Brood XIX (5 page)

It was as though Emma had somehow breathed
life into her creation. She had left a parting gift that proved
that a miracle could be birthed from decomposition and apparent
death. There was no way the nymphs should have survived. And yet
they had.

Vanessa believed it was a message of hope, a
portent.

What was two years when a cicada waited
thirteen to spread its wings and live for but a single month?

She was going to find her daughter.

And she was going to bring her home.

It felt like a great weight had been lifted
from her soul, as though a ray of sunshine had cut through the fog
through which she'd been blindly stumbling since Emma's
disappearance.

The hint of a smile curled the corners of her
lips.

She heard a knock at the front door and rose
from the table. Even her step felt lighter as she strode across the
living room. For the first time, she thought that everything just
might work out all right. Or at least as well as it could.

Vanessa opened the door.

The feeling fled as quickly as it had
arrived.

* * *

"Hi, sis," Trey said.

He had paced on her porch for more than ten
minutes before he finally found the courage to knock. Part of him
had hoped that Vanessa would still be asleep, that he would have to
return later. It was selfish, he knew. He should have called her
the moment they found the remains, but he had needed to be certain.
And now that he was, he wasn't sure he was going to be able to
vocalize the words. He couldn't even bring himself to look her in
the eyes.

Vanessa stood silently in the doorway as he
shifted nervously from side to side, the porch planks creaking
under his weight. He forced himself to look up from his toes. Her
pale cheeks were already wet with tears.

She must have read the news from his
expression, his posture.

"When?" she whispered.

He finally summoned the nerve to look her in
the eyes and saw only fathomless pits of pain.

"Yesterday," he said. "We found her body in
the bayou. Half a mile from Caddo Lake."

"How long?"

"Two years."

"How did she...?"

"Vanessa..."

"I need to know."

Trey reached out and took her hand.

"I need to know!" she screamed and jerked her
arm away.

Trey eased closer and opened his arms. She
balled her fists and hit him on the chest over and over until he
was able to draw her into his embrace. She continued to pound on
his back until she eventually ran out of adrenaline and collapsed
into him, sobbing.

They slumped to the floor right there in the
foyer. He held her tightly and willed whatever strength he had into
her. Tears streamed from his eyes as well. He leaned his cheek
against hers and whispered directly into her ear. He told her
everything. From the discovery of the corpse through the
identification process. He described the condition of the body. The
broken bones. The lack of flesh from decomposition and insect
consumption. The teeth. The hair. He spared no detail. Vanessa
needed to know and it would only hurt worse if she had to hear it
from someone else in bits and pieces doled out over the coming days
and weeks. He needed to crush her now to know if she would be able
to survive it.

She cried until there were no more tears, her
head on his shoulder, her fingers clenching his shirt. He held her
in the silence for what felt like hours, unable to offer any words
of comfort. She had heard them all before and they sounded hollow
coming from him. He thought she had drifted off to sleep or fallen
into a state of catatonia when she finally spoke.

"Will you...?" She paused to dampen her dry
mouth. "Will you take me to see my husband?"

* * *

Vanessa sat at the foot of Warren's grave.
Her brother waited patiently in his car fifty yards away on the
sizzling ribbon of blacktop that meandered through the low hills
crowned with lush grasses and carefully tended copses of trees.
Right now, she needed her husband more than ever before. She had
never felt so alone. Even after Warren's death, there had always
been the promise that her daughter was out there somewhere and it
was only a matter of time before they were reunited. And now that
promise had been found broken and abused, cast aside like refuse in
the swamp.

"There's nothing left for me here," she
whispered.

The cruel sun beat down on her. She would
have felt the skin on the back of her neck burning were she able to
feel anything at all.

She heard the deafening chorus of cicadas
from the cypress trees looming over the row of headstones, the same
trees from which the crunching sounds had previously originated.
There had to be thousands of them in that one stand alone. Predator
satiation, they called it. Produce more offspring than its enemies
can consume and the species will survive. The individual is
nothing. Expendable. The same rules applied to humanity.

Vanessa crawled over the faint lump until she
was close enough to touch the headstone. She ran her palm over the
smooth marble surface. The polish was beginning to pit. She traced
the letters with her fingertips. It was as close as she was going
to get to the physical consolation she so desperately needed from
the man she loved.

"Would you forgive me? If I just went to
sleep and woke up there with you? Wherever you are. Would you be
able to forgive me?"

The cicadas sang even louder, their amassed
voices making the leaves shiver.

"I can't do it anymore. I don't
want
to do it anymore. I want to be with my family again."

A gentle breeze from the east rustled the
trees and the cicada song abruptly ceased. It was replaced by the
buzzing sound of thousands of wings as a cloud of insects rose from
the cluster of cypresses. They swarmed above her, whirling like a
cyclone, casting strange dotted shadows. The air stirred around her
at the behest of so many wings, like fingertips just grazing the
fine hairs on her body. A lover's touch.

And then the cloud descended.

Chitinous bodies assaulted her from all
sides. She threw her arms up over her head and shrieked in
surprise. Cicadas tangled in her hair. Wings tapped her skin. Tiny
feet poked like so many needles. They scurried up her sleeves, down
the back of her shirt. Across her lips and her tongue. She spat and
forced her mouth closed as tightly as she could. They clicked in
her ears as they tried to squeeze into the canals. Then, one by
one, they took to flight again.

The buzz of wings metamorphosed into the
high-pitched squealing and clicking sound.

Cautiously, she lowered her arms and eased
herself up to her knees. She couldn't even hear herself think over
the cicadas. It sounded like they were screaming from inside her
head.

She plucked several stragglers out of her
hair, where they had become hopelessly entangled, and brushed
herself off. It still felt as though they were crawling all over
her. She looked up at her husband's headstone and gasped.

The entire surface of the marble was covered
with the large insects, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, climbing all
over each other. They covered her husband's name, the dates between
which he had graced the world, his identity as a loving husband and
father. The singing cicadas even obscured the majority of his
epitaph, save for two small gaps where no insects crawled.

Two words were clearly framed between the
writhing bodies. Not once did a single insect so much as crawl
across either.

Vanessa leaned closer, her heartbeat racing
to catch up with the rhythm of the cicada song. She focused on the
words of the epitaph:

She could only read two words between the
scrabbling insects:

lives
.

* * *

They didn't speak as they rode back to
Vanessa's house. Trey had seen the cloud of cicadas descend upon
his sister from the driver's seat, but by the time he reached her,
the swarm had settled and she was ready to leave. Sure, he
remembered seeing the insects swarm years ago. Just not like that,
not directly around someone. They had walked to his car in silence,
a silence that hung between them until they were nearly to her
house before she finally spoke.

"Is it possible the body they found wasn't
Emma's? I mean, is there any way the identification could be
wrong?"

He glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
She seemed strangely composed, as though he was returning with an
entirely different person than the one with whom he had left. Her
eyes were glazed, focused on nothing in particular, her posture
almost relaxed. He debated the merits of sugar-coating the truth,
but he couldn't bear to offer her false hope.

"No," he said after a long pause. "The
comparisons of the DNA from her hair and her dental records were
conclusive."

"But they didn't test the body itself, did
they?"

Trey's Cherokee coasted to a halt in front of
her house. Vanessa climbed out without another word and walked up
the path toward her front door. She didn't wave, didn't even look
back in his direction. Just opened the door with her key and
vanished into the darkness.

He sat there under the glow of the
streetlamp. Small dark shapes swirled around the light, casting
strange, shifting shadows. He heard the distant hum of cicada song
from the ancient trees lining the lane.

Vanessa needed help, just not the kind of
help he could give. He was worried about her. Terrified for her.
She could simply walk straight to her medicine cabinet, grab a
bottle of pills, and curl up alone in bed one final time. Was it
possible that he had just seen her alive for the last time? Would
their next encounter require him to break down her door to find her
dead in her bed?

He grabbed his cell phone and flipped it
open. The small screen stared back at him. He debated calling
someone to stay the night with her, but he was all she had now and
there was no way she would allow him to baby-sit her. He thought
about calling a shrink or a pastor, someone who could help her sort
through her feelings, who could convince her not to do anything to
harm herself. But she hadn't appeared suicidal. In fact, she almost
seemed more at peace than she had been in a long time. Was it
possible her doubts were justified?

In the end, he settled on a different number
entirely and listened to the phone ring until someone eventually
answered.

"Packard?" he said. "Walden here. From
Jefferson. I'm glad you're still there. Remember when you said if
there was ever anything else you could do for me...?"

* * *

Vanessa passed through the dark living room
and entered the kitchen. Her thoughts were a chaotic mess and she
was emotionally spent, yet at the same time, she felt remarkably
calm. Memories assaulted her. The bear her daughter had made
crumbling as the cicadas emerged from their molted skins. A ghostly
hand pressed against the glass. The swarm descending upon her from
the trees at her husband's grave. Covering the headstone with the
exception of two conspicuous gaps.

"Still lives," she whispered to the shadows.
It was a homophonic interpretation, a verb instead if a noun.

It couldn't all be coincidence, could it? Any
one of those events could have been an anomaly, a random freak of
nature, but together they formed a message. And there was no
denying what that message was.

Perhaps she was only seeing what she wanted
to see. Maybe something deep inside of her had finally broken under
the weight of her loss. Or maybe, just maybe, her interpretation
was correct. Regardless, there was only one way to find out for
sure.

She flipped on the kitchen light and stared
at the table. The glass case lay in ruin. The base was still flat
on the surface under a mound of dirt. The support post stood erect
from it like a little metal cactus. But the panes were shattered.
Gleaming shards littered the tabletop. She glanced up at the
overhead fixture, at the window that overlooked the back yard.
There was no sign of the cicadas anywhere.

Vanessa headed back through the living room
toward the staircase and ascended into darkness. She was exhausted,
but she knew there was no way her brain was going to shut down long
enough for her to sleep. She didn't feel like trying anyway. Those
two words repeated over and over in her head.

Still lives
.

Still lives
.

Was it possible they were true? That Emma was
somehow still alive?

She contemplated the evidence as her brother
had described it. The dental records had proven that the teeth had
been Emma's based upon comparisons of a forensic odontologist's
physical reconstruction and the existing x-rays. Could the films in
the file have been switched? Could another child's teeth have been
filled to pass for Emma's? And then there was the DNA. The hair
they pulled from the shallow grave had been identical to the sample
she had procured from Emma's hairbrush herself. Was there any way
the samples could have been switched in the lab or somehow
contaminated?

Everything boiled down to one simple
question. With the preponderance of easily verifiable physical
evidence, had anyone formally evaluated the body itself?

She turned left at the top of the landing and
started down the hallway. Her transferred weight made the
floorboards creak, startling the hidden cicadas. Their song
reverberated from the walls, creating the impression that it came
from all around her at once. She passed Emma's bedroom on the left
and switched on the light. It was exactly as her daughter had left
it. Dirty clothes on the floor at the foot of a rumpled bed. Muddy
shoes in the corner beside a short table still covered with crayon
drawings on butcher paper and a film of dust. A rainbow array of
teddy bears lining the tops of her dresser and bookcase. But not a
single cicada clinging to the window or swirling around the
overhead fixture.