Gifted (Awakening Book 2)

by Jacqueline Brown

  “Fine,” I answered as I went into my closet. I retrieved the boots I was going to wear and flipped off the bathroom light. Dad followed me as I took the boots to the edge of the chest at the foot of my bed. I put my boots on. They mostly covered the tall wool socks I wore.

  There was a sweet knock at the door. I tried to beat my dad to it, but he got there before I could.

  “Oh, hi, Paul.” Luca was understandably surprised my father answered my bedroom door.

  “Mr. Cameron,” Dad corrected, though he’d spent the last six weeks telling Luca to call him Paul.

  Luca’s shoulders fell. “Sorry, I meant Mr. Cameron.”

  This was not helping me like my father. Luca was so sensitive to things like that, and Dad knew it. We all did.

  “Tell me again where you two are going?” Dad’s voice was so severe, so clearly saying he was the one in charge.

  “The BayTree,” Luca said, keeping his eyes lowered. “Some of the guys I work with recommended it.”

  “The guys you work with—on a construction site?” My dad’s voice was repulsively snobby.

  Earlier, I had doubted his similarity to Thomas—now I saw it.

  Luca pulled his shoulders back. The movement made him look older, more confident. “They’re good guys,” he said, sounding like my father’s equal.

  Dad checked himself. “The BayTree is nice,” he said after a moment. “And a nice distance from town, though the food is good enough that people do make the drive for it. Especially this time of year, when there aren’t tourists at every table and the roads are still mostly clear.”

  “It will be okay,” I said. “We’ll keep a low profile. No one knows us, anyway.”

  Dad thought for a moment. “More people know you than you realize, and the two of … you don’t exactly blend in.”

  Luca didn’t blend in anywhere in this pale white town and my red hair had never helped me go unnoticed, either. Together … my dad was right, but what was the alternative?

  I said, “We can’t hide in this house forever.”

  Dad rocked back on his heels. “No, no, I suppose not.”

  “Come on,” I said to Luca as I stepped past my dad.

  Dad dug into his pocket. “Here, you can take my car.”

  I reached out my hand to take the keys.

  “Thank you, sir, but that won’t be necessary,” Luca said. “Uncle Jace is letting me borrow his jeep.”

  Dad raised an eyebrow. “Your uncle’s jeep is far from the safest of vehicles.”

  “The roads are clear, and I’m a cautious driver. It wouldn’t be right to take your car, not tonight.”

  Dad and Luca looked at each other for a few seconds, as if they were having an unspoken debate.

  “The roads are clear today,” Dad said, “but in the future, any outings will be done in my car or Mom’s, and that means Siena will drive. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Luca said appreciatively.

  I wasn’t sure what just happened or why it mattered to Luca to be the one to drive, but apparently my dad accepted his unspoken argument. I was grateful for that small ounce of kindness he’d shown Luca, though I didn’t understand it.

  “Come on, we don’t want to be late for our reservation,” I said. I went past Luca and my father. I wasn’t sure if Luca made a reservation or, if he had, what time it was for, but I wanted to leave.

  Luca followed me from the room.

  “Have fun and be careful,” Dad called after us.

  My dad was right. He and I had a lot to discuss, but tonight was not the night to think of his past or my past or even Luca’s past. Tonight I’d think of the present moment. Tonight I’d think solely of Luca and me and the yummy dinner we were going to have—away from the rest of our families.

  ***

  Sam greeted us with a broad grin when we entered the kitchen.

  “You two look very nice,” Gigi said as she placed her hand on Avi’s shoulder, preemptively ready to stifle any inappropriate comments she may have been about to make. It wasn’t necessary.

  “Beautiful,” was all she said in a calm voice.

  It was startling to me that I used to wish for her to be more mature. It was so unnatural that it made me regret ever hoping for such a thing.

  On the other side of the kitchen, Lisieux was helping Jason cook something. Since breakfast, it felt like there was a mountain between Lisieux and me. She didn’t even glance in our direction. Jason at least offered us an approving wink.

  “Here you go,” Sam said, holding the keys out for Luca. She was trying to hurry us along, to get us out of the kitchen as quickly as possible.

  “Thanks,” Luca said, accepting the keys. He took his coat from the hook.

  Sam held my coat. “You look lovely,” she whispered as she handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I whispered back.

  “You two have fun,” Gigi called. Avi’s arms were wrapped around Gigi’s waist.

  “We will,” Luca said, holding the door open for me to enter the frigid garage.

  Luca hurried in front of me and opened the passenger side of the jeep.

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling very much like a princess despite the ripped seat patched with duct tape I was about to sit on.

  “Wait a second,” he said, pulling a mostly clean towel from the back of the jeep. “Sometimes the edge of the tape leaves a sticky mark on clothes.”

  Once the towel was in place, I climbed up onto the seat. The dash was cracked in places, but the car was clean, far cleaner than Dad’s or Gigi’s typically were. I wondered if Sam had cleaned it for us. The few times in the past when I’d glanced in the jeep, the floor mats had been covered with dirt; now they were spotless.

  Luca opened the driver’s door and slid in. In front of us, Sam hit the button to open the garage door and the garage began to get brighter. She waved goodbye and disappeared into the house—no need to allow arctic air into the kitchen.

  “I’ll get the heat going,” Luca said as he turned the key, an action I’d seen in movies. Neither my dad’s nor Gigi’s car had an ignition switch, only a power button.

  “What’s that?” I said, pointing to a wide opening on the dash.

  Luca laughed. “I had to ask Uncle Jace the same question. It’s a tape player. It’s what they had before CDs.”

  “Before CDs?” I said, running my finger along the opening. CDs were old enough; I hadn’t thought about what existed before them. “Do they have tapes to go in it?”

  “Yeah.” He reached his hand to the glove box and his arm brushed my knee. “Take your pick.”

  The glove box was deceivingly large, overflowing with yellowed plastic rectangles. I picked up one with a picture of men with long, puffy hair and electric guitars on the cover. I turned it over. It was a box. I pulled on one side. It opened to reveal a smaller plastic rectangle with two holes. “I’ve never seen one of these before,” I said with amazement.

  “The sound’s not bad. I mean, the stereo system is as old as the car, so nothing sounds great, but the tapes don’t sound any worse than the radio.”

  “Can we listen to this one?” I said, choosing one with another group of men with long, messy hair and tight, ripped clothes pictured on the weathered insert on the inside of the scratched plastic cover.

  Luca glanced over at the one I held. “That one sounds a lot like screaming. If you find the ones with handwritten labels, they’re better. They came from Aunt Sam and don’t have as much screaming. She calls them mixed tapes.”

  “What makes them mixed?” I said as I dug through the glove box, eventually finding one with Sam’s handwriting on it.

  “She made them herself. She said you could record songs from different bands onto one tape. That’s one of her favorites. I don’t love it, but I like it better than the screaming.”

  “Do I slide it in?”

  “Line up the wider side with the wider opening,” he said, his hands holding the steering wheel as we neared the gate.
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  “This is so weird.” I inserted the tape.

  It clicked into place, Luca turned the volume dial, and the music began as Luca turned out of our driveway. Music, outdated, not very good music, blared through the crackling speakers. That, combined with riding in an old rusty jeep, made the whole moment feel unreal, like a moment out of someone else’s life. I closed my eyes and felt the rhythm of the tires against the road. I was grateful for the many bumps I could feel, more jarring than in my dad’s or Gigi’s cars; the bouncing kept me focused on the world in front of me. No memories, no dreams, merely the physical world as it really was.

  “Are you okay?” Luca asked, turning down the music. “We can turn off the tape if you want. It’s definitely not my favorite.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, keeping my head against the headrest while at an angle to watch him. He was right; he was a cautious driver. Both hands were on the wheel and when he looked in my direction, it was for the shortest of moments. I wondered if he always drove like this or if it was because I was in the car. Either way, my father had nothing to worry about. Luca was a safer driver than he was.

  “Do you want to talk about anything?” he asked.

  He didn’t believe I was fine.

  “No, I’m good,” I said, smiling to prove my point. In truth, I didn’t want to talk about anything. I wanted to listen to music from tapes that were probably made before I was born. If Luca and I talked, I wanted it to be about something meaningless, but since I couldn’t think of a meaningless topic, I listened to the song, envisioning a man and a woman with long, unkempt hair, singing together.

  My eyes almost closed as the world of white and brown whizzed by, the edge of the scenic highway bordered on both sides by blackened snow. And usually, beyond that lay pristine snow.

  “I like watching for animal prints in the snow,” Luca said, his focus occasionally going to the side of the road.

  “That’s one of the funnest parts about fresh snow,” I said with a nod.

  “That must be a popular spot,” Luca said, pointing toward a meadow area on my side of the road that held many tracks. He slowed for us to observe it longer.

  “There’s a pond farther back in the woods. Mom used to take me when I was younger,” I said in happy remembrance. “Something about the ground around it or the way it was formed made the bank sandy instead of rocky. It was soft on my toes, like what I imagine Florida beaches would feel like.”

  “Do you go there much?” he asked. “In the summer, I mean.”

  “I haven’t been in years. Dad took us once, after she died. I begged him to, and he gave in. But not since. He said there are too many leeches.”

  “Really?” he asked with concern.

  “They’re common up here. I’m surprised no one told you about them. And the ticks.”

  “I’ve been warned about the ticks.”

  Everyone who came to Maine was warned about the ticks.

  “We have leeches in Florida,” he said. “People don’t talk about them, though, ’cause we don’t swim in ponds.”

  He was so adamant it made me giggle. “Why don’t you swim in ponds?” This was the sort of meaningless chatter I was hoping for.

  He shuddered. “I seriously can’t imagine anyone doing that. Maybe in the middle of the state, where they don’t have oceans, but even then,”—he squirmed again—“the thought is gross. Blech!” He made a disgusted face and stuck out his tongue.

  I giggled. “What’s so awful about ponds in Florida?”

  “They’re so gross,” he said, shaking his head. “Almost all of them are covered in algae and swarming with snakes that are definitely not harmless. And then there are the alligators.” He squirmed. “The thought completely freaks me out.”

  I laughed. “Okay, got it. If I ever go to Florida, I will definitely not swim in ponds.”

  “Good plan,” he said, nodding his head forcefully. “Do you want to go to Florida?”

  “If the ocean water is warm, I’d like to go. When I watch people swimming in the ocean on TV, I’m so jealous.”

  “Where I’m from, during the hottest part of summer, the ocean feels almost like bathwater.”

  “It sounds heavenly,” I said, thinking of the hot Florida beaches.

  “Does the water here ever get above freezing?”

  “If your definition of freezing is the technical one, then yes, it’s almost always above freezing, but if you mean is it ever warm enough to comfortably submerge your entire body in without a wetsuit? Maybe a day or two a year, in a hot year.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he said with a grimace.

  “Do you like swimming in the ocean?” I asked.

  “I love it. I feel most at home by the sea. Being in it is even more peaceful.”

  “At least when you moved up here, you didn’t have to leave the ocean,” I said. My head leaned against the seat, my mind and body relaxed. I was grateful to be talking about simple things like his love for the ocean and his ridiculous fear of Florida ponds.

  “Yeah, that was one of Aunt Sam’s selling points. Not that she needed a selling point. It’s not like I had a lot of options.”

  “You didn’t have to go with her. You were about to be eighteen.”

  “I love being with Aunt Sam,” he said, glancing in my direction. “I would’ve come up here even without the private cove.”

  “A private cove with a haunted inn,” I said wryly.

  He laughed. “She waited to tell me that until I got here. It’s okay, though. Now it’s not haunted, and even when it was, the far end of the cove didn’t bother me. Watching the waves, fishing—it’s what I love to do.”

  “Watching the waves is my favorite thing to do too,” I admitted. The rhythmic movement of the jeep was making me drowsy.

  Luca’s arms jerked hard to the left.

  The turn had been too abrupt and we were spinning too fast. I screamed, my body instinctively pulling into a ball. Around and around went the jeep—my heart beating so fast.

  Were we going to die? Was this my last moment on earth?

  The jeep finally came to a stop. It started to creep forward.

  I opened my eyes. We were in the middle of the road, facing the wrong direction. Luca was pulling the jeep over to the side.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, breathing hard as the jeep crawled to a stop.

  I didn’t answer. I blinked at him, slowly moving myself out of the ball position.

  “There was a … bear, I think. I don’t know what else it could’ve been. It was too big to be a dog. I’m so sorry—it came out of nowhere. I turned to look at you and I saw it coming out of the trees. It was so fast. I had no idea bears moved that fast. Was it a bear? It must’ve been. I’m sorry. Say something. Are you okay?”

  “We have a lot of bears around here,” I said faintly. “Usually, they’re hibernating by now.”

  Luca leaned his head against the steering wheel. “I’ve never seen a bear before,” he mumbled.

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. The emotion of almost dying, coupled with the relief of not dying, and then his having never seen a bear before … something about that was beyond hilarious.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as I continued to laugh uncontrollably.

  He placed a hand on my back. I fell into him.

  “Seriously, why is that funny?”

  “You’ve … never … seen … a bear … before,” I managed to say between fits of laughter.

  “No, I never have,” he repeated slowly.

  The effect made me laugh even harder.

  I was conscious of him gawking at me in bewilderment, but it didn’t matter; I couldn’t stop laughing. After several minutes my sides were hurting so much I was groaning. I breathed deeply. I wiped my eyes, hoping the black mascara hadn’t smudged into raccoon eyes.

  “Sorry,” I managed to say with a steady voice.

  He pulled his arm away from my back. “Don’t be. It was nice to watch you laugh.”
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  I sniffed, the laughter finally fading. “This helped me realize something. I’ve got to start living life. As much as I try to be careful, as much as you are a cautious driver, danger finds me. I could hide in my castle for the rest of my life and I’d probably end up getting struck by lightning or something.”

  “Danger does seem to find you,” Luca admitted.

  I leaned back in the seat. “I’m starving,” I said, touching my stomach.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go home?”

  “And bring the lightning strike down on the whole family? I’m probably safer away from them.”

  “That could be true,” he teased as he turned the ignition switch.

  Fifteen

  A few minutes later we were driving over the bridge that signaled we were leaving our small town and moving into an area visited by more tourists. During the summer months, traffic on this part of the scenic highway was horrific. The view of the bay was incredible, and all the tourists crawled through this area. During the winter, it was left to the locals.

  The tide was low. Wooden piers jutted above a sea of mud. In another few hours the tide would reclaim this place, reaching twelve feet higher than it was now; the piers that currently stood against the middle of the sky would be only a few feet above the water.

  “The ocean is so different here,” Luca said, glancing out at the bay.

  “I’ve heard that. Actually, I’ve heard it a lot.” It was one of the things most often remarked on by the various tourists who occasionally attended Mass at our church.

  “Yeah, I bet. It’s hard not to be amazed by it. At home, the tide sort of drifts in and out so gradually, you don’t notice until your stuff gets wet. But here, it’s like the ocean is completely different at different tides.”

  “You should go up north,” I said. “Our tides are twelve feet here, but up there they can be fifty feet.”

  “That’s incredible. Have you been there?”

  “Once, when I was Avi’s age. It was the last trip we took as a family.” I cleared my throat. “It was a lot of fun. We almost got soaked, though. The tide came in so fast, we had to run off the beach.”