was quiet for a while. Then, in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “I think so.”

  “Good. Now, give your old man a kiss.”

  She sat up, kissed the side of his face, hugged him hard. He tucked her back in, then pulled the bedroom door halfway closed as he stepped out into the hallway.

  Gany startled him, sliding down the hall in the dark toward her own bedroom. She paused and touched his arm. “Hey,” she said. “You’re a good dad, you know that?”

  He smiled at her in the darkness, his face feeling stiff and made of rubber. She returned his smile, though he registered something stiff and insincere about it. He wondered if she was secretly afraid of Ellie and what the girl had done on the highway. He wondered if she was really at peace with all she had claimed she was earlier at the dinner table. Most of all, he wondered if she’d just overheard their conversation.

  “Good night,” Gany said, and continued on down the hall.

  * * *

  In the kitchen he found Tim seated by himself at the table, finishing the last of the wine. Only the small light above the sink was on, leaving much of Tim’s face masked in gloom. Beyond the window at Tim’s back, the night sky boasted an impossible arrangement of stars.

  “How’s the kiddo?” Tim asked.

  “Tired.” David smiled wearily and sat down to join his brother at the table. “So am I.”

  Tim poured the remaining wine from the bottle into a fresh glass, then slid it over to David.

  “You look haunted, you know,” Tim said.

  “I am,” David replied. “She wants to turn herself in.”

  “Ah,” Tim said. “Shame on you for raising such a conscientious child.”

  “She’s my daughter. I’ll protect her at all costs. No matter what.”

  Tim nodded. He knocked back the last of his wine, then said, “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “All right.”

  “I want you to tell me how Kathy died.”

  “I thought I already did.”

  “You said she grew weak until she just expired. But I’d like to know what was her actual cause of death.”