by A N Sandra
“It’s going to be a pleasure being near your energy for an hour,” the woman enthused. “Usually I share my energy with other people for a good experience.”
Joshua reflected that no one in the North State had ever said something like that to him, but he was willing to share his energy. The massage was more enjoyable than he had anticipated. He relaxed and shared his energy with the therapist.
“I sense you have a challenge ahead of you,” the therapist said to Joshua as he was leaving the room. “I feel drawn to give you something.”
Reaching into the v-neck of her tunic, she drew out a necklace covered with crystals of different shapes and colors. She somehow removed a pale blue one and handed it to Joshua.
“No one understands the energy that comes from these, I really don’t understand it at all… but I feel I must give this to you.”
For just a split-second Joshua hesitated to reach out his hand to take it out of annoyance at having to accept a gift without having any means to reciprocate. Girls were always giving him small gifts hoping to build a relationship with him and Joshua was naturally wary of women and gifts. The instant his hand touched the crystal his uncertainty vanished. He held it up to admire it, and it seemed to flicker inside. It was warm, whether from the therapist’s skin or from an inner heat.
“Thank you, very much,” Joshua told her. Surprising himself, he reached out to embrace her and she melted into him, squeezed him, and held his arm when he pulled away.
“Your energy is capable of great things, trust it,” she told him.
Joshua walked back to the spa reception area where Brooke and Court were waiting for him, both of them glowing.
“Let’s eat lobster!” Joshua said in greeting.
They ordered three lobster dinners from room service because Joshua wasn’t twenty-one and wouldn’t have been able to have wine in the dining room. Court was sure that eating seafood without the proper wine pairing was almost sinful. She ordered three different bottles of wine and opened all of them to breathe; an act that would have alarmed Danica, who was afraid of potential waste. The first bottle was a zesty red to accompany the cheese board that didn’t have one kind of cheese Joshua could recognize. There were nuts and dates that had been roasted too. Everything was delicious, and he enjoyed it tremendously. When the cheeseboard looked wrecked Brooke put it aside and drew the next course to the table. Brooke poured a white wine while Joshua gave everyone arugula salad covered with fancy Italian bacon and figs.
“This is aged in a stainless-steel tank, so it’s extra crisp,” Court told them as she leaned back into her chair to take a second sip. “Penner-Ash winery is in Oregon. Those people are wine magicians.”
The wine and food were magical to Joshua, who had never eaten a meal paired expertly with high-end wine.
“My mom would love this,” Joshua said absently. “She can really cook. Her parents owned a bakery when she was growing up. She makes the best food… but this is special.”
“There is nothing, nothing like good food and wine.” Brooke herself took a large forkful of salad and chewed with soulful devotion.
“The lobster is still coming,” Court promised. “I didn’t order dessert, but we can if you want.”
“I want to enjoy every bite of this… maybe we should skip dessert,” Joshua reflected.
“Being a grown-up means making tough choices.” Court grinned.
The lobster was covered with a Thai chili sauce and the sweet fire of the sauce and the tender meat that absorbed it, paired perfectly. A very cold, yet not quite icy glass of wine washed it down in such a manner that Joshua felt it had been a religious experience.
“I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a meal more.” Joshua leaned back. A few greens were left on the plate in front of him with the lobster shell on it, but most of it was just covered with the remains of the sauce.
“We can smoke our dessert!” Court held up a huge blunt.
“You two can,” Brooke said, standing up slowly, probably due to drinking three glasses of wine and eating a plentiful amount of rich food with it in less than an hour. “I’m going to bed.”
When the door closed behind her, Court lit the blunt and handed it to Joshua.
“Does Brooke never smoke?” Joshua asked after he exhaled a stream of smoke.
“Not with me. It makes her too nervous.” Court let the high relax her further into her chair. “She doesn’t want to make a move on me when she’s high. She did it once and it didn’t turn out well.”
“Oh,” Joshua said. He was full, he was tipsy, and he was high. Saying the first thing on his mind was easy. He hadn’t known Brooke was a lesbian, but it made sense when Court told him. He just hadn’t thought about her that way. “I’ll be careful not to make a move on you either.”
“You weren’t going to.” Court rolled her eyes. “Pretty boys like you go for tiny cute girls.”
“I never knew any girls like you before,” Joshua told her. The women in his life had been amazing, but none had Court’s ability to motivate groups of people like the work crews or handle people one-on-one the way she had courted the security guards for both her father’s gated community and the Global Forces Hospital. “You’re the first one.”
She was right about Joshua liking girls smaller than himself. He liked it when they looked up to him. Court wasn’t much taller than Joshua, an inch at most, and she was striking, with bold Slavic features and confident movements. Watching her finesse security people for the last two days would have convinced him she was out of his league if he hadn’t already thought so. He hadn’t known a girl who could talk people into anything the way Court could. Even his sister Jael who sweet-talked everyone around her didn’t have a bold style like Court. Jael was beautiful, delicate, and perfect. She was a flower that people wanted to protect. Court was more than those things. She was something Joshua hadn’t even known existed.
“Just because you’re taller than me isn’t why I wouldn’t make a move on you,” Joshua told her. “You’re out of my league.”
Court rolled her eyes again.
“No, I mean it,” Joshua insisted. Court handed him the blunt and he took a large drag, handing it back very slowly because his reflexes were getting shot. “I’m not going to be with anyone else until I get married. I know the world is ending and I’m not sure how it’s going to play out, but I want to get married and have kids. Maybe even a lot of kids.”
“You look like a player to me.” Court seemed doubtful.
Joshua wasn’t offended, he was hard to offend normally and in an altered state he just didn’t care.
“I look different now than when I came to you,” he reflected.
“It’s been a month and you have a new haircut and wear different clothes. That’s all. You look the same. You look like your brothers and sisters. When I read your dad’s letter to your sister, I stalked you all on the internet. All of you play sports, there are tons of pictures of you everywhere.”
Joshua supposed he did look like his siblings. He remembered a woman at a basketball game watching Twilight making her way down the court last year. “All the Henderson girls are prettier than Disney princesses and they throw the ball around like Harlem Globetrotters,” she’d said. It was true, Twilight had already made Varsity as a freshman and she had been dominating the court. Joshua had been a little depressed at the game watching Twilight, because he was not ready to be done playing basketball even though he had graduated the year before. He could have gone to college and played if he wanted. He had chosen the band. The dream of Back Pasture had been so tempting. The idea of endless fame, money, and girls. Now he just wanted a house like the one he had grown up in with a fun wife and a bunch of kids. Sunday afternoon barbeques and NASCAR racing after church.
“I’ll never watch my kids play basketball,” Joshua said out loud.
“I don’t ever want kids,” Court said. “I just want to survive the life that’s coming. Well, really I’ll be glad to survive tomorro
w.”
“I’m not worried about tomorrow,” Joshua told her. “What happens, happens.”
“You should worry about tomorrow,” Court told him point blank. “If I get into my dad’s house and he wakes up and tells me he loves me and wants to be my dad, I’ll cancel the whole thing. I’ll leave you and Brooke hanging.”
“Wow,” Joshua said. “After everything he’s done?”
“I just want him to love me,” Court said. She looked into a past the Joshua couldn’t see. “He loves my brother, he is capable of love. He just doesn’t love me. He took my mom away, he sent my brother to Oxford, but wouldn’t even pay for me to go to community college, he even sent my step-sisters to nice schools. I know if he wakes up, I should kill him and finish getting the medicine, I will kill him if he wakes up and says something hateful. I hate him most of the time. I’m just weak in some areas.”
“That seems extreme,” Joshua observed. “Kill him or call off the whole caper and stay with him. There’s no in between?”
“Nope. I could do either one,” Court said. “I loved Robbie, more than anything in the world, but when he got crazy about taking on the Hollisters, I begged him to think it through. I begged him to put us first. But he wouldn’t. So, I killed him.”
Joshua had nothing to say to that. He suspected that Court had only announced what happened to Robbie out loud because he had the box. People seemed to have a hard time being dishonest in its presence.
“I’m not sure why I don’t feel worse about it than I do,” Court went on. “Some time I’m probably just going to have a big breakdown over it.”
“You’ll have to think about it first,” Joshua said. “That’s why I stay busy, so I don’t think about my dad too much.” The two of them sat in silence, not thinking about disturbing things together.
“I’m pretty stoned,” Court said at last. “Should we go ahead and order some dessert?”
“Ice cream,” Joshua said. “Let’s have another hit and some ice cream.”
“This is your wake-up call,” Brooke was saying into Joshua’s phone. “Get the hell up.”
Even though her words sounded harsh, Joshua knew her well enough by this time to know she was just nervous. He looked at the bedside clock and saw it was almost four in the afternoon. He stumbled to the minibar, grabbed a glass bottle of Coke from the fridge to get some caffeine into his system, and threw himself into a chair. He and Court had stayed up as late as possible to sleep in as much as possible so they would be more awake for their “caper.”
“Shower, shave, meet Court and Brooke for the Last Supper,” Joshua told himself, chugging the icy soda. His head hurt a little, probably from the overindulgences of the previous night, so he opened a bottle of water and took a drink. Water and caffeine—that would fix him up. This was it. The day. He was glad he hadn’t known about this for months in advance like Court had. He had known about the plan for less than two weeks and tonight, for better or worse, it would be over. Hoping for better.
It was six o’clock by the time Joshua met Court and Brooke in the dining room for an early dinner. They might have been three young people on their way to an early movie premiere. Anyone watching them might have thought so, the way they bantered casually. They ate and Court flirted with the waiter while Joshua looked longingly at the bandstand in the distance, wishing he could play music with his friends one more time before he risked his life to steal some pharmaceuticals from the most impressive military the world had ever known.
“All right.” Court put her large cloth napkin on her plate. “We’ll go to my room and go over this one more time.”
Court’s room had a large whiteboard in it with a timeline, side comments, and sticky notes all over it. It looked like a bad dream to Joshua, who immediately asked for and received a yellow legal pad and made his own timeline while Court talked and he and Brooke clarified things. Even with the box in his pocket and the addition of the blue crystal beside it, Joshua felt his mind run over the plan the way water runs trying to smooth out the path it takes.
“Any more questions?” Court finally asked into silence.
Joshua and Brooke both looked back at her. It was dark outside the room, although a faint glow of evening still lingered. They looked at each other, then they looked back at Court and shook their heads “no.”.
“We could run what-if questions by each other all night at this point and then we wouldn’t get this done,” Joshua told Court, who nodded slowly.
He remembered basketball practice before his first section championship. The stoic feeling, the necessity of practice, but the reality that it was the end of the season. One team was the best and that team would win barring extreme bad luck in the form of injury or reffing. He could remember walking to the locker room to put his basketball uniform on, and now he walked to his room to put on the Global Forces uniform he was going to wear to impersonate Court’s father’s driver.
The drive to the gated community didn’t take long. What did take time was parking the car at a nearby strip mall and sneaking into the gated neighborhood from the back. They scaled the back wall with a rope even though cars were going by in the dark. They climbed quickly and no one stopped them.
“I did this at least twenty times when I was sixteen, seventeen,” Court assured them as they wound through fountains and streams in the backyard of a person who evidently owned a six-million-dollar house they never used. “It never fails. These people don’t pay for a full-time housekeeper, only maintenance people, so there’s never anyone here this late.”
“It looks like these people are home,” Brooke noted as they crossed through a gap in a hedge to enter someone else's property. There were several windows showing light around the edges of the blinds.
“They’re super old. They only employ illegals from Guatemala, so they don’t have to pay them very much. The illegals won’t call the police for any reason. If they approach us, I have money for bribes.”
Court walked them between the fence and the pool house into her father’s backyard. Joshua could see there were lights on in a small guest house in the back. Tiny slivers of light came through the blinds. He knew that was where the driver he would be impersonating lived. Court had assured him that her father was so cruel to his drivers that they hid in the guest house and didn’t come out until her father requested to be driven someplace. No amount of money could get a housekeeper to live-in because Valinda was too unpleasant, so Court was sure no one would be awake.
At the garage Court lifted the lid to the keypad before pushing the code. The small side door beside her made a clicking sound and she turned the knob and pushed it open. With a quick wave of her hand she herded Joshua and Brooke inside the garage and shut the door before turning on a light. A black Lincoln Navigator and an Alfa Romeo Spider were parked next to each other, and a Toyota truck was third in line.
“That’s my brother’s truck.” Court grimaced, her face extra white. “I didn’t think he’d be home. He’s supposed to be at school.”
All three of them stood still for a moment, and just for that moment Joshua thought Court might call it all off. Instead, she mentally regrouped, got the spare keys for the Navigator from a drawer in a large red tool box and handed them to Joshua. No garage had ever smelled so clean to Joshua, and he was suspicious of a garage where no oil change had ever taken place. He opened the door to the Navigator so he and Brooke could begin the process of silently coasting it out onto the driveway while Court went inside to get the codes for the security at the base hospital.
Court slipped into the kitchen of her former home silently, the way she had dozens of times before. With years of practice she had guided Brooke and Joshua through the neighborhood without getting caught on security cameras (she had checked with the guards at the front gate to make sure none had been moved in the two and half years since she had last been home). The people in this gated paradise were allergic to change of any kind.
Even though she had promised herself she
would not get emotional, she remembered how her father and step mother had refused to give her the code to the house, making her wait outside for one of them to come home if she arrived from school or any other activity when they were gone. Hours of her life had been spent waiting outside her own home (her brother Channing was wildly popular and so busy he never had that problem) while her stepsisters were deemed worthier than she was to have the code. One day Court had been sitting by the garage doing homework in the grass when two of her stepsisters’ friends drove up and got out to push the code on the garage.
“Valinda never changes the code,” one of them told the other one. “She uses the same one on her cell phone and never changes it either. It’s her birthday.”
The words had hit Court in the gut like a sucker punch. Not giving her the code was one more way to keep her from belonging to the family. The hours she had spent outside her own house in the SoCal heat had just been another way to make sure she knew her place, not because Valinda and her father were paranoid about security. Mel’s blabbermouth friends all had the code. Court was her mother’s daughter, a phoenix. She had recovered herself, slipped into the garage behind them, and remembered the code. A new life of stealthy coming and going whenever she wanted was born in that moment.
With the caper in mind, Court crossed the dimly lit kitchen silently, making her way to the back stairs that only the housekeeper usually used. Thick carpeting kept Court from making any noise as long as she moved slowly and it was comforting to know that even if her father or Valinda were awake, they wouldn’t use those stairs, so she was safe from discovery. In the distance she could hear the television from the TV room, and she was sure she could avoid Channing.
At the top of the stairs she listened carefully before peeking around the corner. No one was in the hallway and she listened at the door of her father’s bedroom. No noise came from that room, but both her father and stepmother watched TV with headphones so that meant nothing. It was a good sign that no light shone around the cracks of the door. Court was ready to deal with them if they were awake, so she opened the door slowly and silently. Both her father and stepmother were asleep, the television was off, and her father’s laptop was right where she thought it would be. She crept to it and removed it from the room so she could use it without making noise. To avoid being caught by Channing, she went back down one flight of stairs into her stepsister Mel’s room, went into Mel’s walk-in closet, and shut the door.