Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [90]
“They really love you, your grandparents.”
“We don’t have to be with them today, do we?”
“Tell you what. We’ll let them do something with you today, just to appease them, and then that will be that.”
“What does appease mean?”
“It means to make someone happy by giving them something they want.”
“Oh, Daddy. I can’t bear to spend more than half an hour with them. And you have to be there.”
“How about two hours? And they’ll want you to themselves.”
“I want you there.”
“I know you do, but they want you alone.”
“Okay. Two hours. One minute more and I’m running away and joining the circus.”
“It’s a deal, squirt.”
39. TWO LITTLE GIRLS LIVING BY THEMSELVES
Donovan and Achara were slated to show up at nine. Stan Beebe’s funeral would start at the Lutheran church a few blocks north of the station at eleven. The engine was draped in black crepe and festooned with bunting and flags and would carry the coffin to the local cemetery.
The buzz around the station was that Joel McCain’s wife had decided Joel needed to attend Beebe’s funeral. Let me tell you, when I became a zombie, the last thing I’d want was to get wheeled around in front of my old friends like a mummy on tour. It seemed so unlike Mary McCain, who until now had kept Joel under wraps.
Maybe he was getting better.
On our way to the fire station, I told Stephanie to drop us off at the playfield at North Bend Elementary two blocks from the station. Realizing what I was planning, Stephanie gave me a sorrowful look through the windshield as she drove away.
After the girls burned off some of their breakfast, I found myself on my back upside down on the slide, staring up at the clouds, just like a kid. Britney was at the top on her back, the soles of her feet resting against mine, both of us suspended by my grip on the cold rails. Allyson sat at the very top playing with Britney’s hair. Above us was a mostly blue sky, a battery of cumulus clouds rolling over the lip of Mount Si, wispy clouds I couldn’t name streaking the middle of the sky, and corroded contrails from jet traffic to the west above Sea-Tac.
It had been years since I’d taken the time to lie on my back and watch clouds. The absolute grace of the atmosphere astonished me. After a while, I could almost feel the earth moving, could certainly see the clouds shifting in the sky. A private plane traversed the horizon silently. A thousand thoughts ran through my mind.
To have had these girls for as long as I had made me the luckiest man in the world.
“I have something I need to tell you,” I said, finally.
“What is it, Daddy?” Britney and Allyson both had slipped into that same lazy summertime cadence I remembered as a youth, when everything slowed down and you had no worries and it seemed as if there were no such thing as clocks or teachers or homework.
Too bad their lives were about to implode around them.
“Does this have something to do with Stephanie?” Allyson asked, failing to conceal the note of hope in her voice.
I let go of the slide and slid to the bottom, sat up as Britney scooted into my arms. Allyson followed, slamming into us. “Stephanie’s here because she’s my doctor. I’m sick. I’m getting sicker every day. If we don’t find out what’s causing it, I won’t be with you by the end of the week.”
“What’s the end of the week?” Britney asked.
“Sunday.”
“Sunday?” Allyson flicked a lock of hair out of her eyes. “What do you mean, Sunday? Where are you going on Sunday?”
I’d violated my own philosophy of dispensing bad news, the same philosophy I’d used just a few days ago with Marsha Beebe. The rule was: Spit it out quickly and concisely and in clear, unequivocal language.
“If we can’t stop this, I’ll end up like your Grandfather Swope sometime on Sunday. I might even be in the same nursing home with him.