He looked at her, and she looked back. Steady. But his gaze broke her down, and she sighed.
“He’s dead,” she said softly.
“Maybe…maybe someone can save him,” Cal said. “Since I can’t.”
This was important to him, she saw that much. Somehow, some some way, Cal wanted to be able to save this guy. So she nodded and bent to help lift the weight of him. Together they put him in the backseat.
She didn’t want to turn around and see a corpse in the backseat of her car. Cal wove through the wreckage, easing the Volvo through to the other side of the road, where he picked up speed. He hit a bump going too fast, and Renton rolled. He hit the back of her seat. He hit the floor.
“Keep going,” Abbie said through a thick throat when it looked as though Cal meant to slow down. “He’s not going to mind. The sooner you get him to the hospital, the sooner you can get him help.”
The sooner you could admit he’s dead, she thought but kept to herself.
The closest hospital was still standing, as was most of the town when they got there. Emergency personnel, all of whom seemed to know Cal by sight, rushed out to meet them. They took Renton away and left Abbie and Cal to wait.
There was paperwork. There always is. The ER was overflowing with refugees from the destruction. Many of them knew Cal too. More than one, mostly the women, gave Abbie the sort of half-curious, half-hostile looks she’d come to expect from other females, especially when there was an attractive man involved.
Still, paperwork aside, they were only there for fifteen minutes before the doctor came out to talk to them. “I’m sorry. He’s gone.”
Abbie tried hard to look appropriately sad. “Oh. That’s too bad.”
“Was he a friend?”
Cal shook his head. “No. We just met up with him over by Pickett…well. Shit. What used to be Pickett…”
The doctor nodded. “It’s bad out there, I hear.”
Cal nodded, solemn. “Yeah. It’s bad.”
“Well. I’m sorry he didn’t make it, but there wasn’t anything we could do. He was gone when you brought him in. Probably stroke, though they’ll do an autopsy to be sure. It’s going to be a long night.” The doctor sighed, rubbed his eyes. “We could use some extra hands around here, if you’re willing, Cal. Your friend too.”
Abbie shook her head. “Oh. I don’t have any medical training…”
The doctor gave her a bleak smile. “You can make coffee, right?”
She hesitated, then nodded with a quick glance at Cal. “Yes. I guess I can.”
Those five words were the reason why she was in the ER when they brought in the screaming woman. There’d been a lot of noise there. Injured people who were still conscious tended to shout out their agony or frustration if they weren’t deemed high priority and had to take a turn in the hard plastic bucket seats while they waited for the attentions of the overrun and overwhelmed staff. A few screams had filtered out from the exam rooms as doctors and PAs reset bones or stitched wounds. But nobody had been wheeled into the emergency room shrieking like a fire bell.
What made it worse was that the EMTs were as overwhelmed as the onsite staff, if not more. Instead of taking her into an exam room, they simply brought her in the wheelchair, pushed it to the side of the admittance desk, locked the wheels and left her to go back out on call. The nurse at the desk tried to get some information from her, but all she did was scream. She had no visible injuries. No blood. Her clothes weren’t even torn.
Maybe it was grief, Abbie thought, watching the nurse try to deal with her. That could make a person scream like that. In that case, she needed the psych ward. The nurse was trying to talk to her, calm her down, but all the woman did was bat at the nurse as her screams rose to an even greater pitch.
Abbie had been heading out to the front to refresh the coffeepots that were emptied seemingly as fast as she could fill them, and to check the supplies of sandwiches a local restaurant had been sending in for the staff. It wasn’t that she minded being a runner. Cal had been working in the back with the wounded. The last time she’d seen him he was covered in blood, and a little spilled coffee and overexposure to tuna salad was far better than that. Still, she needed a break and there didn’t seem to be any way to take one without leaving the hospital completely — and she didn’t want to abandon him. Stupid, she knew that, but she couldn’t just leave without at least telling Cal where she’d gone.
“You! You!”
It took Abbie a couple seconds to realize the screaming woman had not only cut off her fire bell clanging, but that she was talking to Abbie. She turned and caught the nurse’s look of relief, but shrugged. She had nothing to do with it, really. “Me?”
“Yes. You. Come here.”
Abbie settled the glass carafe on the hotplate and pulled out the filter, dumped the grounds and opened another packet of coffee before she answered. “I’m busy.”
The exhausted young mother who’d been there for almost four hours holding her cranky, colicky baby gave her a weary smile. Abbie returned it. She’d offered to walk with the baby when it was screaming, and it was a statement about the woman’s state of mind that she’d let a stranger hold her baby. Now the infant slept, curled tight against her mother. If the wacko over by the desk had woken her, Abbie thought the young mother might’ve been compelled to contemplate murder.
The coffee brewing, she went to the woman at the desk. “Yes?”
The woman lunged forward hard enough to grab hold of her shirt. “You’ve seen it. Haven’t you? I can smell it on you.”
It had been too long since she’d showered, and self-consciously Abbie pulled away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The flowers,” the woman said. “You saw the flowers.”
Abbie tasted the memory of that bitterness again. She swallowed hard, not sure why she lied except that being a liar seemed to have become her nature. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The flowers,” the woman insisted. “I can smell them on you, you must’ve seen them. They’re inside you now.”
The woman opened her fist to reveal a palmful of blue and purple blossoms, the crimson threads of the roots wound around her fingers. They’d stained her fingers with brown juice, and the smell that came up was both exquisite and revolting.
“Ma’am I’m going to need your —” The nurse broke off with a grimace and put a hand on her stomach. “Hmm.”
Abbie felt the way she had in the early days of both her pregnancies. Queasy and starving at the same time. The woman closed her fingers over the flowers, and the smell diminished but didn’t fade entirely.
“They’re inside you now,” the woman repeated. She closed her eyes, her head lolling. Mouth open. A low, growling groan grated from her throat, which convulsed.
“Oh, dammit.” The nurse sounded totally put out. “I’m too tired to deal with this.”
The woman’s head snapped upright. She stared hard at Abbie, who noticed her eyes were the same color blue as those flowers. The veins the same threaded crimson as the roots. A single, clear strand of drool appeared in the corner of her mouth and hung, swinging.
“It’s not over,” the woman said. “There are still more coming.”
TWO
4
If it hadn’t been for the pork-n-beans, everything would’ve been fine.
But no, she’d gone ahead and opened that can, she’d heated it on the stove and she’d been the one to throw it on the floor. Now she had to be the one to get down on her hands and knees and clean up the spattered, tomatoey mess. Who was she kidding? Nothing was fine. The stink of it made her stomach heave, and for a few crazy seconds Marnie thought about opening her mouth and letting the vomit spew out all over the floor along with everything else. What difference would it make? What difference could anything possibly make when everything had turned to shit?
Above her, the floor creaked. Marnie paused with her hands full of cold, congealed beans, her
face tipped to the ceiling. Tony. Was he coming down to check on her? Christ, she hoped not. But no…he was probably just getting up to pee. If she had been in bed, he’d have woken her by turning on the hall light, and she’d have been pissed off.
She was still pissed off.
Everything about him infuriated her even when he was trying to be nice, which he almost always was. “Babe, let me get that,” Tony had said when she flung the saucepan full of beans onto the floor, but she’d turned on him with a snarl, a real snarl coming out of her throat, and he’d backed away, hands up. Gone out the back door into his damned “man cave,” whatever the hell that meant, to putter and tinker with all of his stupid bits of metal and wood.
But at least he’d gone.
He’d stayed out there for a few hours, leaving her to pace and stew and fume, and if he’d thought she’d be in a better mood when he got in, he’d been sorely mistaken. He’d gone to bed, at least there was that, and left her alone. Only when the house was dark and quiet had she finally gone back to the kitchen.
Now she soaked the dishcloth in the pail of hot soapy water and scooped up a double handful of the mess. Getting to her feet was hard enough now without being unable to grab the counter and or the back of a chair and heave herself up, and she struggled for two minutes too long before sinking down, back onto her knees with her hands full of spilled beans and fatty chunks of pork. The glop slipped through her fingers, and the sodden cloth hit the floor with a sloppy, sloshy thud.
“Motherfucker,” she breathed. “Cock-sucker. Motherfucking piece of shit, pus-encrusted douche-nozzle.”
Cursing the mess didn’t make a difference — she was the one who’d spilled it, so she was cursing herself. That never made her feel better. She wanted to curse at Tony. She wanted to push him, slap him, punch him right in the middle of his mooning, concerned face.
And why? Because he’d dared to tell her he didn’t like pork-n-beans, the meal she hadn’t thought twice about when she was in the grocery store pushing her cart with her enormous belly in front of her, the cans on weekly special at four-for-a-dollar. The meal she hadn’t bothered to plan more than ten minutes in advance when she found the cans in the cupboard and opened them, put them in the saucepan and turned the heat on low, then tossed a loaf of bargain bread onto the table with a tub of margarine and a pitcher of homemade Arnold Palmers.
The drink was the only thing that hadn’t made Tony wince, and it was the one thing she was sorry she’d put an effort into. He loved the iced tea and lemonade mixture she’d made for him the first time she’d cooked dinner, back in those golden days when she couldn’t get enough of him and it was finally okay for them to be together. For her to sit down with him at a table in the tiny kitchen of the farmhouse in which she’d grown up, the same place she’d sat with all her boyfriends. The place she’d sat with Cal when they’d first been dating.
Cal had never cared for mixing his tea and lemonade. He said it was too sweet that way. But Marnie had thought it was fancy, something she could show off and impress Tony with, along with her roasted chicken and rosemary potatoes. Her homemade bread.
She’d wooed him with her tits and ass and the secret between her legs, the way she tossed her hair back as she laughed at all his jokes. She’d wooed him because Tony had come into the pharmacy where she worked as a cashier and made her feel pretty and special and important in ways Cal no longer did or maybe never had. She’d wooed Tony until they ended up sneaking to meet each other in the next town at the Sentinel Motel, where Tony had undressed her for the first time with his eyes wide open, looking at her all over. Up and down. Every single bit of her.
He still looked at her that way. That was the problem. He was always. Fucking. Looking.
“Love you, babe,” he said in the morning when he bent over her to kiss her goodbye before he left for work. “Love you, babe,” he said when he pulled her close at night to snuggle against her when all she wanted to do was go the fuck to sleep, as the book said.
Love you, babe.
Love you, babe.
Babe, sweetie, honey. Love, love, love.
Marnie was drowning in his love, Tony’s affection a concrete block attached to her feet by the chains of his desire. No matter how hard she kicked, she couldn’t get free of him, couldn’t get back to the surface, couldn’t find a way to breathe. She was dying.
She had everything she’d told herself she wanted back in those heady days of secrets, when a look from him could turn her inside out. Except now she knew better. Now when she looked back on those days, it was never Tony who was really making her crazy, turning her on, filling her up. It was thinking about what Cal would think if he found out, how it would make him want her more, how it would hurt him the way he’d hurt her. But what had happened instead? Cal had moved on with barely a backward glance, put her from his life with the same steadfast and unwavering commitment he gave to everything else. Hell, he’d even wished her luck and happiness the day he’d driven off in his dusty pickup truck.
Now here she was, her belly big with another man’s child and her hands full of the cold, congealing beans she’d thrown onto the floor because Tony’d said he really preferred the vegetarian kind. She’d have put her face into her hands and wept, except the smell of the beans was enough to make her gag. Actually putting her face into the mess would’ve made her puke for sure, and despite her earlier thoughts, she didn’t really want to throw up. She’d spent too many mornings hunched over the toilet as it was. Instead, Marnie took a few deep breaths and pushed herself to her feet. She rinsed the dish cloth in the sink again and again, then went back to the mess on the floor.
Floor. Sink. Floor, sink, until her back and knees ached and her head spun. Her breath was short from the exertion. She thought she might pass out but gripped the edge of the sink and bent her head, eyes closed, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth until the feeling passed.
Through the window over the sink she could see the yard, the gravel drive and the barn beyond. That’s where Tony kept his Mustang, the car that had so turned her head and now just irritated the ever-loving shit out of her. Such a goddamned cliché, that car. With the money he spent to “fix up” that piece of junk, they could’ve gone on a real vacation this year instead of spending the weekend visiting his mother in that shitty, broke-down trailer. They could’ve bought a new TV. She could’ve gone to the grocery store and not felt like she had to pinch every penny until it shrieked; she could’ve spent more for the vegetarian fucking beans.
Oh, how she hated this life.
Night had edged on toward morning while she labored to clean the floor. Where had her Saturday nights gone? She put her hands on the lump of her stomach and felt the baby pushing against her with his feet and hands. Just like his father, always touching her. That’s what it would be like when it was born, too. Constant touching. Needing.
The tears came then. Razor-edged, they bled from her eyes and sliced the back of her throat. She gripped the sink and breathed, but the feeling didn’t pass. Would it ever?
A motion in the yard caught her attention, and her head whipped up. Not a person, at least she didn’t think so. Not an animal, either. It was more like…a gust of wind? Something pushing against the huge lilac bushes planted along the side of the house and the dogwood trees in the back yard. It rustled the leaves, swirling, almost solid. A few leaves whirled in a lazy spiral before settling back to the ground.
What the…?
Automatically, Marnie reached for the weather radio and clicked it on. The robotic, modulated voice spoke at regular intervals, telling her the time and temperature, the projected forecast for the the rest of the evening and the next day. She watched from the window as the wind picked up again, kicking at some trash that had come free of the pails at the end of the driveway. No word of a storm. No hint, no warning, no watch.
Here in Oklahoma, tornado watches were a simple part of life. Her grandparents had built the storm cellar for just that r
eason. As a kid, she and her cousins had played in that cellar, even though they weren’t supposed to. They’d snuck inside the dark, cool concrete walls and let the heavy doors settle down over them, making everything dark. They’d lit flashlights and told ghost stories, scaring each other into paroxysms of terrified giggles. When she was a little older, she’d taken her boyfriends in there to make out for hours on the hard cots covered with scratchy, olive-green Army blankets. She’d lost her virginity in that storm shelter.
She’d never actually had to use it to protect herself from a tornado.
The swirling breeze dissipated, but Marnie’d been so taken up with watching it that she hadn’t noticed she’d gone out onto the back porch to get a closer look. She strained her eyes into the night, listening for sirens or the rushing roar of an oncoming storm. Again, nothing.
But she smelled something. Something sweet crept into her nostrils from under the still-cloying stink of pork-n-beans and the faint odor of Tony’s cigars — the ones she didn’t truly mind but had relegated to the barn as one more way to make him tired of her. She paused, one hand on the porch railing, and lifted her face to the night air.
Of all the changes she’d noticed during this pregnancy, her sense of smell was the most enhanced. She’d become super sensitive not only to different smells, but differing gradations of odor. She could determine by smell alone not only if the milk had spoiled, but if it was going to go sour within the next day or so. Strangers passed her and she could tell not only what kind of laundry detergent they’d used, but how long ago they’d washed their clothes. Their perfumes and soaps and deodorants…and how long ago they’d applied them. She’d been living in a hell of stenches, and even good smells had become so overpowering they turned her stomach.
Now…this.
She didn’t know what it was, only that the light fragrance reminded her something of flowers, something like perfume, a little bit like the tanning oil she’d worn as a kid back in the days before she worried about skin cancer. Marnie breathed in deep. Then again. The scent, whatever it was, filled her up inside, all the way, in every nook and cranny, every crevice. Every nerve. She breathed it in, and for the first time in months, didn’t feel sick to her stomach or infuriated. She didn’t feel the simple and bone-deep disappointment her choices had brought her.