Нил Шустерман - Duckling Ugly

"Hospital?" I said. "Are you sick?"

"Not that kind of hospital."

It took a moment, but then I understood. Even before she said it, I knew why they were here.

"My son and that awful wife of his―they signed papers, and had me committed. Didn't even have the decency to come them­selves―they sent the doctor to come here and take me away." She gripped her arms, obviously cold like me, even in the heat of the room. "Old age does terrible things to you . . . but the things we do to each other are worse."

I stood up and looked out the kitchen door toward the dark living room. The truth was dawning on me much faster than I wanted it to. It wasn't just my life that had fallen apart tonight.

Wise and wonderful Miss Leticia Radcliffe suddenly wasn't so wise, and wasn't so wonderful. I took a step forward.

"Don't you go in there!" she shouted.

For a brief instant a lightning flash lit up the living room. I saw a hand hanging over the arm of a high-backed chair. The hand wasn't moving.

"Miss Leticia . . . what did you do?"

And helplessly she said, "I made them some tea."

Thunder rolled like the breath of a beast and echoed back from the mountains.

"It was only supposed to put them to sleep, so I would have time to get away," she said. "But I used too much lily of the val­ley! I made it too strong."

I stood there, unable to say anything, because my insides had started a war.

See, there's a part of you that's an enemy of the mind. It's the heart of inspiration and imagination... but it's also the heart of terror and paranoia. That part of me welled up at that awful moment and said to me, This is your fault. You cursed this poor old woman, just like you cursed your family. Your ugliness touched her and grew into this ugliness. No amount of sensible, rational thought was going to make that voice go away.

"Where will you go?"

"I got old friends in old places," she said. "I can still catch the late bus if I leave now."

"I'll drive you!"

"No!" she said, her voice like the thunder itself. "That would be aiding and abetting, and I will not bring you into this." Then her voice became quiet again. "I know where the Greyhounds stop, and I can see well enough to get there. You best leave here," she told me. "Go home."

"I can't go home."

"Then go someplace else. I'm sorry, Cara, I can't help you anymore." Then she picked up her little suitcase and left.

I stood there in the middle of her kitchen, unable to do any­thing but listen to the rain pounding on the windows like it was the start of the great flood. And then something occurred to me. Something awful.

"Miss Leticia! Wait!"

I raced to the door, not daring to look toward the living room. I burst out into the rain and looked around. It was dark, but I could make her out. She was waddling her way across the hill, taking a shortcut to the main road.

Got a grandson calls me Nana Cyborg , she had said, on accounta all this metal.

She was a single figure in the open grass, while up above the sparking clouds roiled like it was Armageddon.

"Miss Leticia! Stop!"

I raced out to the waterlogged hill. She didn't stop, she didn't turn.

"Come back!"

And then the heavens exploded. All I saw was a blinding white flash. I felt the thunder more than heard it, and the elec­tric charge knocked me off my feet. It sizzled through me like scarabs beneath my skin, and then it was gone. I knew I had felt only a hint of the lightning. The inky darkness returned, and the stench of ozone filled the air. I ran to Miss Leticia. The grass around her was singed and smoking, even in the rain. She was sprawled on the ground, trembling. Her dress was smoldering like the grass.

"C . . . C . . . Cara."

"We've got to get you inside!"

I looked around. The nearest structure was the greenhouse, its back entrance just about fifty yards away. I tried to lift her, but she was too heavy. In the end, I had to drag her across the hill by her armpits. I pulled open the door of the greenhouse, and was laid low by a stench more awful than anything I could remember. Miss Leticia groaned, then grinned. I pulled her over the thresh­old, and we collapsed in a bed of begonias.

That smell―it was like the horrible stench of meat left to rot in the hot, hot sun. A smell like my roadkill room, only ten times worse, and there were flies everywhere.

"It bloomed," Miss Leticia said weakly. "It finally bloomed."

There, just a few feet away from us, I could see the corpse flower's huge bloom. It had the shape of a teacup, but three feet wide and four feet high, surrounding that six-foot stalk.

Flies buzzed over the brim, in and out, in and out, pollinating the hideous thing.

Now it was complete. Now everything in the world had gone rancid.

"Isn't it wonderful?" she said.

"We've got to get you help."

"No help. No help. Already got my wish," she said. Her arm fluttered slightly. I took her hand. "The good Lord saw fit to keep me where I want to be. I got a plot waiting on the south side of the hill. It's good there. It's good."

I wanted to tell her to hold on. I wanted to tell her she'd come through, but it would have been a lie. "Please don't go," I begged, even though I knew I was being selfish. Because I needed her. She must have known what I was thinking, because tears came to her clouded eyes. "I'm sorry," she said. "I promised I would be here to see your destiny." She gripped my hand with the last of her strength. "Go find it," she said. "You go find the answers."

She didn't go limp. She didn't even loosen her grip. But in a moment her eyes, as lifeless as they had seemed before, became truly glazed with the emptiness of death, and I knew she was gone. I rolled her gently onto her back, closed her eyelids, and folded her hands over her chest. Then I tore two massive petals from her beloved corpse flower and covered her body.

I cried for her. They say when you cry for the dead, you're really crying for yourself and maybe partly I was. My life had become one betrayal after another. Gerardo, Marshall, my parents. Now fate it­self had stolen the only person in my life who hadn't betrayed me. I was alone now―really alone―and in that dark lonely moment, I dared to tempt fate. Not just tempt it, but challenge it.

The lights of the greenhouse were reflected in its many win­dows. At night, in the rain, you couldn't see anything beyond the glass. I pushed aside the big rhododendron and fern leaves until I caught my own gaze in the glass: my rain-drenched hair, my sag­ging gown, my awful cheeks and chin and teeth, all reflected painfully back at me.

Then that glass did what nature told it to. It shattered―and not just the window in front of me: It began a chain reaction around the entire greenhouse. One pane after another crackled and blew out, until the air was white with falling crystal, jabbing the plants and ground, piercing my dress, my skin.

And I screamed, not out of physical pain, but a pain much deeper, and much greater.

When it was done, the greenhouse was nothing but a skele­ton. All that remained was the iron frame and the shredded frag­ments of plants.

I could have crumbled, too. God knows I wanted to. Just fall into a heap until they found me there.

But it's in those moments when your world falls apart that you discover what you truly are made of. And I was not made of broken glass.

One by one, I pulled the shards from my arms and shoulders and scalp, dropping them on the ground. Then I walked out of that place, got into the Chevy my father had so unwittingly pro­vided me, and left town.

I had no money, I had no destination, but that didn't matter.