Crawlers by John Shirley

Author:John Shirley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: fiction
ISBN: 9780307414847
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

December 10, afternoon

Ms. Santavo was a petite little woman, shorter than Adair, who wore ladies’ business suits that she had to have specially made for her. They didn’t make them in children’s sizes. She was actually half Vietnamese, half Filipino, if Adair remembered rightly, married to a Mexican guy named Santavo.

She had a psychology Ph.D., and maybe she was using it on Adair, here in her office at the high school, but it didn’t feel that way. Adair’d had several meetings with Ms. Santavo, back when she thought her parents were going to get a divorce and she hadn’t been able to concentrate on school stuff. Ms. Santavo had always been really nice and she’d done some kind of therapeutic talking-through that wasn’t really part of her job, just to try to help. Ms. Santavo was good at making Adair feel like an adult working things out with another adult.

On her desk, Ms. Santavo had a lot of those little toys for grown-ups you got at Earth Gifts and places like that—the miniature Zen sand garden, the baseball-size version of the globe with purple lightning jumping toward your hand when you touched it, the panel with colored sand that made artful-looking shapes when you turned it upside down and shook it, the frame with tiny magnetized diamond shapes of chrome that you could rearrange into any shape you wanted. Adair was playing with that one, absently, as they spoke after school.

“I know what you mean,” Ms. Santavo was saying, sipping a can of Diet 7UP. “I am not real likely to walk up to my own mother and say, ‘Mom, I think you’re acting very strangely’—not unless it’s really necessary. If she seemed to be developing Alzheimer’s, I might have to say something like that. It would be really hard.”

Adair was thinking about what Ms. Santavo said, but her hands were shaping the magnetized metal pieces into an almost familiar outline. A woman with long hair, in rough silvery silhouette. “It’s not just . . . being afraid of how she’ll feel about it. Hurting her feelings. It’s . . . hard to explain. I don’t have any good reason. That’s what’s, like, freaking me out. Being afraid of them for no really good reason. That’s why I thought, maybe I should see a doctor. Maybe, there’s something wrong with my mind. Maybe. I mean, feeling like your parents aren’t human anymore. Both of them, not just my mom—that’s just sick, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you know what, before I’d jump to the conclusion that you’re sick, I’d check out the less drastic possibilities. Like that there might just be a misunderstanding about what’s going on. Look, let’s have your mom come in—talk to her, the two of us. What the heck, if that doesn’t work, we’ll see about doctors.”

Adair felt pinned to a board, like a butterfly. She felt like she had to say yes. But she didn’t want to. “Yeah, sure.”

Ms. Santavo picked up the phone, called Adair’s house. “Hello, this is Ms.

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