The Caretakers Read Online Free Page A

daughter. Are you waiting on her now?”
    Evelyn said no, but Miss Erish didn’t believe that either.
    â€œ Your phone has no battery problems. It is a-buzzing. Why don’t you check it?”
    Evelyn let her hand rest on the purse at her side, felt the rhythmic humming of the thing sure enough. Hands trembling, she reached inside and withdrew the phone.
    COME HOME MOM PLS , the text read, and she read it aloud when Miss Erish told her to. Miss Erish sat quietly for a moment, then delicately lifted the tablet so the yellow light from its screen climbed her torso like a dismal sunrise and finally illuminated her face, the eyes casting ravenously as if from the barren solitude of a tomb.
    â€œYou were here earliest,” she said. “While the others were sleeping, you were awake and about.” She set the tablet on its back, so it lit the curtains, the ceiling. “Of all of them, even Mr. Allen … you arrived first.”
    Miss Erish looked down at the light. It seemed to grow brighter as she did so—as though the sensor had noted some competing glow, and automatically tuned the illumination higher.
    â€œOh dear,” said Miss Erish. “Oh dear, oh damn.”
    Her voice sounded raw. It seemed to Evelyn as though she were crying. Evelyn’s thumbs hovered over the screen of her phone, and the little keyboard there. She felt as though she ought to respond to her daughter, but she could not take her eyes from Miss Erish, who trembled.
    â€œWhat do you think about Miss Retson? She pursued little Miss Wilson very swiftly. As though she were very worried … very worried. Might she … Might it be love ? No. That cannot be. I shall send her a message. Instruct her—” Miss Erish’s fingers clacked furiously against the glass of her tablet. “Oh damn, damn.”
    Evelyn set her phone down. She reached her arms toward Miss Erish, slid forward on the bed, and Miss Erish joined Evelyn there. Miss Erish felt cool and brittle beneath her blouse, and left to her own inclinations, Evelyn would have recoiled at the inhuman touch of her.
    They sat like that for some time, listening to the wind outside as it howled across the highway, along the river—somehow growing colder themselves, in one another’s embrace.

 
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    Copyright © 2016 by David Nickle
    Art copyright © 2016 by Greg Ruth