Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

“He’s sick,” Jason said.

“He won’t get out of his red chair,” Colin said.

Tim said easily, “Let’s let Grandma see to your daddy, and you two show me around. Did that big tree over there get hit by lightning?”

“Yeah!” Jason said enthusiastically. “It’s all burned.”

“Poor tree,” Colin said.

“Show me,” Tim said. “Careful of those steps. They sure need fixing.”

Marianne threw him a grateful look and went into the house.

It was worse than she expected. Clinical depression, if deep enough, produced hopelessness and inertia, but this was something more. Ryan sat slumped in the grimy red wing chair, head down, shoulders sagging. He looked up when she spoke his name but didn’t change expression. The first words that leaped into Marianne’s mind were old-fashioned and scientifically imprecise: nervous breakdown . But that’s what this was. Caused by grief, by guilt, by a sense of failure, by some unknowable quirk of his biology? If Jason hadn’t called her, would the next step be suicide? She was looking, she knew, at pure pain, the kind that gnawed at you from inside until there was nothing left.

She fought to hold herself steady to her son’s need. “Ryan, it’s Mom.”

He nodded but didn’t speak.

“I came to help you. You need help, sweetie.”

She held her breath until he nodded again, slowly. He wasn’t too deep into his private hell to recognize that he could not get out alone.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I promise you, Ryan. It’s all going to be all right.”

Grandma-for-real was different from Grandma-on-Skype. Colin didn’t remember her for real before this visit, but Jason did. Grandma-for-real got things going.

An ambulance came to take Daddy to a hospital, so doctors could make him well again. Grandma had to go with him to sign some papers—Colin didn’t understand that part, but it seemed important—and Tim wouldn’t let her go alone. That was weird; Grandma was a grown-up . Why did Tim get to tell her what to do? They had a whispered fight about it in the kitchen, and Tim must have won because he drove Grandma in his blue car. There was nobody to stay with Colin and Jason, so they had to go, too.

While they waited for the ambulance, Grandma made them both take showers. Tim got the upstairs toilet unstuck. At the hospital Tim took them to the cafeteria for hamburgers and French fries, which was good; Colin was really hungry. The hospital was too noisy, though, in ways Colin didn’t like. The swamp was better.

It was getting dark by the time they got home because they stopped at a supermarket and bought a lot of things. Even though she looked really tired, Grandma started cleaning. She made Colin and Jason help, too. Colin had to find his dirty clothes, which were almost all of them, and bring them to the laundry room to be washed after the bedsheets and pajamas got done. Jason had to do that, too, and then find the dirty dishes all over the house. Grandma told Tim, who was locking all the windows and doors, to clean the bathrooms. He said, “What?” but she gave him the same look that Colin’s preschool teacher gave boys who shoved or hit, and Tim started cleaning. Colin was impressed.

He and Jason were in their washed pajamas, having milk and cookies in the kitchen, when the other noise started. Colin jumped up so fast he knocked over his milk. “Grandma, the trees are afraid!”

“Colin,” Grandma said, “it’s okay. I know you’re scared about Daddy, but he’ll be all right.”

“Not me! Not Daddy! The trees are afraid! And the ground!”

Tim, mopping up the milk, smiled in a way that made Colin suddenly hate him. “An imaginative kid.”

Grandma said, “Colin, honey, I know you’re worried about your father, but the doctors at the hospital are—”

Colin stamped his foot and burst into tears. Nobody ever believed him!

Ten minutes later, the earthquake hit.

Marianne bent to pick the shards of a broken glass off the grimy kitchen floor. During the earthquake, dishes had rattled, toys fallen off shelves in the boys’ room, a small rickety table overturned. No windows broke. Outside, a few branches were down, but no trees. The glass had broken only because Marianne, startled, had dropped it. She crammed the pieces into the overflowing garbage pail.

While Tim checked the car and house, trailed by Jason, Marianne brought up data on her phone.

“I told you,” Colin said.

“That was indeed an earthquake, epicenter near Attica,” she told Tim when he returned to the kitchen, “although this isn’t supposed to be an earthquake area. Still, there’s a usually inactive fault line, the Clarendon-Linden fault line, just east of Batavia and USGS says—”

Colin’s words suddenly registered. Marianne said to him, “What did you say?”

“I told you!”

The little boy stood with legs apart, clad in pajamas printed with railroad cars, feet planted firmly on the kitchen floor. His bottom lip stuck out. His eyes, Marianne’s own light gray, looked very clear, and he did not blink. The back of Marianne’s neck prickled.

“You told me what, honey?”

“That something bad was coming. The trees were afraid. The ground was mad.”

She said carefully, “How did you know that, Colin?”

“I heard them.” His bottom lip receded a little; someone was actually listening to him.

“Heard them talk?”

“Trees can’t talk, Grandma.”

The voice of reason from a five-year-old. Marianne would have smiled, but her neck still prickled. “Then what did you hear?”

“First the ground… it sounded like… like a lot of cars. When they’re far away.”

“The ground rumbled?”

“Yes.” He nodded, clearly pleased with the word. “The ground all rumbled. Then the trees sort of… they… it sounds like the machine the Sheehans have for Captain. To make him stop barking. The Sheehans can’t hear it but dogs can. I can, too. Captain doesn’t like it.”

An ultrasonic emitter. And earthquake measurement depended on infrasonic. Was it possible that Colin could hear above and below the normal human range? Which, Marianne remembered dazedly, was 20 to 20,000 Hertz. How far below that was the infrasonic rumble from plate tectonics? But the trees… Trees didn’t emit sound, did they?

Colin’s little body had relaxed. He felt heard. He said confidently, “I heard the baby mouses, too. Way down in their hole. They wanted their mommy. Uh-oh—here it comes again!”

An aftershock, the slightest quiver under the floor, barely perceptible. Nothing else changed.

Unless everything had.

Her first concern was, had to be, for the boys’ uneasiness over their father. Only they didn’t show any. “He’s in the hospital,” Jason said reasonably, “and he doesn’t have cancer like Mommy did. So he’ll be okay.”

Colin nodded. He trusted in his big brother, and Jason trusted in the universe. Or maybe they were just being practical, as children could be: Life with Grandma ran more smoothly than life with Daddy. Or maybe their fear and anger were just deeply buried, as Ryan’s apparently had been, and would erupt later when Ryan came home again. Although that might be months away. His diagnosis was “clinical depression with suicidal ideation.”

Marianne pushed away her own fear and anger to focus on the next concern: Where were they going to live? The boys had no passports, so Canada was out. She made another call to Stubbins, who was too busy to take it. Was he losing interest in her efforts? Another worry. Without him, she had no source of income, no way to pay Tim, nothing. Although under their intimate circumstances, paying Tim would be—