“And in this case, quite impossible.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. For the first time I realized I was standing on some kind of fibrous ledge, and if I peered straight down, I saw that the cave went much deeper and began to contract into a circle of bright light. There was a lot of fluttering activity down there, but the light was almost blinding. I preferred the softly filtered light through the walls higher up.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You said you could fix the baby.”
“‘Fix.’ ‘Repair.’ These are just words, really. Let’s not get hung up on them. What matters is your baby will be perfectly healthy and well.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“It’s just not something you can patch up with a bit of string and sticky tape. No, no, no, we have to do this properly. Go right back to the beginning of things. Go deep. That’s the proper way to do things. No half measures around here!”
“You mean going right inside the DNA?” I said, still not sure I was following her but wanting to sound knowledgeable, maybe even impress her.
“DNA—aren’t you the clever one! Yes, good, you’re on the right track. And we’ll go deeper back still. That’s where it will make the most amazing difference.”
“So you can make him better,” I said, relieved.
“Of course we can. Be careful, though.” Her voice was softer, confiding. “There might be some people who try to get in our way.”
I shook my head. “Who would do that?”
“You don’t even usually see them, but you know they’re there.”
Immediately I thought of my nightmare somebody, darkly standing at the foot of my bed, and how just a few nights ago in my dream, the angels had come and burned him away like mist.
When I woke up, it was morning and I felt really happy. And then, waking up a bit more, I realized it was just a dream and no angels were going to fix the baby.
In the afternoon Vanessa brought a big plastic bag with some hunks of an old wasps’ nest in it. She showed them to us on the kitchen table. Nicole got in there right away, touching everything. I held back. Looking at it made me feel like washing my hands.
“Is this supposed to make me less scared of wasps?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I just borrowed it from the lab. I thought you guys might be interested.”
Inside were rows and rows of empty little hexagonal cells.
“It’s like honeycomb!” Nicole said.
“Right,” said Vanessa. “And it all starts with the queen wasp. She begins the nest. Sometimes it’s underground, sometimes it’s in a tree, or hanging from a branch, or under the eaves like yours.”
“How does she make it?” Nicole wanted to know.
“It starts with just a little bit of wood fiber and saliva that the queen spits up, and she makes a little stalk from the roof, then a sort of umbrella, and on the underside, a few little paper rooms like these ones here. The queen lays one egg in each cell.”
“And it hatches into a baby wasp,” Nicole said.
“Well, yes, it hatches, but it’s not a wasp right away.”
She was just like a teacher, the slow calm way she talked. It irritated me, but what she was saying was actually interesting. “The egg hatches into something called a larva.”
Nicole narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “What’s that?”
“It’s sort of white and wormy, and it doesn’t look like much. It’s just got a mouth and black dots for eyes, and all it does is eat and eat.”
“What does it eat?” Nicole wanted to know.
“I’m glad you asked,” she said, and she really did look glad. “Usually dead insects. The queen might go and chomp the head off a bumblebee and bring back the decapitated body. Wasps can kill insects much bigger than themselves.”
“We saw one with that crazy big spider, remember?” I said to Vanessa.
“Whoa!” said Nicole, impressed.
“So the larva grows and grows and then seals itself inside the cell with silk. It doesn’t eat anymore. And it’s not called a larva anymore.”
“It’s a pupa,” I said, remembering biology class. I wanted to show Nicole that Vanessa wasn’t the only one who knew interesting things.
“Yep,” she said. “And even though the pupa isn’t eating anymore, it’s changing inside. It’s transforming. And then when it’s all done, it cracks the seal of its cell! And it crawls out! A full-grown worker wasp!”
She did that last part really well, acting out a giant wasp muscling its way into the open, pretending her hands were a pair of hungry mandibles.
“Cool!” said Nicole, looking at all the cells in the nest. “There must be so many of those guys!”
“Except they’re all girls,” Vanessa said.
Nicole looked delighted. “Really?”
“Yep, every one. And then they start building the nest bigger, and feeding the new larvae.”
“More dead bugs,” Nicole said.
“Yes. Although, once they’re adults, the wasps eat only nectar. And they pollinate plants when they do it. It’s not just bees that do that. Wasps are important too. Our planet needs them.”
“So what does the queen do now?” I asked. “Now that everyone’s working for her.”
“The queen just lays more eggs. That’s it.”
Nicole asked, “Do they all become queens?”
Vanessa shook her head. “These ones are all sterile.”
“What’s that mean?”
“They can’t make baby wasps. But at the end of the summer, when the nest is all finished, the queen lays her last eggs. She makes some males and females who aren’t sterile. And these females become new queens and start their own nests next year.”
Finally I touched a hunk of the nest. It had a rustly dry feeling. “It’s ugly.”
Vanessa shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s sort of beautiful. Everything makes nests. Birds for their eggs. Squirrels make dreys to sleep in through the winter, bears make dens, rabbits burrows.”
“We don’t make nests,” Nicole said, laughing.
“Sure we do. Our houses are just big nests, really. A place where you can sleep and be safe—and grow.”
He came right to the door.
I was all alone in the house. Mom and Dad had taken the baby to the specialist. And Vanessa had left early, to drop Nicole off at a friend’s house a couple of blocks away. I was supposed to pick her up in two hours.
I was reading in my room when I heard the handbell that seemed so out of place on a city street. I tried to get back to my book. It was one I loved, that I sometimes read when I wanted something fun to escape into, but I couldn’t concentrate. I just heard the faint sound of the knife guy’s van getting closer, and each peal of the bell growing louder.
My window faced the street, but I wouldn’t get up to look. I just lay on my bed, the book a jumble of unreadable words. Another peal, and I knew the van was right outside my house. I waited for the motor sounds to fade, but when the bell next rang, it hadn’t moved. The van’s motor idled. I waited. Maybe someone across the street was getting him to do something. I felt like there was a shadow in my room, getting thicker.
When the knock came, my whole body jerked. It was not a polite knock. We had an old-fashioned metal knocker, and it slammed against the plate three, four, five times.
I lay very still. I took a jerky breath into my stomach and tried to hold it, one, two, three, four, but I couldn’t. I needed more air.
Slam! Slam!
Nightmare fear jolted through me. I wished the floor would slide open and my bed would go down and the panel would seal me in and keep me safe.
I gasped air and slid off my bed. I commando crawled to the window and pulled myself up to kneeling. I poked my head above the sill. I saw the houses opposite, a letter carrier going from door to door. When I lifted my head, I saw the street, and then the van at our curb. A little higher, and I saw our lawn and the path leading to the front door. There was no one inside the cab of the van
.
The knife guy was definitely at my doorstep, hammering away.
Our next-door neighbor, Mikhael, was mowing his lawn, but he was wearing headphones and didn’t even seem to notice the knife guy. A few cars passed by on the road.
Slam! Slam! Slam!
The noise made red electricity in my head. Paralyzed, I stared through the window, and finally I saw the knife guy walking back toward his van. Eyes just peeping above the windowsill, I followed him. Halfway down the path he suddenly turned and looked straight up at me. Right at me in my bedroom, like he’d known I was there all along.
With one of his misshapen hands he pointed at his van. With his other hand he lifted a knife and turned it to and fro so the light caught the blade. It wasn’t like a normal kitchen knife. It was bigger and had a weird curve to it. He shrugged as if asking a question.
Desperately I looked over at my neighbor. He was still pushing his mower, facing our house now. He must have seen the knife guy by now! Why wasn’t he calling the police? Maybe he’d decided it was just best to ignore a crazy old guy with a big knife.
The knife guy started to walk back toward my house, and I lost sight of him as he stepped onto our porch. I ducked down against the radiator, its metal cool against my cheek. My heart pounded so fast, I worried I might pass out. If he knocked again, I would run out the back and jump the fence into the next street.
But a few seconds later I heard the van motor deepen, and when the bell pealed again, it was farther away. Soon I couldn’t hear it anymore.
I went downstairs, my knees watery. Warily I looked through the tall skinny window beside our front door. Lying on the porch was the big, strangely curved knife.
“It’s very odd,” Dad said, looking at the knife. I’d brought it inside and put it in an old shoe box. Considering its size, it was surprisingly light. The handle had a good grip and felt . . . right in my hand. I didn’t need to touch the blade to know how sharp it was.
“Why would he just leave it like that?” I asked.
“Maybe he left it as a sample,” Dad said. “To show us how good his workmanship is. I don’t know. He’s from a different time. . . .”
“Do you think we should call the police?” Mom asked.
We were in the kitchen. Nicole was watching TV. The baby had fallen asleep on the ride home from the specialist and was in his car seat in the living room.
Dad grimaced and let out a breath. “He’s just a strange old guy—”
“He wouldn’t stop knocking!” I said.
“He was probably just hoping we had some more business for him. He can’t be making much money. I was chatting with the Howlands—you know, at number twenty-seven—and I mentioned him, and they looked at me like I was crazy. Said they’d never even seen the guy. I feel like he’s been on the street practically every week this summer.”
“Well, he really freaked me out,” I said.
Mom put her warm hand on the back of my neck. “That must have been scary.”
“It was just the way he kept knocking and knocking.”
“I’m going to put this somewhere safe,” Dad said. “It’s really sharp. Just leave it alone, all right, Steve? Next time I see him, I’ll give it back and ask him not to knock on our door again.” He looked at me with a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure he’s harmless, but you were right not to open the door.”
I didn’t know how to explain it to my parents, but the knife guy felt familiar. He felt like a nightmare. Unexpectedly I thought of what my dream angel had said, about how some people might try to stop them from making the baby well.
And I thought, What if he comes back for the knife?
The bright walls. The thrum of music. The shimmer of wings, and the angel coming to greet me right away.
“Hello, hello,” she said cheerfully. “I’m awfully glad to see you again.”
She made it sound like I had a choice. “I just come straight here,” I told her.
I liked how she touched my face when she talked to me, and I could see her a bit more clearly now. The big eyes really were enormous, without pupils or irises. They were just pure darkness. And there seemed to be, in the middle of her forehead, a smaller dark dot—maybe it was a third eye, I wasn’t sure. On the top of her head were two particularly thick whiskers, bendy filaments of light, and it was one of these she touched to my face when she spoke. Like a kind of bridge that allowed us to communicate.
“Well, there’s always a choice,” she said. “Always a choice. How are things?”
“Okay.”
“‘Okay’ is a terribly vague word. You can do better than that, a smart boy like you. How is your family, your sister? How is the baby?”
“Still sick, but they think an operation might help. They saw a specialist. He needs an operation on his heart.”
“I see.”
Some part of me was very aware I was dreaming, so I was bolder than normal. “When are you going to make the baby better?”
“My dear boy, we’re working on it right now. Around the clock. No lazybones here!”
“Really? How?”
“As we speak, we’re tending to him and nourishing him and letting him grow. He’s going to be so healthy. He’s still very little, but oh, I can already tell he’s going to be a real beauty!”
I smiled and thought of his little dinosaur sounds. “He’s kind of cute sometimes already.”
“Well, just wait until you see him properly. Wait till he’s in the crib.”
I didn’t understand. “He’s already in the crib.”
“Not your new baby.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘new baby’?”
For a moment it seemed all the musical thrumming in the cave stopped, the silvery wings stilled.
“We’ve already gone through this,” she said. “That’s how we’re fixing him. We’re replacing him altogether.”
Replacing. Inside the lighted cave it was still silent, as if every angelic presence were waiting for my reply.
“But I didn’t . . . that’s not what I thought you . . .” I couldn’t finish my sentence.
“Oh, Steven. Steven, don’t worry. I’m sorry if I didn’t explain it properly. It’s completely my fault. Forgive me. It will all be seamless. One day—and it really won’t be so very long; I know it seems to take forever when you’re anxious about something—you’ll wake up, and the proper baby will be there, that’s all.”
“But . . . where will ours go?”
“The new one will be yours.”
I was shaking my head. “But the . . . the old one?”
Her head tilted. “I’m afraid I don’t understand your question.”
“This one, here, right now. He won’t be here anymore?”
“What would be the point of that? You’ll call him the same name, of course. He’ll look identical. No one will know except us.”
“But this new baby, where does he come from?”
“Well, we’re growing him right now, aren’t we? Right here in our nest, outside your house.”
I WOKE WITH MY HEART RACING. THE INSIDE of my mouth tasted bad. For a second I thought I might throw up. Sweat beaded my face and neck. I sucked air through my breathing hole, tried to inhale like Dr. Brown had taught me last year, my stomach a big balloon that I filled, counting to four as I slowly exhaled.
I was still sickeningly hot, so I threw off my blankets, and was relieved to see it was morning—just past dawn. I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep—didn’t even want to—so I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and went outside to the backyard. It was early enough to be cool still, though you could feel the heat already clenched up in the earth and air, just waiting to unfurl.
I walked along the side of the house and peered up at the nest. In the low light of dawn, it looked like a giant piece of dead gray fruit. It was definitely bigger than before.
It could easily hold a baby.
If the baby were all curled up tight, like in those sonogram pictures of a mother’
s womb.
And then my heart started to race again, because I was worried I was going crazy.
A baby growing in a wasps’ nest.
That whole rest of the morning, I felt like I was sleepwalking. Vanessa made us sandwiches for lunch, and Nicole wanted to eat outside, so we took our plates to the table. I ate as quickly as possible, before the wasps could come and start bothering us, but Nicole’s ketchup brought them fast enough. Nicole still wanted ketchup with everything. A grilled cheese sandwich, fish sticks, carrot sticks. And the wasps went crazy for that big red blob on her plate. The yellow jackets kept diving in, and then some of the pale ones showed up and chased the yellow jackets off. Two landed right on Nicole’s plate. She didn’t seem bothered.
But suddenly they made me furious. I shooed them off. They swirled around. One veered away, but the other landed back on the table. I grabbed my empty tumbler and lifted it high so I could smash the wasp into goo.
“Wait!” said Vanessa, and she took the tumbler from my hand, inverted it, and trapped the wasp underneath.
“What’s that supposed to do?” I demanded angrily. “It’ll just come back when you let it go.”
Inside the tumbler the wasp angrily bashed itself against the sides.
“I’m not letting it go,” she said. “I want to show it to my prof. Maybe she knows what kind it is.”
Vanessa found an old margarine tub from our recycling bin, stabbed some holes into the lid with a steak knife, and skillfully transferred the wasp into it. She sealed the lid tight.
“There we go,” she said.
I didn’t want to dream about them again. I worried it meant I was going crazy. But that very night I ended up in the cave anyway.
Not as much light was coming through the walls now—they looked thicker, more fibrous. When I peered down from my ledge, I saw that the cave tapered inward, and the circle of light at the center was smaller than last time.
I didn’t want to be here. I willed myself to wake up. I told myself it was a dream and I was bored of it and wanted out. But I went nowhere. I turned. Behind me in the tough papery wall was a tunnel, big enough to crawl through, but before I could even bend to peer into it properly, I felt a soft filament caress the back of my head. Despite myself, my body relaxed. A big breath seeped into my lungs. My shoulders dropped. I turned to face the queen.