A look of dread descends upon Jeremy. “About what?”
“Tomorrow,” she says. “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Using a wall switch, she turns off the only lamp in the living room, then disappears through the kitchen and down the hallway, leaving Jeremy and me standing alone in the dark.
“What was Grandma thinking sending us here?” Jeremy asks.
While my eyes adjust to the darkness, I slip off my coat and shoes. “I’m sure she’s thinking this keeps us close to home with familiar people. I hate it, too, Jeremy, but when you think about it, where else would we go? We don’t have anyone else.”
“Tommy Wexler’s parents would’ve taken us.”
“Grandma’s never met them. I’ve never met them. With Mr. Donaldson in the hospital too, this was Grandma’s only option.”
Jeremy and I do our best to make up the hideaway into a bed while standing in the dark. After we pull the paper-thin blanket across the mattress, I toss the single pillow to the head end of the hideaway.
“I’m not sharing that,” he says, disgusted at the thought.
The feeling’s mutual.
“No one said you had to.” I fetch one of the sofa cushions Dooley discarded, and I prop it up as a makeshift pillow.
Jeremy and I crawl under the scratchy blanket. The springs of the rickety frame pop beneath our weight. I’ve half a thought this thing’s going to fold back up into the sofa with us inside and Grandma will never find us again. But I know such weird thoughts come only with the night.
The brain doesn’t work correctly in the middle of the night.
Daylight will bring reason. With daylight comes hope. Everything’s always better in the morning, and morning is only a few ticks away.
I lean back onto the hard sofa cushion. It feels nothing like a pillow, but I don’t care. Staring at the ceiling, I listen to the strange noises of a strange house, wondering how I got here and whose fault it is. I close my eyes and my heartbeat falls into the same rhythm as Jeremy’s.
To my surprise, I feel myself slipping into a deep slumber.
CHAPTER TEN
JEREMY WAKES ME as soon as the crest of the sun breaks the horizon. As quietly as we can, we roll out of the creaky old “davenport” and pull on our coats and shoes before the McGoverns ever get out of their beds.
I quietly undo the locks Mrs. McGovern secured the night before, and Jeremy and I sneak back to our house. Our breaths crystallize before us as we trot across the front lawns with our hands stuffed in our coat pockets.
Even through the foggy gray-blue light of morning dusk, we can see the front sidewalk is still covered in spider remains, nauseating proof it wasn’t a dream. On the front porch, I push the house key into the keyhole and release the lock. With a twist of the doorknob and a gentle push, the door swings open revealing an oddly still and quiet home.
Closing the door behind me, I tell Jeremy, “Get dressed and IM Tommy. I’ll get us something to eat. Don’t forget your backpack.”
While Jeremy bolts upstairs, I snatch my own backpack from the family room and enter the kitchen. I need breakfast for Jeremy and I, and I need lunch for just myself. Jeremy will be eating lunch at school. I won’t.
I load my backpack with snacks, which will serve as meals for the day. I drop in two apples, a half dozen snack packs of trail mix, two five-ounce cans of V8 vegetable juice, and a sleeve of mini powdered donuts Grandma reluctantly stores for emergency breakfasts. On one of the cupboard shelves I find our coin jar, and I add one fistful of bus fare to a coat pocket.
After I’ve loaded up my backpack, I head upstairs to change clothes. I stop at the open doorway to Jeremy’s room. He’s already dressed for school, sitting at his desk, typing away on his computer keyboard. That crazy antenna is on the window sill pointed back at the McGovern house again.
“Any luck?” I ask.
“He said he doesn’t have time to talk right now, and he’ll talk to me during lunch today.”
“Tell him I need to talk to the cemetery boy right away.” I turn away, frustrated. It took me nearly a week to get to this point, but now Tommy Wexler’s going to make me wait?
I enter my room and close the door behind me. I dress quickly and practically: jeans and a t-shirt with a hoodie, warm socks, and broken-in canvas shoes.
I put on my coat and step out of my room to the sudden sound of the doorbell. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I can see into Jeremy’s room. He’s just finished returning the antenna to his desk drawer. He peers out at me with a blank look.
“I thought they never came out during the day,” I say quietly.
My brother nods to confirm my thought. “Only when the earth is in the sun’s full shadow, hours from both dusk and dawn.”
“Then who’s at our front door ringing the bell?”
We both step to the top of the stairs and stare down at the front door. From where I stand, I see I’ve erred and left the door unlocked. A pounding fist suddenly bellows through the stillness of the house.
“It can’t be them, right?” I ask Jeremy. “What if the legend is wrong? What if they come whenever they want?”
“Then why haven’t they come during the day ever before?” Jeremy reasons.
“We’ve been at school, moron. Grandma’s been at work or the grocery store or playing dominos at friends’ houses or something. Or she just hasn’t told us.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re safe if we don’t let them in,” Jeremy says.
The doorknob begins to turn.
“What if the legend is wrong about that, too?”
The door swings open and a man’s dopey voice calls from outside. “Hello?”
Dooley.
Jeremy and I sigh in relief. “Up here, Mr. McGovern,” I say, waving my hand.
Dooley steps only one leg into our home, apparently hesitant to enter any further either out of shyness or respect. He stretches his neck to see us standing at the top of the staircase. The top of his bald head reflects the early morning sunlight slicing in from the front porch.
“My mom was worried,” he says, “but I figured you guys would be here.”
“We just came home to get dressed,” I say.
“You could have left a note. Come back home, please. Mom made breakfast. Eggs Benedict, her specialty.”
It actually sounds quite good, though I doubt Mrs. McGovern’s eggs Benedict could taste any better than Grandma’s.
It turns out I was wrong. Ten minutes later, I discover Mrs. McGovern’s eggs Benedict is, in fact, better than Grandma’s, due largely to the amount of butter in the hollandaise sauce, I imagine. Regardless, it is a fact that will die with me. Even by the time my feet touch the sidewalk for the walk to school, I have already convinced myself that Mrs. McGovern’s eggs Benedict was definitely adequate, but certainly no better than Grandma’s.
Whatever it was the previous night Mrs. McGovern wanted to discuss with Jeremy, she decided to let it go until after school, which tortures Jeremy all the more. He runs a half dozen scenarios by me on the walk to school, each of them more ridiculous than the other, until we reach Lexington Avenue.
“We’ll meet here after school?” he asks, squinting against a clear blue October sky.
“Of course. See you after school.”
“Maybe Dooley will take us to see Grandma tonight if she doesn’t get out today?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“You could make him. You can make anybody do anything, you know.”
I don’t know if his words were meant as a compliment or a criticism, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit feeling some satisfaction when hearing it.
“We’ll see,” I say with a smirk.
He turns his back to me and begins the walk up Lexington Avenue toward school, burdened by sleep deprivation and the knowledge that his sole caretaker lies in a hospital miles away, which is why I have no intention of stepping inside Mount Herod South today.
A quarter mile later, I walk past
the high school rather than enter it.
One block further up, I come to a gas station and convenience store. Behind the store is an apartment complex, and on the sidewalk by the parking lot entrance stands a bus stop shelter for MHT, Mount Herod Transit, route 32.
I know the transit system well. It’s my only method of travel when Grandma doesn’t want to brave traffic. There have been plenty of weekends when Jeremy and I have jumped on the bus to kill an afternoon in Old Downtown. I’ve also ridden alone many times, usually to meet Mackayla or Shannon at the mall. Riding the bus and knowing the transit system is second nature to me. It’s also perfectly safe—during the day.
The hospital will require a transfer, but I can get it done with one 18-and-under fare of 75-cents as long as I let the bus driver know right away.
The bus arrives at the shelter hourly on the forty-eights, and after it pulls up, I must wait for nearly a dozen people, mostly students, to exit before I can board with the other four people who’d been waiting in the shelter with me.
Once inside, I show the driver my student ID and drop three quarters in the fare box. “I need a transfer to route 30.”
“The stop on Chapel and 76th?”
“Yes, that’ll be good.”
The white-haired driver tears a transfer ticket at the nine o’clock line. “Don’t lose this. If you miss the transfer, you’ll have to pay another fare.”
I snatch the ticket. “Thanks.”
I find a window seat three rows behind the driver and drop my backpack in the adjacent seat to discourage creepers from sitting next to me. With stops, it’s a fifteen-minute ride to the transfer.
We drive down Chapel Street for the last five minutes of the ride. The bus moans and squeaks and puffs, revs and bounces, and makes a stop every other block so people can board and exit.
When I see the 76th Street stop ahead with no one waiting, I pull the yellow stop cord even though the driver already knows I need to make the transfer. He could’ve forgotten, or maybe he’s in the mood to make sure I’m paying attention and teach me a lesson. I tend to think the worst of people sometimes, and I wish I didn’t. It’s not because Grandma raised me this way. Its sole source is the bitterness of abandonment and resentment that fizzes in my heart. It’s my parents’ fault, whoever they are.
“Your transfer will be along in five minutes,” he says to my back as I descend the steps.
I say, “Thank you” over my shoulder and step onto the curb. I’m the only one who exits.
The door swings shut behind me, the brakes release with a hiss, the engine revs, and the bus pulls away. There is no bus shelter here, but there’s an empty bench next to a planter of red and gold flowers. I sit and wait beneath the bus stop sign while decorative stone rams’ heads on a nearby building stare down at me ominously.
Up the block a bit sits Chesterfield’s, a coffee house and bakery. The smell of muffins and freshly-brewed coffee rides a current of air down Chapel Street as customers ebb and flow through the shop’s doors. I think about the sleeve of mini powdered donuts in my backpack. If it weren’t for Mrs. McGovern’s adequate eggs Benedict, I’d tear open the pack right now.
The morning is cool, but at least the sun shines, and it is bright in my eyes and warm on my face. I squint against the shining concrete landscape, both watching and listening for the route 30 bus.
Classes have started by now. I’m certain I’ve been marked with an unexcused absence. The attendance office will call the house, but no one will answer. Grandma has no voice mail, no answering machine. It’s Friday, so this petty crime will take days to catch up with me, maybe even weeks, so I’m not concerned—at least, not for the moment.
It isn’t long before the approaching route 30 bus shatters the relative quiet of Old Downtown’s morning. I board, hand the driver my transfer ticket, and randomly choose a seat five or six rows from the front, once again reserving the seat next to me with my backpack. I settle in for another ten-minute, stop-and-start ride to the Mount Herod Medical Center.
I arrive at the hospital shortly before eight-thirty.
Enormous and sprawling, MHMC dominates the outskirts of the towering buildings of Mount Herod’s financial district. Attached to it by a skywalk tunnel is its squat 3-story sister, the MHMC Physicians Medical Office Building. It houses family care doctors and some specialists. I know it well because I visit it no less than annually for my cross-country and track physicals. MHMC itself is a sparkling, window-laden beacon of aid calling Mount Herod’s ill and injured to safety. Somewhere behind one of its windows lies Grandma.
The bus drops me at a bus shelter on the perimeter of MHMC’s vast parking lot. From the roof, a helicopter thumps its way skyward and glides into the blue. Squinting into the sky as the helicopter fades away, I swing my backpack over my shoulder and hike to the hospital’s main entrance, where I enter through the automatic sliding doors.
A large, circular information desk hosting three aging red-vested volunteers sits in the sun-drenched atrium. When I approach, a silver-haired man with glasses rolls his chair forward and says to me with a raspy voice, “May I help you?”
“I’m here to see my grandma.”
“Do you know her room number?”
“No.”
“Her name then.”
I give him Grandma’s full name, which he pecks into the computer with his index fingers. After nearly a full minute, he tips his head back to peer through the lower half of his bifocals and reads to me from the computer screen.
“‘Immediate family and clergy only.’”
“I’m her granddaughter.”
“That’s not immediate family,” he barks. “Is your mother or father with you?”
“No. I don’t have a mother or father.” It’s not the most pleasant thing to say aloud, but I’ve grown accustomed to it, and it rolls off my tongue with very little emotion anymore.
The man stares at me stupidly, so I add, “My grandma is my legal guardian. There’s no other family except my brother.”
“Oh, you live with your grandma?” he asks quite loudly, drawing short-lived glances from the other volunteers, who don’t seem to consider it as foreign of a concept as this man does.
One of the other volunteers, a woman, says to the man, “Ed, call the ward and talk to a nurse.” She shifts her attention to me and delivers a reassuring smile. “Give us just a moment, dear.”
Not wishing to linger at the desk, I wander away in a sort of self-conscious circular pattern while taking in the greenery and stonework of the atrium. There used to be a calming, gurgling waterfall in the center of it all, that is until three years ago when public health officials traced a massive outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease to it after it killed six people. Sometimes it seems like no one’s safe in Mount Herod. Not even in a hospital.
From behind, I hear the woman volunteer, who has apparently taken over the needlessly complex situation, say into a telephone, “Yes. Dr. Young admitted her last night from Emergency.”
Emergency. That’s where the ambulance would have landed Grandma and Mr. Donaldson last night while Jeremy and I waited at the police station. I should have been here with her. It makes no sense to have split Jeremy and me off to the station just because we’re minors. Adults never seem to give teens much credit until our magical 18th birthday. At the stroke of midnight we suddenly go from incompetent, untrusted goof-offs to reliable, competent voters. Nobody thinks twice about the absurdity.
“Missy,” calls the man from the information desk rather disrespectfully. “You can go up. Your grandma’s in room 307. Do you know how to get there?”
“Yes,” I say, but it’s a lie. The truth is I’d rather blindly stumble through the hospital than spend even three more seconds of my life at the information desk, especially now that I’ve been called missy.
An elevator ride and five minutes later, I step cautiously into Grandma’s room to the sound of a heart rate monitor. The blinds are open, allowing her room to fill wit
h white sunlight. She’s propped up in bed, and the television is on but muted. An oxygen tube rests on her upper lip and blows into her nostrils. The plastic clip of a heart rate monitor is clasped to the index finger of her right hand.
She turns her head in my direction. “You should be in school, Abigail. There’s nothing—”
“More important than a child’s education,” I say, approaching her bedside. I pull an oversized green vinyl chair up to the bed and sit down. “You’re more important than a child’s education, Grandma.”
“Oh, you hush,” she says sleepily. In the hall, before I entered, a nurse warned me Grandma was still receiving sedatives. It shows in her demeanor and slightly slurred speech. “Where’s your brother? Is he here, too?”
“No, I made sure he got to school.”
Grandma’s glassy eyes twinkle when she smiles. “You’re a better mother than your mother was, Abigail.”
When I wade into the self-pity and bitterness that comes with Jeremy and my abandonment, I never give much thought to Grandma. I know when my mother abandoned us, her children, she also abandoned Grandma, her mother. But I don’t often think too deeply about it.
I suppose part of me thinks Grandma is old enough to deal with the emotional pain. While children are allowed to be crushed by loss, adults must cope with loss as a duty. Of course, in this moment, that logic feels severely flawed. Her daughter disappeared, leaving us all without a warning or an explanation, and the abandonment certainly had to hurt Grandma as much as it hurt me.
With all of Grandma’s defenses and smoke screens suppressed by sedatives, whether she intended to or not, she revealed to me she thinks about it more than I’d known.
None of us have seen my mother in ten years. We’d have feared her abducted or dead if she hadn’t taken two suitcases and a dozen photos with her.
Grandma took us in and raised us amid the confusion and terror of her own daughter’s disappearance, and she did it alone, as a widow. That’s a special kind of courage. That’s why she’s my hero. That’s why I can’t go to school while she lies in a hospital bed, her face and hands scarred and swollen with dozens of spider bites.
Curse of the Black-Eyed Kids (Mount Herod Legends Book 2) Page 10
