Virulent: The Release (3 page)

Strangers liked to ask Maxine, in grocery lines or at restaurants, about the size of her family, usually to offer sainthood or astonishment disguised as praise. Maxine would smile and say, “After you’re outnumbered it doesn’t really matter how many kids you have. And I certainly don’t deserve an award for having a well-used uterus.” It was her oft-repeated line to strangers that made each kid groan with embarrassment not only because they never wanted to hear their mother say the word
uterus
, but also because they wished she would come up with a different joke.

But while Mama Maxine, as friends of the King kids affectionately called her, handled her six children with tough-love lectures, peppered with facetiousness, she was also the picture of equanimity. And love. Mama Maxine loved each child who entered her home as her own, prompting scores of Pacific Lake teenagers to declare an unyielding allegiance to the woman.

Lucy had handled the news of the nationwide dog crisis with panic. What had been deemed a “Targeted Dog Massacre” by local reporters, the televisions networks exacerbated the story even further, which catapulted the craziness to the Internet, which led to conspiracy theorists pontificating about doomsday scenarios. For dinner that night, her mother put a moratorium on discussion about the dead dogs—angrily shooting an evil eye at any child daring enough to mention the atrocities in front of Harper.

And when Lucy was caught texting and messaging Salem into the wee hours of the morning, comforting her weepy and inconsolable friend, Maxine made a surprise visit and threatened to confiscate the phone. Even through her agitation and worry, Lucy allowed her body to sleep and dream about lounging on white sandy beaches and working on her tan.

She awoke to the rambling of her mother’s to-do list as her mother stood by the foot of her bed, pulling her comforter off her body and exposing her skin to the cold house.

“I need your carry-on bag and your monogrammed tote in the hall in twenty minutes. Hair-brushed, breakfast eaten, schoolwork packed. Limo arrives in an hour to take us to the airport and I will not be delayed. Lucy Larkspur King, I swear to the Lord Almighty that I will leave you behind. Do you hear me? I let you sleep in beyond all reason. Now get your bony ass out of this bed and into gear. Come child. Chop, chop.”

Then she was off, her feet clomping down their carpeted hallway like a whole herd of mothers, off to rouse her next child with empty threats of abandonment.

Lucy rubbed sleep out of her eyes and swung her feet down to the floor. She leaned over and grabbed her phone—as per her morning ritual—checking for late-night missed texts from Salem, but there was nothing new from her friend.

But a second-glance at her feed made Lucy gasp. Tragedy abounded. The dogs, and now other beloved pets, were falling to some mysterious illness, and someone’s grandma had passed on during the night too while a few others complained of an impending flu. Several people linked to an article about the animal deaths and someone suggested contaminated drinking water was the cause. The feed was a veritable plethora of honest-to-God sadness and bandwagon melodramas.

She heard her mom walking back in her direction and Lucy darted out into the hallway, phone in-hand, and tripped over the line of luggage—set up like soldiers marching off to war.

“Mom,” Lucy said and brandished her phone like a weapon. “Have you heard about all of this? Now they say that someone poisoned our water. The water! Mom, someone thinks that people are going to die from this! Like…actual humans now? Mom! This is serious.”

Maxine put her hand on Lucy’s phone and pushed it down toward the floor. “I already talked to your dad. He says there’s nothing to worry about. If we needed to worry, he’d know Lucy.”

“He’s not here?” Lucy gripped her phone tighter. His absence made her anxious—her father was a masterful voice of reason, a beacon of calm. He
never
used profanity.

“He’s meeting us at the airport. Some meeting he couldn’t get out of.” Maxine made an attempt to scoot around Lucy, but she remained rooted, legs outstretched, hands across her chest. “Fifty-minutes Lucy. Fifty-minutes.”

“Mom,” Lucy repeated. She opened her mouth, then closed it. “Mom.” Then just, “I’m scared.”

For a brief second, she thought she saw her mother’s own fear flicker across her face, but then her mom smiled and leaned in, kissed her on the forehead, and moved her out of the way. “Look, maybe some sicko poisoned all the pets. And I hope they catch him, or her, and throw them into the far reaches of hell...but when it comes to disasters, I trust your father. By the time we land in paradise, we won’t be thinking about any of this fear mongering. I haven’t had a vacation in six years...six years! So. Get.” She swatted her hand against Lucy’s backside and with a nod took off grabbing one suitcase with her.

Lucy watched her mom walk out of sight and then ducked back into her room and shut the door; she dialed her father’s phone without thinking. She needed to talk to him, needed to hear the reassurance herself. It rang and rang before her dad finally picked up.

“Morning sweetie,” her dad said as he picked up the phone. Before Harper arrived, Lucy was the only girl in a house of smelly, fighting, dirt-loving boys. Her father doted on her, but he never called her princess, never made her feel like she was special just because she was a girl; he always said awkward things like, “Hey, darling, I just wanted to let you know that I’m so proud of you for your eighty-six percent in math class. You’re trying so hard.” It was like he read a chapter in a parenting book about raising strong, self-confident daughters and followed it to the letter. It would have been more helpful if he had read a book on how to deal with painfully self-aware and awkward daughters with moderate ambitions.

“Dad? Have you seen the news? Mom is all on some Seychelles-inspired happy-juice, but Dad…Dad. This is ridiculous. Are we actually just going to pretend that this isn’t happening? Did someone poison the dogs, Dad?” She took a breath.

“Lucy—”

“Does that mean that
someone
poisoned all the animals?”

“Please, Lucy—”

“It’s a
big
deal, Dad. And why aren’t we talking about it? And why did you have to work today? Didn’t your job give you this vacation as a
reward
? Can’t they let you actually have the day your vacation starts off from work?” She flopped herself back down on the edge of her bed and bounced her knee in agitation.

“It’s okay to be worried, sweetheart,” her father’s calm voice said back to her. “I think the news is worrisome. But
you
are not in danger. I am giving you my word. And, as an added bonus, reason number fifty-two why I’m glad we don’t have pets.” He chuckled, but then trailed-off. “Darling, I’m sorry. But I don’t know what you want me to do. You have a limo to the airport in a bit. Focus on that for me.”

“Can’t a poison that hurts animals also hurt people?”

Lucy’s dad drew in a quick breath and then let out a sigh. “Yes. It’s very possible.”

“Then how can you say—”

“My sweet girl,” her father was quiet for a beat. “I don’t know anything that could help you here and I have to go. I do. I have a plane to catch too. Okay? See you at the airport. Vacation of a lifetime. Right?”

She grumbled into the phone a defeated growl. “Fine. The rest of the world will be in shambles,” she glanced down again at her phone and scrolled through some new articles, “with some new strain of flu virus? The news is saying that...Dad?” There was no answer.

Then he said, “Lucy. Make sure you get in the limo so you don’t miss the plane. Go help your mom with the little ones. Turn your phone off. Start daydreaming of scuba diving. I’m hanging up. I love you.”

Lucy waited for a long moment to see if he had really hung up—but she heard the distinct click and saw the flash of their call time. He was not a dad well suited for her panic and worry; Lucy knew that if there was reason to worry, her father would tell her in calm, well-managed tones. She pushed the fear aside and grudgingly rose to her feet.

Out in the hallway, Ethan nudged her on his way to the bathroom. She turned on him. “Have you seen the news this morning?”

He yawned. “Yes,” he answered.

“Aren’t
you
worried?”

“No,” was all Ethan replied before shutting the door with a deliberate slam.

Paranoia was a trait that Lucy had inherited from her deceased grandmother. When she was alive, her mother would always sit the two of them together at the dinner table—co-conspirators in a world where every stranger is a serial killer and mild-joint pain is incurable cancer. Her grandmother would whisper things to her, a mouth full of mashed potatoes, spittle dribbling on to her neon flowered shirt. “Your father is a spy,” and then with furtive glances, “I think someone is poisoning my food.”

Everyone else treated grandma like a senile pet, but Lucy loved to hear about the bears that sneaked through her apartment at night and delivered the poison for the “agents” and how her husband, a grandfather that Lucy never met, was the actual inventor of the microwave and that the government stole his plans and set “that Percy Spencer up as a puppet.” When Lucy repeated the story, her father rolled his eyes. “My father did not invent the microwave. He had no knowledge of radar technology. I respect that Grandma wants to idolize him, but my dad was a mediocre scientist at best.”

Grandpa King’s lifelong goal was to prove the existence of time travel, but Grandma King said he failed. “A life’s work down the drain,” she would sigh. “I know because if he had figured it out, wouldn’t he have come back to visit me? I could go for a visit with a younger man right about now.” Then Lucy would blush and motion that Grandma was wearing a piece of fruit on her chin, which the old lady would brush to the floor and then say with disdain, “If your parents had a dog, they wouldn’t need a vacuum.”

When Grandma died peacefully in her sleep one night, Lucy mumbled something about wanting to inscribe on her tombstone: “Poisoned by bears.” But the rest of the family was vehemently against the idea and Lucy was outvoted.

As Lucy dressed for the day, she channeled Grandma’s obsession with conspiracy. Her heart tightened in her chest as she pondered the worldwide implications of a petless world. It seemed like an unfortunate time to board a plane. She wished she could comfort Salem and offer some semblance of a rational explanation, but none came to her. There was nothing she could say that would explain the tragedy. Nothing she could say to stop what had already happened.

With great reluctance, she began to pack her carry-on—a gift from her mom for Christmas one year. In the embroidered bag, she tossed in some books and her writing journal. But when she went to her backpack to retrieve her mountains of class work, she found a math book and nothing else.

With dread, Lucy tore through her room. But her homework was nowhere in sight. “Idiot,” Lucy mumbled and slapped her forehead. A locker drop before last period and then the distracting text from Ethan had resulted in her leaving two weeks worth of homework at school. Granted none of it actually mattered; but that was not the point—if one of her teachers had asked her to say the alphabet backwards while performing an interpretive dance, Mama Maxine would make sure it was completed before any fun was had.

This oversight would not go over well.

From downstairs, Maxine blew a whistle. It was a rape whistle that she had acquired while taking a community self-defense class; Maxine wore it around her neck for protection in public and as a parenting tool; the shrill peal was a non-negotiable call to her side. Some of her friends mocked the whistle, but no one could deny its effectiveness. Lucy tromped down the steps, depositing her half-empty bag on the landing with a pout.

Maxine paced in front of her children, as they lined up, leaning, slouching—each possessing varying degrees of excitement about their travel day. She carried a clipboard mod-podged with scrapbook paper. Some craft site on the Internet had turned their mother into a maniac, especially when she had access to hot-glue and an entire bookshelf dedicated to scrapbooking paper. She tapped a purple pen against her personalized travel list—printed freshly that morning, adorned with a stick figure version of their family in the top left corner.

“Anti-nausea pill time,” she announced and pulled a white bottle out of her pocket. “Hands out.” Then she tossed them all a Sesame Street juice box, watching with an eagle eye as each child gulped and choked down the bright orange pills. “Tongues out,” she demanded and then nodded. “Fantastic.”

Her father had stressed repeatedly that the vaccines and pills for the trip were important and that they would be facilitated without complaint. “No child is coming home with typhoid or yellow fever. God forbid you get bitten by some rabies infected wild boar,” their mother had added. Monroe and Malcolm took great interest in the promise of wild boars on the islands.

In general, their father’s disdain for illness of any kind had become a family joke. Maxine was the cleaner of vomit, the giver of medicine, the filler of humidifiers in the middle of the night. Their father worked on the effects of communicable diseases on living tissue—and his work had created a monster; he would visibly bristle at people who coughed and sneezed in public; he refused to shake hands and he applied hand-sanitizer by the buckets. Even though he could bring up disgusting tales of gelatinous tissue in jars and oozing boils growing on lab rats at the dinner table, one mention of a sore throat and he would raise a crucifix at you and back away in fear.

Maxine checked off the first item on her list and continued. “Let’s do a carry-on check.”

Ethan flipped his phone open, glowered at the screen, and with flying thumbs sent off a text and shoved it back into his pocket.

“Anna?” Lucy whispered in a mocking tone as their mom started with the younger kids, rifling through their bags and suggesting additions while tossing out a wayward pirate hat and Monroe’s Ziplock bag full of mismatched Legos.

Ethan rolled his eyes in response.

“You should just dump her,” Lucy said. “Then go hook up with an island girl without regret.”