“There’s something else, too,” David said, “and I’ll be damned if I know how to even begin to explain it to you.”
Just then, Ellie appeared in the doorway. She had her shoe box under one arm and a smile on her face. “Did you see me with the rabbits, Dad?”
He returned her smile with one of his own. It felt like it might crack his skull. “I sure did,” he said, pawing at his eyes.
“One got loose, Uncle Tim.”
Tim waved a big hand in front of his face. “They come back, you know. They’ve got a whole network of tunnels beneath that coop.”
Gany came up behind Ellie. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m thinking about some food, fellas.”
Tim stood up. “That’s a great idea.” He turned to David. “In the meantime, why don’t you and El get washed up? I’ve got some clothes for you both to wear. Have a proper shower.”
David struggled out of the chair, careful not to put pressure on his freshly stitched arm. “Sounds like heaven.”
Tim knocked back the last of his moonshine, then smiled at them. “So then let’s hop to it,” he said. Then he winked at David and said, “We’ll finish our chat after we chow down.”
“Works for me,” David said, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. He followed Tim back inside the house.
52
Tim had given them two bedrooms at one end of the farmhouse, across the hall from each other. The door to Ellie’s room was cracked open, and David poked his head in while on his way to his own room. Ellie stood before an open window, absently flicking large beetles off the screen.
“Hey, you,” he said, coming in.
“Hi.” She didn’t turn away from her bug-flicking exercise.
Folded at the foot of the bed were some clean clothes, as well as the Nike shoe box containing the bird eggs. David moved them aside and sat down. Bedsprings squeaked.
“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk about what happened today,” he began.
“Isn’t much to talk about,” she said. The screen vibrated as she flicked a beetle the size of a quarter off it.
“How did you know you could . . . ease that girl’s suffering?” He didn’t know how else to phrase it.
“Just something I felt.”
“Can you look at me, please?”
She turned around and he saw that the reason she hadn’t wanted to face him was because she had been crying.
“Hey.” He got up and went to her. Put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”
“I wanted to save her. I thought maybe I could.”
“Why did you think that?”
She looked down at her feet. “I don’t know.”
“You brought her peace,” he said. “In the end.”
Ellie looked up at him. “When I touched her, I saw what was in her head. I saw her hallucination.”
“What was it?”
“It was terrible. It scared me. She wasn’t just seeing things, Dad. She was hearing them, feeling them. Like her mind was someplace else and only her body had been left behind. And for a second, I was there, too, seeing and hearing and feeling all those things.” She looked down at her hands, so small and pale, the fingers pink and thin. “I took all that bad stuff out of her and let the good stuff in. I tried to make her sleep.”
David remembered. When he’d grabbed Ellie around the waist and tried to pull her free from the girl, he had been greeted with a shock from just touching Ellie’s flesh. He recalled something about sleeping and birds flying—it had been more of an emotion than an actual image, an emotion that somehow translated into thoughts, into ideas—but he found he couldn’t remember the details of it— (calm perfect calm you can even sleep now if you want it’s so calm it’s so perfect it’s living up here in the cool grass) —now.
“I just wish I could have been there to do that for Mom,” Ellie said.
David hugged her.
“Whatever it is inside me,” Ellie said, “it’s getting stronger.”
“Are you scared?”
“No,” she said, “but you are.”
He offered her a sad smile. There was no use arguing the point. “I’m just worried about you,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” she said. “I think it’s supposed to be this way.”
53
Three weeks earlier