The Shells Of Chanticleer (2 page)

“You’re a chicken!” Colin laughed.

I remember standing in front of the fireplace staring up at Balthazar’s soft smooth neck from underneath, wondering what he thought of the noise and the smells and the crowd. From the stereo, a man was crooning
White Christmas
. I remember that song specifically because in the silence after it ended I distinctly heard my name being called from another room.

“Macy!”

I turned to see who wanted me but no one was there. I heard my name again.

“Macy!” I walked toward the dining room to see who was calling. High-pitched squeals of laughter rang throughout the house but no one seemed to be looking for me.

Seconds later I heard a loud industrial metal-scraping sound, and a high-pitched scream. A mighty thud followed, and still more screams. The conversations stopped and everyone turned toward the great room and gasped. That’s when I saw Balthazar lying face-up in the middle of the carpet, smack on the spot where I had just been standing. His mount had ripped from where it was screwed into the stone wall. Chunks of crumbled stone and a layer of dust covered Balthazar and the carpet beneath him.

My dad swore loudly and pushed through the astonished guests to get to his prized trophy. He knelt down and anxiously caressed the entire surface of the lifeless head, checking for dents or rips in the hide, but there was no damage. Balthazar had survived his ignoble fall.

I screamed louder than anyone when I saw Balthazar lying there. I also dropped my cup of nuts. My brothers thought it was the funniest thing in the world to see me scared. Will, who could be very evil, pulled me aside, but not to comfort me as a good brother might have. Instead, he looked me straight in the eye and whispered,

“He was coming down for you Macy. He’s been watching you ever since he got here. We both noticed it. He wants to eat you. Giraffes have four stomachs and he needs little humans to fill them up. Especially juicy girls.”

Not to be undone, Colin joined in,

“And once you end up in one stomach, he will burp you up to chew on you again. It’s no use. You escaped tonight, but he’ll never stop trying to get you.”

They both laughed hysterically, doubling over, turning red. I broke away and left them there to howl. I knew from books that giraffes only ate leaves; they especially liked acacia leaves. We had a hard time pronouncing that word. I wasn’t dumb. I remembered thinking,
I can see he doesn’t even have a stomach. He’s not going to eat me.

However, I did agree that Balthazar had been watching me. It unnerved me that my brothers had noticed it too. I left the party and hid upstairs in my room. I knew I’d be safe there. Balthazar had no legs and could not climb the stairs.

In the days following the party, my mom tried to soothe my frazzled nerves by telling me that Providence had called me away to safety, and that the voice I’d heard was my guardian angel. She made up a whole story about beautiful blond angels named Michael or Gabriel who stuck by my side everyday.

“They are with you all the time Macy, for your own good. Make sure to thank yours before you go to bed tonight.”

It was nice of her to try to make me feel safe, but it didn’t matter what she said. I couldn’t get over it.

Balthazar went back up over the fireplace with his supports double-reinforced. My dad screwed the mount securely into the studs himself. He hasn’t roamed an inch since that night but he might as well have. I refused to go back into the great room alone, ever, as long as he was up there. And, according to my dad, he was always going to be up there. So we were at a stalemate. Years later I still couldn’t laugh about it.

My fever hung in there the next morning and my parents went off for work, leaving me with specific instructions to take medicine every four hours and drink plenty of fluids. I was sure that I would be better by the end of the day. The fever was pesky, but no big deal.

I fell back to sleep in the quiet house. When I woke up around 11 am, the ticking clocks irritated me. I barely made it downstairs before my head started to spin and I had to lie down immediately. I was so weak that I actually plopped down in the great room with Balthazar. I grabbed the thermometer off of the side table and stuck it in my mouth. It beeped right away and I pulled it out. It read 103.8 degrees. That seemed high to me. Why was it going up instead of down?

I turned on the television. Cable news was running a show on child kidnappers and it made me nervous. Was the front door locked? I had chills and my legs felt fused to the sofa, too heavy to move, but I became obsessed with the idea of creepers driving their vans, prowling my street for open doors and easy victims.

I rolled onto the floor and crawled to the front door to make sure it was locked. I didn’t have the energy to spare, but you just couldn’t be too careful. Our school was always sending home police alerts warning of suspicious strangers stopping their cars, asking for directions. We were all under the strong impression that there were a lot of scary people in the world, and that you could never be too careful.

My friend Kelly insisted that kidnappers always drove ice cream trucks. More than once we had to cross the street and run in the opposite direction when we heard the magical ice cream truck coming to get us. Once I googled ‘ice cream truck kidnappers’ to get more details, but nothing came up. I told her I thought ice cream trucks were probably safe, but she insisted they weren’t.

As for our front door, yes, it was securely bolted, so I relaxed. Fatigued, I lowered my face onto the cold stone floor of the foyer, resting for a minute before I began the long drag back to the sofa. There were dust motes dancing in the daylight, falling like indoor snow. Mote was a funny word, one you never used any other way except as it applied to dust. Dust was so insignificant yet it had its own dedicated word.

The rays of sunlight shot through the windows like a spotlight and hit me lying on the floor. I thought that this, technically, qualified as sunbathing. I was lying down. The sun was hitting me. I chuckled. Who needs Florida? It was ironic. Or iconic. Laconic? One of those words. “The mouse is dry ice,” I said. The stone floor was too cold, so it was back to the sofa. My head spun, nothing made sense.

I hauled myself up, and as I did so my ankle knocked hard against the corner of the wall, and it hurt so much my eyes watered from the pain.

“Oh my gosh. Ouch!”

I peeled down my sock. There was a red lump of tender skin right above my ankle where the splinter went in and red lines traveling away from it up the length of my leg, as if a teacher had drawn all over it with a red marker. A dried smear of brown blood was faintly visible on my skin. My leg didn’t look good and I pulled my sock up to keep it safe.

I crawled back to the sofa and buried my head under the plaid blanket and prayed that Balthazar would not pick that moment to forge his long-awaited attack on me. But why shouldn’t he? I was at my weakest.
Munch, munch.
Would he bite through my bones or just toss them aside like we did with chicken?

If I lifted my head off the cushion I got dizzy, but if I put it down then my neck and shoulder were sore. It was hard to find a comfortable position. I tossed and turned and fell fast asleep. I didn’t take my medicine or drink any fluids and woke up in the middle of the afternoon with Will standing over me holding the phone.

“Dad wants to know what your temperature is,” he said. So I took it.

“104.2.”

Exhausted from that, I rolled my face onto the clammy leather of the cushions, trying to find a spot that wasn’t drenched in my sweat. I pulled the blanket over me because I was freezing, only to toss it off again the next second because I was burning hot.

“Tell him my neck is sore,” I mumbled, scrambling to put the covers back on, suddenly cold again. “Tell him I don’t feel right, and that I have red lines on my leg going all the way up.”

Half an hour later my dad burst into the house talking on his cell phone, issuing orders to my mom on the other end. “No, they said to take her right there. Just meet me in the ER.”

He scooped up my listless body and carried me out of the house, laying me down flat across the back seat of his idling SUV. He gently stuffed the blanket around me like a cocoon and then jumped in, quickly backing out of the driveway.

“Aren’t you going to buckle me?” I asked. “Click it or ticket,” I warned him.

He didn’t laugh. He just drove determinedly, taking the turns carefully, but then flooring the gas pedal. He went through red lights when there was no traffic.

When he carried me into the hospital I was surprised that I didn’t have to wait in the crowded waiting room; the nurse saw me right away. In the little curtained booth they peeled off my knee sock. The ER nurse looked at the red mass above my ankle and palpitated it with her fingers. I flinched at the pain. Temperature, blood draw, pulse. The top of my hand swabbed with a cold alcohol pad and a vein located and punctured with a sharp needle, the intravenous line inserted swiftly and taped securely, replacing the important fluids I had been too woozy to remember I needed.

When my mom arrived I could smell the cold air on her and I asked her if she thought I looked tan, and if she knew where my lunchbox was. She looked at me as if I had three heads and then I conked out for a while. I came to as they were discussing my case.

The ER doctor said, “She has a serious infection. Every hour counts with this and, unfortunately, the infection has a pretty good head start.”

“But she only had the stomach flu,” my dad argued.

“She may have had the stomach flu, but this is something else.” The young doctor handled the hard red infected spot on my leg with his capable hands. “Macy, do you know what happened here?”

“I got a splinter on Saturday, but then got sick and forgot to take it out. I didn’t know it looked like that.”

“Alright, bear with us; we will need to get that splinter out,” he said, disappearing behind the curtain. In a few minutes he was back, wheeling in a silver tray with sparkling scalpels neatly lined up. After swabbing my ankle with disinfectant, he took a long needle and stuck it right into the throbbing mass, shooting me up with anesthetic. I yelped at the pain. In a minute the area was numb and I didn’t feel the sharp tweezers snipping at my inflamed flesh, aiming for the errant wood bit.

“Ah, got it,” cried the doctor. He put the tweezers next to my face so I could see the tiny half-inch of wood outlined against the light. “I’m pretty sure that’s the whole thing,” he said. “It came out clean.”

Meanwhile, my dad didn’t stop interrogating the doctor. “How did this happen?” My dad felt guilty, at fault. He would never have let me get this sick if he had known. It was only a splinter, the doctor acknowledged, but there was no rhyme or reason why the infection took off. My immune system might have been a little suppressed because of the stomach bug. Or maybe not, he explained. Maybe it was just bad luck.

“So now that it’s out, she’s going to be fine,” Dad nodded, wishing it so.

“I wish I could say yes,” said the doctor, wrapping the gauze bandage with surgical tape.

Although the culprit had been removed the infection had taken hold and was raging through my system. Not every infection responded to antibiotics. We lived in the era of the superbug. An advanced infection could reduce my liver or kidney function and cause organ failure. They would be taking me up to the ICU to monitor my vital signs.

“The paperwork to admit her will be here in a minute,” the doctor said, as he stripped off his latex gloves and threw them in the red garbage receptacle before heading back to the main desk.

So I wasn’t going home. Must send out a warning that dangerous tree branches were sighted in the area, I mused, but at the same time I realized that warnings were pretty useless. I had been a careful girl. I looked both ways before crossing the street, suffered every vaccination on schedule, and kept my arms and legs inside the vehicle while the ride was still in motion. I wore my bike helmet, never ate underdone meat, and drank expensive hormone-free milk.

Yet despite my best efforts, I was in mortal danger. I was a modern Sleeping Beauty: spinning wheel, meet splinter. I felt powerless against the universe.
If it wanted to get you,
I thought,
it will.

To add to my annoyance, I had to change into a hideous, backless hospital gown. My temperature still blazing, I heard the doctors and the nurse discussing the best way to handle my discomfort. In the end they decided to dunk me in a lukewarm bath until the antibiotics kicked in.

“It will make you more comfortable,” the nurse promised.

Three nurses in scrubs helped me down from the examining table and into a wheelchair. I was rolled out of the ER and down the hall to a room where a bath was filled. The nurses lowered me in, instructing me to take a deep breath so I could momentarily put my face under and cool it off.

I took a deep breath and went under, letting the lukewarm water lap over me noiselessly. Then I lifted my head back up, keeping my eyelids squeezed tight until the nurse dabbed them dry with a cloth. After sweating so much, the nurses were right in saying the water would feel good.

It was odd being held down in a bathtub by grownups. It was revisionist and revitalizing at the same time. Yeah, it was. The nurses held me down gently but firmly, one nurse sitting behind me holding my head just above the waterline, but letting my hair float loose in the tub. The water soaked the thin hospital gown, rendering it embarrassingly transparent. I closed my eyes while the nurses spoke to me in a friendly, encouraging banter, but all I kept saying was that the mouse is dry ice.

“We know, sweetie,” they responded.

When they pulled me out, the cold air hit me hard and I shook uncontrollably. Actual teeth-chattering, knee-knocking spasms. The white ratty towels they used to dry me off were rough and needed fabric softener. They put a fresh gown on me but the ends of my hair were wet and rivulets of water trickled uncomfortably down my back. When they laid me back down on the bed, they pulled my wet hair up from underneath me and my wavy brown strands lay splayed out across my pillow in spiky tentacles. I thought I must look like Mr. Rochester’s crazed wife, the one who had leapt to her death in the fire. I couldn’t remember the name of the book that Jane Eyre was in. What was it called? Why couldn’t I remember it?
Oh wait, yeah, now I remember. A Splinter in Time
. A classic. Just like me.