Mitch and Kaye faced off against their daughter down the length of the hall. Kaye seemed to recognize this symbolism and turned halfway, not looking directly at Stella, but at the plasterboard, the cornice, the paint, her eyes searching these blank things as if they might be sacred texts.
“I don’t think they would,” Stella said.
“That is not your concern,” Mitch said.
Stella desperately wrinkled her face in what she hoped was a smile. Her tears started to flow. “If it isn’t my concern, whose is it?”
“Not yours, alone, not yet,” Mitch said, his voice many degrees softer, and so full of painful, angry love that Stella’s throat itched. She scratched her neck with her fingers.
Kaye looked up. “Damn,” she said, reminded of something. She stared at her fingers and her nails and rushed into the bathroom. There, she lathered and rinsed her hands for several minutes.
Steam billowed from the sink as Stella stood by the door.
“Fred stuff?” Stella asked.
“Fred,” Kaye confirmed grimly.
“You took a good swipe,” Stella said.
“Mom cat,” Kaye said. She scrubbed back and forth with a stiff little bristle brush, then looked up at the ceiling through the steam and the lavender of the soap. “I’m going to wash that man right off of my hands,” she sang. This was so close to the edge, so fraught, that Stella forgot her guilt and frustration and reached out for her mother.
Kaye knocked aside her daughter’s long arms.
“Mother,” Stella said, shocked. “I’m sorry!” She reached out again. Kaye let out a wail, slapping at Stella’s hands until Stella caught her around her chest. As mother and daughter slumped to the ragged throw rug on the bathroom floor, too exhausted to do anything but shake and clutch, Mitch sucked in his breath and finished the work. He loaded a second suitcase with clothes, zipped it shut, and tossed it into the trunk of the Dodge along with the garbage bag. He imagined himself a rugged frontier father getting ready to pull out of the sod house and hightail it into the woods because Indians were coming.
But it wasn’t Indians. They had spent time with Indians—Stella had been born in a reservation hospital in Washington state. Mitch had studied and admired Indians for decades. He had also dug up ancient North American bones. That had been a long time ago. He didn’t think he would do that now.
Mitch was no longer a white man. He wanted little or nothing to do with his own race, his own species.
It was the cavalry that he feared.
They took the Dodge and left the old gray Toyota truck in the dirt driveway. Kaye did not look back at the house, but Stella, sitting beside her mother in the backseat, swung around.
“We buried Shamus there,” she said. Shamus had come into their lives three years ago, an old, battered tomcat with a rope looped around his neck. Kaye had cut off the rope, sewn up a slashed ear, and put in a shunt to drain a pus-filled wound behind one eye. To keep the orange tabby from scratching out the stitches, Mitch had wrapped his head in a ridiculous plastic shield that had made him look, Stella said, like Frankenpuss.
For a half-wild old tom, he had been a remarkably sweet and affectionate cat.
One evening last winter, Shamus had not shown up for table scraps or his usual siesta on Kaye’s lap. The tom had wandered off into the far corner of the backyard, well away from Stella’s sense of smell. He had pushed his way under a swelling lobe of kudzu, hidden from crows, and curled up.
Two days later, acting on a hunch, Mitch had found him there, head down, eyes closed, feet tucked under as if asleep. They had buried him a few yards away wrapped in a scrap of knitted afghan he had favored as a bed.
Mitch had said that cats did that, wandered off when they knew the end was near so their bodies would not attract predators or bring disease to the family, the pride.
“Poor Shamus,” Stella said, peering out the rear window. “He has no family now.”
As they drove Stella remembered many such trips. She lay in the backseat, nose burning, arms folded tightly, fingers and toes itching, her head in Kaye’s lap and when Kaye drove, in Mitch’s.
Mitch stroked her hair and looked down on her. Sometimes she slept. For a time, the clouds and then the sun through the car windows filled her up. Thoughts ran around in her head like mice. Even with her parents, she hated to admit, she was alone. She hated those thoughts. She thought instead of Will and Kevin and Mabel or Maybelle and how they had suffered because their parents were stupid or mean or both.
The car stopped at a service station. Late afternoon sun reflected from a shiny steel sign and hurt Stella’s eyes as she pushed through the hollow metal door into the restroom. The restroom was small and empty and forbidding, the walls covered with chipped, dirty tile. She threw up in the toilet and wiped her face and mouth.
Now the backs of her ears stung as if little bees were poking her. In the mirror, she saw that her cheeks would not make colors. They were as pale as Kaye’s. Stella wondered if she was changing, becoming more like her mother. Maybe being a virus child was something you got over, like a birthmark that faded away.
Kaye felt her daughter’s forehead as Mitch drove.
The sun had set and the storm had passed.
Stella lay in Kaye’s lap, face almost buried. She was breathing heavily. “Roll over, sweetie,” Kaye said. Stella rolled over. “Your face is hot.”
“I threw up back there,” Stella said.
“How far to the next house?” Kaye asked Mitch.
“The map says twenty miles. We’ll be in Pittsburgh soon.”
“I think she’s sick,” Kaye said.
“It isn’t Shiver, is it, Kaye?” Stella asked.
“You don’t get Shiver, honey.”
“Everything hurts. Is it mumps?”
“You’ve had shots for everything.” But Kaye knew that couldn’t possibly be true. Nobody knew what susceptibilities the new children might have. Stella had never been sick, not with colds or flu; she had never even had a bacterial infection. Kaye had thought the new children might have improved immune systems. Mitch had not supported this theory, however, and they had given Stella all the proper immunizations, one by one, after the FDA and the CDC had grudgingly approved the old vaccines for the new children.
“An aspirin might help,” Stella said.
“An aspirin would make you ill,” Kaye said. “You know that.”
“Tylenol,” Stella added, swallowing.
Kaye poured her some water from a bottle and lifted her head for a drink. “That’s bad, too,” Kaye murmured. “You are very special, honey.”
She pulled back Stella’s eyelids, one at a time. The irises were bland, the little gold flecks clouded. Stella’s pupils were like pinpricks. Her daughter’s eyes were as expressionless as her cheeks. “So fast,” Kaye said. She set Stella down into a pillow in the corner of the backseat and leaned forward to whisper into Mitch’s ear. “It could be what the dead girl had.”
“Shit,” Mitch said.
“It isn’t respiratory, not yet, but she’s hot. Maybe a hundred and four, a hundred and five. I can’t find the thermometer in the first aid kit.”
“I put it there,” Mitch said.
“I