The Nest (5 page)

I felt the familiar prickle of electricity start along my upper back, threatening to radiate out my arms. “Really?”

She nodded. “And the more I looked at it—I think there's something strange about its structure.”

“Its body?”

“Yeah.” She frowned. “The proportions of the head, thorax, and abdomen, and some of the connective structures, they're not like other wasps'. . . .”

For a moment I stopped hearing her, because
my heart was beating in my ears, and I felt the day's heat hard on my face.

“. . . it might not even be a wasp,” Vanessa was saying.

“What is it, then?” I asked, and I guess I must've sounded a bit panicky, because she looked at me strangely again.

“Well, we'll see what my prof says.”

“The doctor said it was a wasp!” I said. “He said I got a wasp sting.”

“Well, lots of things sting. I mean, I'm just an undergrad, Steven. I don't know much about insects at all. It might be a new species, or just a variation that's not been noted before around here. We'll see.”

T
HE BIG LADDER WAS IN THE GARAGE
. D
AD
used it to clean out the gutters in the fall. It was pretty light, and I didn't have much trouble carrying it around the side of the house. I unfolded it and notched the safety hinges. I'd climbed up only once before, and that was with Dad standing at the bottom, holding on.

I bumped it along the wall so it was right underneath the nest. It didn't reach all the way. There was still a big gap. That was why I had the broom.
I figured that from the top of the ladder I'd be able to reach up and knock the nest off. It would fall and smash on the ground. All the wasps would swarm out. But I'd get down the ladder as soon as possible and pelt inside. I had my EpiPen in my pocket, just in case.

I was home alone. Vanessa had taken Nicole and the baby down the street for ice cream and then to the park. I'd said I was staying at home to read. I'd been home a lot this summer. We hadn't planned a vacation, because of the baby, and my day camp didn't start till August. Brendan and Sanjay were both away someplace or other.

I started up the ladder. After a few rungs I felt the legs shift a little, but it still seemed pretty stable. It was funny. I was afraid of a lot of things, but heights wasn't one of them. Even though I had scary dreams where I was stranded on top of
skinny poles, or razor-thin ledges, I liked climbing trees and going up glass elevators, and standing on the see-through floor of the CN Tower.

I wore a long-sleeved shirt, with a hoodie over it, the hood pulled tight, leaving only a small circle for my eyes and nose. As I went higher, the ladder clicked and creaked. With my left hand I held tight to the side; with my right I gripped the broom. I was aware of the wasps flying past overhead, to and from the nest.

With every rung I got angrier. My parents couldn't even deal with the nest. I was allergic, but they were too busy. They were busy with the baby and would be for the rest of their lives, so I had to do it. I didn't know if these wasps were really from my dreams, but I wanted them off my house. I wanted them out of my dreams. That nest was coming down.

I didn't go all the way to the top. I stayed two
rungs down, so I had something to hold on to. With the broom I reached as high as I could, and still it didn't come anywhere near the nest.

I mounted another rung. Now I had to reach down to hold on to the very top of the ladder. The broom came closer, the bristles just shy of the nest's underside. I knew I didn't have long. More wasps were gyrating around the nest now.

I was just off to the right of the baby's window, and there was a stone sill that stuck out a little bit, so I took hold of it in my left hand. I stepped onto the top rung. The ladder swayed and then settled down. My chest leaned against the brick wall, and I felt my jerky heartbeats, but it made me feel safer, something so solid against me. Tilting my face up, I slowly raised the broom, straining for the nest. I didn't know how strong a swing I could give it without losing my grip—or my balance.

First swing, and the bristles gently raked the bottom of the nest. The broom kept going. Grunting, I brought it back and tried again. It hit a little harder this time, and I saw some papery bits waft down.

The wasps came. In a rush they dropped from the bottom of the nest and swarmed around the bristles of the broom. I gripped the very tip of the handle and was preparing to give it a big upward shove, when I was suddenly aware of a single wasp on my left hand, then a second on the knuckles of my right. I froze.

Another landed on the little exposed circle of my face. I felt its tiny legs, the flex of its solid body. I didn't yell. I couldn't. All my instincts—to swat and flail about—had somehow been paralyzed. I was terrified they would sting, but they didn't. They just stayed put. They were all over the broom now, crawling toward me.

I let the broom drop. It clattered down the side of the ladder to the ground. The wasps swirled, and more landed on me, my clothing, my hands, my face, just staying very still. I wanted to reach for the EpiPen in my pocket, but I was afraid the wasps on my hand would sting if I moved. The ones on my face were blurry blots in my vision. But I knew they were there, motionless, their antennae pricked attentively, watching me with their compound eyes, smelling me.

I took a downward step. Some of the wasps left my hands. I took another step. A few launched themselves from my forehead. Step by step more of them left. By the time my feet touched the ground, there wasn't a single one on me.

I looked up and saw the last of them disappearing back into the nest.

A neighbor had seen me up on the ladder and called my parents.

“Who was it?” I asked when Mom and Dad confronted me after dinner. I'd tried to be really careful and make sure no one was around in their backyards.

“Their English wasn't good,” Dad said, shrugging. “I don't know.”

“But that's not important,” said Mom with forced patience. We were down in the kitchen. Nicole was already in bed. “What made you do something so dangerous?”

I felt myself dig in. “I was careful. I wanted the nest down. What's the big deal?”

“For starters, you're allergic!” Mom said.

“I had my EpiPen,” I muttered.

“You get stung enough times, that's not going to help,” Dad said.

“Well, maybe if I got some desensitization shots!” I told him.

“We're a little busy around here, buddy,” Dad said, and I could tell by the look in his eyes, he was getting angry. Mom put a hand on his arm.

“Yeah, well, I'm allergic!” I said. “And no one seems to care about that!”

“We do care—” Mom began.

“So just stay inside until we take care of it,” Dad said. “You don't climb a ladder!”

“What if one gets into the house?” I demanded. “What if I get stung that way? What if the baby gets stung?”

They didn't say anything for a few seconds, but Dad's eyes were still fierce.

“You could've fallen,” Mom said. “You could've really, really hurt yourself. . . .”

“We'll take care of the nest,” Dad said.

Mom came toward me and tried to hug me, but I shrugged her off.

“What's going on, Steven?” she asked softly. “Tell us what's up.”

I turned away from her because I could feel my throat aching, and I didn't want to cry. I looked at the wall, at the print with its brushed silver metal frame. I felt all the words welling up inside me, and I didn't want them inside me anymore.

I told Mom and Dad about my dreams. All the conversations with the angels who'd turned out to be wasps. I sat on the kitchen chair and stared at the floor, partly so I could concentrate and not forget anything, partly because I was afraid to see my parents' faces. I told them how the queen had said she was going to replace our baby with a new one growing in the nest, a healthy baby, and how I didn't think the dream was real, not really, but
I was sick of hearing from her, and I just wanted them all gone.

Neither of them interrupted me, and when I finally looked up, I wished I hadn't. Dad's chest was moving in and out slowly and deeply. Mom was crying, tears running down her cheeks, and then her face crumpled and she was sobbing. Dad went and put his arms around her and whispered something into her ear.

“It's too much,” she said. “I can't . . .”

I sat rigidly, wishing I hadn't told them at all, wishing I could take it back.

Mom wiped her eyes and reached for me, and this time I let her hug me, just so I didn't have to see her face. “I know this has been a really hard time. I'm so sorry if we haven't been around much for you.”

“It's okay. It's not your fault or anything.”

“Do you want to talk to Dr. Brown again?” Dad asked.

I chewed at my lip. Quietly I said, “What if it's true?”

“You've always had pretty intense dreams,” Dad said.

“I know, but—Vanessa said those wasps weren't normal.”

“Well, that may be,” said Dad, and he sounded like he was getting angry again, “but that doesn't mean a thing, Steven. I'm going to have a word with her, if she's encouraged any of this—”

“She hasn't!” I said. “Don't be mad at her.”

I didn't want to talk anymore, because I saw the fear in their eyes, and that made me afraid. Someone told me once that if you worried you were crazy, it meant you couldn't be crazy. Because crazy people apparently had no idea they were crazy; they thought it was normal, walking around naked
and yodeling. As I'd told my dreams aloud, I knew how insane they sounded—but I also remembered everything from those dreams, and they seemed so real.

Dad took a breath and tried to sound casual. “Maybe you should talk about this with Dr. Brown.”

“You think I'm crazy again,” I said, and this time I was crying.

Mom squeezed me hard. “You were never crazy. You were anxious, like a lot of people, like a lot of kids, and you're also imaginative and sensitive. And wonderful.” She kissed the top of my head. “So wonderful.”

I felt tired suddenly, in her arms. “I'll go talk to Dr. Brown,” I sighed. “But I want you guys to get rid of the nest.”

D
R
. B
ROWN HAD ALWAYS LOOKED A
little unstable to me. It was his eyebrows. They were gray and bushy and got pointy at the ends and angled sharply upward. I wondered if he knew. You'd think that if your job involved talking to crazy people, you'd make a special effort not to look crazy yourself. Sometimes his breath smelled bad, like old coffee and maybe cigarettes. I guess if you talked all day, your mouth got kind of dry and nasty. His voice was soothing, though, and he had a friendly smile.

“So, it's been a while since we talked,” he said. “I think almost a year. And we were talking about some challenges you were having, and some strategies for coping with them.”

“Yeah.”

There was a very thin file folder on his desk, closed. He must have checked it earlier. I remembered that he never took notes while we talked. I suppose he did that later, alone in his office, going “Hoo-wee!” and “Cray-zee!” and shaking his head.

“Did you find any of those strategies useful?” he asked me.

I told him that I'd tried to make my bedtime lists a bit shorter, and I wasn't washing my hands quite as much. Which wasn't entirely true. But it was summer, so it was harder for anyone to tell. In the winter, when it was awfully dry and cold, my hands got all chapped and red, especially around
the knuckles. They looked really sore, and sometimes the skin would crack and people would comment on it, like I had some kind of skin disease. Right now they looked okay. I told him I'd been practicing deep breathing.

“Great! And how was your year at school?”

On the drive in to school, I used to silently name the same landmarks so I wouldn't have a bad day. I had a relaxation tape I liked to listen to in the car. At school I drank only from a certain water fountain, and I washed my hands between every class. I also had hand sanitizer with me, just in case. Pretty much every day I worried I might feel sick and throw up in the middle of the hallway in front of everyone, and then no one would be my friend anymore.

I told Dr. Brown the year had gone okay and I'd gotten better at cutting down some of my rituals, and worrying less about throwing up.

“Okay. Good. Your father told me some of the things that have been happening at home. It sounds pretty challenging. How do you feel about things?”

So we talked a bit about the baby and all the visits to the hospital and the doctors and how the house was sad.

“And how about outside home. What're you doing this summer?”

“Not much. Just hanging around.”

“You're seeing your friends?”

“They're mostly away.” I'd seen Brendan a few times, but we didn't really have much in common. He was always so happy and energetic that he made me feel lousy about myself. I was okay being alone. Anyway, I didn't know how to talk about the baby with anyone.
Except the queen
, I thought suddenly.

“And you've been having bad dreams, your dad said.”

“Does he think I'm crazy?”

“No. They're worried about how hard this whole thing has been on you. You used to have a lot of nightmares, I recall.”

I nodded.

“And there was also some sleepwalking, I think.”

“Just a few times.”

“There was one nightmare in particular. Do you remember it?”

Of course I remembered it. “There's something standing at the foot of the bed, just watching me. And sometimes they pull the covers off me.”

“Okay. So tell me about these latest nightmares.”

I let out a big breath and told him what I'd told Mom and Dad. How they hadn't felt like normal dreams at all.

“They certainly are very interesting,” he said. “The wasp, does she have a name?”

“Is that important?”

“No, it's just that you keep saying ‘she' or ‘the queen,' so I was wondering if she had a name.”

“I never asked. She never told me.”

“How many conversations have you had?”

“Four.”

“I remember us talking, last time, about how you had an imaginary friend when you were younger.”

“Henry.”

“Henry, that's it. And you talked to Henry until . . . grade five, wasn't it?”

“Not very much by then, only sometimes.” I remembered what Dr. Brown had told me a year before, and I repeated it now. “It was really just a way of talking to myself. You know, helping me think things through.”

“But when you stopped talking to him, you felt very lonely, you said.”

It wasn't normal to have an imaginary friend in grade five—that's what Sanjay had told me, and he'd told James, and then it seemed pretty much everyone in my class knew. And so I'd had to stop talking to Henry.

I felt an unexpected tug inside my chest. “Yes.”

“And now? Do you still miss him?”

“Not really,” I lied. It wasn't exactly a lie. It wasn't so much Henry I missed; it was having someone like him, only real, to talk to. The perfect listener, the person who could help me sort things out.

“I remember,” the doctor said, “when we last spoke, you had a very interesting expression for how you felt sometimes. I wrote it down because I thought it was so expressive. ‘All in pieces.' Do you remember that?”

I hadn't—not until he'd said it. But now it came back, the feeling it described. Like I had a hundred
shattered thoughts in my head, a hundred glittering bits of stained-glass window, and my eyes just kept dancing from one piece to the next without understanding what they meant or where they were supposed to go.

“Have you been feeling that way again?” Dr. Brown asked.

“A bit, I guess. Not exactly the same.”

“Does the wasp, the queen, ever talk to you when you're awake?”

“No! Only when I'm asleep.”

“Your father said you tried to knock down the nest. He was worried you might have fallen, or gotten stung.”

“Yeah.”

“That dream you had, where the queen said they were replacing the baby . . .”

He didn't finish the sentence, which I knew
meant he wanted me to talk. What I said would be important. But I didn't say anything. I was afraid that whatever I said would be wrong.

“It was a dream,” I said finally.

“It was enough to get you up on that ladder.”

“I'm really afraid of wasps,” I said.

“But you decided to get very close to the nest.”

“I just wanted . . . I wanted things to stop. I was angry at Mom and Dad for not doing anything or getting me my shots.” This seemed normal. This seemed reasonable.

Dr. Brown looked at me pleasantly, waiting to see if I had anything more to add.

“The dreams just seemed . . .” I trailed off.

He smiled. “Well, there are many different theories about dreams. The important thing to remember is it's just a dream. They can feel like very powerful experiences, but they aren't true experiences, and
they have no real power over you. It's sort of like that thing we talked about last time, do you remember? A feeling is not a fact. What happens in a dream stays inside the dream.”

“Okay,” I said. And then I told him something I'd kept back from my parents. “Except the queen told me something that came true.”

“What's that?”

“That Vanessa had killed one of the wasps. I didn't know that. But the next day she told me about it.”

Dr. Brown rocked his head from side to side. “Well, you know Vanessa is a biology student. You know she wanted to study the bug. That's what happens to bugs so we can study them.”

“She said the wasp was unusual. That maybe it wasn't a wasp at all.”

He smiled. “I was in the museum with my kids
last weekend, and there was a sign. I think it said there were five to fifty million species on the planet, and only one million have been discovered. Something like that. Amazing stuff.”

“I guess so,” I said, and thought about whether I should say the next bit. “When I was trying to knock down the nest, a whole bunch of wasps swarmed over me, but they didn't sting. None of them.”

“Lucky.”

“It was like they were just warning me. And as soon as I started going down the ladder, they flew off.”

“I'm not a wasp expert. I know they're very territorial. Maybe when you were far enough away from the nest, they stopped seeing you as a threat.”

“Maybe,” I said, and let out a big breath. I actually felt better. “I don't want to dream about them anymore.”

“Well, I'm pretty sure you can't control that.
Likely you'll have some more dreams about them, the nest, and the baby. There's a lot going on in your life right now, but with time the dreams will fade. Are you able to wake yourself up from them?”

I shook my head. “I tried once and it kept going.”

He nodded sympathetically. “By the way, what's his name?”

“Who?”

He chuckled. “The baby. Your new brother. You've never said his name.”

“Oh. Right. Theodore. Theo, we call him.”

“Good name. Would you like to talk again in a couple of weeks?”

“Sure,” I said.

Three days went by without me dreaming about them, and I felt hopeful. Maybe they were gone for good.

On Monday, Dad went into work and Mom went to the hospital by herself to talk to the specialist about the upcoming surgery. Vanessa was over for the afternoon, watching Nicole and the baby. We were in the living room, and she'd just given the baby his bottle.

“Do you want to hold him?” Vanessa asked after she'd burped him.

“Okay,” I said nervously. I hadn't held the baby much. I was ashamed to admit it, but I was worried I'd get contaminated somehow, that what was wrong with him would become wrong with me. It didn't make any sense; I knew that. But I still felt it. Reluctantly I put my arms out, and Vanessa gave him to me.

Nicole was the one who was always all over the baby. She loved the baby. To her the baby just meant this wonderful happy new thing in her life.
She said once, not long after the baby had come home, “Just let me bask in his glory!”

It always made me feel mean when I watched Nicole with the baby. Because when I looked at him, I saw all the things that were supposed to be wrong with him; and I saw Mom looking tired and worried; and I saw Dad staring out the window, sometimes just into the distance, sometimes at our driveway, where the car was.

Nicole ran off to play, and Vanessa said: “Your mother was telling me about the operation.”

“Yeah.”

“Poor little bambino,” said Vanessa. “He'll be just fine.”

“He's all busted-up inside,” I said.

“Busted-up,” said Vanessa, considering.

“Yeah. It's not just his heart. There's a ton wrong with him. He could die.”

“But no one knows for sure.”

“Not now, but one day . . .”

Vanessa said, “One day things could go wrong with any of us.”

“I guess.”

“Lots of people have broken bits,” she said. “I've got some inside me.”

I looked up at her. “What?”

“It's called polycystic kidneys. My mom has it too. I found out when I was in high school. You start getting all these fluid-filled cysts on your kidneys.”

“Is it bad?” I asked.

“It's slow, but it gets a little worse every year. Sooner or later my kidneys will probably stop working.”

“Then what happens?”

“I'll need a kidney transplant.”

I didn't know what to say. Vanessa grinned and
playfully pushed my shoulder. “Don't look so terrified, Steven. It's not for a long time. Anyway, my sister says she'll donate one of hers, which is pretty great.”

“And you'll be fine then.” I felt like Nicole when I said it, a little kid wanting a quick and reassuring answer.

“For a while. Transplanted kidneys don't last forever. But who knows what'll happen. Anyway, ‘busted-up.' What's that mean? Lots of people I know have something or other wrong with them. A friend of my uncle's just got told he has MS. He's only twenty-seven. No one knows what's going to happen down the road. All I'm saying is, sooner or later we're all busted-up in some way.”

The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn't like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn't know why. My parents thought I
was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn't, but you don't get sent to a therapist if you're normal.

Sometimes we really aren't supposed to be the way we are. It's not good for us. And people don't like it. You've got to change. You've got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren't.