The craftswoman was his only companion. Molly had fallen asleep.
Around one he had ducked out to use the john. When he returned three minutes later she was passed out on the couch. Clutching the can of Mountain Dew he’d given her, her poor kid face already half-covered in webs.
Jared crashed out himself for a couple of hours in the leather armchair. His exhaustion had swamped his distress.
An acrid smell awakened him, drifting in through the screen doors, the sensory alert of a distant fire. He drew the glass doors shut and returned to the armchair. On the TV, the camera focused tight on the craftswoman’s hands as they wove a needle in and out, over and under.
It was 2:54 on Friday morning. A new day according to the clock, but it felt like the previous day wouldn’t be letting them go anytime soon, if ever.
Jared had ventured across the street to requisition Mrs. Ransom’s cell phone from her purse. He texted Mary on it now:
Hey, it’s Jared. You ok?
Yeah, but do you know if something is on fire?
Think so, but I don’t know what. How is your mother? How is your sister? How are you?
We’re all fine. Drinking coffee and baking brownies. Sunrise here we come!! How’s Molly?
Jared glanced at the girl on the couch. He’d draped her with a blanket. The covering on her head was round and white.
Great, he wrote. Chugging Mountain Dew. This is her granny’s phone I’m using.
Mary said she’d text him again soon. Jared returned his attention to the television. The craftswoman was inexhaustible, it seemed.
“Now I know this’ll upset some people, but I just do not care for glass. It scratches up. It’s my true conviction you can do just as well with plastic.” The camera went tight on a pink bead she held between her thumb and forefinger. “See, not even an expert eye’s likely to tell the difference.”
“Pretty good,” Jared said. He had never been one to talk to himself, but he had never been alone in his house with a white-swathed body while the woods burned, either. And there was no denying that little pink fucker looked like glass to his eye. “Pretty dang good, lady.”
“Jared? Who are you talking to?”
He hadn’t heard the front door open. He leaped to his feet, wobbled four or five steps on his aching knee, and threw himself in his father’s arms.
Clint and Jared stood, locked together between the kitchen and the living room. They both wept. Jared tried to explain to his father that he had only gone to pee, he couldn’t help it about Molly, and he felt awful, but dammit he was going to have to go sometime, and she seemed all right, he was sure she’d be okay, chattering away like she was and drinking her Mountain Dew. Everything wasn’t okay, but Clint said it was. He repeated it over and over, and father and son held tighter and tighter, as if by force of will they could make it so, and maybe—maybe—for a couple of seconds, they did.
4
The trimming that Flickinger had taken from an area of Nana’s hand resembled, as Frank peered through the lens of the small microscope, a finely threaded piece of fabric. The threads had threads and those threads had threads.
“It actually looks like a plant fiber,” said the doctor. “To me, at least.”
Frank imagined snapping a celery stalk, the stringy bits that hung loose.
Garth pressed and rolled the piece of white fiber between his fingertips. When he spread his fingers apart, the stuff stretched between them like bubblegum. “Adhesive—incredibly tensile—fast-growing—somehow distorts the chemistry of the host—fiercely distorts it—”
While Garth continued, talking more to himself than to Frank, Frank considered the reduction of his daughter to the word host. It didn’t make him happy.
Garth chuckled. “I don’t like the way you behave, Mr. Fiber. I really don’t.” He grimaced as he squished the material onto a glass microscope slide.
“You okay, Dr. Flickinger?” Frank could accept that the surgeon was eccentric and stoned, and he seemed to know what he was doing so far, but the guy did have a bunch of sharp implements around Frank’s incapacitated daughter.
“I’m peachy. Wouldn’t mind a drink, though.” Flickinger dropped back on his haunches beside Nana’s prone figure. He used the point of the trimmers to scratch beneath the rim of his nostril. “Our friend Mr. Fiber here, he’s contradictory. He ought to be a fungus, but he’s so busy and so aggressive and at the same time only interested in the XX chromosome. Then, you snip him from the rest of the mass and he’s nothing. Nothing. He’s just some sticky shit.”
Frank excused himself, rifled around in the kitchen, and settled for the crap on the top shelf between the baking powder and the cornmeal. There was enough to pour them each an inch. He brought the glasses back to the living room.
“Unless my eyes mistake me, that’s cooking sherry. We’re roughing it now, Frank.” Garth didn’t sound disappointed in the slightest. He accepted the glass and tossed it off with a gasp of satisfaction. “Listen, do you have any matches? A lighter?”
5
“Okay, Ree, the next part won’t be news to you. Little habit became big habit, and big habits are expensive. Damian stole stuff from a rich guy’s house and got away with it once, but not the second time. They didn’t arrest him or anything, but he got his ass fired.”
Ree said Why am I not surprised?
“Yeah. Then I lost my job at the daycare. That was when the economy was really going bad, and the lady who owned the place, she had to make some cutbacks. Funny thing is, there were a couple of girls that hadn’t been working there as long as me, weren’t as experienced, she kept them on. You’ll never guess what the difference was between me and those girls.”
Ree said Oh, I might have a guess, but go on and tell me.
“They were white. Hey, I’m not making an excuse. I’m not, but you know, that’s how it was. And it was fucked up, and I got a little depressed. A lot depressed. Like anybody would. So, I started taking pills even when my head didn’t hurt. And you know what made it especially bad? I understood what was happening. It’s like, oh, so this is the part where I become a stupid fucking junkie just like people always thought I’d become. I hated myself for that. Fulfilling this destiny people gave me for growing up poor and black.”