Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  “It felt like the right thing to do. He deserved to know.”

  “How did he take it?” Bart asks.

  “As well as you’d expect.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yeah. He is not happy about it,” I say, understating the matter by a factor of a million (give or take), “but I made it clear that it’s something I have to do, and his approval wasn’t necessary.”

  “How much exposure came with this admission?” Edison asks.

  “Minimal exposure. Dad figured out pretty quickly who the rest of the Hero Squad are, but that’s it.”

  “Good. On that note: how are things with the Squad?”

  “You probably know more than I do. I haven’t spoken to Matt, Stuart, or Missy for weeks. Most of what I can tell you is stuff I learned from Facebook and Twitter. Missy got her cast off this week and is starting physical therapy. Stuart’s brother is home from law school and doing the whole Millennial-living-at-home thing. Matt’s a month away from getting his driver’s license...”

  “There’s a terrifying thought,” Edison says.

  “...but that’s about it. The bottom line is that there currently is no Hero Squad.”

  That’s the first time I’ve said that aloud. It sounds so final, like a death sentence.

  “Matt and I have been talking a lot lately,” Edison says. “We had a lot of air to clear.”

  “Beijing has less air to clear,” Natalie says to me out of the corner of her mouth. Oh, I’m sure. I can only imagine what sort of spirited discussions those two have had.

  “Matt’s still in, and he’s confident that, with time, he can get the Squad back together. He might appreciate some help,” Edison says, looking my way.

  “Matt and I still have to work on Matt and I,” I say, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That’s all I ask — and, thinking positively, once the team is back on its feet, we need to get serious about providing Missy and Stuart with some training. Natalie, I know you’re busy working with Matt, but I think Missy would —”

  “No.”

  I’m impressed with myself. The Entity makes one of his out-of-the-blue appearances and I barely jumped. I’m getting used to the creepy weirdo. Yaaaayyy...

  “I’ll take her,” the Entity says, joining us at the table. Natalie snatches up the big white cardboard carton of pork fried rice off.

  “You’ll take Missy?” Edison says. There is a round of confused grunts and an exchange of skeptical glances.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You’re going to train Missy?” Natalie says. “Since when do you care about her?”

  “Or anyone?” Astrid says.

  “Yeah. What’s your interest here?” Edison says.

  “That’s my business,” the Entity says. Edison makes a disapproving noise. “I wasn’t asking for your consent. I’m training her.”

  “And what if Missy doesn’t want you for a super-hero tutor?” I ask. “Does her opinion count for anything?”

  “She’ll say yes.”

  I’ll take that as a no. “If she refuses, you back off. Got it?”

  The Entity glowers at me. I think. Stupid mask.

  “Hm,” he grunts, which I’ll take as a yes, whether he meant it as such or not.

  The Entity skulks out of the room after that, leaving the rest of the meeting to us (no one complains). Edison briefs the team on the Manticore incident, informing us that Manticore got lucky and nailed the right transport, killing Doctor Skyfall and four of the six Byrne personnel in the vehicle. However, he says, there were no further casualties thanks to my timely intervention.

  That’s where the interesting bits of business end. I fade out after that. Once the meeting’s adjourned, I head out to attend to something more important.

  Bart knows where I’m going. He offers to give me a ride, but I politely refuse for no particular reason. I guess I don’t feel like company.

  Kingsport Hospital runs late visiting hours on Fridays, which gives me plenty of time to sit with Sara — not enough to make up for a month’s worth of lost face time, but it’s a start. I take comfort in knowing Meg made a point of dropping in at least once a week, and she kept me in the loop during my sabbatical. She said Sara looked better each time she came, but I’m not prepared for what I see when I enter Sara’s room. She looks really good — you know, for someone who’s basically been comatose for a month and a half. Her color is healthy by Sara standards. There’s an air of serenity about her, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear she was asleep.

  If only.

  “Hey, stranger,” I say as I circle around her bed. “Sorry I’ve been away so long. I’ve been trying to get my head back together. I’m sure you sympathize.”

  I sit and talk to her, telling her about my summer. Popular theory is that someone in a coma can still hear you, that the brain responds to the stimulus of human speech. Matt told me a story once about the guy who used to do voices for Bugs Bunny and all those old cartoon characters. He got into a bad car accident and lapsed into a coma, and the doctors tried to rouse him by speaking to his characters. It worked; the guy responded in his character voices, and he revived soon afterward.

  “What’s up, Doc?” I say. Nothing. “Sorry. Girl’s got to try, right?”

  The time creeps toward eight, the end of visiting hours. With a resigned sigh, I get up and get ready to leave.

  “Gotta run. I’ll be back soon. Promise,” I say, leaning over the bed to kiss Sara on the forehead. A sensation like a faint electrical charge dances across my lips. With a startled gasp, I draw back.

  And then Sara opens her eyes.

  “Miss? Miss!”

  Man’s voice. Above me. A hand, gently probing my neck.

  I gasp and sit up abruptly, almost head-butting the nurse kneeling over me. Startled, he falls onto his butt while I kick away in the other direction until I’m pressed against the edge of the bed.

  “Are you all right?” the nurse asks me.

  “I think so?” I say. “What happened?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.” He stands and helps me to my feet. My head swims. The nurse eases me onto the edge of Sara’s bed and —

  The bed. It’s empty.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. I came in to let you know visiting hours were over and she was gone,” the nurse says.

  I check my phone. It’s eight-seventeen. I’ve been out for twenty minutes.

  I pull away and stagger out into the hallway. The nurse chases after me, insisting that I sit down and let a doctor look me over. I ignore him and head for the elevator. The pursuit ends there. The last thing I see before the doors slide shut is the nurse shaking his head and frowning in disapproval.

  Edison? No. Bart. I pull up his number.

  Before he can finish saying hello, I blurt out, “Sara woke up.”

  “She what?”

  “She woke up! She woke up and did something to me and now she’s gone.”

  “What did she do to you?”

  It takes me until I reach the ground floor to find a way to describe it. “It felt like my mind was a book and she flipped through the pages really fast,” I say, “and there were all these flashes of memory hitting me...”

  “Memories of what?”

  “Of her. Of Sara.”

  “Hmm...”

  “Talk to me, Bart, what the hell’s going on?”

  “There was a possibility,” Bart says after a moment’s hesitation. “A psionic’s brain is far more advanced than a normal human brain. Aside from its superhuman abilities, it forms neural pathways more quickly, the cells are more resistant to diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s...and it can heal damage.”

  My teeth grind together. “You knew Sara could recover and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I said it was a possibility, and not a strong possibility. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. The last thing you needed was another disappointment.”

 
“I deserved to know,” I snap before hanging up. Talking to Bart’s accomplishing nothing but pissing me off, and I need a clear head if I’m going to figure out where Sara went.

  She couldn’t have gotten far on her own steam. I mean, she’s been bedridden for, like, six weeks. She also couldn’t have slipped out without anyone seeing her...

  Her powers. That mind-fog trick of hers could have easily gotten her past the staff unnoticed, and a gentle telepathic push could have scored her a ride, but that doesn’t tell me where she’s gone.

  I can make an educated guess, though.

  I touch down in the woods near my house, which is the first place I check. Mom and Ben are out for the evening, and thank God for that. No way could I think up a story to explain Sara showing up out of the clear blue in a peek-a-boo hospital gown.

  Once I’m sure it’s all clear at my place, I head to my second target. I know I’m on the right track when I find an ambulance sitting in front of Sara’s house. The driver is slumped over the wheel, unconscious.

  The front door hangs open a crack. I take a breath to steady myself and nudge the door open with a trembling hand.

  Once inside I instinctively reach for a light switch but nothing happens. Well, duh. No one’s been around to pay the utility bills, of course there’s no electricity. I switch my headset to night-vision mode and wend my way through the living room. I shiver as I remember the last time I was here, when I watched EMTs carry out Sara’s parents, their eyes wide and empty.

  I find her in the kitchen, sitting on the floor and propped up against a cabinet. As I creep toward her my hands start to tingle, like my powers are trying to warn me of impending danger, telling me to get ready to fight. I refuse to listen. I won’t fight her. Never again.

  I kneel down at Sara’s feet. She doesn’t look at me, but she knows I’m here.

  “I thought it was a nightmare,” she says in coarse whisper, her throat raw from disuse, “but I really did it. I hurt my parents.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You did.”

  “I hurt you. I hurt Matt. Stuart. Missy.”

  “Yes.”

  She closes her eyes. A tear slips down her cheek. I reach for her but she pulls away, curling into a ball.

  “No,” she says. “Don’t.”

  I ignore her. I sit next to her and take her in my arms. She tries to pull way, but she doesn’t have the strength.

  “No,” she whimpers.

  “Shh. You shut up.”

  She makes one last token effort to shake me free. Sorry, Sara. You should know by now I’m not going anywhere.

  “Don’t you dare forgive me,” she says.

  “Too late. Already done. No take-backsies.”

  Sara utters a shuddering sob. “How can you possibly forgive me?”

  We sit there for I don’t know how long, there on the cold tile floor, in the dark, in the silence.

  “Because I’m sick of losing my life one piece at a time,” I say. “I’m taking it back. Starting with you.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  My first call is to Bart. He takes care of the cover story, planting in the ambulance driver a false memory of encountering Sara by pure happenstance all of a mile down the road from the hospital — farther than a coma patient could have gotten on her own power, realistically speaking, but as I’ve observed before, human beings can rationalize anything if they try hard enough.

  Once Sara is back in the hospital, safe and sound, my next call is to my mother, who cuts short her date night with Ben when I tell her of Sara’s miraculous recovery. She shows up at the hospital a half-hour after I call, and hugs me so hard I’m scared my internal organs are going to squirt out of my mouth like toothpaste. Mom’s borne no small amount of guilt over Sara’s fictional suicide attempt, like what happened was due to some failing on her part as a surrogate parent, so her relief and her joy almost put mine to shame.

  I excuse myself to go hunt down some coffee and place call number three, which goes to Matt. I know the hospital won’t let him in to see Sara tonight since he’s not family, but if anyone deserves to hear the news...

  I make the call from a quiet hallway. There’s a lot I need to say to Matt, a lot we need to talk about, but that’s business for another time. I worry he won’t pick up but he does, and I don’t waste any time getting to the point.

  “Matt, Sara’s awake.”

  Matt doesn’t say a word, not for a long, long time.

  “How is she?”

  “Exhausted. Disoriented.” I hesitate. I don’t want to tell him the next part, but we made a promise: no secrets, no lies. “She remembers everything.”

  “Oh,” Matt says. Another lengthy silence follows, and ends with, “Thanks.”

  Then he hangs up.

  The doctor lets us see Sara, briefly, then sends us home for the night so Sara can rest. There are hugs. There’s crying. We tell her we’ll come back in the morning.

  “Promise?” Sara says.

  “Promise,” Mom says.

  We make good on that promise, returning to the hospital a few minutes before the start of AM visiting hours, but we’re not the first people in line. Matt’s right there, pacing the hallway outside Sara’s room and staring at his phone, as if trying to will time to speed up.

  It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since our falling out. There’s a moment of tension between us, the ghost of our fight haunting us both, but it vanishes as soon as I take Matt in my arms. Or he takes me in his arms. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.

  “Carrie,” he whispers in my ear.

  “Later,” I say. “We’ll talk later.”

  At nine on the dot we file into Sara’s room, but it looks like someone got early admission privileges.

  “Ms. Hauser,” Bart says, “Matt, Carrie, good morning.”

  “Did you stay here all night?” Mom jokes.

  “I went home for a little while. I had some homework to do, since I’ll be helping Sara put her various affairs in order. Which reminds me...” Bart takes my mother by the arm. “May I borrow you for a few minutes?”

  “Of course. Besides, I think the kids might want some time alone.”

  “Sara. We’ll talk about that other thing later,” Bart says, suddenly grim.

  “There’s nothing left to talk about,” Sara says. “I’m not changing my mind.”

  Bart frowns. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “What was that about?” I ask.

  “Bart told me what he thought really happened to me,” Sara says, “that the King of Pain got into my head, messed with my mind, made me...made me crazy.”

  “You sound like you don’t believe him,” Matt says.

  “Why would he lie to you about that?” I say.

  “Because he doesn’t want me to feel guilty about what I did. It’s a nice gesture, but...” Sara shakes her head and says with iron conviction, “Even if it’s the truth, I can’t accept it. Everything I did, I did. Regardless of what drove me to it, I have to accept responsibility for myself.”

  I’m proud of Sara, but that pride is tinged with pity. The transition from teenager to adult isn’t supposed to be smooth, and it sure isn’t supposed to be painless, but it is supposed to be a transition. Children shouldn’t be chucked headlong into the deep end of the adulthood pool kicking and screaming.

  There’s something especially tragic about innocence lost before its rightful time.

  “I asked Bart to do something for me, something important,” Sara says. “He doesn’t want to. He insists I’m making a rash decision and once I think it over, I’ll realize I’m overreacting.” She shakes her head. “I’m not.”

  “What did you ask him to do?”

  She tells us.

  Holy freaking crap.

  “Sara,” I begin.

  “I’m sure,” she says, anticipating my question. “Matt, I know it’ll affect the team —”

  “I don’t care,” Matt says. “If that’s what you have to do, do it. Don’t worry
about the team.”

  Sara, understandably, levels a skeptical gaze at him. “Really?”

  “You need to get better. That’s what’s important.”

  She smiles. “Thank you.”

  Matt nods. Then he says to me, “Can I talk to Sara alone for a minute?”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

  “Thanks,” Sara says.

  You’re welcome...but I wasn’t talking to you.

  Matt waits until the door closes, and then he waits a little more.

  Then he waits a few minutes after that.

  “I need to say something. I need to say a lot of things. I don’t know where to start.” Matt shrugs. “Maybe it doesn’t matter where I start. It’s all going to end up in the same place.”

  Matt sits at Sara’s bedside and takes her hand, presses it to his lips without truly kissing it.

  “I’m not mad at you,” he says.

  “You should be.”

  “I’m not. I’m too happy that you’re okay to be mad.”

  Sara, unable to muster a smile, nods.

  “While you were...um, here, I thought a lot about you. Like, every day, I thought about you. About us,” Matt says, directing his words to floor beneath his feet, “and every day I kicked myself for not telling you how I felt about you. I was worried...I was terrified that I’d never get a chance to tell you to your face. I don’t want to ever leave anything between us unsaid. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Good. Sara —”

  “I’m a lesbian.”

  Matt’s intended confession dies in his throat. His love for Sara, a warmth in the center of his chest that sustained him throughout this, the darkest time in his life, collapses in on itself, shriveling to a cold ember.

  “Matt,” Sara says.

  Matt silences her with an abrupt gesture. Questions flood his brain — a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, all fighting to be the first to be given voice. Seriously? When did that happen? How long have you been a lesbian? Why didn’t you tell me? Are you in love with someone else?

  A memory rises up, unexpected and unbidden, of a little girl with dark hair pulled into a messy braid and a mischievous smile bearing a prominent gap where an eye tooth should have been. In this memory, the girl is holding a red rubber ball exactly the size of Matt’s six-year-old head. He knows this because moments earlier, during a lively game of kickball, the girl threw the ball in his face, knocking him to the ground. You’re out! she crowed, and then she celebrated her victory by spiking the ball on Matt’s stomach before running back to reclaim her position at first base, giggling all the while.