Growth by Jeff Jacobson Page A

meant he wouldn’t expect anything that night and it certainly smelled better in there when he was finished.
    She made her way down the lawn, letting gravity guide her. Her entire face was swollen, leaving just slits for her eyes, and she couldn’t see much. She carried a basket for eggs. He might be leaving her alone for now, but he still damn sure expected breakfast.
    Ingrid peered through the wire. It looked like the hens were still inside the coop. Maybe something had spooked them in the night. Usually, once the sun was peeking over the corn, they were out scratching at the dirt. She would have to remember to feed them later. She only trusted herself to carry one thing at a time, and since she had to get Kurt’s breakfast started, she would bring the seeds down later.
    She brushed the new cobwebs out of the way and opened the back of the henhouse. The hens were still in their nests, strangely quiet. They moved slowly away from her searching fingers, if they moved at all. Her aches and pains pushed any puzzlement out of her head until it was all she could do to shove her fingers under the closest hens and find the eggs in the straw. She collected four eggs, still warm, and deposited them in the basket. She latched the henhouse door, and shuffled back up the lawn.
    The chickens never made a sound.
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    Bob couldn’t sleep.
    He parked himself in his chair with a pint of Jim Beam and waited for the news to report what he already knew. Belinda had spent the night in their bed, sobbing into pillows. Bob tried not to listen. It was important to them that they each grieve in their own way, independent of the other. Bob, having let all of his anguish out in Junior’s cornfield, sat silent and motionless in his La-Z-Boy. He felt his gaze bounce ever so slowly from Fox News to Junior’s high school portrait on the mantel and back to the TV, all night long.
    He rarely drank anything stronger than lemonade, and the Jim Beam went straight to his head. It didn’t help.
    Especially when the aerial footage of the smoking island hit the news networks. Bob felt lost within the blurry, shaky images, and only a few key phrases penetrated his fog of mourning. “Total annihilation . . . one hundred and sixty-four confirmed dead . . . quite possibly a result of ecological terrorism . . . the State Department is pledging full cooperation with Haitian authorities . . . Allagro stock has fallen significantly, following rumors of a failed new seed launch . . .”
    Bob was never one to sit still and wait, but now, there was nothing else he could accomplish. He wanted to go out and smash something, but he needed to listen for any breaking news. There was still a part of him that wanted to hope, hope that his son had somehow made it off the island in time, and was drifting in the ocean somewhere, just waiting to be picked up. He fought against this hope, fought against it like white blood cells fighting off an infection. Still, the hope swelled inside him like an abscess, even though he knew it was poison.
    He coughed and felt around for the bottle of Jim Beam on the floor next to the La-Z-Boy. He hoped he was wrong about its being empty. But he needed something to soften the blow. He knew his son was dead. He just needed the confirmation to kill the hope that he was wrong. And until then, he was a fish caught on a hook; doomed, but still alive, still allowed to struggle.
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    Kurt was still in the bathroom.
    Ingrid thanked the Lord for small favors and set the basket of eggs on the kitchen counter. She pulled milk and bacon out of the fridge, deftly sliced a hunk of butter from the stick, and flicked it into the frying pan on the stove. She turned the heat down low, just enough to melt the butter. Her hands found a clean bowl next to the sink and set it next to the eggs. Despite being so injured that she couldn’t walk without pain, she found peace in the kitchen. Her body seemed to glide around by