All-Day Breakfast (27 page)

“Well, 17
is
around the side.”

Smart-ass! I figured I could grab the Etch A Sketch and knock her and Chad cold in all of three seconds, even with that gun strapped to Holmes's hip, but that would erase poor Frankenstein. Frankenstein's monster.

“I should be getting a call from dispatch,” I said. “I guess the hospital—”

“If Gabe calls I'll put him through. Help with his bags, Chad.”

The kid loped around to the door and held it open for us.

“So, I guess you're set,” said Holmes. “Now I can go tell Nestor Solomon his wife's passed away. Lucky me.”

“Oh, no,” I said, my hand on the ambulance's door latch—and for a second I saw this poor Nestor Solomon on his doorstep, squinting hard at Holmes before his face crumpled. Grabbing the doorjamb to hold himself up. Their empty kitchen with her egg-streaked plate still in the sink. I knew what Nestor Solomon's future held, though with Lydia we'd at least had those weeks when we'd known she was going and could talk about it. Nestor just had Holmes on his doorstep, he—

I'd hit the fucker so hard he'd fly through the back of his house, wind up like a smashed watermelon!

“Just down by the school—I'll walk,” said Holmes. “I might check on you later.”

She turned across the parking lot, and I didn't say a thing after her. She really was cute as hell, with really wiry-looking hands, I loved that, and terrific as it would be to screw her, staring down at her sweaty forehead as I gave it to her, I didn't want to find myself knocking her block off if she happened to fart. I sounded like Amber sitting on Cam Vincent's desk. And what was the point in giving us any urge to reproduce in the first place? Very sorry, Lydia, my brain tried to say.

Our ambulance smelled more like sawdust than I'd realized.

“G,” Clint asked through the window, “are you going to have sex with the police?”

“Five dollars says yes!” hissed Franny.

“How'd you like a ride straight back to Rob?” whispered Colleen.

Mom was getting tough. I drove around the building and backed into the space in front of 17.

“You wait for me to let you out,” I said to the ambulance. “You do not move.”

“Carry your bags in, mister?” asked Chad.

He leaned against the room's green door, his hands pressed behind him. The sun broke through the clouds all of a sudden, glinting off his braces like a carnival ride. I brandished my key.

“I'll sort that out later,” I said. “Right now I have to sleep.”

“Drove all night from Nebraska, hey?”

He stepped aside as I unlocked the deadbolt and stumbled into the room. I saw a brown pole-lamp, a television, the bed yawning in front of me. Then my face was on the white pillow, and somewhere behind me the door clicked shut.

“Oh,” Chad said from outside. “Okay.”

But after a couple of minutes—maybe two hundred—the need to talk to my kids woke me up. I sat up and my intestines tied a knot around my belly as I looked across at the beige telephone. All I wanted was to hear one of them say “Dad” in my ear, and I just hoped that whatever vague explanation I gave of what I'd been doing wouldn't sound too hollow.

I dialed. The ring from the other end sounded like a good old Nebraska ring. My arms felt weak despite all the
pbf
bacon.

“Hello?” Deb said, matter-of-factly, like she didn't figure her line was tapped.

“It's Peter,” I said.

“Oh, I knew it. Call display said ‘Ohio,' and everyone I know in Ohio's passed on—oh, what a thing to say.” Her voice got faint. “Kids! It's your dad!”

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. The drive was fine the other day, and I signed them up to start at Parkview down the road tomorrow. Does Josie really take size eight shorts for gym? They look awfully short on her.”

“That's what she had in September,” I said, “but I thought she could've had nine or ten. Get twelve if you want, she'll grow into them. And keep track, I'll pay you back.”

“Oh, it's my pleasure, Peter. This has just been lovely. Here's Ray.”

“Hey, Da-ad?” he asked.

“Yessir.” I smiled. “What is it, Ray?”

“Are you in bed?”

“I was, yeah. Because I'm not feeling well, you mean?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I can't fall asleep if it's during the day.”

“Yes, I've heard that.”

“Dad?” This was Josie, on the other line.

“Hi, Sweetheart,” I said.

It was a mistake to have phoned. I needed to touch the backs of their heads.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked.

“I
do
feel better, a lot better, but there's still a few things to sort out.”

“How, um, how come you're in Ohio?”

“Hey, MacArthur has Ballocity! But you have to keep your socks on,” said Ray.

“Well, I can be there in time for your birthday,” I said. “I'll take you then.”

“My birthday's after Easter.”

“Grandma says I'm going to need braces,” Josie said solemnly. “She said my bite looks weird.”

“Do you want braces?”

“No.”

“I'm not allergic to cinnamon anymore,” said Ray.

I watched my oblong, reflected self in the turned-off television screen—if I'd bothered to wash my face I might've looked like someone's father.

“Okay, I should talk to Grandma again. I love you so much. Have fun at your new school.”

“Okay,” they said together. “Bye!”

Then a clatter of handsets. Somehow in the
tv
reflection I didn't have any ears.

“I'm still here,” said Deb. “They really are fine.”

“You're all relaxed, hey? Nobody strange coming by the house?”

“No, no, everything as per usual. We raked leaves. The house across the street, do you remember the one?”

“With the fountain?”

“It was on the market
two years
, then on Saturday it said
sold,
and this morning somebody moved in.”

“Uh-huh.” My gut re-knotted—I pictured gas-masked Penzler guys unloading houseplants from a moving van. “Is it a, uh, a whole family?”

“No, just one fellow so far. He's on the plump side so the girls and I may have to get him out walking.”

All was well in MacArthur, so my unconscious suddenly reminded me to let the zombies out of the ambulance. Had it been hours?

“Peter?” Deb called from my hand.

“Sorry, I'm right in the middle of wending my way back to you,” I said, angling the phone toward its cradle. “Love to everyone.”

I staggered to the door. The sun was significantly lower in the sky. The rest of the parking lot was empty, and as far as I could tell no one was spying from behind curtains. I opened the ambulance's back door an inch. The sawdust smell was getting pretty rank, and I could tell by the absence of its smell that they'd finished off the bacon.

“Anybody got to pee?” I whispered.

“Holy crap, it's him!” said Franny.

“Holy crap, were you asleep?” asked Clint.

“Too late, you bastard,” said Colleen. “I peed in the Rubbermaid.”

“This thing seemed a lot roomier when it was moving,” said Harv.

“Harv said you got clubbed to death!”

“I seriously thought you'd left for California once and for all,” said Clint. “Didn't I say that?”

They managed to assemble their five faces in the crack, like on an album cover.

“How big's the room?” asked Franny. “Lots of beds?”

“One double. But if we—”

“I'll go check us in,” said Colleen. “Then we won't have to keep peeping and hiding.”

“Oh,” I said, “okay.” That did make sense—I'd pictured propping a kid in each corner. “Aren't they going to wonder how you got here?”

“Let us out. My boyfriend dropped me off.”

I took her small hand and helped her down to the pavement. Beneath the angle of her eyebrows she squinted at me in the bright afternoon.

“Did the cop say anything when you were inside?”

“I wasn't inside her,” I said by accident.

“When you checked in. Has she come across anybody like us?”

“Didn't mention.”

“Go in and go back to sleep, I'll see if we can get next door.” She touched her toes, did a revitalizing jumping jack. “You'd better dump out that Rubbermaid.”

My doorknob rattled
a while later, and I was on my feet opening it before I really knew where I was. Colleen stood yawning into the back of her hand.

“We're next door. They want to watch
tv
,” she said. “But I don't.”

I could hear it through the wall—sirens and explosions. She dragged her feet across the room, lay down on her side across the bedspread and folded a pillow under her head.

“After dark we go find Penzler's house,” she said to the wall.

“Uh-huh.” I chained the door, suddenly envisioning the disaster-area
swat
team, then followed her over. “They get another text from Amber?”

“You can put your arms around me,” said Colleen.

I lay down next to her, tucked one arm under her head and wrapped the other around her ribs—if she'd been my Lydia, that hand would've found her breasts and I would've pressed myself against her behind, but I kept a quarter-inch of distance down there. I lay staring at her ear, breathing on the back of her neck. Josie and Ray were happy and healthy, I had that for consolation, though something in their neighborhood sounded weird.

“Go back to sleep,” said Colleen.

I woke up
with her hair in my face—it smelled of tangy, unwashed scalp. Dark outside, and cold in the room except for where I was pressed against her—I'd have to stumble around and find the thermostat, probably had electric baseboard heaters. We'd had them in the rental house in Champlain but in Josie's room they'd been on the fritz so I'd had to bury her under a pile of blankets—I'd felt like shit about that. Now the wall reverberated with thudding bass from the
tv
in 18, and a scratching from somewhere around the foot of our bed. A mouse woke me up?

I sat up, and sleeping Colleen smacked her lips. It
was
cold in there, enough to see my breath by the neon filtering through the blue drapes, though I was more
aware
of the cold than anything. Captain America's super-soldier serum had set me above such trivialities. My hands felt ready to crack walnuts.

The scratching came from the door. I bounded across to open it and my legs were vaguely stiff, maybe from stomping Lonny's head in. So many golden memories.

I opened the door a crack. Chad and another kid—also goofy looking, with blond hair that was long in the back and possibly permed—crouched at my feet, lower than the hoods of the parked cars, like no one was supposed to notice them. Which would explain their scratching instead of knocking.

“Mr. McAvoy,” whispered Chad. “You got trouble.”

“What in hell you doing?” I said. “Get in here.”

They crawled inside like it was a scene from
The Great Escape
, and once their high-top sneakers dragged across the threshold I clicked the door shut. Chad got up and ran across the dark room to the pole-lamp, where he started clicking through the various tri-light settings: dim/regular/very bright/dark again/dim/regular, which took me back to Champlain Middle School's Diagnosing Autism seminar.

“What?” Colleen sat up, shading her eyes.

“I don't know,” I told her.

“I'm Pat!” The blond kid leapt up like a jack-in-the-box beside my shoulder, then knelt again to tighten the Velcro on his shoes.

“Holy crow!” Chad whispered. “You're the mom from 18!”

“It's cool,” I said. “You didn't walk in on anything.”

“Oh. Are you brother and sister?” asked Pat.

“Yes.”

“Mr. McAvoy?” Chad whispered. “One of the guys from Penzler was just at the desk, and he said, ‘Who's from Nebraska?
Who
's from Nebraska?' But I didn't tell him, I was like, ‘What? Nebraska?' ”

“You
totally
were like that!” added Pat.

“How do you know he was a Penzler guy?” asked Colleen.

“He had the hat,” said Chad. “One of the big guys!”

“And, uh, why should that bother us?” I squeezed my left earlobe between thumb and forefinger. “I'm just here to drive an ambulance.”

“He was
mad
,” Pat said.

“Yeah, he
was
mad,” said Chad.

“We go in people's rooms all the time!” offered Pat.

“Shut
up
, man!”

“Did he see the register?” I asked.

Chad shook his head, still clicking through the settings. Very bright/dark/dim.

“I put that the five of us were from Loogootee, Indiana,” said Colleen.

“Should've put French Lick!” said Pat.

“Are you signaling to him with the fucking light, is that it?”

“No, no!” Chad jumped back like it'd given him a shock. “I was just—”

“I'm going back,” Colleen said, and went out the door in a half-crouch.

“Stay in here a minute,” I told the boys. “Help yourselves to the ice bucket.”

“Really?” asked Pat, eyes wide. “We can?”

I ran out and jumped into the ambulance. All the other parked vehicles looked dark and still—nobody watching or waiting that
I
could see. Even if the gentleman in the Penzler hat hadn't read Nebraska in the register, he could still read my plates. I gnawed the last cold strip of bacon from the mixing bowl as I drove around to the back of the motel and parked in front of twenty-six. Blue television light flickered behind its curtain and I could hear sneaker-squeaks and whistles from a basketball game—anybody with their
tv
turned up that loud deserved to have Penzler knock down their door. Of course, I was undertaking these misleading machinations while wearing a
velouria medical
shirt.