Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett 2)

He blinked as he stepped out into the different world aboveground. The light-and-shadow-striped gully of Seventh Avenue was crammed with people—thousands, tens of thousands of them.

Good morning, class, he said silently, as he pointed himself toward the geyser of lights in Times Square.

Chapter 7

GETTING MY KIDS CLEANED UP, hydrated, medicated, and back into their beds took me over an hour. I wasn’t able to tuck myself in until after four a.m. Outside my bedroom window, the sky was actually beginning to lighten above the East Side.

Hadn’t pulling an all-nighter once been fun? was my last thought before I fell unconscious.

It seemed like just a finger snap later when my eyes shot open again. The sonata of coughing, sneezing, and wailing that had awakened me continued at full pitch through my open bedroom door. Who needed an alarm clock?

Being a single parent was tough in a lot of ways, but as I lay there staring up at the ceiling, I decided on the absolute worst one: there was nobody beside me to nudge with an elbow and to mumble, “Your turn.”

Somehow I managed to get to my feet. Two more of the kids were down: Jane and Fiona in the bathroom, taking turns at the Bennett vomitorium. A dizzy, pleasant fantasy suddenly occurred to me—maybe I was just having a nightmare.

But it lasted only a couple of nanoseconds before I heard my six-year-old, Trent, moan from his bedroom. Then he uttered a chilling premonition, another thing that fell into the worst-possible category for parents.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” his little voice quavered.

My bathrobe wafted out behind me like Batman’s cape as I hightailed it to the kitchen. I ripped the garbage bag out of the pail, sprinted back to Trent’s room with the empty barrel—and threw open his door just in time to watch him lose it from the top bunk.

Trent’s guess had been right, and then some. I stood there helplessly, wondering which was worse. That the thick rope of his projectile vomit had demolished his pajamas, his sheets, and the carpet. Or that I’d been forced to witness another scene straight out of The Exorcist.

I gingerly picked him up under his arms and lifted him out of bed, shaking the excess vomit off him into the mess on the floor. Then I carried him, crying, toward my shower. At that point, I was seriously considering taking up crying myself. It wouldn’t help, but if I wailed along with everybody else, maybe at least I wouldn’t feel so alone.

For the next half hour, while dispensing children’s Tylenol, ginger ale, and puke buckets, I wondered what the procedure was for getting a national disaster declared. I knew it usually applied to geographical areas, but my family’s population was almost up there with Rhode Island’s.

I’d been checking on our baby, Chrissy, every few minutes. She was still giving off more heat than the radiator. That was good, wasn’t it? The body was fighting the virus or something? Or was it the other way around—the higher the fever got, the more you had to worry?

Where was Maeve, to tell me in her sweet but no-nonsense way exactly how much of an idiot I was?

Chrissy’s hacking, crushed-glass cough sounded as loud as thunder to my ears, but when she tried to talk, her voice was just a weak whisper.

“I want my mommy,” she cried.

So do I, honey, I thought, as I did the only thing I could think of, cradle her in my arms. I want your mommy, too.

Chapter 8

“DADDY?”

The speaker was my five-year-old, Shawna, watching me from the kitchen doorway. She’d been following me around all morning, a faithful lieutenant delivering frontline dispatches to a doomed general. “Daddy, we’re out of orange juice.” “Daddy, Eddie doesn’t like peanut butter.”

I raised my hand in a wait gesture as I squinted at the microscopic Sanskrit on a bottle of children’s cough syrup. Which patient was this for? I tried to remember. Ah, yes, Chrissy. One teaspoon for somebody two to five years and under forty-seven pounds, I managed to decipher. I didn’t have any clear idea of how much she weighed, but she was four and normal size, so I decided to go with it.

“Daddy?” Shawna inquired again, as the microwave timer behind me started beeping like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown. Between tending to the sick kids and getting the well ones ready for school, our household had now apparently entered DEFCON 3.

“Yes, baby?” I yelled above the din, now looking around for the medicine bottle’s plastic measuring cup, which had gone AWOL.

“Eddie’s wearing two different-colored socks,” she said solemnly.

I almost dropped the cough syrup and collapsed in laughter. But she looked so concerned that I managed to keep a straight face.

“What two colors?” I said.

“Black and blue.”

Finally, a no-brainer. “That’s okay,” I said. “Cool, in fact. He’s a trendsetter.”