“We feed him, clean him, take care of him best we can,” Turk said. “We try to keep the end from coming.” Turk shrugged. They could have been talking about baseball scores for all his casualness. “It’s all we can do.”
“And no one else who’s been in contact with him has gotten sick?”
“No. Anyway, no one’s sure how people even catch the damn thing to begin with. Some think it’s airborne, others say it’s in the water. Even the government’s come out and said it might just be hanging in the air and absorbed through the skin. Heck, who’s to say it ain’t genetics? Who’s to say some of us ain’t just born with it and now it’s coming active inside our brains?”
“You could be right. It’s almost like—”
Something slammed against the other side of the door, causing them both to jump. The door bucked in its frame, and the crucifix fell from its nail and thudded to the carpet. David took a step back, but Turk remained planted to the spot, a look of consternation on his hardened, sun-reddened face. A muffled moan reverberated against the door, and then it bucked a second time against the frame. It was Jimmy, throwing himself against the door.
“Let’s head on back downstairs,” Turk suggested, his voice lowered now. “He don’t like us standing out here jawin’ about him, is all.”
24
Pauline invited them to stay for dinner, and David accepted. He was aware that Turk had stashed the Glock somewhere and he didn’t want to leave without it, so he thought it best to respond in a positive light to their hospitality. Hopefully he could earn Turk’s trust and he’d give him back the gun. Despite the discomfort of knowing they kept their terminally ill son locked in a bedroom upstairs, handprints stamped in shit on the walls, there was still a level of trust and even comfort David felt around this family. He wondered if it was because his own family, over just the course of a handful of days, had essentially disintegrated.
Ellie had brightened a bit toward Sam, too, and after David came down from using their shower (dressed now in one of Turk’s clean T-shirts, this one a Mot?rhead concert tee about two sizes too big), he found them both in the living room watching a DVD of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. David paused in the doorway and watched his daughter for several seconds. She had never been the type of girl to dress up like a princess or sing along with a movie’s soundtrack, and even now she sat watching the movie cross-legged on the carpet, the look on her face one of studious incredulity at the sight of an animated anthropomorphic teapot lecturing like a British schoolmarm. Yet some fashion of levity had come into her countenance, some brand of innocence and awe that seemed more befitting of an eight-year-old girl than the dark suspicion that also hung just behind her eyes. David had always thought she was too smart for her own good, and too practical to maintain many friendships with girls who just wanted to play dress-up and house, so it did him some good to see a softness in her profile now. Beside her, Sam narrated the events of the film a few seconds ahead of the action, something that the old Ellie would have found annoying. But now she was actually smiling at the boy.
In the kitchen, Pauline was preparing a strange assortment of food on a single plate—chocolate chip cookies, a single slice of white bread slathered in peanut butter, apple slices, and a powdered doughnut.
“Healthy food for a healthy body,” he joked.
Pauline smiled at him, but there was no humor in it. David couldn’t help quell the feeling that whenever Pauline looked at him, it was with an odd mixture of appreciation and pity. She turned away from the plate and retrieved a plastic cup with Transformers on it from the cupboard. From the fridge, she pulled a jug of chocolate milk. She filled the cup with it.
“Turk says you met Jimmy.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Pauline set the plate of food and the cup of chocolate milk on a tin tray with the NASCAR logo on it. “It happened after the evacuation, you know.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke. “Turk says there’s no way to be completely sure, seein’ how there could be an incubation period and all, but, well . . . a mother knows.”
“So he was healthy after the evacuation? And he hadn’t been around anyone else who was sick?”
“No one else,” she said.
He heard Turk speaking in his head, the same words he’d said upstairs, on the other side of his son’s locked door: Some think it’s airborne, others say it’s in the water. Even the government’s come out and said it might just be hanging in the air and absorbed through the skin. Heck, who’s to say it ain’t genetics?