Touch: A Trilogy

by A. G. Carpenter

  I push my chair back and stand up. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  He frowns, but nods. “Okay.”

  For once my smile does not feel as awkward. “Good. I should go. Mama Lettie will be waiting for me.”

  “Yeah.” He follows me to the door. Leaning out to peer up and down the street again. “Tomorrow then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come around the back.” And he closes the door sharp.

  I smooth the front of my blouse and turn out toward the street. I am nervous about leaving my books with him, but he must know that I trust him or we will not succeed.

  The young man who gave me directions is still sitting on the steps when I pass back by. I wave and he nods in acknowledgment, but I don’t stop to talk. The sun is beginning to drop in the west, and I have a ways to go if I want to get home by dinnertime.

  4

  The streetlights are beginning to flicker on by the time I get back to the Michaels’ house, but the porchlight is off.

  For a moment I wonder if something has happened to Mama Lettie. The breeze shifts, bringing with it the smell of burning tobacco and the sickly-sweet stink of artificial strawberry.

  I hitch the satchel around behind me and slip through the gate into the backyard. The trees are unkempt, and the light spilling from the kitchen door doesn’t reach more than a few feet. There is a steady orange pinprick in the deepest shadows at the far corner of the yard.

  “Mama Lettie?”

  The orange blob shudders and disappears. “Alex. I wasn’t expecting you to...” She shuffles forward, the hand clutching the cigarette hidden behind her back even as the smoke drifts over her shoulder.

  “It’s time for dinner, isn’t it?”

  For a moment, we just look at each other. Finally, she grins, lifts the cigarette to her lips, and takes a long drag. “Don’t tell Jonathan.”

  “I never do.”

  “Ah.” She nods and stubs the last of it out, then flicks it over the back fence into the pass-through.

  It is an odd secret that I share with both of them. Papa Michaels smokes in his truck. Mama Lettie has a pack hidden back here in the trunk of the scraggly dogwood tree, a plastic baggy providing protection from rain and ants. They both pretend they don’t know about the other, and I don’t say anything about it.

  Papa Michaels has told me how he used to smoke, but quit a few years back to please Lettie. Until Alex went missing, he says. But he hasn’t had the heart to tell her how he’s picked it up again.

  For her part, Mama Lettie has never offered a reason for the cigarettes smoked in the dusk. I suspect she’s had this secret habit for many years. Not that it matters. Everyone has secrets.

  She tugs the front of her shirt a couple of times to try and fluff away the lingering smell of burnt tobacco. Then slips her arm through mine and walks me toward the house. “Best get inside before your father comes home. He might wonder why we’re standing out here in the dark.”

  I nod and follow her up the steps into the kitchen. It’s warm and smells of cornbread and green beans. There’s also a tray of fried chicken with molting breading. “I thought you were going to make casserole?”

  “Oh.” Her lips tremble. “I forgot.”

  “I like fried chicken,” I say quick, trying to ignore the fact that it is one of the sorriest batches of fried chicken I’ve ever seen. “Still can’t get the breading to stick?”

  Lettie flushes. “I don’t know. Maybe the oil wasn’t hot enough.”

  I pinch a bite off the nearest piece, blow on it when I realize how hot it still is, and pop it into my mouth where I can hold it with my teeth instead of my fingers. “Tastes good. That’s what’s important.”

  For a moment, she stares at me, eyes wide and hands knotted under her chin. Not the first time, but there is something keener this time. I stand straighter, wary. Wondering if I have done something wrong. “Mama Lettie?”

  She waves her hand as if shooing away a fly. “It’s nothing. Go and put your things away, and then you can help me set the table.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.” She turns away, surreptitiously flicking away tears. “Make sure you wash your hands, too. I don’t need any germs from the bus at the table.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I walk through the living room to the hall and glance back over my shoulder.

  Lettie stands at the stove, adding a little more salt to the green beans. But she pauses, bending over almost as though she is in pain, and I hear a sob, quickly muffled in a dish towel.

  I duck out into the hall, quick, before she can turn to look at me, and tiptoe up to my room. Maybe she’s sick. But Papa Michaels hasn’t said anything, and neither has been to the doctor lately. Have I done something wrong?

  I hang my jacket and satchel in the closet. Stand for a moment in the dark room. Waiting. The face in the mirror stares back at me, barely more than a pale blur.

  Finally, she hollers from the kitchen. “Alex? Are you coming? Table won’t set itself.”

  “Coming.” I take a breath, still uneasy, and hurry to wash my hands. Whatever is wrong, I don’t have time to fix it.

  5

  After dinner Papa Michaels claims a spot on the couch in front of the TV, a glass tumbler with a couple fingers of whiskey balanced on his knee. He’s not like Daddy. He doesn’t get mean when he drinks; he just sits and breathes heavily when the commercials get all feel-good or the characters in the show start crying.

  I help Mama Lettie with the dishes and putting away the leftovers while the TV chatters and giggles through the eight o’clock sitcom.

  Mama Lettie hangs the dish towel up to dry as I put the last of the plates back in the cabinet. “You want to watch TV with us for a while?”

  “Maybe in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.” She nods and smiles. “Okay. I’ll save a spot on the couch for you.”

  Papa Michaels barely looks at me as I cross the living room and into the hall. The tumbler resting on his knee is already empty, and he’s sinking into the cushions with a slow deliberation.

  I worry about leaving them, Mama Lettie and Papa Michaels, but I know that staying here is not helping them. Although they have come to a certain acceptance of Alex, there is a hole here I will never be able to fill. I hope that once I am gone they will heal from all these wounds—visible and invisible.

  I sit down on the edge of the bed and pull out one of the blank books. Draw a line and number it like I am doing math in elementary school, but this one goes to thirty and then begins to repeat. I am counting out days. A couple of hatch marks at the bottom of the page keep a tally on the weeks.

  Some things are going to happen whether I am there or not. And others only begin when I start them. Making it match up, especially now that I can’t see anything beyond this minute, requires some careful counting.

  There is a knock at the door, and Mama Lettie peeps into the room, hesitant. “Alex?”

  “Yes, Mama Lettie.” I close my book, but let it sit in my lap.

  “Here.” She holds out a little book with a lavender cover. “I was going through some things in my dresser and I found this. My mother gave it to me when I was a girl and...well, I thought you might like it.”

  I take it, run my fingers over the floral pattern on the cover, all embossed with gold leaf. “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

  She sits down beside me on the bed. “It’s a little over the top, I guess you’d say. But some of it is nice.” She touches the ribbon threaded between the pages. “This one in particular reminded me of you.”

  I open to the page she’s marked. The sonnet is numbered ten with a Roman numeral. On the facing page is a delicate geometric design with a quotation inside it. And while the wheel of birth and death turns round that which hath been must be between us two.

  “That’s Edwin Arnold,” Mama Lettie says quick. “I meant the sonnet.”

  I smooth the pages carefully.

  Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful ind
eed

  And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,

  Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light

  Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:

  And love is fire. And when I say at need

  I love thee—mark!—I love thee—in thy sight

  I stand transfigured, glorified aright,

  With conscience of the new rays that proceed

  Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low

  In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures

  Who love God, God accepts while loving so.

  And what I feel, across the inferior features

  Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show

  How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.

  I lick my lips and stare at the page as if still reading, but my heart is pounding. The verse, despite its overly romantic language, does speak to me, but nothing I have seen or learned about Alex makes me think she would have felt the same.

  Mama Lettie watches me, an uncertain tremble around her lips. Her hand drifts in the air between us, a gesture I have seen her use when trying to coax the feral neighborhood cat from under the back steps.

  “It’s pretty,” I say finally. I close the book and start to hand it back to her, but she shakes her head.

  “No. I want you to have it.”

  “But your mother gave it to you.”

  “Yes. And now I’m giving it to you.” She puts her hands over mine, still with that searching look. “Because I want you to have it.”

  “Thank you.” I smile, a little stiff, but everything is a little stiff these days.

  Mama Lettie nods and stands up. “Jonathan and I are going to have some ice cream. If you want to come and have some...or I can bring you a bowl.”

  “No. I’ll come out. Just let me finish this.” I shift the notebook in my lap.

  If she’s curious about it, she doesn’t let it show, just nods again. “Okay. Don’t take too long or it will melt.”

  I put the book of poetry on the table beside the bed and open my notebook again. I was just about finished anyway. I know what it will say even without writing out all the gaps and days.

  Time is running out.

  I scribble the last few notes, then put the notebook on the bedside table with the book of Barrett Browning sonnets. I am confident Franklin will help me, because he wants to help his sister again. But the others...

  Martinez will be tricky. Although he understands the risk more than most, he will be less willing to help me fix this mess. Not the way it needs to be fixed.

  I stand up and smooth my skirt. Time for ice cream and sitting with Mama Lettie and Papa Michaels one last time. The rest can wait until the morning.

  6

  The dreams began when these second-hand bones started to cool. They were fragments at first—flashes of people and places I know. As this skin grows looser and my time in this flesh shorter, the dreams have gotten longer and more detailed.

  I think they are like the unending visions I used to have of the future, or the dreams of the present I had while I was in the afterlife with Baby and Addie. But there is an oddness to them I never experienced before.

  They only happen when I am asleep.

  I guess that is the point where my soul is closest to being separated from this tired body. Or maybe they are just dreams, churned up by the near-constant recitation of the contents of my notebooks—my brain refusing to let go of the problem before me.

  How do I save Percy? How do I save myself?

  I recognize the FBI office in Atlanta. Desks clustered in various groups of four or six. The little conference rooms along the back wall with sliding glass doors that provide silence but not privacy. There’s a part of it on the end of the room where I never followed Percy or any of his team. I think it is another hallway and individual offices, but it jitters and glitches when I look at it. First I see a doorway and a corridor beyond, then only a blank wall.

  The rest of the floor of desks and windows and not-so-closed conference rooms does the same out of the corner of my eye. It settles down if I look at it straight on, but stammers and trembles around me as I focus on the subject of this dream.

  Martinez.

  The other desks are empty, the windows at the other end of the room dark, save for the glitter of other skyscrapers and dull glow of a nighttime sky that never grows completely dark. Martinez rattles off the last few sentences of a report and hits the save button. Leans back in his chair to stretch, turning casually to see if he is alone.

  He leans down and pulls open the bottom drawer of his desk and reaches all the way to the back. A grimace and he pulls out a battered file folder nearly three inches thick. Another glance around to make certain no one else is around, and he pushes his keyboard out of the way and flips the file open.

  At the very top of the stack of reports and clippings is a photo of five young girls in front of a Dust Bowl era house, with The Mulvaheney Sisters printed neatly along the bottom edge of the print. They are not smiling for whatever photographer decided to preserve their childhood for posterity. I see a reflection of myself in their blank stares and dirty knees, the hint of a sixth pale face in the window that might be their mother—too sick to stand in the sun and have her picture taken.

  But even in the old photograph, even with the youngest one still sucking her thumb, there is an echo of the Power that lies within them. Not like mine, and not so much like Percy’s either, though I know they put it to destructive ends. But these girls cannot hide the magic in their bones the way Neeny Johnson did and channel their energy into reading cards or tea leaves or poorly formed glass.

  Martinez frowns and sets the photo to one side. He shuffles through the photocopies of scrawled police reports, faded newspaper clippings, and blocky faxed sheets detailing a string of murders that stretches across decades. His hands move out of habit, the same way I thumb through my notebooks—already knowing what they say, but reading them again anyway.

  I don’t know if it’s a glitch in the dream or if Martinez and I are just so focused on the photos and clinical phrases of death, but when Percy drops into the chair at his own desk, we both jump.

  “Cox.” Martinez flushes, slowly collecting the contents of the file folder and putting them back in order. “I thought you’d left for the day.”

  “In a few minutes.” Percy points his chin at the stack of paper resting under Luis’s hand. “Your cold case?”

  “Everyone needs a hobby.” Martinez folds his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair. “You want to take a look?”

  Percy shakes his head. “Thanks, but I’d rather leave that behind at the end of the day.”

  “Right.” Martinez picks up the photo of the five little girls again. “Does it ever scare you? Knowing that there are folks out there who can suck the life right out of you? Knowing that they could look just like me? Or you?”

  Percy picks up a stray pen off his desk and drops it into the canister sitting beside the stapler. “I guess most the folks we deal with look like you or me whether they have the Touch or not.”

  “Maybe.” Martinez tucks the photo away and puts the whole file back in the bottom drawer of his desk. Pauses, looking at Percy with a worried crinkle between his eyebrows. “You all right?”

  Percy is silent for a moment. Finally, he digs in his jacket pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper, tosses it onto Luis’s desk. “You know about that?”

  Martinez unfolds it carefully. It’s a lot cleaner that most the photocopies in his file, though the toner is flaking along the creases from having been repeatedly folded and unfolded.

  Local Boy Escapes Killer

  The headline at the top of the page seems extra-large. Below is a grainy photo of eleven-year-old Percy, and an even blotchier driver’s license photo of the creep that tried to murder him.

  Martinez blinks a couple times, then folds it up and hands it back. “Yeah.” He looks hard at Percy. “Did you?”
>
  Percy rubs his fingers through his hair. “I dunno. I mean, I guess so. But I don’t have many memories from...then.”

  “Because of the Magiprex.” The change in Martinez’s voice is slight, but my heart aches with it.

  “That’s right.” Percy straightens the phone on his desk, moves the stapler a half-inch to the right. “It doesn’t say outright, but...I think I used magic to kill that man.”

  “That criminal,” Luis says.

  “Yeah. But if that were true, if I used magic against another human being like that, it would make me a Power.”

  Martinez pushes his face into an expression that looks thoughtful and leans back in his chair again. His right hand slides down to rest on the sidearm holstered on his belt. “Could be. You know the classifications are—”

  “Complicated and arbitrary.” Percy glares at him. “I know. I’ve read the handbooks. And the papers. And the old texts. All of it putting folks like me into little boxes and categories based on what we could do and what we might do and whether our parents drowned or burned or turned to dust when someone stabbed them with a silver knife. And meanwhile I’ve walked free, helping find the folk we think are monsters, and folk like Delaney are locked away forever ‘cause she survived something she shouldn’t have.”

  Martinez frowns and swivels his chair so that his right side is farther away from Percy and unsnaps the holster. “Delaney was in Greenhaven for her own good.”

  Percy slams his fist on the desk. “Del was in Greenhaven because they were scared of her. And they drew lines and ticked boxes and said, ‘She’s a Power,’ so they didn’t have to feel guilty about locking up a child.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Luis nods. “You’re right. But what does that have to do with you?”

  “So I killed someone with magic before. A criminal, sure. But I killed him. And everything I’ve read says that’s a place I can’t come back from. Everything I’ve read says it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.” Percy’s anger fades, giving way to resignation. “You know it, too.”