Worm

by M. L. Owen

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Worm was three steps down the hallway when the voices reached past his ears to his brain.

“I’m sorry that I can’t get my patients to schedule their problems to suit your needs.”

“My needs? My needs?” Her voice went higher. “You’re the one who made the promise. You did, not me. You promised you’d be here.”

“If I could. If I could. There’s no way I can know in advance that I’m not going to be called on an emergency. There’s no way…”

“No! You didn’t say ‘if you could,’ you said you’d be here. And since when is Betty Whittacre’s acne an emergency? Well, if I’d known…”

“Betty doesn’t have acne, well she does, but that’s not what the call was about. Besides, that wasn’t what made me late.”

“Really? Because that’s what you said made you late.”

“No, it wasn’t. I was explaining the series of events that ended up causing me…”

Worm changed his morning plans, retreating from the hallway back to his room, closing the door behind him. His parents’ voices faded a bit, but not completely. He grabbed a book from the nightstand by his bed; Kim by Rudyard Kipling. He curled up on the bed and opened the book to where he’d left off last night when his mother came in and told him he had to turn off his light and go to sleep. Kim’s voice grew, while the argument faded to ghost talk. He barely heard the door slam. A little later he barely heard the knock at his door.

“Worm?” It was a whisper, almost a whisper.

He closed his eyes and the book, and laid his head beside it. He could hear the door open. He could hear her breathing. A faint sniffle impaled his ears.

“Oh, my precious little Bookworm.”

After a moment, the door closed. He could make out the sound of the door to his parents’ room opening and closing. He waited forever, then reopened his eyes and, with great care, his book. He read to the end of the next chapter. He closed the book and went to the door. He listened. He eased the door open. He listened again. No sobbing. No sound. He went out into the hallway, the front room, the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and studied the contents for a full minute. Then he made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, poured some milk into a jar, capped it, wrapped the sandwich in wax paper, grabbed his book, and headed for the back door. Then he stopped, retraced his steps and, casting a glance over his shoulder toward the living room and the rest of the house, put the peanut butter, jelly, bread, and milk away. He washed the knife and put it away. He brushed the crumbs off the counter onto the floor. Then he left.

He rode his bike, food in the basket, down to the Old Bridge Road, and then out along its dusty length to the rusty old bridge, two miles outside of town. He dumped his bike in the trees and walked out on the bridge with the jar of milk and sandwich. Halfway across, he sat and dangled his legs over the side. He could see the new bridge about half a mile south, with cars crossing it at irregular intervals. Below him, the water coursed through the narrow opening below the bridge, dark and full of patterns. Reflections of the clouds above mixed with images from beneath the water, moving in counter directions. Animals seemed to appear: faces, unknown things in unknown shapes. Sometimes an actual fish, an actual stick. Maybe he’d see a corpse someday. Maybe he’d seen one and didn’t know it.

He opened the sandwich and ate it without looking at it: drank the milk. He dropped the wadded up waxed paper into the water. It would sink. He put the cap back on the bottle and contemplated throwing it in too, knowing it would float, and he could probably retrieve it downstream, if he hurried, if he could get his pants off in time to get out to it, if no one from the other bridge could see him. Even if they could see him, he was too far away for them to know who he was, and they would probably assume he was wearing a swimming suit. He knew older kids came out here to skinny dip. He’d heard that. But he decided against it, all of it. He moved the jar closer to his side and picked up Kim.

***

The voices startled him awake.

“You were with that woman again.”

“Yes, if by ‘that woman’ you mean Jeannie. She’s a nurse. I’m a doctor. We work together. All the time.”

“Work together, play together. How convenient!”

“Keep your voice down. You’re going to wake Mark.”

“So what,” but her voice did go a bit softer. “Maybe Worm should know. God knows, everyone else in town knows.”

“Nobody knows anything, because there’s nothing to know, and don’t call him Worm. It’s degrading.”

“We’ve been calling him Worm since the first grade. Everyone does. He’s a bookworm. There’s nothing degrading about that. What he might mind is the fact that his father is fucking someone besides his mother!”

Worm pulled the cover over his head then stretched out a hand to grab The Call of the Wild from the nightstand and pull it under the covers. He reached out again and grabbed his flashlight from the lower shelf. The bunched-up covers emitted a soft glow, he knew, but he didn’t think anyone would be looking in the door. He focused on Buck’s troubles with other dogs, and the voices faded.

***

Worm left his bike leaning against the garage and headed for the back door. He’d thought about going down to the old bridge, but the sky threatened rain, so he’d headed home. His father’s car was in the garage, unusual for so early on a weekday. Maybe he’d had surgery this afternoon. The path from the garage to the back door led past his parents’ bedroom window. He heard their voices.

“Well, you’re not helping much with that!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t do anything right, can I?”

“Honey, you do a lot of things right, but…”

“But this sure isn’t one of them, right? Things weren’t always that way. You were all over me then. Now, you’d rather beat off by yourself than…”

He ran back to his bike, grabbed it and took off.

***

The library was quiet. Mrs. Heilberger would greet him and smile, and then ignore him. Even if he left the children’s section and went into the regular fiction section and looked through books there and maybe even checked one out, she wouldn’t say anything to him, except maybe how much she’d enjoyed that book. Even if he went into the medical section and looked at the anatomy books that showed everything, she wouldn’t notice, or at least say anything.

Sometimes he would just sit in the reading room and stare out the window. He did that now. There was a great deal of thunder and lightning, and then the sky opened up and threw water at the earth. The lights went out. There were two other people in the library at the time, not counting Mrs Heilberger. They closed the books they were looking at and left.

Mrs Heilberger came over to where he was sitting. “The lights may not come back on for quite a while, Marcus. Maybe you should leave and come back later.”

He looked at her, a little surprised to hear her speak. Then he nodded and got up. He put the clip around his ankle to keep his cuff from getting caught in the bicycle chain and headed for the door.

“Do you have an umbrella? Would you like to borrow mine?”

He looked back at her and shook his head. “I’m on my bike.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I can see that would be difficult. Well, if you like, you could stay here. The lights may come back on right away, so I’ll be staying around for a while, but in the meantime, I’m afraid it will be difficult to read.”

“That’s okay,” he said. He turned to watch the rain on the windows. Everything looked strange, familiar, but strange. It was easy to get lost in it.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

His eyes opened wide and turned toward the voice even before his head moved. Mrs Heilberger was sitting across the table from him. He swallowed twice, working his tongue around in his mouth. Finally, he managed a deep breath and asked, “Uh, about what?”

“When I sit and stare out the window, I’m usually thinking a lot about something,” she said. “Sometimes, when I’m thinking a lot about something, it helps me get it clearer in my head if I can talk about it. At least, if I can talk about it with someone who isn’t involved in what I’m thinking about. You know what I mean?”

He started to nod his head, but it twisted a bit sideways. His eyes squinched. “It’s kind of pretty, looking out the window with the rain coming down it. It’s quiet and peaceful.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding with more than her head, her whole upper body. “It can be nice to have some peace.”

“Yes,” he said.