The Nest (10 page)

 

 

W
ITH A GASP
I
OPENED MY EYES
,
AND THERE
were Mr. Nobodys all around me, powerful looming shadows. One of them had huge flat hands held high above me and was chanting like a holy man raising someone from the dead.

“Steven!” I heard someone shout, and then again, “Steve! Steve!”

I felt my heart surge, and it almost swallowed me with blackness again. I blinked and gasped and looked around in terror at all the shadows. They were beginning
to have faces now, and bright yellow-and-orange suits, and the one closest to me was taking off his huge flat hands, which were metal paddles.

I was shirtless, shivering.

“He's in rhythm,” someone said.

“Let's get him to the ER,” another voice said.

“Oh, Steven!” came a more familiar voice.

“Get that stretcher over here!”

“There's wasps in the house!” I croaked.

“Take hold of the drip. Let's move him.”

“It's all right,” someone said to me. “We've taken care of that.”

“The baby,” I said. “Theo.”

“Baby's fine. You saved his life. The baby's just fine.”

And then I must've slept again, because when I woke up, I was someplace different, and I felt calmer, and there were only Mom and Dad beside me. Mom was holding the baby.

I came home the next day. There were still a couple of news vans outside, and reporters tried to talk to us as we walked to the front door, but Dad told them no.

I knew what had happened. They'd told me at the hospital.

The emergency operator I'd called had actually sent a cruiser around to our house, and the two officers had knocked on the door but hadn't seen anything weird. They'd been about to leave, when the dispatcher had gotten another call, an anonymous one this time, saying there were wasps swarming around the house.

“Was it the knife guy who called them?” I'd asked.

“Why would it be the knife guy?” Dad had said.

“I just thought . . . I heard his bell when I was inside the bathroom.”

The police had taken another look around back,
and this time they'd seen a huge swarm outside the upstairs bathroom window. They'd called the fire department right away; they'd never seen anything like it.

The firefighters arrived and were getting their helmets on just as Mom arrived back home. She told them the baby and I were inside, and she let them in. They found me unconscious in the bathtub, hunched over the baby, wasps all around me. But almost instantly the wasps flew away, out the broken window.

The baby had been stung only twice. It was amazing, they said. That with all those thousands of wasps, the baby was stung only twice.

I was in real trouble, though. I was all swollen, and my throat was starting to close up, and the paramedics jabbed me full of adrenaline and anti-histamines, but my heart stopped anyway.

They got out their de-fib paddles and jolted me back to life.

I was dead for twenty-five seconds.

On Saturday morning Theo had his heart operation. I was still pretty swollen up and freaky-looking, but I wanted to go with Dad and Nicole that evening to see him. There were lots of tubes in him. He looked so small. But the doctors said it had gone really well, and he was strong.

“He'll make a full recovery,” the surgeon told us all. “He'll be here only a couple more days.”

“And after that we go home and everything goes back to normal,” Nicole said cheerfully.

I saw Dad look at Mom, and I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he was thinking,
The heart is just one problem, but there are lots of others
. Maybe he was thinking,
Things will never be normal
. Maybe,
like me, he was thinking we'd never know what was going to happen next week or month or year, but no one really did anyway.

Dad said, “Yeah, it'll be good to get home, won't it?”

“And there's no such thing as normal anyway,” I said.

Surprised, Dad's eyes met mine. He gave a tired smile and nodded.

The exterminator came by again a couple of days after Theo's operation, just to make sure there were no other signs of infestation.

Last Friday, his team had spent a solid day shoveling the evacuated nest out of our attic. It had filled fifty garbage bags. They'd also sprayed down the timbers with some kind of chemical to make sure no other wasps would try to build there.

“Odd-looking things,” the exterminator said
during his second visit, when he came down from his final check in the crawl space. In his cupped hand he held a few dead pale wasps.

“Have you ever seen that kind before?” I asked.

He was an older man, said he'd been in the business his whole life. He frowned like he'd tasted something nasty, and gave a grunt. “Maybe just once. A long time ago.”

I followed him outside as he checked the exterior. The nest above Theo's room had been blasted off the wall with a fire hose. It still lay in crumpled pieces on the ground.

“Now, this is very strange,” he said. “See this? You look inside—no cells. The queen didn't lay any eggs in this one. It's just an empty shell. Nothing.”

After he left, I picked through the pieces of the nest. I stared hard. There was no sign that a baby had ever grown against those sodden walls. I was
about to let the last shard drop, when something caught my eye. A little glint. I looked more closely. Caught in the fibrous weave was a tiny pale rectangle with rounded edges—the smallest, most perfect fingernail I'd ever seen. When I pulled it out, it felt just like wet paper, ready to tear. I dug a little hole in the ground and buried it.

That night in bed I was more tired than I'd ever been.

I tried to do my two lists, but I knew I'd never make it through both.

So I said: “I'm grateful for all the things on this first list.”

And I said: “I want everyone on this second list to be okay. And Mr. Nobody, too. And especially Theo.”

Before sleep took me, I thought I heard the sound of Mr. Nobody's handbell, and I knew we'd
never see him again. I heard Theo murmuring, and Mom talking to him gently as she fed him a bottle.

I pulled the covers over my head and went to sleep in my nest.