The Nest

by Kenneth Oppel

  “She hasn’t!” I said. “Don’t be mad at her.”

  I didn’t want to talk anymore, because I saw the fear in their eyes, and that made me afraid. Someone told me once that if you worried you were crazy, it meant you couldn’t be crazy. Because crazy people apparently had no idea they were crazy; they thought it was normal, walking around naked and yodeling. As I’d told my dreams aloud, I knew how insane they sounded—but I also remembered everything from those dreams, and they seemed so real.

  Dad took a breath and tried to sound casual. “Maybe you should talk about this with Dr. Brown.”

  “You think I’m crazy again,” I said, and this time I was crying.

  Mom squeezed me hard. “You were never crazy. You were anxious, like a lot of people, like a lot of kids, and you’re also imaginative and sensitive. And wonderful.” She kissed the top of my head. “So wonderful.”

  I felt tired suddenly, in her arms. “I’ll go talk to Dr. Brown,” I sighed. “But I want you guys to get rid of the nest.”

  DR. BROWN HAD ALWAYS LOOKED A little unstable to me. It was his eyebrows. They were gray and bushy and got pointy at the ends and angled sharply upward. I wondered if he knew. You’d think that if your job involved talking to crazy people, you’d make a special effort not to look crazy yourself. Sometimes his breath smelled bad, like old coffee and maybe cigarettes. I guess if you talked all day, your mouth got kind of dry and nasty. His voice was soothing, though, and he had a friendly smile.

  “So, it’s been a while since we talked,” he said. “I think almost a year. And we were talking about some challenges you were having, and some strategies for coping with them.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a very thin file folder on his desk, closed. He must have checked it earlier. I remembered that he never took notes while we talked. I suppose he did that later, alone in his office, going “Hoo-wee!” and “Cray-zee!” and shaking his head.

  “Did you find any of those strategies useful?” he asked me.

  I told him that I’d tried to make my bedtime lists a bit shorter, and I wasn’t washing my hands quite as much. Which wasn’t entirely true. But it was summer, so it was harder for anyone to tell. In the winter, when it was awfully dry and cold, my hands got all chapped and red, especially around the knuckles. They looked really sore, and sometimes the skin would crack and people would comment on it, like I had some kind of skin disease. Right now they looked okay. I told him I’d been practicing deep breathing.

  “Great! And how was your year at school?”

  On the drive in to school, I used to silently name the same landmarks so I wouldn’t have a bad day. I had a relaxation tape I liked to listen to in the car. At school I drank only from a certain water fountain, and I washed my hands between every class. I also had hand sanitizer with me, just in case. Pretty much every day I worried I might feel sick and throw up in the middle of the hallway in front of everyone, and then no one would be my friend anymore.

  I told Dr. Brown the year had gone okay and I’d gotten better at cutting down some of my rituals, and worrying less about throwing up.

  “Okay. Good. Your father told me some of the things that have been happening at home. It sounds pretty challenging. How do you feel about things?”

  So we talked a bit about the baby and all the visits to the hospital and the doctors and how the house was sad.

  “And how about outside home. What’re you doing this summer?”

  “Not much. Just hanging around.”

  “You’re seeing your friends?”

  “They’re mostly away.” I’d seen Brendan a few times, but we didn’t really have much in common. He was always so happy and energetic that he made me feel lousy about myself. I was okay being alone. Anyway, I didn’t know how to talk about the baby with anyone. Except the queen, I thought suddenly.

  “And you’ve been having bad dreams, your dad said.”

  “Does he think I’m crazy?”

  “No. They’re worried about how hard this whole thing has been on you. You used to have a lot of nightmares, I recall.”

  I nodded.

  “And there was also some sleepwalking, I think.”

  “Just a few times.”

  “There was one nightmare in particular. Do you remember it?”

  Of course I remembered it. “There’s something standing at the foot of the bed, just watching me. And sometimes they pull the covers off me.”

  “Okay. So tell me about these latest nightmares.”

  I let out a big breath and told him what I’d told Mom and Dad. How they hadn’t felt like normal dreams at all.

  “They certainly are very interesting,” he said. “The wasp, does she have a name?”

  “Is that important?”

  “No, it’s just that you keep saying ‘she’ or ‘the queen,’ so I was wondering if she had a name.”

  “I never asked. She never told me.”

  “How many conversations have you had?”

  “Four.”

  “I remember us talking, last time, about how you had an imaginary friend when you were younger.”

  “Henry.”

  “Henry, that’s it. And you talked to Henry until . . . grade five, wasn’t it?”

  “Not very much by then, only sometimes.” I remembered what Dr. Brown had told me a year before, and I repeated it now. “It was really just a way of talking to myself. You know, helping me think things through.”

  “But when you stopped talking to him, you felt very lonely, you said.”

  It wasn’t normal to have an imaginary friend in grade five—that’s what Sanjay had told me, and he’d told James, and then it seemed pretty much everyone in my class knew. And so I’d had to stop talking to Henry.

  I felt an unexpected tug inside my chest. “Yes.”

  “And now? Do you still miss him?”

  “Not really,” I lied. It wasn’t exactly a lie. It wasn’t so much Henry I missed; it was having someone like him, only real, to talk to. The perfect listener, the person who could help me sort things out.

  “I remember,” the doctor said, “when we last spoke, you had a very interesting expression for how you felt sometimes. I wrote it down because I thought it was so expressive. ‘All in pieces.’ Do you remember that?”

  I hadn’t—not until he’d said it. But now it came back, the feeling it described. Like I had a hundred shattered thoughts in my head, a hundred glittering bits of stained-glass window, and my eyes just kept dancing from one piece to the next without understanding what they meant or where they were supposed to go.

  “Have you been feeling that way again?” Dr. Brown asked.

  “A bit, I guess. Not exactly the same.”

  “Does the wasp, the queen, ever talk to you when you’re awake?”

  “No! Only when I’m asleep.”

  “Your father said you tried to knock down the nest. He was worried you might have fallen, or gotten stung.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That dream you had, where the queen said they were replacing the baby . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, which I knew meant he wanted me to talk. What I said would be important. But I didn’t say anything. I was afraid that whatever I said would be wrong.

  “It was a dream,” I said finally.

  “It was enough to get you up on that ladder.”

  “I’m really afraid of wasps,” I said.

  “But you decided to get very close to the nest.”

  “I just wanted . . . I wanted things to stop. I was angry at Mom and Dad for not doing anything or getting me my shots.” This seemed normal. This seemed reasonable.

  Dr. Brown looked at me pleasantly, waiting to see if I had anything more to add.

  “The dreams just seemed . . .” I trailed off.

  He smiled. “Well, there are many different theories about dreams. The important thing to remember is it’s just a dream. They can feel like very powerful experiences, but they aren’t true exp
eriences, and they have no real power over you. It’s sort of like that thing we talked about last time, do you remember? A feeling is not a fact. What happens in a dream stays inside the dream.”

  “Okay,” I said. And then I told him something I’d kept back from my parents. “Except the queen told me something that came true.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That Vanessa had killed one of the wasps. I didn’t know that. But the next day she told me about it.”

  Dr. Brown rocked his head from side to side. “Well, you know Vanessa is a biology student. You know she wanted to study the bug. That’s what happens to bugs so we can study them.”

  “She said the wasp was unusual. That maybe it wasn’t a wasp at all.”

  He smiled. “I was in the museum with my kids last weekend, and there was a sign. I think it said there were five to fifty million species on the planet, and only one million have been discovered. Something like that. Amazing stuff.”

  “I guess so,” I said, and thought about whether I should say the next bit. “When I was trying to knock down the nest, a whole bunch of wasps swarmed over me, but they didn’t sting. None of them.”

  “Lucky.”

  “It was like they were just warning me. And as soon as I started going down the ladder, they flew off.”

  “I’m not a wasp expert. I know they’re very territorial. Maybe when you were far enough away from the nest, they stopped seeing you as a threat.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and let out a big breath. I actually felt better. “I don’t want to dream about them anymore.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure you can’t control that. Likely you’ll have some more dreams about them, the nest, and the baby. There’s a lot going on in your life right now, but with time the dreams will fade. Are you able to wake yourself up from them?”

  I shook my head. “I tried once and it kept going.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “By the way, what’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  He chuckled. “The baby. Your new brother. You’ve never said his name.”

  “Oh. Right. Theodore. Theo, we call him.”

  “Good name. Would you like to talk again in a couple of weeks?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Three days went by without me dreaming about them, and I felt hopeful. Maybe they were gone for good.

  On Monday, Dad went into work and Mom went to the hospital by herself to talk to the specialist about the upcoming surgery. Vanessa was over for the afternoon, watching Nicole and the baby. We were in the living room, and she’d just given the baby his bottle.

  “Do you want to hold him?” Vanessa asked after she’d burped him.

  “Okay,” I said nervously. I hadn’t held the baby much. I was ashamed to admit it, but I was worried I’d get contaminated somehow, that what was wrong with him would become wrong with me. It didn’t make any sense; I knew that. But I still felt it. Reluctantly I put my arms out, and Vanessa gave him to me.

  Nicole was the one who was always all over the baby. She loved the baby. To her the baby just meant this wonderful happy new thing in her life. She said once, not long after the baby had come home, “Just let me bask in his glory!”

  It always made me feel mean when I watched Nicole with the baby. Because when I looked at him, I saw all the things that were supposed to be wrong with him; and I saw Mom looking tired and worried; and I saw Dad staring out the window, sometimes just into the distance, sometimes at our driveway, where the car was.

  Nicole ran off to play, and Vanessa said: “Your mother was telling me about the operation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Poor little bambino,” said Vanessa. “He’ll be just fine.”

  “He’s all busted-up inside,” I said.

  “Busted-up,” said Vanessa, considering.

  “Yeah. It’s not just his heart. There’s a ton wrong with him. He could die.”

  “But no one knows for sure.”

  “Not now, but one day . . .”

  Vanessa said, “One day things could go wrong with any of us.”

  “I guess.”

  “Lots of people have broken bits,” she said. “I’ve got some inside me.”

  I looked up at her. “What?”

  “It’s called polycystic kidneys. My mom has it too. I found out when I was in high school. You start getting all these fluid-filled cysts on your kidneys.”

  “Is it bad?” I asked.

  “It’s slow, but it gets a little worse every year. Sooner or later my kidneys will probably stop working.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “I’ll need a kidney transplant.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Vanessa grinned and playfully pushed my shoulder. “Don’t look so terrified, Steven. It’s not for a long time. Anyway, my sister says she’ll donate one of hers, which is pretty great.”

  “And you’ll be fine then.” I felt like Nicole when I said it, a little kid wanting a quick and reassuring answer.

  “For a while. Transplanted kidneys don’t last forever. But who knows what’ll happen. Anyway, ‘busted-up.’ What’s that mean? Lots of people I know have something or other wrong with them. A friend of my uncle’s just got told he has MS. He’s only twenty-seven. No one knows what’s going to happen down the road. All I’m saying is, sooner or later we’re all busted-up in some way.”

  The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn’t like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn’t know why. My parents thought I was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn’t, but you don’t get sent to a therapist if you’re normal.

  Sometimes we really aren’t supposed to be the way we are. It’s not good for us. And people don’t like it. You’ve got to change. You’ve got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren’t.

  I held the baby, and he was small but not as light as the last time I’d held him. Because he was sickly, I always imagined I’d barely feel his weight, that he would float up and away. But in my arms he was surprisingly solid. I thought about what was inside, all the wet weird things we have in our bodies that make us work. And then deeper still, all the little squirmy cells and inside them the threads of DNA that tell everything what to do. And with the baby I pictured them like strings of Christmas tree lights, only some bulbs were missing, and others were winking, and some had blinked out for good.

  And I didn’t know what was going to happen or what it all meant, or what I was supposed to do about it.

  “No one’s perfect,” Vanessa said, “that’s all I’m saying. Your brother seems to have a lot wrong with him right now. But it might not always seem that way.”

  I knew I shouldn’t ask, but I couldn’t help it.

  “That wasp you took,” I said, “did you learn anything else about it?”

  Vanessa looked uncomfortable. “Hey, you know, I’m sorry if I got you all freaked out about the wasps. Your dad wasn’t too happy about it. He said you tried to knock down the nest.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.” I hoped Dad hadn’t said anything mean to her.

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” she said.

  “I know!”

  “Anyway, he asked me not to talk about it anymore.”

  “Oh.” For a minute I said nothing, but then I felt angry. “I won’t tell him anything. I’m just curious what it was.”

  “You promise you won’t tell him?”

  “Promise.”

  “You’re not going to do anything else stupid with the nest?”

  “No! So, what are they?”

  “I showed it to my prof, and she agreed she hadn’t seen one like it. She pinned it and took some pictures, but when she started to dissect it, there, uh, wasn’t much
of anything inside.”

  I swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “It just kind of collapsed, like an empty shell.”

  Whenever I got a panic attack, it almost always started the same way. There was a hot flush in the nape of my neck, and it would travel down my back and then out my arms, and sometimes my legs, like I’d been struck by lightning. And then came the feeling that I was going crazy, that I’d end up curled into a little ball and never, ever be right again.

  “Probably I just put too much ethyl acetate in the killing jar,” Vanessa was saying. “I might’ve dissolved it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to take a big breath into my abdomen.

  The wasps weren’t normal. They weren’t filled with the normal stuff.

  After dinner that night the baby wasn’t interested in his bottle, and his little body seemed really floppy.

  “Maybe it’s the heat,” Dad said. It was blistering outside, and even with the air-conditioning on, it wasn’t much better inside.

  “He’s not right,” Mom said, and she seemed really worried. Dad drove them to Emergency.

  Nicole and I watched television, and I kept letting Nicole have more and more cookies until Dad came back.

  “They’re keeping him overnight,” he said. “Mom’s staying.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “They think it might just be a virus.”

  “Like a cold,” Nicole said, still watching television.

  Dad ruffled her hair. “Right.”

  After Nicole was in bed, I asked Dad, “Is it serious?”

  “They’re not worried about the virus too much. It’s just . . . he needs to be strong for the heart surgery, and he needs it soon. But they don’t want to risk anything until he’s as healthy as he can be. We just have to hope for the best.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He hugged me good night, told me to get some sleep, told me he loved me. As I was coming back from the bathroom, I glimpsed him sitting on the edge of his bed in his underwear, taking his socks off. His head was lowered, and I could see the patch where he was losing his hair. He got one sock off and massaged his toes and then seemed to forget about the other sock. And then he wasn’t even massaging his toes anymore. He was just sitting there, not looking at anything at all.