Vanessa believed it was a message of hope, a portent.
What was two years when a cicada waited thirteen to spread its wings and live for but a single month?
She was going to find her daughter.
And she was going to bring her home.
It felt like a great weight had been lifted from her soul, as though a ray of sunshine had cut through the fog through which she'd been blindly stumbling since Emma's disappearance.
The hint of a smile curled the corners of her lips.
She heard a knock at the front door and rose from the table. Even her step felt lighter as she strode across the living room. For the first time, she thought that everything just might work out all right. Or at least as well as it could.
Vanessa opened the door.
The feeling fled as quickly as it had arrived.
* * *
"Hi, sis," Trey said.
He had paced on her porch for more than ten minutes before he finally found the courage to knock. Part of him had hoped that Vanessa would still be asleep, that he would have to return later. It was selfish, he knew. He should have called her the moment they found the remains, but he had needed to be certain. And now that he was, he wasn't sure he was going to be able to vocalize the words. He couldn't even bring himself to look her in the eyes.
Vanessa stood silently in the doorway as he shifted nervously from side to side, the porch planks creaking under his weight. He forced himself to look up from his toes. Her pale cheeks were already wet with tears.
She must have read the news from his expression, his posture.
"When?" she whispered.
He finally summoned the nerve to look her in the eyes and saw only fathomless pits of pain.
"Yesterday," he said. "We found her body in the bayou. Half a mile from Caddo Lake."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"How did she...?"
"Vanessa..."
"I need to know."
Trey reached out and took her hand.
"I need to know!" she screamed and jerked her arm away.
Trey eased closer and opened his arms. She balled her fists and hit him on the chest over and over until he was able to draw her into his embrace. She continued to pound on his back until she eventually ran out of adrenaline and collapsed into him, sobbing.
They slumped to the floor right there in the foyer. He held her tightly and willed whatever strength he had into her. Tears streamed from his eyes as well. He leaned his cheek against hers and whispered directly into her ear. He told her everything. From the discovery of the corpse through the identification process. He described the condition of the body. The broken bones. The lack of flesh from decomposition and insect consumption. The teeth. The hair. He spared no detail. Vanessa needed to know and it would only hurt worse if she had to hear it from someone else in bits and pieces doled out over the coming days and weeks. He needed to crush her now to know if she would be able to survive it.
She cried until there were no more tears, her head on his shoulder, her fingers clenching his shirt. He held her in the silence for what felt like hours, unable to offer any words of comfort. She had heard them all before and they sounded hollow coming from him. He thought she had drifted off to sleep or fallen into a state of catatonia when she finally spoke.
"Will you...?" She paused to dampen her dry mouth. "Will you take me to see my husband?"
* * *
Vanessa sat at the foot of Warren's grave. Her brother waited patiently in his car fifty yards away on the sizzling ribbon of blacktop that meandered through the low hills crowned with lush grasses and carefully tended copses of trees. Right now, she needed her husband more than ever before. She had never felt so alone. Even after Warren's death, there had always been the promise that her daughter was out there somewhere and it was only a matter of time before they were reunited. And now that promise had been found broken and abused, cast aside like refuse in the swamp.
"There's nothing left for me here," she whispered.
The cruel sun beat down on her. She would have felt the skin on the back of her neck burning were she able to feel anything at all.
She heard the deafening chorus of cicadas from the cypress trees looming over the row of headstones, the same trees from which the crunching sounds had previously originated. There had to be thousands of them in that one stand alone. Predator satiation, they called it. Produce more offspring than its enemies can consume and the species will survive. The individual is nothing. Expendable. The same rules applied to humanity.
Vanessa crawled over the faint lump until she was close enough to touch the headstone. She ran her palm over the smooth marble surface. The polish was beginning to pit. She traced the letters with her fingertips. It was as close as she was going to get to the physical consolation she so desperately needed from the man she loved.
"Would you forgive me? If I just went to sleep and woke up there with you? Wherever you are. Would you be able to forgive me?"
The cicadas sang even louder, their amassed voices making the leaves shiver.
"I can't do it anymore. I don't want to do it anymore. I want to be with my family again."
A gentle breeze from the east rustled the trees and the cicada song abruptly ceased. It was replaced by the buzzing sound of thousands of wings as a cloud of insects rose from the cluster of cypresses. They swarmed above her, whirling like a cyclone, casting strange dotted shadows. The air stirred around her at the behest of so many wings, like fingertips just grazing the fine hairs on her body. A lover's touch.
And then the cloud descended.
Chitinous bodies assaulted her from all sides. She threw her arms up over her head and shrieked in surprise. Cicadas tangled in her hair. Wings tapped her skin. Tiny feet poked like so many needles. They scurried up her sleeves, down the back of her shirt. Across her lips and her tongue. She spat and forced her mouth closed as tightly as she could. They clicked in her ears as they tried to squeeze into the canals. Then, one by one, they took to flight again.
The buzz of wings metamorphosed into the high-pitched squealing and clicking sound.
Cautiously, she lowered her arms and eased herself up to her knees. She couldn't even hear herself think over the cicadas. It sounded like they were screaming from inside her head.
She plucked several stragglers out of her hair, where they had become hopelessly entangled, and brushed herself off. It still felt as though they were crawling all over her. She looked up at her husband's headstone and gasped.
The entire surface of the marble was covered with the large insects, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, climbing all over each other. They covered her husband's name, the dates between which he had graced the world, his identity as a loving husband and father. The singing cicadas even obscured the majority of his epitaph, save for two small gaps where no insects crawled.
Two words were clearly framed between the writhing bodies. Not once did a single insect so much as crawl across either.
Vanessa leaned closer, her heartbeat racing to catch up with the rhythm of the cicada song. She focused on the words of the epitaph:
His memory still endures
Through the lives he touched
She could only read two words between the scrabbling insects:
still
lives.
* * *
They didn't speak as they rode back to Vanessa's house. Trey had seen the cloud of cicadas descend upon his sister from the driver's seat, but by the time he reached her, the swarm had settled and she was ready to leave. Sure, he remembered seeing the insects swarm years ago. Just not like that, not directly around someone. They had walked to his car in silence, a silence that hung between them until they were nearly to her house before she finally spoke.
"Is it possible the body they found wasn't Emma's? I mean, is there any way the identification could be wrong?"
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. She seemed strangely composed, as though he was retu
rning with an entirely different person than the one with whom he had left. Her eyes were glazed, focused on nothing in particular, her posture almost relaxed. He debated the merits of sugar-coating the truth, but he couldn't bear to offer her false hope.
"No," he said after a long pause. "The comparisons of the DNA from her hair and her dental records were conclusive."
"But they didn't test the body itself, did they?"
Trey's Cherokee coasted to a halt in front of her house. Vanessa climbed out without another word and walked up the path toward her front door. She didn't wave, didn't even look back in his direction. Just opened the door with her key and vanished into the darkness.
He sat there under the glow of the streetlamp. Small dark shapes swirled around the light, casting strange, shifting shadows. He heard the distant hum of cicada song from the ancient trees lining the lane.
Vanessa needed help, just not the kind of help he could give. He was worried about her. Terrified for her. She could simply walk straight to her medicine cabinet, grab a bottle of pills, and curl up alone in bed one final time. Was it possible that he had just seen her alive for the last time? Would their next encounter require him to break down her door to find her dead in her bed?
He grabbed his cell phone and flipped it open. The small screen stared back at him. He debated calling someone to stay the night with her, but he was all she had now and there was no way she would allow him to baby-sit her. He thought about calling a shrink or a pastor, someone who could help her sort through her feelings, who could convince her not to do anything to harm herself. But she hadn't appeared suicidal. In fact, she almost seemed more at peace than she had been in a long time. Was it possible her doubts were justified?
In the end, he settled on a different number entirely and listened to the phone ring until someone eventually answered.
"Packard?" he said. "Walden here. From Jefferson. I'm glad you're still there. Remember when you said if there was ever anything else you could do for me...?"
* * *
Vanessa passed through the dark living room and entered the kitchen. Her thoughts were a chaotic mess and she was emotionally spent, yet at the same time, she felt remarkably calm. Memories assaulted her. The bear her daughter had made crumbling as the cicadas emerged from their molted skins. A ghostly hand pressed against the glass. The swarm descending upon her from the trees at her husband's grave. Covering the headstone with the exception of two conspicuous gaps.
"Still lives," she whispered to the shadows. It was a homophonic interpretation, a verb instead if a noun.
It couldn't all be coincidence, could it? Any one of those events could have been an anomaly, a random freak of nature, but together they formed a message. And there was no denying what that message was.
Perhaps she was only seeing what she wanted to see. Maybe something deep inside of her had finally broken under the weight of her loss. Or maybe, just maybe, her interpretation was correct. Regardless, there was only one way to find out for sure.
She flipped on the kitchen light and stared at the table. The glass case lay in ruin. The base was still flat on the surface under a mound of dirt. The support post stood erect from it like a little metal cactus. But the panes were shattered. Gleaming shards littered the tabletop. She glanced up at the overhead fixture, at the window that overlooked the back yard. There was no sign of the cicadas anywhere.
Vanessa headed back through the living room toward the staircase and ascended into darkness. She was exhausted, but she knew there was no way her brain was going to shut down long enough for her to sleep. She didn't feel like trying anyway. Those two words repeated over and over in her head.
Still lives.
Still lives.
Was it possible they were true? That Emma was somehow still alive?
She contemplated the evidence as her brother had described it. The dental records had proven that the teeth had been Emma's based upon comparisons of a forensic odontologist's physical reconstruction and the existing x-rays. Could the films in the file have been switched? Could another child's teeth have been filled to pass for Emma's? And then there was the DNA. The hair they pulled from the shallow grave had been identical to the sample she had procured from Emma's hairbrush herself. Was there any way the samples could have been switched in the lab or somehow contaminated?
Everything boiled down to one simple question. With the preponderance of easily verifiable physical evidence, had anyone formally evaluated the body itself?
She turned left at the top of the landing and started down the hallway. Her transferred weight made the floorboards creak, startling the hidden cicadas. Their song reverberated from the walls, creating the impression that it came from all around her at once. She passed Emma's bedroom on the left and switched on the light. It was exactly as her daughter had left it. Dirty clothes on the floor at the foot of a rumpled bed. Muddy shoes in the corner beside a short table still covered with crayon drawings on butcher paper and a film of dust. A rainbow array of teddy bears lining the tops of her dresser and bookcase. But not a single cicada clinging to the window or swirling around the overhead fixture.
Vanessa crossed the hall and checked the bathroom. Emma's hairbrush, toothbrush, and half-squeezed tube of toothpaste were still on the counter next to the sink, her smudged fingerprints on the corner of the medicine cabinet mirror. She saw hazy shapes through the opaque glass of the shower stall at the rear: bottles of shampoo and conditioner stacked on the edge of the tub. Used towels hanging on the rack. It still smelled like Emma's soap.
The noise definitely originated from farther down the hall.
Her bedroom---the master she had once shared with her husband---was to the left. Directly ahead, a small linen cabinet barely large enough to hold some towels and cleaning supplies. To the right was a bedroom slightly smaller than Emma's that they had converted into Warren's home office. The sound was coming from in there, on the other side of the door that was always kept closed. She hadn't been able to bring herself to go in there since his death. She knew that once she did, she would have to begin boxing up and clearing out his belongings, which would ultimately lead to erasing his existence from a house that would no longer feel like her home.
She took a deep breath and opened the door. The office still looked like he had just stepped out to refill his mug of coffee or use the bathroom, as though at any moment he might slip past her through the doorway and plop down on his worn leather chair. From time to time, she opened the door long enough to allow the air to circulate and imagined him sitting there at his desk, combing through his records on the computer in anticipation of the coming day's appointments, researching test results, and following up on the financial end of his practice. Billing was contracted out to an agency, but the bottom line was that he and his partner were responsible for keeping their office in the black. It was a small practice in an even smaller town, which meant that maintaining any kind of profit margin required constant oversight. Warren could have easily made twice as much over in Dallas; however, it had been important for her to stay in Jefferson, where she had been raised and where she wished to raise her child, and so it had been important to him, as well. Besides, he liked the idea of being a small-town physician. Half of the town relied upon him. It made him feel necessary, gave him a greater sense of worth. And like old Dr. Patterson, from whom Warren had purchased the practice upon his retirement, he got a kick out of making the occasional house call to the outer fringes of the city limits, just like real doctors used to do back in the day. When it had been a noble service profession, and not an assembly-line, treat'em-and-street'em job.
She flipped on the lights.
The cicadas were crawling all over the keyboard and the computer monitor on the antique maple desk. Their fat bellies filled and deflated as they sang.
For the first time in two years, she crossed the threshold. It smelled of dust, but there was still the faintest hint of Warren's aftershave and the hazelnut coffee he loved so much. She fel
t as though she were stepping into the past, into a better time when the future was only a dream.
She nudged his chair aside and watched the black and gold insects scurry over the keyboard and the monitor, their eyes like twin globules of blood. Those on the screen took flight and buzzed around her head. She waved them away as those on the keyboard continued to sing.
Several cicadas alighted on the mouse. Warren must have only put the computer into sleep mode, for even the slight application of their weight brought the monitor to life, bright even through the skein of dust.
The screen displayed a page from a website called RapiDx, a site for physicians that featured tools to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of skeletal and physiological maladies using primarily radiographs and lab values from blood draws.
This was the last page Warren had ever viewed, the last diagnosis to occupy his mind.
The page showed x-rays of knees that appeared swollen and deformed, the cortices of the distal femora bowed outward to accommodate patchy black lucencies that lent an almost moth-eaten appearance.
Osteosarcoma.
* * *
Trey knew it was a fool's proposition. There was just something about the way Vanessa had asked, about the aura of what could have passed for serenity exuding from her, that gave him pause. Between the dental records and the DNA match of the hair samples, there was more than enough concrete evidence to guarantee the proper identification had been made, but the more he contemplated it, the less convinced he became.
He sat at his desk with the forwarded dental files open on the screen in front of him. The monitor showed the two sets of x-rays, side-by-side. On the left, the broken and reassembled teeth. On the right, the film from Emma's last visit to the dentist prior to her abduction. The fillings, the unfilled caries...they matched up perfectly. So perfectly that none of them had noticed the obvious. All of the teeth had been broken at the roots. Most of them were chipped or cracked in some fashion. All of them, in fact, with the exception of the three with metal fillings and the two with existing cavities. Factoring out the sharp breaks along the root-line, they were otherwise intact. The exact teeth they had needed to determine the identity...and they were so well preserved they might as well have been bagged and tagged before they were buried.
Brood XIX Page 4
