The Children's Hospital

83

“Do you think she’ll come?” Jemma asked Calvin.

“She always comes,” he said. They were waiting for their ride to school, a woman named Deb who drove a yellow taxi. Their mother had hired her months before, to solve the problem of driving them to school in the winter, after a failed experiment with a carpool — she’d entered them in it enthusiastically, but pulled them out quickly when she realized she was expected to drive other people’s children into town. Now it was September, in the middle of a late heat wave, and there was no snow anywhere, but their mother liked the arrangement too much to have canceled it on account of good weather, especially during times like now when she had retreated into her darkened room to sleep and sleep. Jemma, not very far penetrated into the third grade, was eager to get to school, not least because she feared the wrath of her new teacher, Sister Gertrude.

“Let’s get the bikes.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jemma.” She put her head out the door to listen for the distinctive rattle of Deb’s taxi. The hot, wet air made her gasp a little. It was quiet, except for the birds, whose song seemed muted by the heat and humidity, and who walked slowly over the lawn, as if they were too exhausted by the weather to fly.

“We should get Mom,” she said a little later. Her brother shook his head.

“You try and wake her up,” he said. Jemma was afraid to do that, but after five more minutes of watching their empty driveway her anxiety pushed her down the hall and around the corner to the foot of the stairs and their parents’ door. It was closed, of course, and radiating the sense of forbidding that it sometimes did, so Jemma was sure that if she touched the doorknob she’d get a shock that would blow her across the hall, clear through the picture window in the living room, over all three ravines to land, dead and smoking, on Beach Road. She stared at the knob for a moment before she reached for it slowly, and let her hand hover just an inch from it before grabbing it. She got a little thrill, a tingle at the base of her spine, but no shock. She turned it, thinking it would be locked, but it wasn’t. The knob turned, but the catch did not disengage. She was about to turn it further when she heard Deb’s horn.

She ran back down the hall, picked up her bag, and quickly overtook Calvin, who was never in such haste that he didn’t walk along the narrow line of railroad ties that bordered both sides of the driveway. Jemma opened the door, threw her bag in, and clambered in after it.

“Hey kiddos!” said Deb, not turning around to look at them but smiling into the mirror. From where she was sitting Jemma could see an eye and a cheek, some teeth and a portion of her maroon lips.

“We’re kind of late,” Jemma said. Calvin climbed in beside her, hauling on the door with both hands to slam it enthusiastically.

“Don’t jostle the old lady,” Deb said, meaning the car, which was very old, but had broken down on just one occasion, back in the winter. Deb was old, too. She was the wrinkliest person Jemma knew, and had old eyes with big rims of wet pink on the bottom, caught between her white eye and dark eyeliner. She had a head of springy gray hair that was always pushing her hat up off her head, a baseball cap she wore all the time, sometimes under a wool stocking in winter. She’d got it, she told them, by sending in a hundred proofs of purchase from her cigarettes. It had been white, but now was a very lived-in sort of yellow, and said in blue letters across the front, Oh Yeah! “We’ll get there, little Jemma,” she said. “Mary Ann can hurry when she has to. Can’t you, honey?” She patted the dashboard, raising a little cloud of dust that floated with the cigarette smoke in the columns of sun that came through the windshield. “How ’bout this weather?” Deb asked them, turning around as they crested the hill and started to go down. “Like trying to breathe with a wet washcloth stuffed in your mouth, huh?”

“It’s an affliction,” Calvin said.

“Not so bad as that,” she said, turning back around as they drifted a little into the grass. “An affliction would be the summer of ’73. Or ovarian cancer and diverticulosis and a no-good husband.”

“That’s worse,” Calvin agreed. Jemma began to look on the floor for something interesting. She had found all sorts of things before, a broken calculator, a gold pen, various lipsticks, all sorts of change, and a condom, once, though she hadn’t known what it was till after she lost it, when she described it to Calvin. She’d unpeeled it from the floor mat and stuck it in her pocket back in March, while Calvin and Deb were having a conversation. She’d brought it out to examine it every now and then, not sure what it was but knowing it was important. She had planned to show it to some people at recess, especially Andrea Blake, a girl with whom she would have liked to be friends, but who always ignored her, and to whom Jemma never knew what to say. Now she would know. She’d ask her if she wanted to see something neat, and it would all begin from there. Years later Andrea would say, “Do you remember when you showed me that wonderful thing? That’s when we became friends.” But, like a living creature, it worked its way from her pocket during a game of tag — she was always it, and never able to pass on the condition to anyone else. She didn’t look for it long. If she’d looked longer she might have found it before Andrea, who named it a snakeskin, and dutifully informed Sister Mary Fortuna of the likely presence of a poisonous reptile in the schoolyard. It was shortly surrounded by an impenetrable ring of nuns. They came pouring out of the school to form an Ursuline condom-disposal squad, one ring standing facing out toward the children while an inner ring gathered it up for destruction. Sister Gertrude came out in yellow rubber gloves to pick it up and carry it to the boys’ bathroom, while Andrea made the observation that it must be a very poisonous snake whose skin caused such a fuss. Today there was only a penny, stuck with a trace of gum to the floor. Jemma put it in her pocket.

“Did you hear,” Deb asked, “the latest about the Strangler?” There was a murderer abroad around the river and the bay, who killed whole families, more by stabbing and shooting than by strangling them, but he always left bruises around their necks. “He strangles you,” Deb and Calvin had told each other while Jemma tried not to listen, “after you’re dead!” He’d been killing all summer.

“Was there something in the paper?” Calvin asked, sitting forward into the space between the front seats.

“Nothing. Not a word. That’s the latest — nothing. How many days is that without a word?”

“Twenty-nine,” said Calvin.

“I think he’s moved,” said Deb.

“I hope so,” said Jemma. She’d had nightmares about him and his big white hands, as big and white as the hands of Mickey Mouse, soft but strong and deadly.

“I bet he’s gone on to Buffalo,” Deb said with a sigh. “Or down south, to another bay. Down to Tampa.”

“Or San Francisco,” Jemma said. “That’s a bay.”

“Oh I bet he’d like it there. He’s probably one of those.”

“Those what?” asked Calvin.

“Nothing.”

“Those what?” Calvin asked again. He’d already showed Deb how angry he could get if he thought an adult was hiding something from him.

“Forty-niners,” Deb said. “Gold-diggers. There’s gold out there, you know.”

“Cape Cod,” Jemma said. “Boston. Honolulu. They’re all on bays.”

“Anyway, he moved on. To Buffalo, you wait and see.”

“Do they need killers there?” Calvin asked.

“No more than anyplace else,” said Deb, and started to talk about the weather again, and how it gave her trouble with her emphysema, and made her awful phlegmy. Jemma scooted down in her seat, curling her knees up and falling to the side, so her cheek rested against the peeling leather seat, and she could see out the rear window. The familiar procession of objects — the tall trees alongside the long road out of the forest; the telephone wires strung alongside General’s Highway; the aerials on the houses just outside of town — passed more quickly than usual. Mary Ann sped along faster than ever before. As they went faster, Jemma felt calmer. She reached a hand up to the open window and spread her fingers against the rushing air, listening to her brother and Deb talk of murder and baseball and the heat.

“Let me drop you off in the courtyard today,” Deb said as they turned at the statehouse and passed down School Street.

“No thanks,” said Calvin.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll honk the horn and you can wave to all the kids. They’ll all die of jealousy. They’ll just all drop down dead.”

“The usual place will be fine,” Calvin said.

“One day I’m going to drive you right into the lobby,” Deb said, and laughed so hard she started coughing, and pulled over a half a block from the tree where she usually let them out, so she could double over the wheel and hack and hack. Jemma stood on her seat and peered over the armrest, but Deb waved her out, gasping “I’m fine!” Calvin helped Jemma out of the cab, and held her hand till they were a block from school. Deb drove by just as they were passing through the iron gate. She honked and waved and cackled, drawing stares from every other child in the yard, but Jemma and her brother kept their heads down and their eyes on the ground.

Sister Gertrude liked to talk about sin, especially on a hot day. For two weeks in their fourth-period religion class they had been learning about Hell, who lived in what level, and the particulars of their suffering. Today there would be a test, after a last-minute review. She’d drawn the familiar triangle on the board — the gentler upper regions of Hell being more exclusive than the lower regions because, as Sister Gertrude said, more people sin worse. It looked to Jemma just like the food pyramid, and she had confused the two in daydreams, so she almost answered once that fruits and grains were punished in the frozen bottom of Hell.

Sister Gertrude stood behind her desk, obscuring the top of the pyramid with her wimpled head. She scanned the quiet, dark room — she liked to draw the curtains and turn down the lights during fourth period, because she thought the darkness facilitated profitable spiritual reflection — and suddenly pointed at Martin Marty, two desks to Jemma’s left. “You, Martin,” she said. “A candy-fresser drives his scooter of a cliff because he is too busy unwrapping his taffy to watch where he is going. Where does he go?”

“To the second circle,” he said immediately. “Where all gluttons are punished.” Jemma had known that one, and wished she’d been asked.

“Very good,” said Sister Gertrude. She passed by Martin’s desk and deposited a cherry cough drop on it. She was always eating them, and did not consider them candy, though they had only the faintest hint of menthol in them, and they were the most pleasant reward she gave. “Rachel,” she said, “Another candy-fresser is denied her nasty gratification by her wise mother, who will not buy her the pound of chocolate she desires. The girl holds her breath in the middle of the supermarket checkout aisle, thinking to force her mother, but the wise lady ignores her stupid show. The angry, sullen creature holds her breath longer than ever before, even after she passes out, and she suffocates herself. Where will she find herself next?”

“Oh, that’s a hard one,” Rachel said, from three seats behind Jemma. “It wasn’t a suicide, was it? She didn’t mean to die. She’s doing some gluttony, isn’t she, but she’s angry, too, and the angriness is worse than the gluttoniness, so she should go to the place that hurts more. That’s, um, number five?”

“Excellent,” said Sister Gertrude. “Excellently reasoned.” She swept by the desk, depositing two cough drops. “Donald Peerman, how will she be punished there?”

“Oh, something really bad. Poked with hot pokers, right?”

“Wrong, it is a wet punishment, not a dry. Petra Forsyth?” Jemma’s attention started to drift as Sister Gertrude’s calls fell farther and farther away from her desk, and she thought not of hell, but of her sleeping mother — she wondered what she was dreaming about. She let her eyes fall almost closed so she could imagine it better. Her mother was dreaming of flying, just like Jemma did. Probably it was an ordinary dream, she was walking home up the hill, or walking down the street in town, when suddenly she realized that there was a much better way to get around, and took to the air, not in a leap like Superman, but in strokes, like she was swimming, pulling and kicking herself a little further up into the air with every stroke. Jemma followed her all over town. She was doing laps around the statehouse when Sister Gertrude called on her.

“Miss Claflin!” she said, rising up suddenly in front of her desk and leaning over so the delicate crucifix she wore on an extra-long chain swung at Jemma’s eye. “Please tell me where daydreamers are punished.”

“Oh,” Jemma said, fidgeting in her chair and thinking furiously, flying through the pyramidal Hell in a rapid sweep, looking around her desperately for the easily distracted girls with half-lidded eyes. “Not in the first circle, or the second. Um, not in number three, or number four, that’s for greedy people. Not in number five, where the angry people get wet, like you said. Uh, it must be lower. Boy, I wish it was higher, but it must be lower. Is it between five and six?”

“Is it? Is it? I thought you would know, being a practiced artist of the daydream. Do not try to distract us with answers to questions I have not asked, Miss Claflin. If you are ignorant then proclaim your ignorance. We have not, in fact, discussed the fate of incorrigible daydreamers, who waste their lives in idle speculation. It is a kind of sloth, but not punished with the worst kinds of sloth. Daydreamers remediate in Purgatory. That’s where you’ll go. Can’t you just see the newspaper article, children? Miss Jemma Claflin was hit by a bus this afternoon as she walked along, daydreaming of the loveliness of creampuffs. Stern angels escorted her immediately to Purgatory, where she will spend three quarters of eternity peeling and sewing the skin onto the same banana, and trying to organize her thoughts.”

“How long is three-quarters of eternity?” asked Rachel.

“Just as long as it sounds. Enough of review, though. Almost everyone is ready. Books away, pencils out!” Sister Gertrude erased the board with a damp sponge, eschewing the dry eraser so no trace of the pyramid would be left to tempt and assist incipient cheaters.

The test wasn’t so terrible. It was the usual format, matching, multiple choice, and fill in the blank. With a ruler Jemma carefully drew lines between sins in the left column and the appropriate place in Hell in the right column, eating five pounds of gummy bears connected with circle number three, not sharing your snack with somebody who forgot theirs connected to number four, and saying your prayers wrong connected with number six. She had no trouble with any of the multiple choice questions except the last one: Lying children are punished a) with hot licorice whips b) by being turned into snakes c) by having their tongues split every morning with a rusty knife d) tickling and boiling. No one was tickled in Hell, everybody knew that. Only gluttons were punished with food. She knew the right answer involved a forked tongue, but snakes had forked tongues, so b and c both seemed like the right answer to her. She stared and stared at the paper, waiting for one or the other to seem more right. In the end she chose b.

The last question was the hardest one. It was sort of a trick; Jemma didn’t like it. Bullies are punished in the seventh circle for _____ and _____ and ______. Jemma ran through all sorts of combinations in her head: a thousand years, then another thousand, then five hundred? She raised her hand and asked Sister Gertrude if there was a mistake with the question. She only shook her head. Five and five and five thousand years, she wondered. It was for always, but how to divide that up into three? Was this a religion test or a math test? Time was almost up when she finally got it. The tests were being handed toward the front as she scribbled in her answer, forever and forever and forever.

Jemma and her brother took a long detour on their way down to the beach. Their mother was awake and active when they got home. She’d blown up a pair of inner tubes for them to take down to the river, and was in the middle of preparations for dinner. She told them not to come home for at least two hours, because the cooking would require her absolute attention, and might be dangerous to little bystanders.

They rolled their tubes down the hill, but turned right instead of left at the Nottinghams, and went down a half mile into the woods beyond the fifth hole, wedging the tubes along the way in the branches of a live oak tree. There was a path that led down to a clearing and a pond, and the railroad tracks, which ran along the eastern border of the forest, but never crossed any road. Teenagers went down to the pond, sometimes, to drink or smoke or swim without their pants, younger kids almost never went down there. Lately, though, the teenagers had fled, driven away by the memory of friends, replaced by younger kids looking for gruesome mementos. Two boys had died down there early in the summer, Andy Nyman and Chris Dodd. They’d laid down in the train tracks to let the train pass over them. They were both quite tall, with big strong chins, and there was speculation that their noble chins were what had done them in, or that they’d lifted them too proudly. The cowcatcher caught Andy under the chin and took his head clean off, throwing it hundreds of yards into the bushes. Chris lost his head, eventually, but not as cleanly as his friend — his body was lifted and dropped again before the train, then crushed and mangled by the many wheels. Many parts of him had not ever been found, a couple toes, an eyeball, and the whole left hand. It was mostly for the hand that the children searched, because a rumor had grown up that it could, if ever found, grant wishes like the fabled monkey’s paw, five or less, as many as the number of fingers still attached.

David Tracy and Johnny Cobb, two of Calvin’s friends, were already there, and already looking. “If you find it,” Calvin told Jemma, “don’t touch it. Just come and get me.” He handed her a stick with which to poke in the bushes, and ran off to go greet his friends with punches to the stomach and shoulder. Jemma began to wander around, in and out of the clearing in little loops, beating the bushes with her stick, and calling out to the hand like to a kitty. She wasn’t dressed for bushwacking: she wore a pair of bright-yellow terry-cloth overalls over her bathing suit. It was getting to be the hottest part of the day. She undid the bib of her overalls to let it flop down over her belly, but felt no cooler.

She took longer and longer loops out of the clearing. Calvin and the other boys weren’t doing much looking. They were sitting on a mossy log that stuck out of the pond, passing a cigarette back and forth. Jemma called to the hand again, and this time thought she heard a stirring among the leaves and twigs on the ground. She walked in the direction of the noise, passing another split oak and some holly bushes, and coming in a few hundred feet to another clear space, littered with magazines and bottles. Someone had built a fire there, a long time ago. Jemma poked her foot in the ashes, uncovering a half-burnt latex glove, but no hand. She picked up some bottles and threw them against a tree. None of them broke.

A flash of yellow caught her eyes, a little bit beyond the little clearing. She thought it was a bird, and so went very quietly, thinking she could catch it in her hands, then run back to her brother, saying, I found a finger! When he peered over her closed hands she’d open them, releasing the bird right into his face.

But it was a twinkie. Someone had impaled it on a hawthorn bush, still wrapped up. Jemma wondered, just for a moment, if this could possibly be a twinkie tree just beginning to bloom, and considered running for her brother to tell him, but the other wrappers scattered on the ground, and an empty box she found half buried under the bush, spoke against that lovely possibility. She knew what had happened: someone had glutted themselves on soft golden cake, and played with their food when they could eat no more of it, instead of making the effort to bring it to somebody who needed it, or at least giving it a proper burial. It still looked quite fresh inside the wrapper, except where it was pierced by the thorn, where there was a little circle of green rot. She leaned close, and sniffed it, and saw how one edge of the plastic had been gnawed at unsuccessfully by some little animal. She pinched it and discovered how it was still very soft. It couldn’t have been there very long.

She went back to the big clearing, kicking an almost empty can of shortening in front of her. She kicked it toward the pond, and it would have gone in if Johnny, demonstrating an extra sense for kickable objects, jumped backward off the log, turned around, and sent it flying over Jemma’s head back toward the trees.

“What have you been eating?” her brother asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“There’s stuff on your face.”

“Oh. I had a cookie, from before.” He put his hand out at her. “I ate it all.” The boys searched her, patting all her pockets, David extracting and inspecting her little vinyl change purse, then returning it. “Told you,” she said. “I didn’t find the hand.”

“Us neither,” said Calvin. He lit up another cigarette and passed it around. Johnny could blow smoke rings. Jemma asked for a puff.

“Okay,” said Calvin, “but only pretend.” He held the filter an inch or so from her lips. Jemma pursed her lips and sucked in air, and held it in as long as she could, then stuck out her bottom lip and blew out straight up, hard enough to lift her bangs. It made her cough, and the boys laughed at her.

“Let’s go swim,” she said to her brother.

“My brother says they came down here to kiss,” said David, “and to dress up like girls to dance and have pillow fights, and talk about baking cookies.”

“And they put on makeup and played field hockey,” said Johnny.

“And they felt so bad about kissing that they laid down under the train. It was totally on purpose.”

“I wish we could find that hand,” said Calvin. “I’ve got some wishes.”

“I wish we could go swimming,” said Jemma.

“Go ahead,” said her brother. “You know the way.” Jemma looked over her shoulder into the warm shade beneath the trees.

“Come on,” she said.

“We’ve got more smoking to do. Go ahead. If you find the hand, don’t touch it and don’t make any wishes. Come right back here right away.” She stared at him a little while longer, but he just puffed on the cigarette and looked at the sky. She walked away, looking back a few times before they were out of sight. He was never looking at her. The path was clear all the way up, it had been trampled true by three generations of teenagers. Jemma found her tube and rolled it up the hill like a stone, going very slowly, hoping Calvin would catch up with her.

She had an imaginary brother that she could force to accompany her when the real one would not. He went with her now, leading or following, all he asked was that she not look directly at him. If he was following she could hear him stepping behind her, crushing leaves or sliding on loose dirt, and when he went ahead of her his shadow flashed across the shiny leaves of holly bushes along the path as they passed through breaks in the canopy of leaves. He called back to her that it was very hot, and she agreed.

The beach was crowded, full of adults and kids on the sand and everywhere in the water, some standing in it up to their necks, some just to their chests, and some just getting their feet wet. Tiffany Cropp almost ran into her as Jemma rolled her tube down toward the water, passing by with her sister, a very fancy float suspended between them — it was a little island with an inflatable palm tree growing out of one side. Jemma tested the water with her foot before walking in. It was warmer than she had hoped it would be.

Kids swarmed to the tube like tadpoles toward a lump of bread, all of them clinging with their hands and arms, so they all faced each other over the hole, and Jemma had no room to sit. Jemma didn’t mind, though she didn’t join in their chatter. Jemma drifted, and watched her imaginary brother playing in the water, just from the corner of her eye. He sported like a dolphin or a whale, leaping in somersaults, or in high arcs that landed him on his back, and she got a glimpse of his foot, or of his hand, as he fell back in the water.

She realized she was daydreaming, and remembered what Sister Gertrude had said to her. She let go of the tube and stood in the water, submerged to her neck, thinking of the punishment she would get after she died, and then realizing she was daydreaming about that. She tried not to think about it, but found that she could not, and tried not to picture it, to consider the lesson but not the entertainment, but couldn’t do that either. She tried to focus just on the water against her neck and the wind blowing gently against her face, but Purgatory was unfolding in her mind, a gray wasteland peopled with dreamy sinners and little monkeys on tricycles with sidecars full of bananas. She began to cry.

Someone splashed water at the back of her head. She turned around and saw her brother. “What’s the matter, Bubba?” he asked her. She told him she was going to Purgatory for almost ever, and that there was nothing she could do to stop it. He frowned, then scowled, then slapped the water with his hand. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Only somebody stupid would listen to that crap. What does she know? She doesn’t know anything, or whatever she does know is all wrong.” Jemma protested that Sister Gertrude knew quite a lot, that she knew more about Hell than anybody Jemma had ever met.

“Why are you defending her?” Calvin asked. “Oh, come on, I’ll show you how wrong she’s got it.” He took her by the arm and pulled her after him out of the water. They knelt in the middle of the wet sand and he started to draw with his fingers. “I’ll show you,” he said. He drew another pyramid, this one with the pointy side down. “Okay, here it is. What is it?”

“Hell,” Jemma said in a very small voice.

“Right. Okay, level one. Who’s there?”

“Virtuous pagans,” Jemma said automatically.

“Wrong,” said Calvin. He drew a line a few inches form the base of the pyramid and wrote over it, harmless nuns. “See? How about level two?”

“People who kiss too much.”

“Not people,” he said. “Nuns.” He wrote it down: Kissy nuns. “On we go — level three.”

“The gluttons,” Jemma said.

“Close,” he said. Fat nuns. He took her down through every level, describing torments as they went; angry nuns, blabby nuns, ugly nuns, stupid nuns, creepy nuns, cruel nuns, beating nuns, thieving nuns, lying nuns, treacherous nuns, and finally Sister Gertrude cramped up in the tip of the inverted pyramid. “At the very bottom,” he said, “in her very own level where nobody lives but her. Do you know why?”

“No,” Jemma said, still sniffling, and somewhat ambivalent about the nuns burning and clawing their flesh in her imagination, feeling sorry for them but knowing too that their punishment was just, and didn’t Sister Gertrude herself say it went against God’s will to pity those he’d set aside for deserving punishment?

“Because she’s a dumb-ass, ass-licking, shit-eating, motherfucking, dog-fucking, lizard-fucking bitch. There’s only one of those and she lives right here.” He pounded his fist over Sister Gertrude’s chamber. Jemma’s mouth had fallen open at the incredible stream of bad language that had come out of his mouth. She was shocked, but delighted, too, to hear the forbidden words. Her heart raced and she drew in a breath, deeper and deeper, gasping, and then she laughed. Calvin was smiling but not laughing, driving his fist into Hell, grinding all the nuns deeper into their punishment. “Just wait,” he said. “Just fucking wait.”

Dinner was not much fun. Jemma’s twinkie was sullen in her belly; she wished she had not eaten it. It made her mother angry how little she ate. Her father was angry, too. He usually was, on the days their mother woke up late, though he was quite solicitous when she was sleeping, never screaming at her to get out of bed, and directing Calvin and Jemma to take care of her when they got home from school. But that night he found fault with the way the napkins were folded, and the fluffiness of the soufflé (it was too fluffy — fluffy like a cat, is what he said); and the meticulously constructed rib roast complete with immaculate little socks on every bone, he compared to a very fancy shoe. Jemma and Calvin left the table early and had dessert in Calvin’s room, watching television.

They watched a documentary about blood and a half hour special on the Severna Strangler, in which a shrill lady stood in front of the various houses of his victims while pictures of the murdered parents and children popped up around her in the air, and proclaimed the horror of what he’d done. She only stood in from of the houses in the dark, and the bright camera lights made her face shine as golden and unnatural as a twinkie. Jemma’s stomach still hurt. She let Calvin eat her sorbet.

“Moron,” Calvin said to the television, because the lady had proclaimed, like Deb, that the Strangler had moved on. “You’re just going to make him mad, saying that. You think he’s not watching? Now he’ll kill again tonight, and it’ll be your fault.” He turned to Jemma and said, “He’s going to do it tonight.”

“Shut up,” she said.

“Tonight. You better sleep in my room.” Jemma changed the channel, and found another documentary, this one about Mark Twain’s dog. “That dog better look out,” Calvin said shortly. “He’ll get him, too.”

“He’s in the TV,” Jemma said.

“You think that’ll stop him? You think his hands can’t pass right through the TV? They’re magic, killing hands. And thanks to that stupid lady, he’s coming for us tonight.”

“Please stop saying that.”

“Can’t help it, can I, if it’s true?”

“Stop it!” Jemma screamed.

“I’ll be ready, though,” he said. Jemma got up and ran downstairs to get their father. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs just in time to see her mother fling a dish at her father’s head. He was sitting on the couch, sipping at his drink. He ducked casually, leaning over to the side. The dish flew over the couch and shattered against a piano leg.

“Go on,” her father said calmly. “Throw another dish. That will solve everything. That’s your problem, really, the dishes.”

“Cocksucker!” her mother shouted. Her father put down his drink and lit a cigarette.

“Yes, yes. I’m a cocksucker all right. A great big cocksucker. That’s what I’m doing all day and half the night, sucking cock in the OR.” Jemma ran back upstairs and went to her room. It was almost as loud, there, and she could hear every word they said, even her father’s quiet responses. She would have stayed, though, if it weren’t for the thought of the Strangler at the window. She went back to Calvin’s room.

“They’re fighting,” she said.

“I can hear,” he said. He’d turned off the TV and was reading in his bed. “They’ll stop.” He folded his book across his chest and opened the covers. She climbed in, and they listened to the shouts and occasional crashes. Sometimes they heard nothing, and sometimes just a single word. Their father was getting louder and louder, but their mother was loudest of all, and her voice, shrieking higher and higher, finally carried to the room as clear as if she was standing right in front of them.

Calvin moved his hands above the covers, lifting them high when his mother shouted, and low when they heard their father’s voice. “I’m conducting them,” he said. “I can make them do anything I want.”

“Shut up,” Jemma said quietly.

“Really,” he said. “And I started the fight, anyway. It was easy. I just told her I heard him talking to some nurse on the phone. They were making a date for dinner.”

“Shut up,” she said. “It’s not funny.”

“Not at all,” he agreed. “But it was so easy. I saw it in my imagination, and then I made it happen. If they hate each other enough, then it will lift me up. I’ll ride their misery right through Heaven.”

“You’re crazy,” Jemma said.

“I am going,” he said. “Don’t hold on too tight.”

“I’m coming too.”

“You don’t want to. It’s not going to be easy, you know. And the ride will be rough. A fountain of blood, and murder is the rocket’s tail.” He was quiet a moment, and then he shouted, “Hit her with a brick!”

“That’s disgusting.”

“What do you know?” he said, but he hugged her. “Blood calls to blood. If they spill blood, then the strangler will smell it, and come to us. He is coming, and I am going. Do you understand?”

“Shut up.”

“It’s not me, it’s them, calling him. Tell them to shut up.” So she shouted it at the door, not loud enough for them to hear over their own shouting all the way downstairs. But not long after that, they quieted.

“Tell me he’s not going to come,” Jemma said.

“I cannot tell a lie,” Calvin said, and turned on his side. She put her head on his back, using it as a pillow, but not sleeping, though she drifted, and almost fell asleep. For a few brief seconds she rode through the air above Hell in a monkey’s tricycle sidecar, throwing bananas down at the suffering nuns. Calvin sat up suddenly. “He’s here,” said. “Did you hear that?”

“No,” Jemma said.

“I heard his hand against the house.” He got out of the bed, slowly and quietly, and picked up his two biggest lacrosse trophies from his dresser. “Don’t scream until I start hitting him,” he said, and went to stand by the window.

“Okay,” Jemma whispered. She could barely hear herself. She sat up against the headboard, ready to scream, not sure if she could be anymore terrified as she waited and waited, until, impatient for the thing to finally happen, though she did not want it to happen, she imagined it. The Strangler would lift the window and come in one pale, fat hand at a time. She saw Calvin strike him once and twice, with either hand, right in the head, and saw him fall down to the carpet. Then she started screaming, as loud as she could, summoning her parents, who arrived almost instantly, dressed in pajamas and heavy boots, which they turned against the murderer, kicking him in the back and the chest and the head, while Calvin struck him, one-two, one-two, with his bloody trophies. And when he was as good and dead they would wave for Jemma to come to them, and she’d climb out of bed and walk over, and put one bare little foot upon his neck. “Calvin,” she whispered, her eyes shut tight now. “Tell him to hurry up.”