by Michael Beeman
1.
The alarm of my daughter’s shrill screams wakes me in the middle of the night, and I’m moving before I’m even fully conscious. Sarah and I collide in the small space between out twin motel beds, fumble over hers, and reach the blank wall where the door should be. But we are not at home –we are in Florida. My mind whirls to reorient itself. By the time it does, Sarah has already hurdled both beds and run to the next room. I follow a step behind. Julie’s shrieks come in regular intervals, steady as a car alarm, and she pauses only to refill her lungs with breath.
…..Sarah gets to her first, and I hear the screams die away to whimpers –real whimpers, like a frightened dog- while I slap against the wall, find the light switch, flood the room with white.
…..There is no one to fight; the adrenaline storming my veins slows. Sarah is sitting on the edge of the bed smoothing Julie’s straw-blond hair down over the back of her head, whispering to her the comforting things all mothers know to say. I hear “it’s alright,” but Sarah sounds unsure, as if she’s trying to convince herself. Julie’s hands are clamped over her ears. “Did you have a bad dream?” Sarah asks. Julie shakes her head. “It went in my ear,” Julie says. She takes one hand away from her head, and points to her right ear. “This one.”
…..I move out of the door frame and crouch behind Sarah. Sarah brushes Julie’s hair back from the small pink shell of her ear. “Need my glasses. Damn it!” and Sarah is running again. I hear her footsteps stomp heavily in the hallways, through the bedroom, ending by our dresser. I hear the clutter in the top drawer being thrown around, and Sarah’s frantic cursing. But my vision has always been better than 20/20, so I look in. It’s hard to see at first because of the shaking, but I gently hold her head steady and brush away the hair. I lean in closer. Then I see it.
…..Something black sticks out of her ear canal, like a piece of obsidian stone chiseled to a small, triangular point. Julie’s whimpers are replaced by hyperventilating breaths, and I can feel her hot tears on my palms. Without thinking, I brush the end of the triangle with my thumb, my fingerprints just grazing it. It is hard, but gives slightly, like a piece of cardboard or rubber. Then it moves. It shifts. The point of the triangle splits down the middle and breaks outwards. The two halves surround something small and round. Julie’s screams begin again, full-volume. Sarah’s feet thud back down the hallway. I watch the two pieces of the triangle come together again as it moves in further.
2.
Sarah sits behind me, her cell open on speakerphone, talking to the hospital while I drive. In her free hand she holds a list of emergency numbers which includes everything from the local police and fire department to the national poison hotline and the center for disease control. These lists follow us everywhere we travel, an identical template with interchangeable names and phone numbers that I usually complain are Sarah’s way of over-preparing. Right now, it just feels like being smart. They way I’m driving makes me think all the NASCAR I watched with my father growing up wasn’t a waste of time after all, either, but maybe it, too, was preparation. Our minivan streaks through the empty roads like a burgundy bullet, careening into the opposite lane on sharp corners, accelerating out of the turns, bombing the deserted straight-aways. My GPS says we will be at the hospital in twenty minutes. I can make it in ten.
…..A frantic call to the hospital tells us three things: One, there is a bug inside my daughter’s ear, and the name of the bug inside my daughter’s ear is “Periplaneta Americana,” a breed of cockroach normally confined to South and Central America that has been appearing with increasing frequency in the southern states in the past decade. Two, this happens all the time (the woman on the phone said they “pull bugs” at least once a week during the peak season). Three, the child, although understandably upset, will not be harmed so long as the insect is removed quickly. If the bug stays in for longer than twenty-four hours it will start to nest. The bug has been in Julie’s ear for less than thirty minutes, during which she has cycled through screams, whimpers, and shrieks. Who would let one stay in for an entire day?
…..I’m pulled back from my minivan-racing by a new sound coming from the behind me. Amazingly, I hear laughter. Julie’s little girl laugh, light and sweet like a run down the high keys on a piano, sends a wave of relief through me. My hands loosen on the wheel. Sarah is working some kind of magic in the back seat. “Girls, what’s so funny back there?” I ask, and meet Sarah’s eyes in the rear-view. Her eyes are open wide, and afraid.
…..“What is it, baby?” Sarah asks Julie.
…..Julie shakes her head. A grin stretches across her face. “It’s funny. And it tickles me!” She can speak only when her under-the-breath laughs give her a chance. “He’s saying the funniest things!” For the first time in the ride Julie takes her hands away from her ears. Now she covers her mouth. Her laughter grows louder, more forceful. Soon, she gives way to full-bodied guffaws. “He’s so funny!” Sarah recoils. Julie can’t speak at all, she is laughing so hard. She is laughing as loud as she had been screaming. Laughing, laughing, laughing, as I drive faster, clip a curb with my rear tire, find an on-ramp, rush though the dark highway to the hospital.
3.
By the time we reach the emergency room, Julie has stopped laughing. And speaking. She responds slowly to the nurses, nodding at odd places in the conversation: a question asked to someone else, the scratching of our pens over forms, the middle of long stretches of silence. It takes about forty minutes to ready her for the “procedure:” A doctor pulls the cockroach out of her ear with a pair of tweezers. The thing comes out so easy I start to get angry at him for not just telling me how over the phone and letting me do it myself. All the time spent driving, filling out paperwork, comforting Julie, not to mention the costs we’ve racked up, could have been saved with a set of eyebrow tweezers from Sarah’s travel bag.
…..Julie stares out the window and works on a lollipop someone at the hospital must have given her for the ride home. Darkened houses roll by, their bottom stories splashed with orange circles by the streetlights, swaths of blue moonlight glinting off the higher windows and shingled roofs. The radio was turned off when Sarah called the hospital. The front windows are down to let in the air. Our tires thump over the cracks in the road, a steady but irregular percussion slapping through the pull of the wind and the rise and fall of the engine. I check the rear-view constantly. Julie just keeps looking at the night outside. Her eyes seem to have grown bigger to accommodate the low light. Her head bobs as our car sways over the uneven roads. Her hair falls forward in a sheet, rocks slightly from side to side like a blond curtain. Occasionally I look up and catch her shaking her head. More often, though, she tilts her head forward, just slightly, as if offering nods of agreement to the ghost of her reflection in the window, the houses beyond, and the dim lit world at night.
4.
Although Sarah and I agreed that after the trip to Disney World we would no longer postpone the inevitable divorce, that we cannot extend the happy-but-sleeping-in-separate-beds charade to include separate houses and towns, I still clung to hope the entire time. We tried to invest the vacation with as much cheer as we could to manufacture some final pre-divorce memories for Julie, and truth be told I got caught up in the act. At times I really thought the too-happy smiles Sarah gave me, her over-the-top exuberance for all the sights and rides –the pretending for Julie’s sake- could somehow whitewash the mistakes that had accumulated over the years. But when we returned home again, the act was over. Sure, we could stretch things out a few more weeks, another month, maybe even half a year, but you can’t keep a parody going forever, and by the time I had noticed something was wrong that’s what we had become. By then we had both been pretending for far too long.
5.
When the moment comes to tell Julie, Sarah and I try our best to handle things well. We call her into the living room and arrange our seats into a triangle so it doesn’t seem like we’re interrogating her. Sarah brings a notebook, and I see a list with “The divorce talk with Julie” written across the top, and imagine she has one for me, and that there is a file hidden in our house where I can recover all the lists from our important moments. “Things to say on our first date,” one might read. “Meeting Frank’s parents,” another. “Do I still love him after Amy?” that is one of the old ones, from when our relationship “wasn’t completely defined” (my own lame words coming back to me). Maybe that list would have a cost-benefit analysis drawn in underneath. I glance at Sarah’s list while we talk to see how we are doing. Like clockwork, she strikes each of her bullet points, one by one.
The divorce talk with Julie.
1. We both still love Julie.
2. We are all still a family.
3. Sometimes people need to change their lives, and it isn’t anyone’s fault.
4. It isn’t Julie’s fault.
5. Your Dad will live nearby. You will visit him and he will visit you. He will pick you up from school some days, and always come to your plays and soccer games.
6. You will still have all of your grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins.
7. You don’t have to choose between us.
8. We both still love Julie, and always will.
…..Sarah does a pretty good job of not crying, but I have to take over at the end. After we finish, Julie sits quietly for a moment. Then she tells us that cockroaches don’t have parents at all, and can live anywhere in the world. Also, she hates the name Julie and wants to be called Rochelle. “Sometimes cockroaches hiss,” she says in a small, matter-of-fact voice she must have copied from someone on television. “And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they make other noises, like clicking or chirping. Sometimes they sing. Sometimes at night they talk to you, but you don’t understand. Other times they run under the refrigerator when you turn on the lights.”
6.
The talk about Frank’s future.
…..This would be the oldest list. It would start out small, a few questions Sarah asked me when we first started dating scratched into a square yellow Post-it note. What did I want to do with my life? What was my Plan? Did I want to be a realtor forever? The answers were equally vague at first, but soon more Post-it notes would be added on, stuck to the side like amendments or posted on top of previous drafts. The Post-it note answer, “It’s a good job for now,” becomes replaced by “I just got a raise,” in turn covered under, “I will be getting a bonus in July.” Those answers are eventually superseded by, “It’s what I do.” This is lost beneath, “Don’t I make enough money for us?” and “Everyone has to work.” By now the first Post-its are old and brittle, like fallen leaves. The note on top reads: “It’s too late to start over.”
7.
When Sarah calls after I’ve moved to tell me of Julie’s weird behavior, I try to act surprised. She caught Julie staying up at night, sometime around three in the morning, just sitting in our living room. No TV on, no lights. Julie was awake but not doing anything. Julie told her, as she sat there in the dark, that cockroaches stay up all night. They don’t have bedtimes. They are nocturnal animals. Not insects, animals. When Sarah flipped on the light Julie ran back to her bed. Over the phone comes the long pause while Sarah waits for me to say something. I don’t say anything. I don’t tell her that Julie has been acting strangely at my new place, too.
…..I thought I saw the cockroach again the first time Julie visited my new apartment. I saw something in her hair, something dark like a leaf or piece of grass. When I reached for it, it moved towards her ear. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe it was a leaf or piece of grass or a shadow. Maybe I didn’t imagine it, and glimpse its tail –do they have tails?- or its legs as it crawled back in. Julie didn’t even notice. She sat there drawing pictures over the black and white outlines in the coloring book I bought her. If only it was another cockroach. If only we, Sarah, Julie, and I, could be reunited again by another inconsequential emergency. One a week would be fine: a scraped knee, a flu, a cold. A reason to come together again as the family we were, or could have been.
…..I imagine the list Sarah has in her hand when she calls. Julie is out back, digging under the porch for God-knows-what. The major points she hits: is this happening for you, too? How have you been responding? Should we punish her for this? How? Is this our fault, or only mine?
8.
The talk about the other woman.
…..If I could find the list for this talk, it would be written on one piece of notebook paper. The paper would be well-worn, stained with the rings of coffee cups drank when the line between late at night and early in the morning begins to blur. The creases have been folded over so many times the page is deteriorating into perfect quadrants. The basic premise is the same, but the dates have been changed along with the names and supporting evidence. Some words have been traced so many times they are digging furrows into the paper, and in places ripping holes straight through.
9.
When Julie comes over now, she chirps instead of speaking. She spends most of her time crawling around on the floor and getting under things. I’ve turned the office I use for her bedroom into a den: the windows are blocked out, taped over with cardboard, and Julie sleeps in a nest of blankets under the new and very expensive twin bed. She gets angry when I call her Julie. When I call her Rochelle, she smiles. So I call her Rochelle. She prefers to be alone when she sleeps, but most nights I manage to sneak in after she has fallen asleep and lie on top of the bed. Sometimes hours pass before I fall asleep because I’m trying so hard not to stay awake. The proximity to my own daughter is a novelty, why be asleep and miss it?
…..The day Julie was born was the most terrifying day of my life. I’d kept a brave face for Sarah throughout the whole pregnancy. I joined her in Lamaze classes, I watched the videos, I learn about the natural wonders of birth. I even cut things off with the girl I’d started dating from my office. But it was all an act –I knew the correct way I was supposed to respond, so that’s what I did, impersonating someone else like I could bluff it all away.
…..My bluff ended at the hospital. Seeing Sarah, stomach ballooned to the point of bursting under her paper-thin gown, lying in a reclining bed, a bracelet fixed to her arm like she was some kind of specimen, well, that ended it all. I was scared –I was plain terrified in a visceral, physical way that I hadn’t been since I was a child. I stayed numbed by fear through most of the delivery. Part of me went away, retreating to a far corner of my brain, and from a distance I watched the doctors go to work, saw Sarah struggle and push like I was looking from the end of a tunnel. I saw my own hand being squeezed so tightly I lost all feeling in my right thumb. When she finally let go, my hand was racked with pins and needles.
…..I came to myself again when I saw Julie. I hate to say it, but she didn’t look good. Red and wrinkled, like a rose-colored prune, birth-gunk sticking to her face, her hands groping for something to grab on to while she let out a tiny, thin scream. But when she opened her eyes she looked right at me and a new space was carved into my heart. I wasn’t told about that, I couldn’t have prepared.
…..Lately, that space has become harder to fill. Such short visits don’t do it, but only make me more aware that the void is there, and that it is growing in her absence. So if Julie looks a little bit different when she visits now, if she crawls around in a way that seems, well, impossible –her joints facing the wrong way as she skitters around the floor- so what? So I blot out the window of her room with cardboard, and bring in some dead leaves and dirt to line the floor, and am thankful. I call her Rochelle and avoid sleep on top of a small twin bed while my daughter is curled underneath, and it’s better than nothing at all.
10.
The talk about Frank’s drinking.
…..But there would not be just one list for this. This would have to be a series of lists, each of which includes parts of the others. This list would not be a single sheet or a series of Post-it notes, but would be written on thin strips of paper that reach out to connect the rest: the Other Women list, the Future list, the Going Back to School list, the Will You Ever Be Happy list. Lists with titles for things I haven’t yet named myself: a vague dread, a growing apprehension. The “Talk about Frank’s drinking” list would be a scaffolding surrounding all of the others, joining one to another, going in between. Supporting. Connecting them all. One familiar constant.
11.
They call us into the school a month after school’s been back in. Julie, Principal Hartman explains, didn’t come in from recess.
…..“We found her in the woods.” She seems embarrassed to be admitting this, as if our daughter’s weird behavior is some social faux pas she would rather overlook. We sit across from her; Julie sits in a chair off to the side, staring out the window. She has a twig or something in her hair.
…..“It’s this whole thing,” Sarah says. She pinches her elbows together in front of her and gestured with her hands, as if hoping to explain it all in one awkward motion. Principal Hartman nods. Our divorce was already well-known to her; teachers find out about these things so quickly. Julie was doing well in school despite her increasing detachment, she explains. But she is more spacey than normal. Like she was somewhere else. Usually the kids started acting that way around fifth grade, not as early as second. But who can tell? “It’s just a phase that she’s going though, I’m sure,” Sarah says. “Just a period of adjustment, right Julie?” We turn to look to her.
…..Julie does not look up right away. Her gaze slides up gradually, as if weighted down. When she meets our eyes, I shudder. Behind her eyes, deep within our daughter’s mind, something foreign is moving. It used to be so easy to make her happy: a new toy, a trip to get ice-cream, being allowed to stay up late and watch TV. But when I look at her now I cannot guess what she is thinking, what she needs. Instead I see an awakening, a chasm opening between us that will never be closed again, and hear the sounds of far-off claws scuttling away into the dark.
12.
The talk about Julie.
…..Oh, but this would be my best list. Whatever faults I have, as evidenced by the other lists Sarah is keeping if not physically than certainly in her head, they are refuted by this list. This list is type-written, and printed out on pristine white computer paper. This list is laminated. It includes the fishing trips we go on Sunday mornings in the summer, just me and her. The hours I spent reading to her before she even understood the words. All the times I stayed home with her watching movies when she was sick. Teaching her to ski. The subjects of the other lists cannot approach this one. Or they shouldn’t. But they have.
13.
Removing a Periplaneta Americana from a terrified little girl is such a simple procedure. All it took was our doctor, a portly man with a receding hairline and scraggly goatee, taking Julie by the hand and walking her to an exam room. He fairly beamed when we told him about the problem, both of us harried and frantic, out last vacation interrupted in the middle of the night. I could see him smirking to his friends later, joking about the tourists panicking over nothing and the local doctor setting them straight. All he did was take a pair of tweezers from his lab coat, brush the hair away from Julie’s ear, reached in to grab the thing, and pull.
…..“Viola!” And he flourished the bug, by then wriggling around on the end of the tweezers, presenting it like a magician pulling a card out of thin air.
…..It was hideous. He’d gotten it by the -thorax? Abdomen? The base of its body, the part at the end that bulges out straight like the plug of a light bulb. Its wings were moving fast, whirring like a miniature electric fan. Little brown-metal, rusted legs crawled at nothing as if it was trying to reach out to us or get back inside Julie’s head. Just seeing it made my skin crawl. The doctor turned and held it out to Julie, pushing it close to her face so she could see, and it took everything I had not to knock his hand away.
…..Julie wasn’t afraid or repulsed. She took the tweezers from him, and brought it closer to her eyes.
…..The thing’s legs scrambled for purchase on the air. It made weird chirps and hissing noises. Sarah and I just stood there, watching, as Julie examined the bug that had crawled into her ear. She twisted her hand this way and that to view it from every angle. She smiled, looked up at us, and returned her grin to the cockroach.
…..“Cool,” she said, in a hushed voice. “It is so cool.”
–
–
Michael is a graduate of Champlain College, where he won the fiction award in 2004, and recently earned his MFA through the Stonecoast MFA program. Michael’s fiction has been published in New Plains Review, Willard and Maple, and Midnight Streets. Michael’s reviews appear regularly in Publishers Weekly, ForeWord Magazine, and at Chamber Four. He is also a contributing editor for Chamber Four, where he recently edited the website’s electronic fiction anthology (available for free).