He tore the bandage off and stared in abject horror at the avalanche of small black beetles that spilled out from his perforated wound. He shrieked, swatted at the wound, feeling no pain, feeling nothing except the sensation of those bugs crawling all over his flesh. It wasn’t until he’d torn open a number of stitches that he realized there were no bugs there. And he was left bleeding freely from the reopened wound.
He reached out and used the leg of the nearest rabbit hutch to hoist himself to his feet. Behind the meshwork, large gray rabbits scampered about, panicked. One of them roared at him like a lion. On closer inspection, he saw that they weren’t rabbits at all, but alien creatures with slender, segmented legs and bodies comprised of thick, iridescent shells. Their heads were mainly a system of eyes of varying sizes, some of them mirrored so that David could see his own terrified reflection in them.
He staggered back to the house, up the steps, in through the porch. It seemed to take a great effort, as if he was doing this simple exercise on a planet with a stronger gravitational pull and less oxygen.
When he came in through the kitchen door, he saw Tim standing there, tugging on a lightweight jacket. Ellie stood beside him. At the sight of David, a shadow darkened her features.
“Dad,” Ellie said, her voice low.
“I was just coming out to look for you,” Tim said. He stood frozen in the middle of pulling on his jacket.
“I think I’m sick,” David said.
“Yeah,” Tim said, finally shrugging off his jacket and folding it over one of the kitchen chairs. “We know.”
David shook his head. “How . . . ?”
“I could tell the moment I laid eyes on you,” Tim said, “right when I came up and hugged you outside. Ellie told us when you guys got here. She knew.”
Their secret conversation at the breakfast table, David thought, his mind racing. Their secret birds at the breakfast car. His head pounded and his thoughts were muddled.
He looked at Ellie. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” she said, “but I knew. I could feel it in you.” She was fighting off tears. He wanted to go to her, comfort her, lie and tell her it would be okay. But at that moment he didn’t trust himself to move.
“Sit down, David.” Tim moved toward him, pulling out a kitchen chair.
“No,” David said. He took a step in Ellie’s direction but the world seemed to cant, the floor sliding out from beneath him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tim said, and hurried to his side. He grabbed David beneath the armpits and helped lower him onto the kitchen chair. He went down like wet laundry.
David’s gaze lowered to the table. Three perfect circles of blood, each one smaller than a dime, formed a constellation on the tabletop. He turned his hands over, examined his palms, and thought he saw the ghostly impressions of the wildflowers hidden there among the whorls and creases and crosshatches.
Ellie took a single step toward him. She seemed hesitant to approach him, though he knew she wasn’t afraid of touching him, of getting sick. She was seeing him, and in perfect clarity, from where she stood, and she was reluctant to move from her vantage because she was digesting every bit of him.
She’s a special one, Kathy said in his ear.
“Yes,” he said aloud. “She is.”
And then she was just Ellie again, Eleanor Elizabeth Arlen, his Little Spoon, the delicate spray of freckles across the saddle of her nose, her eyes impossibly filled with so much intuition and wisdom and understanding that she looked like an old soul in the body of a young child, and she came to him with economical footsteps, a firm expression of both compassion and sadness— (cold it’s so cold) —and when she reached out and hugged him about the shoulders, he found himself desperate to inhale her every scent, embrace every molecule of her, terrified at the prospect of his traitorous brain dismissing all his best memories of this wonderful, impossible, fierce, loving, inimitable girl, and their brief time together on this planet.
“I want to save you,” she whispered in his ear.
“It’s too late for me,” he said.
Gently, Ellie pulled away from his embrace. He expected her to be crying, but she wasn’t. She was her mother again in that instant, so clearly Kathy that David had to wonder if he wasn’t suffering another hallucination.
“How bad is it, David?” Tim asked.
David looked at his brother but didn’t respond. Tim nodded; David’s look spoke volumes.
“Could you give us a minute, Uncle Tim?”
“Sure thing, El.” Tim smiled at them both, then left the room, his heavy footfalls receding down the hall until David heard the front door squeal open.
Ellie turned back to him, not speaking right away. Her eyes scrutinized him. “Does it hurt?” she said.
“Not really. Just here.” He pointed to his heart.
Ellie nodded. “Me, too,” she said. A tear rolled down the side of her nose. “I tried to make you better. While you slept, I tried to take it all out of you. I thought maybe . . . maybe the stronger I got, I might be able to do it. But I just couldn’t do it. I’m not strong enough. Not yet. I can’t get the sickness out of you.”