Happy Birthday to You (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3) (6 page)

Margaret had
waited this long. She could wait another hour, if need be.

It turned out to
be nearly two hours before Darlene returned, feeling experimented on and
violated, but happy to know she was finally done with all the tests. The time
had given Margaret to consider her history with her wife and former girlfriend,
how the two had met. Back in the late 1990’s, Margaret had been enjoying her
summers teaching Extension courses at Yale. Reeling from a recent break-up from
a local theatre actress who had left Hartford for Broadway, Margaret was
looking for anything but another relationship. But when Darlene, African
American, a little on the chubby side, started talking her ear off after every
one of her History of the British Novel classes, she started to get the feeling
that this funny, attractive woman might be interested in her. By the end of
August they had started dating, by 2000 they were celebrating their
two-year-anniversary, and in 2008 they made it official by tying the knot in an
intimate ceremony, just days after the November election when same-sex marriage
became legalized in the state. They had been happy, healthy, and prosperous in
the last fourteen years together. And Margaret didn’t want that to go away.

“Please, have a
seat,” the white-haired doctor said to Margaret as he entered the room forty
minutes after Darlene had returned from all her tests. Margaret and Darlene sat
next to each other on two chairs in the back of the room,
awaiting
with fear, anxiety, and only a modicum of hope for what the doctor was about to
say to them.

“So you’ve been
pretty swamped today?” Margaret asked, a forced smile on her face.

“Swamped? That’s
not the word. In thirty-seven years, I’ve never seen anything like today.
People get sick. But they don’t all come down with symptoms the same morning.”

“What do you
think is causing it?” Margaret asked again. Darlene was keeping her mouth shut.

He shrugged. “I
don’t know. I saw those reports about the children rapidly aging…”

“Us too,”
Margaret said. “Do you know why something like that would be happening?”

The doctor shook
his head and turned toward Darlene, who looked frightened to hear his next few
sentences.

“Hi Darlene,” he
said.

“Dr. Gallagher,”
Darlene said with a nod. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“You too.”

“How’s your
family?”

He didn’t
answer. He darted his eyes toward Margaret for a moment, and then back at
Darlene. “Darlene, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

“Oh?”

“What?” Margaret
added, clutching her chest with one hand and grabbing onto Darlene’s hand with
the other.

“May I
ask
…” the doctor continued, “how long you’ve been
experiencing these symptoms? The stomach pains… the nausea…”

“Since
Saturday,” Darlene said.

“Two days ago
Saturday?”

“Yeah.”

“And nothing
before then?”

“No. I’ve been
fine.”

The doctor
squinted his eyes, like he was deep in thought. He crossed his arms and leaned
back in his chair, clearly dumbfounded by her response. “This is just…
incredible.”

“Incredible?”
Darlene asked.

“The pain you’re
experiencing… you should have been feeling pain for weeks, for months.”

“I felt
perfectly normal until Saturday,” she said with a shrug.

He nodded.
“Darlene, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you have stomach cancer.
Stage 3 stomach cancer.”

“What?”

“What?” Margaret
stood up, her jaw dropped. “Doctor! No.
Stomach
cancer
? There would’ve been symptoms…”

“I know…”

“Stage 3? That’s
impossible!”

“I understand
your—”

“Impossible!”

Margaret started
bawling as she dropped down on the marble tile floor and backed up against the
wall. She brought her hands up to her face and continued to sob. Darlene didn’t
freak out though. She stayed glued to her chair, in total shock.

“Uhh… Doctor…”
Darlene tried to talk, but she was struggling. She felt like throwing up again,
but she kept her composure. She breathed through her nose for a few seconds,
then
said, “Doctor, how long do I have?”

He didn’t say
anything for a moment. He just stared at her. Finally: “Normally, I’d say, at
least a year, maybe two.”

She nodded and
tried to smile. “That’s not… that’s not too bad…”

“But considering
how fast the cancer has grown since you first started experiencing symptoms on
Saturday… I’d say… one or two
days
.”

“One or two days?
Until what?” Darlene asked.

The doctor
turned his gaze from both of the women. It took Darlene a few seconds, but
soon, she knew.

Margaret grabbed
Darlene’s hands again.

Darlene didn’t
have any trouble crying now.

4.

“I don’t think I
can go in there again,” I said, scratching the top of my backpack, trying to
avoid looking at the front of the house.

“You have to,
Cam,” Liesel said. “It’s part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

“You’ll see.”

I avoided
looking at the house that previously provided shelter for Hannah’s insanity,
and Liesel’s mother’s rotting corpse. Instead, I looked across the street,
where families were frantically packing their cars with luggage, chairs,
computer screens, everything. It looked like that scene in
Independence Day
when Will Smith walks out of his home to see all
of his neighbors leaving town, unaware of the spaceship looming overhead.
Except here in Los Angeles on this hot afternoon, Liesel and I would not be one
of these departing families; we’d apparently be staying put for a short while.
We had just arrived at 1242 Addison Street in Los Feliz, where Liesel had grown
up as a child, where she had spent many, many years with her whacked out
sister.

“What… do you
think she’s actually here?” I asked.

“Of course she’s
not here. We’re not here for her. Come on.”

“I told you I
don’t want to go in, Leese!”

She shook her
head. “You’re such a baby.”

I stopped. “Hey!
Be careful! The last time you said that, you turned me into a
real
baby.”

Liesel didn’t
smile. She unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out of the car, taking quick,
quiet steps all the way up to the front door.

I didn’t move
for a moment, wanting to remain in my comfy passenger side seat for as long as
I could. Liesel and I had switched off driving all the way down to Los Angeles,
but she had driven most of the last three hours while I took a quick nap. I had
no idea where she was taking me, even though the Los Feliz house made sense.
Liesel and Hannah had a history here; I understood that. If there would be any
clue as to Hannah’s whereabouts, it would be somewhere in this house. But I
really didn’t want to return. I didn’t want to see that corpse, that
basement, that
crib, any more diapers. It had taken us close
to ten hours to reach L.A., mostly because we decided to drive the speed limit
the whole way. We didn’t want to be pulled over by any cops. Not today. Not
ever.

I finally jumped
out of the car, slammed the passenger side door, and looked up ahead. Liesel
had disappeared.

If
she’s been kidnapped
by Hannah
again, I’m going to kill somebody. Starting with myself.

But then the
front door opened from inside, and Liesel waved to me. “Come on,” she said.

I turned to my
right to see many of the family cars taking off down the road, and part of me
wished I
was
with them. I wanted Liesel and I to
escape to some middle of nowhere destination, where we could try to get back to
our normal routines, and essentially hide from the rest of the world. But I
knew every second counted with us. Every single moment we weren’t on the hunt
for Hannah was a moment added to more casualties in this massive war that was
to affect the lives of everyone.

As I walked to
the front door, my cell phone started ringing for the fortieth time. This time,
the call was from my dad. Again, I ignored it. I couldn’t talk to them right
now. I knew I would down the line. But now, it was time to focus.

The interior of
the house felt bright and lived in, with a clean living room and a small but
neatly designed kitchen. The place looked old, to be sure, but it didn’t
exactly seem like the place of death and horror I knew it to be. When I walked
down the hall, I could see the door to the downstairs basement closed shut. My
fingers lingered on the doorknob, and when I pushed forward, the door opened.

I really don’t want to go back down
there. But part of me feels like I have to.

I hadn’t really
talked to Liesel about it, but my few hours in that basement reigned as the
most frightening of my entire life. What I experienced in those last remaining
days at Washoe
Med
as an eighty-something-year-old man
last year was
nothing
compared to
what I suffered during that traumatic day last April. It had to have been more
of a scar left on Liesel’s psyche, given that she was down there for more than
a week, humiliatingly locked up in a cage. But it was still high up there on my
list of infamously awful days. I needed to see it again. Maybe it would help
get me past it.

“Liesel?”

I didn’t hear
anything. The silence haunted me for those grueling ten seconds, when my imagination
started coming up with different scenarios of what might have happened to her.
Kidnapping. Chloroform. Ax to the head.
I shouted her name twice more, and again she didn’t reply.

I took a few
more steps down the hallway, past the door to the basement. “Liesel? Where are
you?”

“Cam? I’m down
here!”

I couldn’t
believe it. Liesel had just shouted at me from the basement.

What the hell is she doing down there?

“Leese?”

“Yeah?”

I didn’t want to
ask, but I felt like I had to. “Are
there
any… you
know… corpses down there?”

“No. My mother’s
gone.”

Sometimes it
amazed me just how focused Liesel could get. She was talking to me as if I had
asked her what her favorite brand of cereal was. It seemed almost as if the
cage and the corpse hadn’t affected her at all. As I started descending the
winding staircase, though, a thought occurred to me:
Maybe Hannah is down there, with a knife to Liesel’s throat, making her
say these things in a calm, monotone way
.

When I reached
the bottom step, I was relieved to see Liesel walking up to me, no knife or gun
or bow-and-arrow in sight. She shoved two cans of paint into my hands and
turned back around.

“Go on. Take
these to the car.”

I looked down at
the unopened cans, which were outrageously heavy and bulky.

“Leese…
are
these…”

“Yes.”

“The silver
paint… but I thought you
can’t
get near them.”

“I can if
they’re unopened.” She stopped and stared at me. “So, yeah, don’t open them.”

“Trust me, I
wasn’t going to.”

I made my way to
the staircase again and turned around, seeing Liesel on her hands and knees
reaching as far as she could into a small hole in the wall. I turned to my left
to see the cage gone, the crib gone, only that black leather couch still in the
center of the room. It didn’t look very livable down here, but it definitely
didn’t look like a madman was torturing innocent victims.

“How many cans
are we taking?” I asked.

“A lot. Hurry.”

It felt so
ridiculous, considering all the madness that was just only beginning in the world,
for Liesel and I to be carrying cans of silver paint back and forth to my car.
Hannah had told me wet silver paint was her and Liesel’s kryptonite—why
she decided to reveal this to me I’ll never know—so I figured Liesel had
to know that the only way two regular human beings like ourselves, ones without
Hannah’s staggering witchly powers, could defeat this girl, was with the paint.
It seemed smart, I guess. Still though, I had no idea how Liesel and I were
going to find Hannah’s
top secret
location.

By the end of
the hour, Liesel and I had smuggled sixteen cans of silver paint to the car. I
asked her why we couldn’t have just gone to the local paint store. Apparently
the kind of paint Hannah had been using on Liesel in the basement was an
expensive imported kind that was rare and hard to find; it also, due to its
weight, seemed to be thicker than an average coat of paint.

I slammed the
last two cans in the back of the car and turned to my right to see Liesel
locking up the house. She ran right up to me and glanced into the trunk.