The Nest (2 page)

I'd never told any of my friends about this, ever. That I was scared of the dark. That I had nightmares. That I'd sometimes slept in my parents' bed.

The night after the wasp sting, I could feel the nightmare coming on in my sleep, like a thunder-cloud gathering on the horizon. A dark shape
assembled itself at the foot of my bed, and just stood there, watching me.

But then the most amazing thing happened. There was a sound, a kind of low musical trill, and with it, points of light. I knew because I looked; for the first time ever I turned in my dream and looked. More and more tiny little bits of light surrounded the dark shape and landed on it, and the darkness started to dissolve and disappear, and I felt such relief.

Suddenly I was in a bright cave-like space, lying on my stomach, and in front of me was her voice.

“We've come because of the baby,” she said. “We've come to help.”

“Who's we?” I asked.

“We come when people are scared or in trouble. We come when there's grief.”

I looked around at all the glittering creatures on the walls and in the air.

“Are you angels?”

“You can think of us that way.”

I stood up. I tried to look more closely at the angel in front of me. Her head alone seemed as big as me. It was a bit like standing before that huge stuffed lion at the museum, except the mane and whiskers were all light, and the eyes were huge, and the mouth never moved. She was magnificent, and I wasn't sure she had a mouth at all, but I was aware, every time she spoke, of something grazing my face, and of the smell of freshly mown grass.

“Now,” she said, “my first question is, how are you?”

“Okay, I guess.”

She nodded patiently, waiting.

“Everyone's worried about the baby,” I added.

“It's dreadful when these things happen,” she
said. “It's common, you know. There's some comfort in that. You are not alone in this.”

“No, I guess not.”

“And your little sister, how is she?”

“She's a pain, as always.” I was beginning to feel a bit more at ease.

“Ah, yes. Little sisters.”

“I don't think she really understands about the baby being sick. Really sick.”

“That's just as well. Your parents?”

“They're super worried.”

“Naturally.”

“And scared.”

“Of course they are. Nothing's scarier than having a sick child, and one so newly born, and so vulnerable. It's the worst thing for a parent. That's why we've come to help.”

“How can you help?”

“We make things better.”

“You mean the baby?”

“Of course.”

“No one knows what's wrong with him exactly.”

“We do.”

“Angels know everything?”

She laughed. “Everything is a tall order! But we know enough to know what's wrong with the baby. It's congenital.”

“What does that mean?”

“He was born with it. Don't you worry—I know you're a worrier—it's not something you can catch, or get later in life.”

I wondered how she knew I was a worrier. But I guessed angels knew all sorts of things without needing to be told.

She said, “It's just a tiny little mistake inside him, and we can fix that mistake.”

“You can?” I said with a rush of hope.

“You know about DNA, don't you?”

I remembered it from science: all the little pieces inside each of our cells, like a spiral ladder, that made us who we were.

“Well,” she continued, “sometimes the bits get mixed up. It's the tiniest mix-up, but it can lead to bigger problems. People are very complicated inside.”

“When?” I asked. “When can you do all this?”

“Soon enough. You'll see.”

And then I woke up.

I
WAITED THREE DAYS BEFORE
I
TOLD
M
OM
about the dream.

I wasn't going to at first, because I had a lot of weird dreams, and sometimes they seemed to worry her; so I'd stopped telling her. I didn't want her to worry. I didn't want her to think I was a freak. But today she was looking so tired as she fed the baby, I thought this one dream might make her feel better. She smiled when I told it, but it was a wistful smile. “You've always had the most interesting dreams,” she said.

“Maybe it means things will be okay.”

When I was little, she and Dad had sometimes gone to church, but they pretty much stopped a few years ago. The occasional Easter or Christmas. We didn't talk about God or anything. Nicole blessed people at night, and she must have gotten that from Mom or Dad. But Mom also read her horoscope every day; she said it was just for fun, so I didn't think she took it seriously. Once I'd heard her say there was more than us in the universe, but I wasn't sure what she meant by that exactly. Aliens, or some kind of supernatural forces, maybe? I didn't know if she believed in a god, though.

All I knew was that this dream made me feel better. Waking up from it, I'd just felt happier. It happened sometimes, a dream that cast a kind of hopeful light from the night into the daytime.

Mom was feeding the baby from a bottle. She'd
tried to breast-feed him, but he wasn't very good at nursing. Something about the mouth muscles not being strong enough.

Afterward the baby was sleepy, and Mom put him back into his crib. When I looked at the baby, here's what I saw: a baby. He looked normal to me, ugly, like a turtle, his neck all wrinkly. Tight little red fists. Nicole had looked like that when she'd been born. And I'd looked the same too, in the pictures.

Here's what the baby could do: He slept a lot. He made funny faces. He kicked his arms and legs. He stuck out his tongue. He cried. He made pterodactyl sounds. He was a noisy gulper. Sometimes he spluttered and choked, and Mom patted him on the back. He gripped your little finger with his fist. He looked at bright lights. He looked past you, and sometimes right at you. Sometimes his eyes were
half-open; sometimes they were wide open and bright and curious. He kicked his skinny legs and struck out with his arms at nothing at all.

But when I looked at the baby, mostly what I thought of was all the things I couldn't see—all the things that were going wrong inside him.

I felt stupid having a babysitter. I didn't need one, but Nicole did, and I didn't want to have to look after her all the times Mom and Dad were at work, or taking the baby to his appointments.

Her name was Vanessa and she was a zoology student at the university. She was taking a course over the summer, and the rest of the time she worked for us. She spoke very calmly, and sometimes I wished she'd talk faster. I got impatient waiting for her to finish sentences. She lived in a basement apartment a few streets over. Her clothes
had a musty, scalpy smell. Nicole really liked her. She said Vanessa was good at playing castle and talking about bugs and horses.

I was inside watching TV, where it was air-conditioned and there were no wasps. Dad had showed Vanessa my new EpiPen and where we kept it in the medicine cabinet of the downstairs bathroom.

Through the sliding patio doors, I could see into the backyard. Vanessa was on the deck. She walked to the table and poured a drink of lemonade for Nicole, who was on the swings. Then Vanessa stared at the wooden table and kept staring. Her look was so intense, it made my skin crawl.

I went to the door and slid it open. “What's the matter?”

“Shh.” Without looking up, she waved me over. She nodded. There was a big wasp on the table. It had pale markings, like the one that had stung me a few days before.

“I've never seen one like this,” she said.

“It's not a yellow jacket,” I told her.

“Or a hornet. Hmm.” She seemed genuinely curious. “Maybe it's an albino. But it's definitely a social wasp. A nester.”

“How do you know?”

“Look what it's doing.”

The wasp was scraping its head along the surface of the table. There was a very faint clicking sound.

“You see its mandibles?” she whispered.

“Why's it eating the wood?”

“Not eating it. The adults just eat nectar.”

“So what's it doing?”

“Collecting it.”

Behind the wasp I saw a pale line where the surface had been scraped off.

“It takes a bit of wood fiber, mixes it with its own saliva, and then regurgitates it.”

“Why?”

“To build the nest. Look, there it goes.”

I took a step backward as the wasp lifted off and rose into the air. Almost in the next moment another insect landed heavily on the table. It took me a second to realize it was actually two bugs. The one on top was a big silvery wasp, and it was clutching a dead spider beneath it. The spider was bigger than the wasp, and it took the wasp a couple of tries to lift off again. Slowly, like an airplane with heavy cargo, it rose into the air with its kill, slewing off in the same direction as the first wasp. My breakfast lapped greasily against the sides of my stomach.

“Looks like you've got a nest nearby,” Vanessa said, holding her hand to her eyes as she tracked the wasp.

It was high up now and didn't seem interested in stinging me, so I followed Vanessa as she walked along the side of our house, past Dad's favorite Japanese maple. We tilted our heads way back.

“See it?” she asked. “Waaaaay up there.”

Under the eaves, right at the peak of the roof, was a tiny semispherical ball. A few shapes moved around on the outside. Our wasp disappeared inside.

“It's all different fibers from trees or plants or wood tables. That's why the nest can have several different shades.”

“It's just kind of gray,” I said.

I looked more closely at the wooden posts of our fence, and everywhere I saw little white lines. The wasps were eating our fence and table to make their nest.

“It's amazing,” Vanessa said. “They're amazing little architects and engineers.”

“I'm allergic,” I reminded her.

“I know exactly where your EpiPen is.”

The nest was above and to the right of the baby's room.

From down the street came the sound of a bell ringing. Nicole ran over, looking all excited.

“It's the knife guy!”

She bolted into the house so she could watch from the front door. Nicole was fascinated by him. He'd started coming around just this summer. He drove a strange stubby van without doors, slowly, ringing his bell, to see if anyone needed their knives sharpened.

Vanessa and I followed Nicole through the house. My little sister threw open the front door and stood on the porch, waiting. It was weird how excited she got about the knife guy. On the side of the van were lots of faded pictures of knives, and in big crooked
hand-painted letters, the word “Grindi g”—because the last
n
was so worn out.

The van glided toward us. I didn't know how he made any money. I never saw a single person stop him and rush out with their kitchen knives. Last month, before the baby was born, Dad had flagged him down. I think it was just to give Nicole a thrill.

Nicole had stood with us at the curb as the van pulled over, and the knife guy stepped out in his coveralls. Before, I'd just glimpsed him in passing. He was an older guy, surprisingly tall, a bit stooped. His cheeks were hollowed out, and he had gray stubble for hair. He looked like his bones were meant for an even bigger body.

Dad had dragged his rotary lawn mower out from the garage—the blades were getting pretty dull, he'd said—and asked the knife guy if he could sharpen them. The guy gave a shrug, pursed his lips, and
made a sound like, “Ehhhhhh,” so we didn't know if he was saying yes or no. But then he went into the back of his van and came out with a screwdriver and removed the mower blades one by one.

Nicole watched everything, enthralled. The knife guy smiled at her as he took out the blades from the lawn mower, and then let her watch from the open back of the van as he sharpened them on his grindstone.

It wasn't until the end, when he was putting the blades back into the mower, that I noticed his hands. They were very large with big knuckles, but he had only four fingers on each hand, and they were weirdly shaped, and splayed so that they looked more like pincers.

Afterward Nicole said to Dad, “I guess he's not very good at his job.”

“What do you mean?” Dad asked.

“He cut off his own fingers!”

Dad laughed. “He didn't cut them off, sweetie. He was born like that. I knew someone once who had the same condition.”

“Oh,” said Nicole.

“Anyway, didn't seem to slow him down any, did it?”

Dad ran the mower over a patch of the lawn, and grass clippings flew up, leaving a clean wake.

“Much better,” Dad said.

Now, as Vanessa and I watched the van approach, Nicole looked up at us imploringly. “Can we bring him some knives?”

“I'm not sure your parents would want that, Nicole,” Vanessa said. “We'd have to ask them first.”

She sagged. “Okay.”

As the van crawled alongside our house, the
knife guy leaned down over his steering wheel so he could peer out.

Nicole waved. The knife guy waved back, gave a big smile, and stopped. Maybe he didn't understand we had nothing for him today. I don't think his English was too good. He seemed familiar to me somehow, but not in a good way.

“We're okay!” I said. “Thank you!”

“Okay! Thanks you. Okay!” he said, and then he rang the bell again and kept moving on down the street.

When he turned the corner, I realized I'd been holding my breath.

That night at dinner Mom and Dad weren't talking much. When they'd come back from the hospital, they looked pretty serious, and I was afraid to ask them what had happened. Nicole didn't notice.
Between mouthfuls of mashed potato and fish sticks she talked about castles and metal and her favorite knight and all its special skills. Her phone was under her chair, like she was expecting an important call at any moment.

“Did Mr. Nobody have any good jokes today?” Dad asked her.

Nicole frowned, then shook her head. “He wasn't in the joking mood.”

“Ah,” said Dad.

“There's a wasps' nest on our house,” I said. “Way up high, under the roof.”

“Really?” Mom said.

“Vanessa and I saw it. Shouldn't we get an exterminator or something?”

Dad nodded. “Yeah. I'll call someone.”

Mom asked, “Did you make the appointment with the allergist for Steve?”

“I'll do it tomorrow,” Dad said.

“How's the baby?” I asked finally.

“We've got an appointment with a specialist. She's supposed to be very good. One of the few people who know about these things.”

Nicole said, “And after that the baby'll be all better.”

Dad smiled. “Don't know about that, Nic. But we'll know more anyway.”

“I was sick when I was born too,” she said.

“No you weren't,” Dad replied.

Indignantly Nicole said, “Yes I was. I was yellow.”

Dad sniffed out a laugh. “Oh, that was just jaundice. Postnatal jaundice. Lots of babies have it. It clears up in a couple of weeks.”

Mom looked at Dad. “We were worried, though, remember? It seemed worrying. At the time.”

I hated it when her eyes got wet. It made me scared. Like she wasn't my mom anymore but something fragile that might break.

After dinner, when Mom was giving Nicole her bath and I was helping Dad clean up the dishes, he said to me, “How are you doing, buddy?”

I shrugged. “Fine.”

“A bit crazy around here.”

“Is the baby going to die?” I asked.

He was doing a pretty lousy job arranging the plates in the dishwasher. Usually he was very particular.