Come Little Children (19 page)

“Because sometimes,” he said, “a cure can do more damage than the sickness. The rules, remember? Only—”

“Children. I know.” She adjusted herself on the bench. The flashback was still swimming around her head, but at least she could focus now. “Why?”

“They come back the way they were before.”

“Whereas adults?”

“Can come back worse. This is dangerous, all right. It’s a risk every time. Todd’s young enough he should be fine, and thank God it was an accident, but it’s still a risk.”

That doesn’t answer my question
. “A risk of what? Side effects?”

“You could say that.” Peter shifted Camilla’s arm. “It can start as paranoia and turn into anxiety. Think, like…an addiction. Eventually grandma’s odd snack became the only thing she would eat. It was so bad we had to pin her to the floor and pour broth down her throat so she wouldn’t starve in the winter.”

“Because of the fruit?” Camilla’s eyes were wide again. “What about the seeds? Who discovered their effects?”

“That was the generation before. Five of grandma’s cousins were sent away in the war and shipped home in body bags—two from Normandy and the rest from Bastogne. As you can imagine, my Great-Uncle Warren was devastated. By the time the fifth casket rolled up to the house, he must have snapped.”

Snapped…?

Peter read the confusion on her face. “He started experimenting in the basement. The way my dad explained it, our family always knew something was wrong with the tree. And not just the way the fruit made you feel either—I mean, back then everyone ate it—but they’d dream about it too. Warren must’ve had a hunch, or maybe a dream of his own, to start messing around. There were a lot of fights, but no one stopped him. Instead, they all just turned a blind eye every time he went out picking apples or digging holes or bringing back road kill. Half the family must’ve felt sorry for him, the other half probably thought he’d lost every marble in his head.”

Peter lowered his voice. “Then he did it. Sort of. The sons came back, but they…Well, they weren’t the same. And not just
bad to look at either. They were bad to be around. They had to be taken out.” He paused. “It’s safe in certain conditions—for children, mostly, and if anyone deserves a second chance, it’s them—but it’s something the rest of the world can’t handle. That’s why the rules were set.”

The snap of a metal clasp made Camilla jump. It was followed by the
whoosh
of the kitchen window and Moira sticking her head out directly above them. “Dinner in ten.”

Camilla checked Peter’s watch. It was half past seven, and the sun was beginning to set.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You haven’t eaten anything all day. Come now,” Moira insisted.

“Go ahead,” Camilla whispered to Peter. “I’m good.”

“We’re good, mom.”

“Suit yourselves.” Moira sniffed, adding, “I used to sit there all night too, you know, waiting to let them in. Then I realized to hell with it; I brought them all the way back from the dead, the least they can do is take ten more steps and ring my bloody doorbell.”

Moira’s head sucked back inside the house, and the window slammed shut. It was just Peter and Camilla again, alone with Mother Nature and her thunderstorm.

Peter put his arm around Camilla and curled her in farther from the wind; she lifted her legs up on the bench and rested her ear against his shoulder. A thousand other questions were spinning through her head, but they would have to wait for later. At the moment, this quiet embrace was infinitely more important.

The two of them stayed that way for over an hour, watching the sky drench the courtyard until the weight of the whole day and the hypnotic sounds of wind and raindrops pulled Camilla’s
eyelids together and brought her rest. How many hours passed then, she didn’t know. Dreamless, she slept a pitch-black sleep, the sounds of the constant rain and thunder steady rhythms with her dosing heartbeat.

No images of children.

No images of corpses.

No images of her mother in the Avalon Park stateroom. Just black, soundless sleep.

And later that night it wasn’t a flash of lightning that woke Camilla—nor the boom of the thunder, nor Peter stirring at her shoulder.

It was the familiar sound of soft, swishing pond water.

14

Burning Up

T
he first ring was followed immediately by a second, then the speaker clicked straight to voice mail: “You have reached the Avalon Park Center for Psychiatric Care. Our reception hours are between nine a.m. and four thirty p.m. Monday through Thursday, and ten a.m. to three p.m. Friday and Saturday. If you wish to leave your name and number, we will return your call as soon as—”

Camilla hurried to nudge the phone out from under her chin. Her hands were covered in something blue and sticky—her elbows were blue too, as well as a loose streak of pinned-up hair—and the gooey substance continued sloshing over the edge of the mixer as she raced across the kitchen for the telephone cradle by the far door.

Both the phone and the oven timer bleeped as she wrestled the handset onto the hook.
Great, another one-second message. Makes me seem nervous
.

“Camilla? You in there?” Peter came into the kitchen, dressed in a warm autumn peacoat. He passed through the doorframe and froze point-blank at the sight of the room. “Jesus,” his lips wobbled.

The cupboards (all of them) were hanging wide open, and a mountain of Pampered Chef measuring cups had avalanched across the glossy sheen of the Swiffer-clean kitchen tiles. The counters were covered in a sticky afterbirth of egg whites, water, and flour—
so much flour
—from whence two sets of powdery paw prints wove a trail straight to the pink, sandpaper tongues of Prim and Proper, happily licking spilled milk off the floor and purring louder than the Indy 500 starting line.

Camilla had gone to fill up the sink but was now standing, stone-still, with her eyes on the enormous tree in the backyard. She was completely zoned out, and not for the first time that morning.

Peter placed a hand on her shoulder and immediately removed it, massaging a glob of sticky blue icing between his fingertips. “Umm…” he whispered. “Hi. How you doing?”

“Oh,” she said, her trance breaking. “Good. I’m baking.”

“I can see that. And smell it.”

Camilla sniffed—suddenly her eyes popped. She seized an oven mitt from the island and gripped the handle of the stove, yanking it open to unleash a billow of thick, tarry smoke into the room. She batted one arm frantically in front of her face and stuck the other inside the maw of the Kenmore dragon, bringing out a pan of what looked like volcanic rock.

“No-ho-ho-ho,” she whimpered and stuck her bottom lip a mile out.

Peter shook his head. “Isn’t baking—”

“Shh,” she hushed, signaling him to keep his voice down.

“Sorry,” he whispered back, “but isn’t baking supposed to be like chemistry? And aren’t you supposed to be good at science?”

“That’s—no.” Camilla frowned, annoyed that her chemistry background was suddenly par with a housewife’s kitchen skills. “The only periodic table a stay-at-home mom knows about is the one she sets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

“That’s sexist.”

“Please.”

Peter walked around the island—Prim and Proper barely fidgeting as he grazed by—and dipped his pinky into the icing. “But seriously,” he said, licking his finger, “what’s going on? And why are we whispering?”

“Do
you
want your mom to walk in right now?”

“Point taken.”

“Anyway,” she said as she glanced down at the charred cake, “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d make something for Todd and bring it over this afternoon.”

“You mean…” Peter scanned the counters: the icing and the eggshells, the milk and the flour, the sprinkles and the candles. He threw his head back and let out a laugh that filled the room.

“Shh!”

“You were baking him a…a what? A welcome-back-to-life cake?”

“Is there something wrong with that?” She planted a fist on her hip. “He’s got double the birthdays now. And I mean, what’s a birthday without a cake?” Then, off Peter’s look, “OK, smart-ass. What would you get him?”

“I don’t know…nothing? A case of beer?”

“Nothing it is,” Camilla said. She stomped the pedal of the garbage can and dumped her brick of chocolate and brimstone inside.

“Good. Don’t want to kill the poor guy twice.”

She frowned again.
Why do I have a bad feeling this is just the start of the murder jokes?
She slid her pan into the sink and massaged the tired bags underneath her eyes. “How was he, by the way?”

“Glad to be home.”

“And alive, I assume?”

Peter shrugged. “They usually don’t know they checked out in the first place. I heard it’s like waking up from a good sleep.”

“And his parents?”

“Better than a lot I’ve seen. They cried, of course—that’s nothing new—but people calm down fairly quickly when they start thinking about the alternative. Same with Todd. And you know what, it turns out he’s not such a bad guy, so far as wedding crashers go. Seemed pretty nice, given the circumstances.”

If a child goes bad, it must be abolished
. The third rule flashed through Camilla’s head with the image of Todd’s face rising out of the pond. She saw his wet figure stumbling closer, coming at her for revenge with outstretched arms and dark, deep-set eyes, and she felt a sudden tightness take over her chest.

No! He didn’t come at me. He didn’t even remember who I was. Get a hold of yourself—

“Camilla? Everything OK?”

“Sorry.” She blinked back. Her eyes trailed to the clock on the oven and noticed that it was already seven a.m. As if on cue, a creak echoed from upstairs as the sound of footsteps thumped over the floorboards in somebody’s bedroom.
Shit
. She scrambled to flip off the tap water and frantically began piling dishes into the sink. Even as she attacked the abominable mess, something kept gnawing away at the back of her mind.

“What if…” she said, chewing over the thought as she rung out the muddy suds from an old S.O.S. pad, “what if things
do
go bad?”

“They won’t,” Peter assured her, just as he had all throughout the night.

“You’re sure he’s not…different?”

“Apart from the new scar, no. And so what if he can’t play skins or go shirtless at the lake now? He’s fine.”

Camilla breathed a sigh of relief. She spooned out a bowl of icing into the trash and wiped her nose on a clear patch of her shoulder. Only one question remained.

She spied the entrances to the kitchen and the window above the sink—all clear—and listened again for the noises up on the second floor. The creaking footsteps had been replaced by the steady gush of hot water hitting a shower drain.

“What did you tell them?”

“That he slipped on his way to the packaging room. I showed up a minute later because I didn’t want the
Sun
printing my brother’s wedding pictures. You weren’t there.”

Another sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

“That’s the truth now. Don’t worry about any other version.”

Camilla leaned in and kissed him.
I won’t. I won’t worry about any other version, and I won’t dwell on Todd anymore. If I never see him again, that’s probably best for the both of us
.

She rested her head on Peter’s chest and hugged him tightly. No one else in the world cared about her enough to shoulder such a great amount of suspicion and accept responsibility for something like this. He had trusted her with the family’s secret and taken on an enormous risk in covering her dirty tracks; he was a good man, and she was incredibly thankful to get to spend the rest of her life with him.

“I love you,” she said. It was the first time Camilla had said it to him—to any man—which was a little backward, seeing as the two of them were already engaged. The texture of the words
would take getting used to, and she hoped they didn’t sound as awkward to his ears as they did to hers.

“Love you too,” he said. They kissed, then his bottom lip curled into a pout of his own.

“What?”

“I don’t wanna do yard work. It’s gutter week.”

“Well I don’t feel like cleaning this kitchen. Tradesies?”

Above them, the sound of the second floor shower stopped.

“On second thought…” Peter backed toward the patio door. “I think I could use some fresh air. Good luck.”

“Beat it.” She batted him away, diving her hands into the soapy dishwater. “And P.S., don’t fall or break your neck out there. I swear I can’t see a loose shoelace, let alone a twenty-foot ladder, without sweating bullets today.”

Peter snickered, doing up his peacoat and jerking the door handle. “Perfect,” he shot back, “our kids won’t be able to leave their cribs until they’re eighteen.” He flashed a wink and ducked out onto the patio, throwing a wave over his shoulder while he skipped down the porch steps two at a time and took off into the yard.

The smile on Camilla’s face vanished.

She peeked through the curtains and placed a hand over the flat of her stomach, watching Peter head for the tool shed. The terrible sinking feeling had nestled back in its pitted place.

Just when all the cards felt like they’d finally been laid on the table, she remembered the one that was still hidden in her lap—still waiting to be played. Waiting to change the game.

15

St. Teresa’s

W
hile Laura and Lucas were away on their two-day honeymoon at the Dawson Inn (a romantic lovers’ retreat with running water and ten—yes, ten!—TV stations), Camilla was put in charge of holding down the reception desk. Laura had tidied it up before she left, making sure all the right forms were easily accessible and assembling the pens and staples and paperclips like well-prepared paratroopers in their slide-out compartments.

Camilla sat quietly in the heavy oak chair, staring at the front door, and literally twiddled her thumbs. She felt like she’d been double demoted, from embalmer to secretary to guard dog.
I’m a certified funeral tech, I shouldn’t be wasting my time taking phone messages
.