Part 5 (2/2)

After our call to Joel's house, Karrie had wept openly. Stan Beebe had gone home sick. I might have done either or both, but at the time I was too upset about my meeting with the cannibal to think straight. You meet a man-eater like that, it disturbs you.

What happened to Joel and Holly was the type of thing you could put off thinking about if you were thirty-four like I was. You could tell yourself you didn't need to think about it for another forty years. I didn't even have a corner of my brain where I kept problems like that.

Three years earlier when my father had a stroke, I'd calculated that I had forty-six years before I needed to worry about it myself. Now I faced the inescapable fact that people my age were not exempt-were, in fact, dropping like flies.

I was not exempt. was not exempt.

It was something you always knew but tried not to face, in the same way teenagers knew they could die if they drove recklessly but, nonetheless, still drove as if they were invincible, which of course was why so many teenagers died in automobile accidents.

None of us knew for certain whether Joel McCain's brain was still functioning. Or Holly's. To be able to think but not speak. To be able to itch but not scratch.

You got like that, it had to be h.e.l.l on earth.

Stan Beebe had told me he'd rather be dead.

I would rather be dead. would rather be dead.

Life was such a simple thing when you sat down and thought about it. You were conceived, born, lived for a few years, mated, had children, grew old, and then you died and fed the worms. Afterward, your offspring duplicated the process.

Same as any animal.

Same as a kernel of corn.

My life was no different from anybody else's. My days pa.s.sed pretty much like everybody else's. I got up in the morning and looked in the cupboard for a box of cereal. Thought about the fact that I needed to take the girls shopping for school clothes, that I'd forgotten to write a check for the phone bill. That the car needed gas. I found my wallet empty and went to the cash machine. Like those around me, I was consumed with the minutiae of daily life, by the fact that the driver in the next lane cut me off, by how much of a raise the fire department might expect from the city next year. c.r.a.p, all of it. Absolute c.r.a.p.

Rarely did anything that mattered touch my thoughts.

The downpour of daily trifles was so constant and so steady I rarely had time to look up at the sky.

It sounds foolish to say it, but the feeling of my own impending death seemed to fill the pickup truck. Some philosopher said that when we feel sad for somebody else's death, we are actually mourning our own. He might have been writing about me.

When I rolled down the window, the cool night air tossed around some papers on the seat beside me right before it brought tears to my eyes.

DAY TWO.

11. WEAK LEGS, MILD HEADACHE,.

THE HANDS TAKE ON A WAXY APPEARANCE.

I woke up unable to breathe.

When I opened my eyes, a seven-year-old was sitting on my chest, a nine-year-old alongside straddling my pillow as if it were a horse. Britney was skinny as a pencil. She'd been bugging me to cut her hair, which was the same shade of red her mother's had been as a child. Her older sister, Allyson, had black hair that fell just beyond her shoulders, almost the same color as mine; she thought she wanted to keep hers long. Or short. Alternating opinions by the hour. Allyson was already beginning to stretch out into the elegant young woman she would become.

Even though I discouraged it, Allyson had taken up the unofficial mantle of mother in the family, striving to be the voice of reason in any familial endeavor or discussion. Allyson had become the sober one, taking after my father and myself, Britney the free spirit, as Lorie had been, as my mother had been in her youth and now was again.

The three of us had stayed up late playing Monopoly and listening to a Britney Spears CD. ”Come on, Dad,” Britney said. ”Your alarm's been going off for hours. You have to wake up. Time to go to work.”

”Oh, yeah?”

I'd slept like a rock, which was unusual because I was generally a light sleeper, especially after a day as fraught with emotional scenes as yesterday. Now I had a headache. I wondered if I'd picked up a bug at Tacoma General. But then, I doubted a bug I'd picked up last night could strike so quickly.

”It's ten after seven,” Britney said. ”You're not going to have time for breakfast.”

”The alarm go off? I didn't hear it.”

”Been buzzing for hours,” said Allyson, as if already bored with the day, rearranging my hair with one hand.

”Your alarm woke us up, and we were all the way in the other room,” said Britney. ”We're just little. We're supposed to sleep through anything.”

”Know what else?” Allyson asked.

”What?”

”If you're going to find a really good stepmother for us, you're going to have to stop wasting your time on bimbos.”

”What makes you think I was with a bimbo last night?”

”You said yourself she was foxy.”

”I meant foxlike. As in sharp teeth.” I gnashed my teeth. They laughed.

”You always say we'd sleep through a nuclear saster nuclear saster,” said Britney.

”Nuclear disaster, honey. And I didn't hear my alarm.”

”Buzzing for hours hours,” said Allyson.

”Yup,” confirmed Britney, sighing. ”I don't know what you're going to do about breakfast.”

”I'll grab a bite at the station.”

”Dad, what happened to your hands?” Allyson picked up my right hand and showed it Britney.

”Oh, ick,” said Britney as the front doorbell rang. ”Looks like you got into the Elmer's Glue.” She rolled off the bed and sprinted for the front door. ”That's Morgan.”

”Don't open up to strangers,” I said.

”You know who it is, Dad,” Allyson said.

Morgan was sixteen and lived next door. Baby-sitting for me was an easy-money summer job for her and a pleasant experience for my girls, partly because she looked on them as contemporaries and shared her secrets about boys and high school, partly because she brought over makeup and showed them how to apply it. Seven and nine, going on seventeen and nineteen, my girls shared a thousand little confidences with Morgan that I wasn't supposed to know about, including the fact that Morgan had a crush on me.

We were in the same house the girls and I had lived in with Lorie, a rambler on two and a half acres just north of the main section of town. A fixer-upper that had taken five years to bang into shape. When the girls came along, Lorie quit work and our budget became strained at about the same pace as our relations.h.i.+p.

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