Rundown by Michael Cadnum Page A

shoulders and hips, and she stands about my height. In volleyball, she can spike the ball better than anyone, but my serves drop in.
    I thought of crashing the parakeet cage over her head, but parakeets can be startled to death very easily. Quinn had moved to Reno with his family, and I had almost completely trained myself not to think about him.
    â€œI knew you’d want him to know,” she said. “That you’d want him to hear the news, but that you couldn’t, probably, bring yourself to tell him yourself.”
    Usually when people talk about what you would have wanted, you’re a corpse and unable to overhear. My dad has headaches like this, migraines that send him to the medicine cabinet. I had never experienced anything like it.
    â€œQuinn was very upset,” Marta was saying. She reached into a conure’s cage and looped a squabbling, half-wild bird onto her finger. The scarlet and azure bird had bit everyone, even Mr. DaGama, until this moment. “Quinn was really worried about it and wanted to know how you were doing. He thought you’d be in a hospital, and I said you were at home.”
    Marta drove me home in her Toyota, a car with stuffing bursting out of the upholstery. Marta was definite that she wanted to be a veterinarian, but with a specialty in either tropical fish or birds of the rain forest. She was fascinated by any living creature with symptoms of illness, got wide-eyed with concern, and needed a running account on any symptom. Including me.
    â€œYou don’t have any diarrhea, though,” said Marta. “Do you? Loose stools are a key in diagnosing illness. In any animal. And that includes humans.”
    Sometimes when Marta starts to talk she never stops. I said, “Stop the car.”
    But diving or driving, Marta is deft. She had the car at the curb in a wink, and I opened the passenger door and deposited the contents of my stomach into the gutter.
    Bernice has a brace of corporals and sergeants. They creep, snipping the privet bush in the garden, dusting the bottom rungs of the dining room chairs. A dust expert knelt on the stairs, spraying a substance onto his yellow cloth, applying it to the bare wood on either side of the Turkish carpet.
    Slung low to the ground, feeling like a rhino, I stumbled past this dust engineer. I found myself in Dad’s bathroom looking hard into my reflection, brown hair, brown eyes. I don’t use a conditioner on my hair, just baby shampoo, brush it. When Cass is around sometimes she braids it for me.
    Dad’s new medicine cabinet was replete with Demerol and Tylenol with codeine. He had Percodan, generic oxycodone, and painkiller suppositories, in case he became too nauseated to swallow. But he hoards old pills, in case he needs them. The capsules outlast their sell-by dates, some of the prescription labels still sporting Dr. Rigby’s name, an internist who retired a year ago.
    I slept, huddled in my bed in my shadowy cavern, and as I drowsed I heard voices. I sat up at one point, sure that I heard Detective Margate downstairs. I strained my ears, but then I decided the muffled voice belonged to Mom.
    Footsteps tiptoed up the stairs. Someone knocked softly and peeked in.
    It was Bernice. She gave me a cool, wet washcloth, like a Victorian remedy for the vapors.
    â€œLet yourself rest,” said Bernice. Life for someone like Bernice is a matter of allowing—letting herself sit, permitting herself a moment of rest on the back step in the afternoon sun.
    When I woke the headache was gone, and I felt that strange, deceitful sensation of lying down on a nice day, sunlight slicing through the crack in the curtains. I heard Dad’s voice somewhere far away, and I knew this was impossible—he was in L.A.
    I lay still, looking at the empty landscape of my ceiling, but the rich drowsiness was over. I put my feet on the floor and sat, doing a systems check, shoulder, blackberry scratches, bruised hand. I