The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 6

  I nodded.

  For a moment, he hovered like he wanted to say something, but then he just said, “Great. Thanks a bunch, kiddo.” He kissed me on the head and walked back through the blue door, silently.

  I put the folder aside. Whatever else was inside could wait. I had to come up with a way to get out of this job. If things kept going the way they were going, within a couple of days I was going to be kicked out of this family. First Em. Then the Lauras. Now for some reason I couldn’t stop making things worse with my parents. I was seriously running out of things to be kicked out of.

  I closed the window for the glove website, and discovered that the schedule-reminder pop-up was still there. I read it before I remembered that I was ignoring it:

  OUT OF FREEZER: Heads (2.5 days to thaw)

  At least they hadn’t been lying to me. They really were defrosting.

  And, I realized, I didn’t want to be around when they were done. If they were already that gross and irritating half frozen, I didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they’d finished the job.

  Somehow, I’d find a new summer plan before those guys thawed.

  The last thing I needed that night was Grandma Van.

  So of course, there we were: my mom, my dad, and I, making our usual dinnertime trek into the maroon velvet lobby of the Swan Song Retirement Village apartment building.

  The Swan Song is six blocks from the building we live in, meaning that we spend way too much time over there. It’s an old-fashioned place, and has both pros and cons. The really nice part is that it’s on the lake, so there are beautiful views. The bummer part is that over every window is a cement demon-swan emerging from the brick and stuck in midflight, so every time you look out of a window at the great view, your first thought is that something terrifying is about to crash in through the glass at you. It’s even creepier from outside, like the whole building is going to dissolve into those swans and they’re probably going to peck you to death or, if you’re lucky, smother you quickly with their icky cement feathers. Those blank cement eyes are the worst.

  The ownership really embraced it, though, apparently making sure there were as many demon-swans on the inside as there were on the outside. The indoor ones were wall-to-wall and upholstered, from the giant gray swan frowning in the middle of the maroon lobby carpeting to the nightmare-y inch-size versions on the velvety maroon drapes and the decorative armchairs. Everything matched in the most horrific of ways.

  It was the perfect building for Grandma Van.

  She lived on the eighth floor, so we hopped on the ancient elevator and rode up slowly. It was cramped in there, even with just the three of us, and the walls were plastered with notices of events going on in the Swan Song. As the flyers indicated, every single club, game night, and singing group had been organized by Julia Klinger, who was, inconveniently, my grandmother’s archnemesis. She lived one floor up, and though I’d never met her, she was apparently out to get Grandma Van. My grandmother used to be the boss of the Filipino part of the nursing home, and Julia ran the Armenian part. Ever since Julia took over the social calendar for the entire building, Grandma Van refused to do anything even remotely social, including eat with the other old people, which was why we’d been having dinner there every other night for the last five weeks.

  The elevator binged and we walked down the long hallway to her door. It was the one with the enormous portrait of Henry VIII on it. “A man who knew what he wanted,” Grandma Van always said admiringly. Like her hero, my grandmother knew what she wanted. Almost every one of our dinnertime conversations revolved around how much Grandma Van looked forward to her imminent demise. She’d planned out her funeral about a million different ways, and every time it changed, she’d tell me my new role.

  “You’ll lead a procession holding a lit candle shaped like my face….”

  “It’ll be a cocktail party, and you’ll be walking around with my ashes on top of an upside-down pineapple cake….”

  “I’ve rented a flock of swans from the wildlife center. It’ll be my tribute to the Swan Song. You can herd swans, right?”

  I lived in fear of her death, and it didn’t help that according to her, it might happen any moment.

  We reached Henry VIII, who snarled at us. My mom knocked, and after a minute, we heard the electric hum of the scooter moving closer to the door. A few locks turned and the door opened several inches.

  A single eye magnified by a pair of drugstore eyeglasses peered out suspiciously. The eyeglasses just barely fought off a mountain of thick purple-black hair that threatened to crush them. Grandma Van did the dye job herself. “Who are you people?”

  My dad sighed and shifted the dish of chicken adobo to the other hand.

  “Just kidding,” Grandma Van said. Her gravelly voice was exactly how I imagined all the concrete swans sounded when they discussed who they were going to swarm first. She grunted, swanlike, and looked past me. “No new friends yet, huh?”

  Flap flap flap.

  I shrugged, wishing I’d never brought Em over. It had only been like three times, but that was enough. Grandma Van knew where your weak spots were. It was her gift, along with funeral planning.

  She turned back to my parents. “What’d you bring?”

  My dad peeled back the aluminum foil.

  “Chicken adobo. What a surprise.” Then, keeping a disappointed eye on us, she hit reverse on her scooter, backing up all the way into her apartment. There was a wire basket attached to the front where she normally kept her enormous purse and a box of crackers, and it scraped a long, ugly line in the plaster of the wall as she went. When she’d gone as far back as she could, she turned the motorized chair and drove into the living room, leaving a few crumbles of plaster in her wake. From around the corner, we heard her say, “Kicking the bucket never looked so good.”

  Nobody said much over dinner. My parents tried to fake some cheerfulness, but it wasn’t very convincing.

  “Fovea had her first shift at the lab!”

  “Tell your grandmother all about it, Fo!”

  Grandma Van sighed deeply and helped herself to some chicken.

  There was nothing I wanted to tell anyone about my day, least of all Grandma Van, whose depression might actually get depressed if I mentioned that death was “iffy.”

  “There’s a real fish now,” I said. “He spent a lot of time in the castle today.” I scooped some chicken for myself and then examined it, remembering the possibility that it had spent some time in the body freezer. I mushed it with my fork. It looked normal, but if I was going to eat it, I needed to be certain. “Where did this come from?”

  “Oh—I made it,” my dad said distractedly.

  Grandma Van sighed again. “Pretending to be Filipino does not fool the chicken,” she muttered.

  “I helped a little,” said my mom.

  Grandma Van eyed her. “Helped? You can’t even make ice water.”

  “Dad?” I said. “After you made the chicken, since then, where has the chicken been living?”

  “In the freezer,” he said, frowning.

  “The kitchen freezer?”

  “As opposed to?”

  All right. I was convinced. “Never mind. Please pass the pepper.”

  There was a pause.

  “Speaking of pepper,” said Grandma Van, “did you people know that Julia petitioned the management to replace all the pepper grinders with shakers? So now instead of twisting the knob to get your pepper, you just dump the stuff on your plate. It’s like she’s rewarding everybody who has arthritis. Nobody works for anything around here anymore. When I go belly-up, I’m leaving money to this place, but only on the condition that they go back to grinders.”

  On the way out after dinner, my mom gave Grandma Van a hug.

  “Maybe you should try something new, Mom,” she said. “Maybe you’ve been holed up here too long, you know? Maybe you’d like an activity?”

  “Bite your tongue!” my grandmother snapped back. �
�As long as Julia’s running things, I am activity AWOL.”

  “Even, like, bingo?”

  A look from my grandmother could kill a cockroach from eight feet away. “I’ll be joining the majority soon enough,” she said. “Soon enough.”

  We were all silent.

  “That means I’ll be dead, babies.”

  Tuesday morning.

  My alarm clock went off at six, but I was already awake.

  I hadn’t slept well.

  Sure, everything I thought I knew about life and death had been turned on its head, like, literally. But I was actually more stressed out about my parents. They still seemed upset with me and I didn’t know how to make it right.

  As we left the apartment building, they walked a few steps ahead of me, talking quietly. They talked quietly, past the Museum of Holography, down the block, and under the train tracks. They never acted like this. It was unsettling, all the way to the lab.

  My parents went into the back with no fanfare. I sat down and gave Hippocrates a wave. After yesterday’s craziness, it was too quiet, so I was actually relieved when they came out again not much later. I shouldn’t have been.

  “Fo, we…erm…need to step out,” my dad said, absentmindedly scratching between his shoulder blades with a long pair of clamp things. “You were a pro yesterday when we were at the lecture hall, so we’re going to let you stick around here again, okay?”

  “It’s not usually like this,” my mom said, looking a little worried. “The two of us being gone so much. Normally, there’s just a lecture here or there. But we’ve hit a bit of a—”

  “Problem,” said my dad.

  “Right,” said my mom. “A problem. And we need to track a few people down.”

  “Maybe you could call them? Or I could call them?” I offered.

  They shared a glance. “Thanks, Fo,” my mom said carefully. “But considering the situation, we need to talk to them face-to-face.”

  “Maybe I could come with you?” I tried not to sound too desperate.

  “Lock the door behind us,” my mom said, like she hadn’t even heard me. “And you’ve got the computer, that’ll be fun. If you want something else to do, you could feed Herophilus, maybe? Or organize the office supplies? And we’ll see you in a bit?”

  Everything about this was weird. The fact that I’d had to beg to be left alone yesterday, and now they didn’t seem to care at all. Something was wrong.

  Now I didn’t want to be left.

  “See you later,” I said. They walked out, waved distractedly through the glass, and were gone. Not a single stupid anatomy joke.

  I locked the door, double checked it, and then wandered over to Herophilus. He was doing a pretty bad job of hiding behind some fake seaweed. I wondered how, exactly, I was supposed to feed him since the tank seemed to be part of the wall. I pressed my face against the cool glass, peering through the seaweed into the darkness on the other side of the tank. Where did it go? There had to be a back entrance.

  I stuck my head through the blue door and looked down the Hall of Innards. The wet lab was closed. With no heads roaming around, I was a little more confident investigating the conference room, which I’d spent almost no time in, unless you counted lunch the day before.

  I flipped on the lights. Nothing had changed. It was pretty boring—the conference table and matching chairs took up most of the space—but there was a large closet at one end of the room. I opened it and discovered a few lonely lab coats hanging in a corner and, more importantly, the back of the tank, glowing in the dim light. Through the seaweed I could see the empty lobby. Spooky.

  From the closet side, you could easily take off the lid and add food or whatever you needed to do. A can of fish food sat on the shelf holding the tank, so I popped off the lid and dropped a pinch into the water. Herophilus swam to the top immediately, scarfing the food like he’d never been fed before in his life. “You’re welcome,” I said. “I definitely won’t be here long, but until I leave, I will hook you up with all the shrimp flakes your fish heart desires.” Seemed borderline cannibalistic to me, but he was enjoying it.

  Returning to my station in the lobby, I sat down to organize the desk drawers. After that, I’d do that stuff in the folder my dad had given me the day before. I was going to be so productive even I’d be impressed with me.

  I pulled open the top drawer.

  Right.

  Lots and lots of tampons.

  I didn’t know how to organize those things.

  I skipped down one drawer. Whitney’s collection of old sticky notes. I grabbed a handful, figuring I’d skim through them, make sure they didn’t look important, and then throw them out. I read the first one, and immediately discovered a problem. I was pretty sure it was a love poem. More or less.

  You’re the sauce to my spaghetti,

  I’m the footprint to your Yeti.

  There were tons of them, just like that one. I didn’t know what to do with weird love poems any more than I knew what to do with tampons.

  Drawers: 2. Fovea: 0

  Next drawer: menus. Finally. That was a good one. First, I’d throw out all the barbecue ones. I dropped a stack on the desk in front of me with a hard clunk. Interesting. I sifted through them and pulled out a phone. Whitney’s phone. I knew because it looked like the kind of phone Whitney would have had.

  Also, it said WHITNEY all across the back of it in rhinestone letters.

  She’d left town pretty quickly—overnight, almost. She must’ve forgotten it. I turned the phone over in my hand. It was either off or dead.

  I was getting an idea.

  The thing was—maybe I could find contact info for Dean, that boyfriend she mentioned in the note she left my parents. A quick call to him, and I could reunite Whitney with her phone. She’d be super grateful and it would be the perfect moment for me to convince her to move back to Chicago and her old life. My parents would be so impressed with my new take-charge attitude and how I got their receptionist back they’d let me stay at home the rest of the summer.

  I tried the power and the phone jumped to life, a blurry picture of a cat filling the screen. It wasn’t locked, so I opened her contacts. They were organized by last name, and of course I didn’t know Dean’s last name, so I just went through the whole list. Twice.

  There was no Dean.

  You don’t run away to another state with somebody who isn’t even in your phone.

  Right then, the phone started buzzing all over the place as the messages loaded from all the time it’d been off. Six voice-mail messages. I put it down on the desk in front of me, debating. It wouldn’t be wrong to check out the messages if they helped me return the phone to her. Probably?

  The first message was from two weeks ago, right around the time she left.

  There was a beep. “Whitney,” a voice said. “It is I, your Prince Charming! Call me! But don’t call me late for dinner, hmm?”

  I didn’t know what Dean sounded like, but I knew that wasn’t him. That voice, without a doubt, belonged to a certain cremator who liked to slink around and be all kinds of in-your-face unnerving. Inko Fredrickson hadn’t needed Whitney’s number because he already had it. I kept going. The second message was also Inko Fredrickson. And the third.

  Beep. “Whitney. You said you liked poetry, so feast your ears on this: ‘Ode to a Heart That Beats for Love Despite Having Been Burned to a Crisp: Tha-thump, sizzle. Tha-thump, sizzle. Love. Burns. Forever.’ I’m a regular—what do they call them? Lariat? No, that’s a cowboy necklace. Laureate. Yeah. Laureate. At…your…service.”

  Beep. “Whitney. I know it’s early, but I was thinking about adoption.”

  Beep. “Whitney? Call me! Call me anything, even late for dinner, heh, hmm. Just call me back. Are you actually listening to my messages? I’ve written them all down in case you’d rather read them. Let me know.”

  Yeesh. I was glad to not be in the middle of that anymore. I let the voice mail keep playing, still hoping for Dean. The n
ext message was from yesterday.

  Beep. “Whitney. I’m standing outside the lab.” Oh man. He’d called her while he was here. It made me feel kind of weird for my past self. Also weird for my current self. I was starting to regret my decision to listen to the messages, but now that I’d gotten this far, I didn’t feel like I could stop.

  It got worse as the message went on. “I thought you loved me. All those things you said about love and growing old together. About cuddling. Staying cozy on cold winter nights. And now you’ve left me for somebody else? Some Floridian? Unbelievable. Unconscionable. Unimaginable. I hereby challenge him to a duel. Now I’m going back in, where it smells like you.”

  Beep. “Whitney.” The last message, from a few hours later. “Just in case you two need some incentive to return from your Floridian paradise so that the duel can commence, I happen to have an incentive right here. As I waited in the lab for you to appear, my tortured heart scabbing over every second, I used my acute sense of observation to determine that your precious lab has lost a specimen. That specimen could be anywhere, Whitney, and as you know, a missing specimen is a MASSIVE BIOHAZARD. Exactly the sort of thing that the state regulatory board would shut a lab down for. Send people to jail for. And if they discover, through an anonymous tip, for example, that there has been a cover-up? Well. I expect the punishment would be very, very harsh.

  “I’m giving you forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours to get back here and let me fight for your love. If you start driving now, you’ll make it. If you delay, then I’m calling in that anonymous tip and people will get hurt. People that I think you care about.

  “I won’t let you go without a fight. Good-bye.”

  I dropped the phone on the desk in front of me.

  That lovesick cremator was using my parents as bait. And I’d given him the hook to stick them on. My stomach turned upside down. A missing specimen. That was what they’d been talking about when I’d put them on speakerphone. This was my fault. A wolf had come into the henhouse and I’d given him the matches to burn the place down.