by Jack Ketchum
Between the kitchen and the outside door. A dog-sized crack in the doorway and no light on inside.
He backs off again. Third time today if you count the couch and he definitely counts the couch.
“Uh, Bart? Robbie? She’s in here.”
“Your drink’s on the counter,” Bart says. “I’ll take care of this.”
“You got it, my friend,” he says.
Delia stands outside the door to her room. She doesn’t want to go in there. Not without Caity. Bedtime? Ghosts again? Yeah, maybe. And forget the ghosts, Caity’s her sleep-mate. This sucks. She hears her mom’s heavy footsteps behind her and turns. There’s a tall glass of water in her hand.
“Mom? I can’t sleep in there. Not without . . .”
“Yes, you can.”
“. . . not without Caity. Mom, I’m sorry. Caity’s sorry. Couldn’t we . . .”
Her mom gives her a little push. Not rough, but purposeful. She walks Delia over to her bed. Moves her hand to Delia’s shoulder and eases her down. She holds out her hand.
“Take this. Wash it down.”
A pill. Delia never takes pills. A baby aspirin maybe sometimes but that’s all and rarely even that.
“Why? What is this?”
“Something to help you sleep. Take it.”
“No.”
“Delia Ann Cross. I have not spanked you since you were four years old.”
My god, she thinks. She’s serious.
I really think she would. She could try, anyway.
She takes the pill, turns it over in her fingers. Such a tiny thing. It doesn’t look dangerous. Part of mom’s stash.
“Swallow it.”
“Mom, I really don’t want . . .”
“I don’t care what you want, Delia, not right now. Tomorrow is important. Maybe the most important day of your life. Do you understand that? Do you? You need to sleep. Here.”
She plucks the pill out of Delia’s fingers and holds it inches from her lips.
“Open.”
I hate this, she thinks. It isn’t right. Important or not, I shouldn’t have to do this. All of a sudden she feels close to tears. Where’s Caity when I need her? she thinks. Dammit! She opens her mouth. Takes the pill offered up to her and drinks. One big gulp of water. Done.
Her mom sits down next to her and strokes her shoulder, trying to soothe her.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she says, “but we need to keep you on track.”
Mom strokes some more. Delia isn’t soothed, isn’t comforted.
“You should be excited, Deal, for god’s sake. Tomorrow? It’s a whole new game. We’re proud of you, baby.”
And she isn’t excited, either. Maybe tomorrow she would be. But right now she’s something else.
She stares at the dollhouse. Stares hard.
“I want Caity,” she says.
SIX
What the hell? thinks Bart. She’s growling at me now?
She’s wedged herself between the vacuum cleaner and the laundry basket, her back to the wall. Ass down and paws planted firmly on the hardwood floor in front of her. Glaring at him. Daring him. He tugs gently at her collar.
“Okay, c’mon now,” he says. “That’s a good girl. C’mon . . .”
He drags her six inches or so, slides her across the floor. She won’t get up.
This isn’t like her. Not at all. What they had here was basically a pretty damn placid animal.
He tugs some more. She yelps. Though he doubts he’s really hurt her.
This is all fucked up.
“Caits, it’s okay, c’mon, I’m sorry, girl. Get up, will you?”
Finally she does. And that’s good because he’s beginning to seriously sweat here. He leads her by the collar to the door, where she stops dead in her tracks. Feet planted and ass-to-floor again. He can see the pen outside through the plate-glass doors and obviously so can she. She looks up at him. And now her eyes are sad.
Better sad than mad, he thinks. Much better.
“Oh, come on, you big baby. It’s just for the night.”
He opens the door and she allows herself to be led to the big wire chain-link cage just beyond the slide and swing set. He hauls her in, shuts the gate and locks it. She whines and scratches at the wire.
“Sorry, girl. Mom’s orders. To be honest, I’m not all that nuts about that ol’ hillbilly con man either.”
Cait barks. He decides to take that to be assent.
She lies in dusty old hay spread across the floor of the cage and the blanket on top of that and these scents are both good and familiar—they speak of her, of her sleep—though the sharp metal scent of the cage itself is unwelcome as always. She watches Bart close the glass door behind him and reach for a bottle on the counter. She knows the smell inside the bottle and it too is good and familiar unless too much of it courses through Bart’s body, mingling with the other odors which are specific to him, drowning those scents in the tang of anxiety as they often do, as they have done only just moments ago.
She knows to some degree she has caused this anxiety. She dislikes this cage but she is happy to be free of him out here. Free of her responsibility for him as she is responsible for all of them.
She will lie here then in her own scent and all the night-scents. In the insect chirp and the flutter of bat wings, the one fodder for the other. She has no choice. She submits.
Roman has finished his drink and gone and then it’s just the three of them down there and the house seems very quiet.
“So what do you think, Rob?” she says.
He looks up from his game. “Think about what?”
“Your sister. The show.”
“It’s good, mom. It’s all good.”
“It is, isn’t it.” She sips her drink. By now it’s largely ice.
“I wasn’t too mean to her, was I?”
“To who? To Deal?”
“Yes.”
He’s looking at her strangely. As though he doesn’t quite understand the question. Though it seems to her the question is clear enough.
“Not really. Caity was being a jerk. And Delia just . . .”
“She can be bratty sometimes, huh.”
He frowns, then smiles. “I don’t know. She’s probably just tired.”
“Tired. Yes.”
She gets up to pour herself another. Just a short one. Reaches over and mussed his hair.
“You’re a good brother, Robbie,” she says. “We love you.”
“Same here, mom.” He yawns. “I’m tired too. Goin’ up to bed.”
Caity sees.
This is nothing new to her. This she has been able to do for as long as she can recall, at the first touch of a little girl’s hand along her back, at the first salty taste of her cheek and chin on her tongue, the first scent of her silky hair. With all these senses she now surrounds Delia and sees. As, when she wishes, she has always done.
Delia sleeps. In the tiny window of the house beside her bed a red light sputters to life and holds. Growing bright, brighter. A blast of air ruffles her hair, slides along her face. Caity can feel its unnatural strange caress. She sniffs at her cage, the damp tang of metal. She searches for some weakness there.
In the bedroom, a muffled yipping screeching sound, the same as they’d heard the night before. It grows louder, the flow of air around Delia’s face stronger. Why doesn’t she wake? The light in the small window in the small toy house beside the bed begins to spark. All these things together and at once her search is urgent. She paws at the cage. Delia sleeps on. Caity hunts for access to her sleep, hunts the cage for egress. The light spits and sparks.
She finds it. A thinness to the wire near the top right corner of the cage. She goes at it with her teeth. She can hear her heartbeat lavish in her chest. She goes at it with her paws. A toenail splits, cracks. She tears with her good strong teeth again. The thick muscles of her neck and shoulders bunch and pull. She rips the corner free. Tastes raw metal. Tastes her blood.
T
he tiny window bursts.
She can see it, smell it, hear it against the ghostly yawning. Sparks fly. Smoke trickles into the air, shaken and dispersed by the air strangely blasting from the headboard.
And inside the small house, beside the sleeping Delia’s cozy canopied bed, a flame blooms.
She tears at the hole she’s made, rips downward with her jaws, inserts a paw and rears back. Blood and spittle fly. There is panic now and an awareness of time. Time inside the room, time inside the cage. She whimpers, rears and pulls again, hurling both front paws against and through the opening, all her weight and muscle bearing down.
The small house is on fire.
Her head is through the opening. Not enough. Wider. She backs away and clamps her jaws to the section she’s pulled free, yanking, shaking. Wire savages her mouth, froths her cheeks.
The small house is on fire. A chunk of roof falls to the floor, rolls to a stop directly under the canopied pole at the foot of Delia’s bed.
She launches herself into the hole. Head and shoulders plunge through but then she’s trapped, half suspended a foot above both the lawn ahead and the floor of the cage behind her. Wire scours her belly. She wriggles, struggles, muscles tight as bowstrings until finally the cage disgorges her back and hips and she is free.
She races to the glass double doors, slams against them again and again, barking, roaring her distress.
“Jesus, now what’s her problem?” Bart says.
He’s just brought a full bottle of Widow Jane Seven-Year Kentucky Bourbon, a bucket of ice and two fresh glasses to Pat at the living room coffee table, where she sits composing announcements for Delia’s website, Twitter, and Facebook pages. She’d been delighted to see him.
“That dog’s had a problem all goddamn night,” she says. “Let her bark her damn fool head off for all I care. You pouring?”
“I’m pouring.”
He stubs his Winston out in the ungainly ceramic ashtray Robbie’d made for them in the fourth grade.
But what the hell’s that thumping sound? he thinks. Where’s that coming from? What’s going on here?
Light flickers, dances glowing through the bedroom window above her head. Fire. She backs away, turns, dashes across the lawn past the table and chairs where they often share with her their midday meal. Dashes to the tree. It’s a pinyon tree. She has tasted its bark and sweet nuts. Its branches reach nearly to their rooftop—Delia’s and hers. She hits the tree at a dead run, breath whooshing from her chest, climbs its trunk like a squirrel, makes it halfway up the trunk before her purchase fails and falls four feet down onto her side.
She’s aware of pain, in her ribs, her hip, and thigh, throbbing through her body. She’s dizzy. Inside the room flames climb the canopy of Delia’s bed. Steady, spreading, white to black. She smells scorched walnut, bubbled lacquer, and burning cotton. She gets up, shakes her head, runs back across the lawn, turns, and runs again. Hits the tree just right.
Her left paw finds a branch, then the right. She hauls herself up, runs the limb in perfect balance, and leaps to their roof, the roof they share, to the screened-in window between her and Delia inside, Delia finally, at last awake now and coughing, batting at flaming falling debris overhead. Her eeeeeeeeeeee sails through the screen. She is under attack.
Caity backs away to the roof’s edge as the canopy disengages, comes loose, falls. Instinctively Delia has thrown up her hands to protect her face but that is exactly where it falls, onto hands pressed tight to her face, onto bare arms, neck and head. The screen is thin wire mesh and tears and flies clattering away off its track as Caity’s full weight comes crashing through and she lands hard beside Delia on the bed. Flames climb down Delia’s twisting, rolling body. She springs over and across her, into the flames, flattening herself against Delia’s body beneath and she can smell her own fur burning and Delia’s hair and flesh burning, smoke rising between them as she bites down hard on Delia’s arm and tears her hand away from her face, she must!—and as she screams and screams, drags her off the bed.
Rob stands in the open doorway. In a single moment he takes it in. The dollhouse aflame, the bedcovers aflame, his sister and his dog rolling burning across the floor. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. What have I done?
Only moments ago he’d been . . . playing. Just messing around.He’d been standing in his closet making these spooky, eerie noises and blowing hard into the length of garden hose piped into her room through the adjoining closet and up to her headboard, messing with the electric dimmer switch that popped the lights he’d secreted in the dollhouse, having real good fun scaring her over the past four nights, the scares escalating—orchestrated nicely if he did say so himself, kind of a power thing, sure, and a little cruel, but so B-movie dopey he was surprised she bought it—having great good fun until just now when he pushed the dimmer to the max and all of a sudden it started sparking, sputtering in his hands and he dropped it to the closet floor, kicked it out of the closet away from his clothes and shoes and into the bedroom, then stomped on the goddamn thing until it was dead.
He smelled burnt wiring. Then moments later, another burning.
Not electric. Something else. Her room!
He tore open his bedroom door and ran out into the hall.
“Mom! Dad! Fire!”
Then he heard the screams.
And he was suddenly in her bedroom. Seeing what he’d set in motion. Frozen by what he’s done and what to do next and where to go, the dog his sister the bed and thinking stupidly stunningly water, water! until his father shoulders in behind him shouting jesus fucking christ! and rips off his shirt, diving on top of Caity and Delia and rolling, smothering the remaining flames, and seeing this at last releases him. He rips what’s left of the burning canopy down off its posts and stomps it out while his mother screams and tears the sheets off the bed and does the same.
Then it’s quiet but for their breathing.
The smell of smoke.
And the burning of things he does not wish to name.
SEVEN
He slips into his father’s examining room and quietly closes the door behind him. The nurse gives him a nod, then snips off the bandage on his father’s forearm and wraps it gently with beige adhesive hospital tape. The nurse is young and pretty. Probably only ten years older than he is.
“There you go,” she says. “Be good as new.”
“Where’s my wife?” he says. “She with Delia? My daughter?”
He seems a little out of it, sits back heavily against the raised examining table.
The nurse is tapping something into the stand-up computer.
“I believe so, yes. You just relax a little while, Mr. Cross. Stay comfortable. Can I bring you anything? Glass of water? A blanket?”
“No. No thanks.”
“I’ll come back for you as soon as we have word from the doctor.”
Robbie steps aside for her and she goes out the door. It’s only then that his father seems to notice him. His father sighs and shakes his head.
“Dammit, Robbie. What the hell happened? I can’t believe you would . . . I mean, what the hell were you thinking, son?”
I was thinking about me. About Delia. No. I don’t know what I was thinking.
“Are the police . . . ? Are they still out there? I just don’t understand, Rob. This is bad, son. This is real bad.”
“They’re gone. They said that for now they just want us to stay together . . . for Delia. There’ll be a . . . a hearing I guess. Later. A judge. God, dad, I’m so . . .”
“Sorry? Well yeah. You damn well should be.”
His dad must have seen him flinch because he softens then.
“How’s your sister? How’s Delia?”
“I don’t know. Mom won’t talk to me. Won’t say anything to me. Nothing. Last I heard they were putting her in some sort of . . . a tub . . . to clean out the wounds.”
He’s seen the wounds. The wounds are red and black.
“Jesus, Rob. Jesus.”
You use what you’ve learned.
The double doors swing open and Dr. Ludlow hurries past her to the nurses’ station. Past her? He doesn’t see her standing there? He’s ignoring her?
He’s holding up a chart, talking to one of the nurses. The pretty blonde who’d gone off with Bart.
“Dr. Ludlow? Dr. Ludlow, please . . .”
He hands the nurse the chart. She smiles a wholly professional smile and moves away down the hall.
“Hi, Mrs. Cross. The nurse is going to fetch your husband and your son. Won’t be but a moment.”
“Please . . .” Tell me it’s fine. Tell me it’s okay.
And she is actually reaching for his sleeve, she would never do that, never, she can’t believe it, not in a million years, when the emergency room doors swing open again and three of them, nurses in scrubs, come through pushing a gurney and handling oxygen and monitors and an IV drip which depends from and is attached to that gurney, and on the gurney is a small figure which she sees to be her daughter, Delia, intubated and unconscious, tucked into clean white sheets, sterile dressings covering her entire face and head, being whisked along efficiently past her.
Her breathing stops. She staggers. The doctor takes her arm.
“Hey. Hey, hold on there.”
He moves her to a chair. She backpedals along with him. He sits her down. He sits too. And she can hear it in his voice—the doctor is seriously pissed.
“I told them to give me a few minutes alone with you before moving her over to ICU. Obviously they weren’t listening. I’m sorry, Mrs. Cross. Really sorry. Hard to see that, I know.”
Why do doctors always say that, I know? she thinks. They don’t know. They don’t know what you do. Not what you feel deep down in your blood.
She falls back to what she does know. What is sure and certain.