Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle

Author:John Darnielle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781443437400
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2014-09-15T22:00:00+00:00

Two

11 I caught Vicky looking at my face in the light—I was sitting at my desk with some old pictures I’d dug out from an unmarked box. Me and my grandma running with geese somewhere. The zoo, I guess. Or on vacation. I wasn’t sure.

If I’m in a bathroom out there in the world someplace I’ll catch the glint myself on the raised ridges on either side of my mouth area, the dully shining skin. “Pretty bad?” I said.

“No, now, no,” she said, with a little catching laugh in her breath. “You know I work doubles on weekends out at Loma Linda, though.”

“No,” I said. My conceptions of people’s outside lives are pretty crude: basic, two-dimensional stuff.

“I do, I do,” she said. “Anyway, my sister’s friend works reconstructive. They had somebody like you in there just last week.”

Our eyes met. This doesn’t happen for me often, with anybody. It felt so naked. I tried to stay with it, to be present for it, to see where it would go.

“They can do so many things now, honey,” she said, returning her eyes to her work. She was prepping some swabs for my cleaning. “It’s a lot they can do since you first got hurt.”

“I—I know. I talked to them about it a couple years back.”

“How long ago was that?” she said, her gaze back on me, pretty steady. You forget how well people know you, when they know you.

I opened a drawer on the left side of my desk, the personal business side, which doesn’t see a lot of traffic. I moved some stuff around and found a few brochures. One was even from Loma Linda. Imagine.

Vicky looked them over. “They’re in their own building now,” she said. “This one is from when they were still over in the main surgery building.” The western desert gives way a little. Marsh gas? Some smell on the wind. DON FACE MASK. TRACE BACK. CONTINUE DUE EAST. DIG SHELTER.

“Anyway,” she said, “you could call them,” and she swabbed my cheeks with some glycerine on a compress, so gentle it barely stung at all.

“It’s your grandmother,” Dad said on the phone after we’d finished up our opening moves today. “Last night she—she died last night.”

When you shoot yourself in the face with a Marlin 39A, one thing you don’t think about is what your father will tell his mother when it becomes necessary to tell her something’s happened. My grandfather on my father’s side had been dead for over a decade; he had a heart attack one day in the supermarket. I’d overheard my dad explaining it to Mom after he came home early from work. “The aisle was empty, it was early,” he said. “He was lying there for—for a little while.” I was twelve; they took me to the funeral at Oak Park and I stood quietly imagining what the screams would sound like if the coffin lid sprung open and something crawled out.

Grandma stayed on alone in the giant house where my dad and his brothers had grown up.

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