Michael Collings - The Slab

Catherine woke. She did not jerk into awareness, nor was she startled from sleep-as she had so often been during the past weeks-by the intrusion of one of her children. No one stood by her bed waiting patiently for her to open her eyes. No one cried out in the darkness for her help or her love.

She woke gradually. It was deep night; she could feel that by the stillness in the air, the darkness all around her, the almost oppressive silence of the house.

She lay unmoving in her bed, waiting for sleep to resume, for whatever dream that had carried her away only moments before to return and reclaim her. She heard Willard breathing next to her, lightly, comfortably. She felt his warmth radiating from him and smoothing against her flesh.

But she did not fall asleep. If anything, she grew more awake, more aware. She found herself tensing, listening for…something…

Finally, she rolled out of bed, careful not to disturb Willard. She felt around at the foot of the bed and located her robe, pulled it on and cinched the belt around her waist. She stepped into her slippers.

Without turning on any lights, feeling secure with her sense of feel as she trailed one hand along the wall, she moved down the hall to Suze’s room. There was enough light filtering through the window for her to see Suze fast asleep, one arm thrown around her favorite stuffed animal, a grey-striped cat that she had had for so long that it was now flattened and out-of-shape from being used as a pillow. Flat Cat, Catherine called it.

She stepped out and moved on to the back bedroom.

Again, the light from the window was sufficient for her to see, even though the shadows in this room were much darker, blacker than they had been in Suze’s room.

She glanced to the left. Both boys were asleep on the bunks. Will, Jr., was bundled up, almost invisible in the layers of sheet and blanket that muffled him like a cocoon. Burt was, as always, nearly naked, his pajama bottoms pulled up to his thighs and his tops wrinkled just under his armpits. But his head was, also as always, snuggled into his pillow beneath a layer of blanket.

She shrugged. It was a warm night. She wouldn’t bother tucking him in, since he would probably look just like this in the morning.

Sams was curled up on the floor, halfway between the older boys’ bunks and his box bed. His blanket lay across his face.

She stepped over to him and leaned down to pick him up.

The scream of anguish and terror blasted through Willard’s dream, exploding him into the night. For an instant, he couldn’t breathe.

Then the scream repeated, and he was on his feet and flying down the hall toward the back bedroom and Catherine’s hideous, gasping cries.

He spun around the door jamb.

Burt and Will, Jr., sat bolt upright in their beds, their faces screwed up in fright. Both seemed on the verge of shrieking but neither had yet found his voice.

Catherine stood in the middle of the room, cradling Sams’ tightly in her arms.

She turned to Willard. Her face was as white as death, and her voice shook so badly he could barely understand her. When he did, he felt the blood plummet from his face as well.

“Sams is dead! He’s dead! My baby is dead!”

From the Tamarind Valley Times, 5 November 1995:

OFFICIAL END TO VALLEY MYSTERY

The courts moved earlier today to declare Bryan Sydney, the Tamarind Valley real estate executive missing since October, 1989, legally dead. Members of Sidney’s immediate family gathered in the chambers of Judge Martha Feldmann to hear the official declaration which put an end to a seven-year investigation into his mysterious disappearance.

With the ruling, legal claims levied against the now defunct Ace-High Construction and the equally defunct McCall/Sidney Realty will advance to a more abstract level as attorneys for sixteen families…

The Huntleys, Last Week In August 2010

Final Reckoning

August passed.

Each member of the Huntley family tried to deal with the fact of death privately, individually.

Suze spent much of her time at home in the far corner of her room, the farthest from the boys’ bedroom, moving her dolls in complex, repeated patterns on the carpet and speaking to them in a voice so faint and fragile that, standing in the doorway and watching her daughter, Catherine could never understand any of the imagined conversations. Suze would retreat to her room as soon as she arrived home from school on weekdays, and frequently not leave it for longer periods than to eat and go to the bathroom on the weekends. Catherine and Willard might try to entice her out-even demand that she join the rest in some activity in the family room, a game or a particular television program-but as soon as their attention strayed from her, she quietly disappeared.

Burt didn’t seem quite so badly troubled. He was willing enough to spent time in the front of the house-perhaps too willing. He would clear a space on the family room floor and play for hours with his army figures, the same ones that Sams had so enjoyed watching in the make-shift tent on Burt’s bunk. He would send army against army, silently destroying formations with a single swipe of his arm or leg, and knocking individual soldiers over by striking them with the base of whichever one he held in his hand.

Will, Jr., preferred the armchair next to the couch in the family room, where he would sit with his dog, Crud, for hours on end, ruffling the dog’s fur or scratching its ears. Sometimes he would simply hold onto the animal, cradling it tightly in his arms. Often, he would almost cry.

Willard became more an automaton rather than a person. He woke at 5:00 am on work days, got ready to leave and let himself out of the house without saying a word, without making any extraneous sounds that might disturb the others. He never called home from work. He never spoke about his work while at home. He began arriving home later and later, sometimes an hour later than usual, sometimes two hours or more, always explaining curtly that “Traffic was bad.” Those words, exactly, never an alteration. “Traffic was bad.”

On week ends he puttered around the house, futilely spattering plaster on the ubiquitous cracks that kept extending themselves in corners, on new ones that spread like narrow cancers in window corners. He never repainted any of the repairs. Occasionally he would work outside, doing what was required to keep the place presentable-mowing the front yard but rarely the back; sweeping the front sidewalk and drive when blowing leaves accumulated along the foundations of the house; trimming the hedges separating his house from those on both sides, but ignoring the overgrown shrubs along the back fence.

Catherine responded worst of all to Sams’ death. She barely registered what the coroner’s representative meant when he said, in abstracted, formal officialese that nearly left her breathless: “If the child hadn’t been so old, I would call it SIDS-as it is, all we can say is that he suffered an ALTE that ultimately proved fatal.”

“ALTE,” Willard had asked humbly.

“An apparently life-threatening event. We found no other definable cause of death.”

And, as far as the authorities were concerned, that was it. Dead child. So sorry. Nothing more to say.

She wouldn’t let Willard remove the little box bed from the back room. He had wanted to carry it out to the back yard and take a sledge hammer to it, pound it until nothing remained but infinitesimal fragments that would blow away with the faintest breeze…but he never told Catherine. About a week after she had found Sams’ body, he made one effort to pick the bed up, then noticed that she had changed the bedding that morning, left the room, and rarely entered it again.