The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [161]
She smirked and ignited the flame again. And, just as quickly, extinguished it.
She watched a bug, a beetle as big as her thumb, make its way under one neighbor’s fence and march toward the property behind them. That neighbor had a pool and a dog that crapped freely in the yard. That’s why the beetle was headed there, for supplies of feces and water.
Flame on.
An instant later, she could see thousands of them, thousands of bugs she hadn’t even noticed before, ants mostly, and tiny flies and a handful of bees, a whole bug underworld, and they were all commuting behind her garage for some purpose, flying and crawling this way and that. Bugs were busy, industrious, purposeful.
Does that make bugs happy? Does that make bugs normal? Do bugs even notice when their father goes missing? Do bugs even have fathers?
Thousands of them. They had been there all her life and she’d hardly noticed. Hardly noticed them except one at a time, when an ant traversed her sandwich or a bee buzzed her ear. Certainly they had noticed her, a giant walking across the grass. They had known her, feared her presence, wondered about her nature without ever comprehending it, and, like her father’s indifferent God, she had hardly given a thought to them.
She stomped her foot twice, warning them with a tremor. Canada Gold held her father’s flaming lighter at arm’s length in front of her face and dropped it into the long, dry grass.
Ten years later, standing over the doctor, she let the match burn out, and then she pulled him to his feet, the sedative wearing off now, her rage providing direction and adrenaline giving her strength. She opened the door and pushed the doctor down the empty hall, the box of matches against his back. His right hand was cupped over his half an ear and every few steps he would expel a noise like a whimper.
On the way out of the room, she grabbed the little black box he had used to turn off her spider.
A floor away, the house had erupted in a chaos of shouts and orders. Canada stopped to look out a half-circle window and saw a riot outside, and she wondered again if it were real. The gate of the house collapsed by a big truck, people running on and off the grounds, looters, vandals, mischief makers. The world had changed in the few hours she had been asleep. She approached the steps—Woodward’s twister—and could hear voices from below. She silenced the doctor with a pinch and pulled him backward.
She marched him down a dead-end utility hallway. Instead of being oak-paneled, the doors here were whitewashed. The hardware was brass, but the maintenance fell below the standards of the rest of the house. Even without her spider, she noticed spots of tarnish and traces of dried green polish left on the knobs. She glimpsed a utility room through an open door and pushed the doctor inside. The room was the size of a walk-in closet. There was only a folding chair, nothing else she could push up against the door besides empty white wicker baskets. A counter-top held piles of folded sheets and towels and clothes, which had been carted up from the second-floor laundry and were waiting to be put away. Mops and brooms and two vacuum cleaners were lined up against the back wall. On a higher shelf were bottles of window washer and bowl cleaner and miscellaneous household chemicals. Everything smelled of soap and softener. There was no lock on the door, not even a cheap push button on the knob. No doubt, in answer to a long-ago question from her contractor, Myra Jameson had replied, “When would anyone need to lock the utility room?”
She motioned for the doctor to sit with his back to it. He didn’t try to run.
“I need to tell you some things. Please,” the doctor said. His voice was raised to a desperate pitch, although, she noticed, her mind no longer correlated the syllables with notes. He winced at a horrible metal-on-metal crunch from downstairs.
She didn’t care. Burrowing through a pile of clean laundry, she found a pair of Myra Jameson’s black stretch pants. Canada only now