There was something wrong with my mother. Hallucinations or paranoia or early onset of dementia. Thyroid condition. I was leaning toward that one. The sudden weight loss fit. And the notes. Oh god. The notes.
tell mother you love her every night
pray out loud before bed—important!!!
get new print of roses for kitchen
But most of all, the one on the back of the bathroom door, that said simply:
it’s real you’re not imagining things
Dear god, what was going through her head? Something terrible, clearly. Something she didn’t want to talk to me about. (And who could blame her? If I was having problems, I’d have bent over backward not to inflict them on anyone else myself. Mom and I were too damn much alike, that was the problem.)
I left the bathroom, feeling desperately ashamed of myself. I’d been crawling around fretting about old phantom hands in the shrubbery, which was obviously ridiculous, and meanwhile Mom was in much worse shape than I’d thought.
Who could I talk to about it? I didn’t know any of her coworkers. I sure as hell wasn’t going to call her boss. Who did that leave? Phil? Gail?
Maybe Gail. Gail had said that she didn’t think there was anything wrong with Mom. If she was covering for her out of friendship, maybe I could convince her to talk to me. And if she wasn’t … well, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
It was too late tonight, of course. Too late for anything but wine and television and worrying. It seemed like that was all I did lately, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I’d had too much wine to drive somewhere with signal and call Brad. I could text various friends of mine, who are generally lovely people, but what were they going to say? “Wow, that sucks. Tell me if there’s anything I can do to help.” And they’d mean every word, but they couldn’t fix my mom’s problem, and it wasn’t like any of them had a spare fifty grand to move Mom into dedicated care, if that’s what had to happen.
I felt suddenly desperately lonely. I don’t, usually. When you grow up as the weird kid taking photos of bugs you get used to it, and when you later find that the world is full of other people who want to talk about bugs with you, it’s a glorious revelation. But here I was, thirty-two, alone in my mom’s house, and everything was terrible, and I couldn’t fix any of it.
Fuck. I brought the box of wine into the living room, set it on the coffee table, and put on Inspector Lowell. Maybe I should get a Scottie dog. We could solve mysteries together. The Mystery of the Sudden Ladybugs. The Mystery of the Upsetting Notes. The Mystery of What Happened to All the Wine. The Mystery of What Is Going On With Mom.
Maybe all the beige had driven her bonkers. If so, I couldn’t blame her. It was going to drive me bonkers soon. I wondered what Mom would say if she came home to discover that I’d painted the living room turquoise.
She’d be supportive, of course. Mom was always supportive. Dammit. That was the worst of this, that I didn’t know how to be supportive in return. I was supposed to be helping, and all I was doing was upsetting her and bad-mouthing Gran Mae and breaking glass everywhere. And alienating Phil. “Can’t forget about Phil,” I muttered, raising my wine in a toast.
Maybe the best thing I could do was leave and tell my brother that he should come handle it, because I was making a god-awful mess.
On-screen, someone was murdered in their bedroom. The camera watched from outside as they collapsed against the window, hands clawing at the glass. Then the murderer finished up and the hands slid limply down the pane.
Disembodied hands was too much for me right now. I turned off Inspector Lowell, drained my wine in three gulps, and went upstairs. The clock ticked at my retreating back.
When I got up in the middle of the night for my usual trip to the toilet, the house was oppressively silent again. The air conditioner wasn’t even on. Maybe this was the sound of beige paint, this fraught absence of sound. “I hear the souuuunds … of ecru,” I sang, and began giggling. Christ, I must still be drunk. I shoved the bathroom door open.
Something moved in the bathroom sink.
A white hand reaching for me. I only caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, but for a horrifying instant, I knew that’s what it was, coming out of the drain on an impossibly elongated wrist, and it was going to latch onto my face with its dirty nails and they’d find me in the morning dead and the hand would be gone, coiling bonelessly back down into the pipes, waiting …
I shrieked and flung myself backward. The towel bar struck me painfully in the back. The pain shocked me awake and I scrabbled for the wall and the light switch.
Fluorescent light blossomed overhead and chased away the vision of a hand. Something was moving in the sink, but it was a dark spreading stain.
Ladybugs.
“Goddammit.” I leaned over the sink, my heart still pounding. They were pouring from out of the drain, spreading across the ceramic like blood. Hundreds of them, crawling on top of one another, sliding down the slick surface of the sink, with still more flooding out. Some had already reached the countertop and were scurrying across it, blood splatter from the open wound.
I hastily pulled the little metal knob that closed the drain, and the tide stopped. The green-pepper smell of crushed ladybugs hit my nose. Dammit. I hadn’t meant to kill them.
“What are you doing in the drains?” I demanded. “Drain flies, sure. The occasional centipede, yeah, okay. But ladybugs do not swarm in drains!”
The ladybugs crawled around the sink, refusing to answer. My fingers itched. I held up a hand and ladybugs coated my fingers like a red glove, so densely I could barely see the skin.
“Jesus Christ!” I shook my hand wildly. Entomology brain thought this was all quite fascinating, but it was getting swamped under the sheer numbers of the invaders. Ladybugs flew in all directions, some of them actually flying, some of them hitting the wall or the mirror and raining down with tiny ticking sounds. A couple landed on my face and in my hair and I am embarrassed to say that I shrieked and slapped at them, and that didn’t help at all and they were still on my hand and covering the counter now and I couldn’t look in the mirror because they were on the mirror and I couldn’t tell what was on me and what was on the surface of the glass and one was on my ear and in a minute it would crawl inside—
Get hold of yourself! You’re a professional, dammit! They’re not demons, they’re not monsters, they’re Harmonia axyridis and maybe some Hippodamia convergens and they swarm sometimes and that’s the reason they’re here. Stop freaking out and think!
I forced myself to stand still. I flicked the one on my ear away, took a deep breath, and looked in the mirror. There were two on my forehead and one meandering around my chin, like a giant mobile pimple. That thought made me snort and I felt a little bit calmer and picked them off and set them in the sink again, and brushed the last few off my hand. The webbing between my fingers was itching in earnest now, probably because they’d been trying to bite. (Yes, Asian lady beetles do bite, but they can’t get through human skin, so it’s just a small scratch. No matter how many there were, I wasn’t going to get skeletonized by ladybugs. I was in more danger of rose picker’s disease.)
It occurred to me suddenly that if the ladybugs were in this sink, they might be coming out of the other sinks as well. I had a horrible vision of all the drains in the house erupting with shiny red beetles, flooding our house like the elevator in The Shining. I took two steps to the bathtub, saw a single ladybug wandering around, possibly from being flung, and hastily closed the stopper.
Still wobbly from too much wine, I staggered around the house, closing all the drains. None of the others had ladybugs coming out, but you couldn’t be too sure. The clock ticked at me from the mantelpiece. Mom’s notes were dark squares and I avoided reading them.
Once again, I found myself vacuuming up bugs in the middle of the night and shaking them loose in the backyard. “That’s enough of you in the house,” I informed them. “Stay out here and take care of the roses.”
I staggered back upstairs, grumpy and groggy. The shot of adrenaline had worn off while I was vacuuming. My hand still itched. I scratched it irritably and sat down on the bed.
I wanted to go back to sleep, but I had a nagging feeling that there was something I had forgotten to do. Something I’d dreamed about. Wasn’t there?
The roses say … say your prayers.
Ridiculous. I didn’t pray. I hadn’t prayed in years. It’s not a thing I did. I didn’t know what was out there, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t an interventionist god who cared whether or not I say grace over my pizza.
The roses say …
I stared at the ceiling, hearing the whisper in my head. It sounded just like the one that had whispered, Little piggy. Not a real voice. Somewhere between a thought and a memory.
I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in ritual. I doubt you can be an archaeologist and not know that rituals have a powerful hold over human brains. I sighed and knelt down next to the bed.
I would have sworn that I didn’t remember how to pray, but the words were right there on my tongue.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Morbid damn prayer. I’d always thought so. Who wants little kids to fixate on dying? But I felt better after saying it, and I crawled into bed and didn’t dream about ladybugs or hands or anything else.