by P. D. Cacek
YOUNG MOTHER COMES BACK AS SUFFRAGETTE!
… then cocked his head to one side as he turned back to the camera.
“Obviously,” he said, “she’s come a long way, baby.”
Jess tried to stop himself but couldn’t. The laughter, which unfortunately contained more than a few stray bits of rice cake, exploded out of him like a cannon, spraying the coffee table.
“Yes?”
His wife came in from the kitchen just as he wiped the last pieces of his ‘heart-healthy snack’ onto the plate with a napkin.
“Just something on TV,” he said, still smiling until he saw her face. Jess picked up the remote and turned off the television just as the late-night host mentioned something about miracles. “What’s wrong?”
She sat down on the couch next to him and took his hand, which would have been a sweet and loving thing to do if the look on her face hadn’t continued to look grim. Jess sat up straighter and felt his heart begin to race while at the same time doing a quick mental inventory of possible husbandly transgressions.
He was sure he took out the garbage. He remembered taking out the garbage. Did he take out the garbage?
Jess gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “Come on, Monica, you’re starting to scare me.”
She blinked.
“What? Oh…oh, no, sorry, I was just being…” She laughed and Jess’s heart slowed a bit. “…a mom, I guess.”
“My mom never looked like that unless she got a call from the principal about me.”
“You used to get into trouble?” She feigned shock. “You?”
Jess batted his eyelashes. “Yes. All the time. What’s wrong?”
“Oh.” She laughed again and this time it sounded forced. “It’s Abigail.”
“Abigail?”
That surprised Jess enough to bring him back into a full upright and locked position. Abigail? Of their beautiful twin daughters, Abigail had always been the quieter, the easier of the two. Both of them were smart, well-behaved and respectful, the epitome of what the daughters of a Presbyterian minister should be, but where Abigail was humble and quiet, her older sister by three minutes, his namesake Jessica, was the living equivalent of a category five tornado but never in a mean-spirited or vengeful way. The two were as different as night and day. Where Abigail accepted things, Jessica questioned them. Where Abigail was obedient, Jessica was….
Jess took a deep breath. Jessica was just…Jessica.
Abigail was his little princess, was his pride.
Jessica, the tomboy, was his joy and as close to the son Jess always thought he wanted until they were born.
“Are you sure it was Abigail?”
He thought it was a legitimate question. They were mirror twins after all and even though they seldom, if ever, dressed alike, and Jessica’s hair was much shorter, he had called them the other’s name more than once.
His wife gave him the same look the late-night host had given the camera, but it wasn’t the least bit funny on her. Jess cleared his throat.
“Seriously, Jess?” Jess ducked his head in apology and waited in silence. His wife took pity on him. “A boy asked her out.”
Jess’s heart picked up speed. “She’s only thirteen!”
“I know, our baby’s growing up.”
“Our baby’s only thirteen. Who is this boy?” Jess hadn’t been aware that he’d gotten to his feet until he realized he had to look down to meet his wife’s eyes. “Do we know him? Where does he want to take her? When? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
She smiled. “I was waiting for you to stop talking, Dad.”
Message received. Jess stopped talking and sat back down.
“And to answer your first question, yes, we know the boy. It’s Jacob, Zach and Brie’s son, you know, from down the block. He shoveled off the driveway last winter. Jacob and Abigail are in the same English class. You know…Jacob. You like him.”
“That was before he asked my daughter for a date.” She slapped him lightly on the arm. “So where does he want to take her?”
His wife smiled. “To the new Star Wars movie this Saturday…with his parents. And then for pizza afterward…also with his parents.”
Jess leaned back, crossing his arms in front of him. “You are a cruel woman, Monica Pathway.”
She chuckled but didn’t deny it.
“But if it’s only a date,” he said, “and we know Jacob, why did you look so…stricken when you came in?”
Jess watched the look – not stricken, no, he’d been wrong about that, but it was something he didn’t remember ever seeing before – return.
“Because our little girl is growing up and it’s hard on a mother, knowing everything she’s going to have to go through.”
Jess got worried again. “Like what?”
His wife just made a little noise in the back of her throat and shook her head. It was sometimes very hard, even as an ordained minister with a master’s in counseling, to be the only man in a household of women. Jess wondered how single fathers managed.
“It’s just part of growing up,” she said, as if that explained anything. “Abigail asked me to ask you if it was okay.”
Jess didn’t ask why Abigail hadn’t asked him herself because he was grateful she hadn’t. God only knew what trauma he might have inadvertently caused if she had.
“Sure. Yes. It’s okay.” He took a deep breath. “What about Jessica? Jacob has a brother, doesn’t he…. Axle, right?”
A different look reshaped his wife’s face and this one Jess knew – sorrow. “Axle, yes, but no…he didn’t ask Jessica. Besides, she has a softball game Saturday afternoon.”
Jess exhaled slowly. Thank you, God.
* * *
Phoenixville, Pennsylvania
Eva Steinar looked down at her hands, folded peacefully in her lap, and realized with something close to shock that they were her mother’s hands. She’d had beautiful hands once, everyone told her so – small and graceful, the fingers long and delicate, the pale skin smooth and soft. But that was a long time ago and now her hands were old and wrinkled, dotted with age spots and crisscrossed with the tiny scars she’d gotten over the years.
Just like her mother’s.
She should have been more careful with her hands.
She should have been more careful with everything.
She should have paid more attention.
“But I don’t understand,” she said, because her husband hadn’t said a word since the doctor explained what he thought happened. “Curtis was fine.”
“No,” the doctor said, “he wasn’t, and I don’t think this was as sudden as you’d like to believe.”
Eva squeezed her fingers together until the work-reddened skin turned an ugly shade of yellow.
“Curtis is my son,” she said, looking up to meet the doctor’s eyes. “I would have known if he was sick.”
The doctor met her eyes. “I spoke with the counselor at your son’s school and she said both you and your husband were made aware of Curtis’s increasingly bizarre behavior.”
Eva shook her head. “The woman has always been against Curtis. She’s intimidated by his genius.”
“Mrs. Steinar, I am reasonably sure neither’s the case. Ms. Gates is a qualified adolescent counselor who is simply concerned about—”
“Keeping her job.” Eva couldn’t believe the vindictiveness of the woman. “I know Ms. Gates and she’s a bitter, angry woman who fabricates problems and manipulates parents into believing them. If she was good enough she would have been a real counselor with her own practice. I mean, it’s high school for God’s sake, why do they feel they need a counselor in the first place? A school nurse was all we got when I was in school.”
When the doctor looked like he was about to say something, Eva lifted her right hand to stop him. He
r fingers throbbed as the blood rushed back to fill them. “You have his charts so you know Curtis was given the Stanford-Binet intelligence test and scored one hundred and sixty-four. I gave him the test myself.”
The doctor lowered his chin. “You did?”
“Yes. I found the test online and printed it out and gave it to Curtis. It didn’t take him long to finish. He’s gifted, a genius, and geniuses don’t think or behave the way – other children do.”
She’d almost said ‘the way normal children do’ but knew the doctor would have jumped on the word for all the wrong reasons. Curtis wasn’t normal, Eva knew that. Dear God, why would he be normal? He was above normal; he was a genius.
The doctor sat back, nodding in defeat, Eva thought.
“I see. But geniuses generally don’t walk into a school’s science lab during lunch hour and kill a half dozen rats and guinea pigs, claiming they’re alien invaders.”
“What?” her husband said. “Jesus, the school didn’t mention that. They just said he’d passed out and was brought here. He…Curtis killed them?”
It was the first time her husband spoke since the doctor asked them to sit down and Eva wished he’d remained silent.
“It was the movie,” she said quickly, before he could say anything else.
Both the doctor and her husband looked puzzled. “What was?”
“What…they said Curtis did. He watched a movie last night on his computer. What do you call it, streaming? Yes, he was streaming this movie on his computer and I happened to look in when I passed his door.” Eva rolled the unexpected shudder out of her shoulders. “It was…very violent and Curtis was just sitting there staring at it. He didn’t even hear me when I called.”
The doctor made a note on the open file in front of him. “Did you try to get him to turn off the computer?”
Eva clasped her hands over her purse. She’d tried. Once she noticed what he was watching – how could they show things like that? – she all but ran to his bed and touched his shoulder. She hadn’t yelled or shouted because Curtis was sensitive to loud noises, but she had run and somehow forgot he didn’t like sudden movements either. And it scared him, must have scared him because he never would have hit her otherwise. Curtis was a good boy, a genius.
She’d scared him and he just reacted. It was her fault.
Thank God for makeup and a husband who wouldn’t have noticed a broken jaw, let alone a slight bruise below her right eye.
“Of course I did,” she said, “and he turned it right off.”
The doctor wrote something else. “But you think those images stayed with him?”
Eva didn’t like the direction the conversation was going. “I suppose, but it’s the movie’s fault. They shouldn’t show things like that to impressionable children.”
The doctor took a deep breath and Eva felt another shudder weave its way up her back.
“No, you’re right, they shouldn’t, but most impressionable children only have nightmares. They don’t confuse what they saw in a movie with reality the way Curtis did.” He set the pen aside and tapped his fingers against the file. Eva found herself watching his hand. It didn’t look like a doctor’s hand, although she had no idea what a doctor’s hand might look like. The knuckles were too big. “Ms. Gates also mentioned he’d had trouble concentrating in class.”
“Geniuses get bored easily,” Eva said to the doctor’s hand. “The teachers don’t know how to keep him stimulated.”
“And there have been some anger issues.”
“Hormones. He’s a teenager.”
“With paranoid delusions. Has Curtis been having trouble sleeping?”
“No.”
“Yes.” Eva stopped looking at the doctor’s hand and glared at her husband. “I hear him sometimes at night,” he added, “walking back and forth and talking to himself. It’s more than just hormones, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Mr. Steinar. Once Curtis was stable and coherent, I asked a colleague of mine to speak to him and we both feel Curtis is experiencing sudden-onset adolescent schizophrenia.”
“What are you talking about?” Eva demanded, but neither the doctor nor her husband seemed to notice.
“I’m very sorry, but it’s not as dire a prognosis as you may think.”
“He’s not sick!”
“I knew something was wrong,” her husband said. “I knew it. What can we do?”
“Did you hear me? He’s not sick!”
“I think the first thing we need to do is get Curtis on an antipsychotic drug regimen. There are some wonderful second-generation drugs that have fewer side effects and—”
Eva stopped trying to be heard. Instead she went quiet and listened and nodded, and when her husband asked question after question she kept quiet and listened and nodded again. The doctor was wrong. The doctor’s colleague, whoever it was, was wrong. Her husband was wrong. All of them were wrong and when she got home she was going to call their lawyer and sue Ms. Gates for starting the whole thing.
There was nothing wrong with her son except that he was too bright, too advanced for any of them to recognize. Curtis was a genius and geniuses were different.
“You’ll have to make sure Curtis takes his medication every day, Mrs. Steinar.”
Eva nodded again and stood up. “Of course I will. Can I see my son now?”
March 2018
Chapter Two
Los Angeles, California
“Can you open your eyes for me?”
A hand touched her arm. Holding her breath, she lay still, played possum until they’d done what they wanted and let her be. When the hand pressed a little harder she couldn’t stop her eyes from squeezing tighter together.
“Shh, it’s okay, you’re fine.” She didn’t recognize the voice, but it was soft and gentle, not like the others, not like the Haints. “I know you’re probably confused, but I need to see your eyes. Do you think you can open them just a little?”
She opened her eyes and immediately shut them. The sky was too bright, like milk glass held up to the sun.
“Sorry, sorry.” The voice whispered something and the sky over her darkened. “I’ve turned down the light. Can you try again?”
Turned down the light? She didn’t hear a lantern hissing, but slowly let go her breath and cracked her eyes just a little, and was prepared to snap them shut again quick-quick if needs be. The face looking down at her smiled. He was a white man, but his smile was real, soft and gentle like Mr. Benezet’s and his other Quaker friends.
“Hi,” the white man said, “I’m Dr. Ellison, but everyone calls me Barney.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes.”
She screwed up her eyes again just to see better. The room was cool and shadowy dark, but she could see that the walls and ceiling were white. She was in a bed, that much she knew without having to look, but it wasn’t stuffed with corn husks or cattail fluff. It was soft and hard all at the same time and the bedding sheets both under and over her felt softer than the linen tablecloth she got switched for, and when she moved her head on the pillow – a real pillow! – she smelled only clean without a hint of lye. Mr. Benezet must have found her and brought her to the Big House.
“I’m alive.”
The doctor named Barney chuckled and nodded. “Yes. Can you tell me your name?”
She licked her lips and felt her nose wrinkle. Her lips felt slimy and tasted like…strawberries mixed with lard and they felt funny, thinner and thicker at the same time. The Haints must have hit her a few times after—
“He shot me.”
“What?”
“Tell Mr. Benezet it was Mr. Leeworth shot me. He’s one of them Haints and he come ridin’ with three others down t’th’ school. Did the child’en git away? I sent ’em off through the woods and told ’em to get Mr. Benezet. Tell him Mr. Leeworth was the on
e shot—”
Her throat closed up on itself and it took a powerful lot of coughing and choking before it opened up again.
“It’s okay. Breathe. That’s it, deep breaths. Here.” The doctor held a little blue cup with a white birch reed sticking out of it up to her lip. “Just take a little sip.”
The water tasted like it came from a stagnant well, but it was cool and went down real easy. She kept sucking on the reed until she sucked only air. The doctor took the cup away.
“Better?”
“Yessuh. Will you tell Mr. Benezet? He gotta know the polecat he’s been dealin’ with.”
Doctor Barney nodded. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Millie.”
“Hello, Millie.”
“’Lo.”
“So, if I understand you correctly, the last thing you remember was this polecat named Leeworth shooting you, is that right?”
“Yessuh.”
She took a deep breath and wished he’d bring her another cup of water no matter how flat it tasted. She wouldn’t ask, though. “Where be Mister and Missus? The Haints didn’t get ’em, did they? They safe and the chid’en safe?”
Doctor Barney nodded. “Yes, everyone’s safe and you’re safe too, Millie. You don’t have to worry about the Haints or Leeworth anymore. They’re gone and will never hurt you again. I promise. Now, why don’t you try to get some sleep and I’ll come back and talk to you later. All right?”
Before she could answer the doctor Millie felt her body relax as sleep began pouring into her like warm water. She was safe and the children were safe and Mister and Missus were safe and….
* * *
Arvada, Colorado
They were calling them ‘miracles’ and that wasn’t right. Miracles were sacred things and the work of God, and it troubled him that so reverent a term was being reduced to sound bites that unscrupulous newsmongers fed like sugar cubes to an unsuspecting public.
Besides, it was ludicrous to think the things they were describing could really happen.
Wasn’t it?
“Of course it is,” Jess told his congregation, “because miracles, true miracles come from God alone…from God alone…and not some prime time news special.”