“If I’m really lucky, maybe it’ll reverse enough that I can drink again,” she says.
I roll my eyes.
She waves her free hand. “Okay, maybe not.”
“She’s my problem now,” Doc Roger says to me, kissing Jilly’s hand. She has a major diamond on it, I now notice.
Holy moses. My mother’s engaged.
I can’t believe my luck.
“Now can we go home?” Nick says behind me in something perilously like a whine.
I get up and go to kiss Jilly. I’m careful at first. Forty-three years of habit.
But she smells wonderful.
I relax, very slowly, in her baby-powder-smelling embrace. A few tears leak out of me. She’s so happy.
I’m so happy.
Nick comes and lays his hand on my back and I feel something inside me leap toward him. It’s the part of me that has been sucking away strangers’ lives all these years. But for once that part is not unhappy or angry or terrified or forlorn or starving.
Nick has given me something so precious, I don’t know if I can tell him yet. He’s given me the chance to hold my mother, really hold her and feel her love for me. That’s what this happiness is. It’s me and Jilly, touching.
I’m aware of a strange feeling. It’s not fear and it’s not worry and it’s not the rush of relief I get when I’ve finally drunk enough to go numb.
It’s as if somewhere far ahead of me, not quite out of sight, a door has opened where there was no door before. Light is leaking through the crack. Now I notice how dark I am. How much I’ve taken that darkness for granted.
I feel my own energy field pop open, like an umbrella opening halfway down a cliff in a road runner cartoon.
A hysterical sob comes up inside me. I give Jilly a quick smooch and back off.
I can see it in her eye. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
“Don’t starve yourself anymore, sweetie,” she says. “I’m begging you.”
I pat her arm and gulp, feeling the love, the safe love.
“Gotta run, Ma,” I whisper. “Call you tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Nick is silent on the way over to Katterfelto’s office. I keep sip-sip-sipping at his energy while he drives the Cherokee south again. He seems unusually peaceful inside. I feel my own hot, confused feelings settling down, just sitting next to him.
Not that there’s nothing to worry about anymore.
I haven’t told him I can go invisible, or fly, or smell his boner from five feet away, or read his moods in his prana.
Then it occurs to me that he’s pretty good at reading my moods.
Another reason to get to Katterfelto’s office and get some answers.
Sageman-the-kid will probably be at the Katterfelto installation by now. Are we walking into another disaster? Then I think of those serene, grubby ladies in the office, and Katterfelto’s unshakably calm energy, and I can’t picture Sageman getting the better of that.
When we arrive, I see a familiar car in the parking lot. “Rats,” I mutter.
“What’s wrong?”
“My student and his mother are here. It is so not-good for me to walk in there covered in blood.”
“Tell ’em you were roller skating and fell down.”
His energy is so good. He’s in a terrific mood. I can’t imagine it’s about this chance to see the inside of Katterfelto’s “installation,” so it must be because he’s with me.
Nick looks at me. Yeah, his good mood is for me. I’m stunned with happiness. He says, “You don’t have to go in there.” This is Nick? Agent Nick, bossy Nick, Master Of All Nick?
“I’m hoping he has a shower and some clean clothes in there.”
We find Beulah at the desk. “They’re in the lab,” she says to me. “Goodness. Are you all right?”
I lean toward her ear. “Listen, do you guys have a shower? And some clean clothes? I, uh, took a spill on my skates, and Nick here picked me up in his car, and I was hoping—”
“Of course!” Beulah gets up and clucks us back to a kind of apartment in the back. Nick shows a tendency to want to hang around while I shower, but I send him back to the reception area with Beulah.
Twenty minutes later, clean, dressed in a blue linen Dior sheath dress that has apparently been thrown in the washer and dryer without a lot of respect, I’m ready to face people again.
I meet Nick in the front office.
He is in the act of handing the coin over to Katterfelto.
“I do not thank you, my friend,” Dr. Katterfelto says. “But it vill be safer wiz me until I can find a better place to hide it.”
“I’m only trusting you with it because I know you’ve had it before and didn’t use it,” Nick says. He doesn’t look super pleased with his decision.
“Didn’t you notice? The blue zone has dissipated, now that ze coin is no longer buried there,” Katterfelto says.
Nick scowls. “If you wake up in a blue fog, you’d better get rid of it, pronto.”
“Zat is my problem. Tell no one I have it,” Katterfelto says, and touches his lips.
“I won’t,” Nick says.
We all go into the room with the psychespectrometer.
As I’d expected, Katterfelto stands Sageman in front of the white wall first. He babbles happily in his fakey mad scientist accent about stabilization patterns in the first and second chakras.
My student Breck goes to stand beside Sageman.
I want to leap out forward and yank the kid away from there.
“Oh, Ms. Nagazy!” And here’s Virginia, clueless as usual.
I send Nick a warning look. Nick has his bland Federal agent face on.
“Ms Nagazy!” Breck shouts and hurls himself off the platform in front of the wall of light. He crashes into my arms.
I give him a hug and take a tiny hit of prana off him. “Settle down, buddy,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Dr. Katterfelto fixed my chakra!” he yells. “See?” He runs over to the printer and shows me the picture they’ve taken of his aura, chattering the whole time.
Dr. Katterfelto comes forward. “You fixed it yourself,” he says to Breck. “Show your mother, hm? I must talk now to Ms. Hel.”
Nick is looking at the light wall in befuddlement.
Up on the platform, on the wall of light, Sageman’s aura lazes out around him where he stands, calm, I might almost say serene. He’s really different.
I walk forward.
“Have you come to have your picture taken, too?” he says to me in that weird little-boy-old-man voice.
I’m sniffing at his energy. I’m not crazy about the idea, but I reach out a hand and come maybe a foot away from him. From there, I can taste his energy.
Wow. It’s true. There is such a huge change in Sageman. His prana is, I dunno how to say it, it tastes clean. Where he once stank of greed and desperation and evil, he’s now calm, at peace. Like Beulah and Katterfelto, he radiates a what-me-worry vibe that seems too good to be true.
How did he get like this? Did the coin do it to him?
“Professor Katterfelto’s elixir did it. His ultimate weapon let me love myself,” Sageman says. “The coin merely made me young.”
“Yeah,” I say aloud, rather pointedly, because it’s really creepy when he reads my thoughts, “what’s with you being, like, seven years old?”
The kid Sageman shrugs. “It offered me my heart’s desire. I realized in that moment that I wanted to be forever young. Those were my words. The coin asked me, ‘At what age were you at your very happiest?’ and I answered, ‘Seven.’ And behold, I’m seven.”
And he’s happy, apparently — so happy that all the evil has been sucked right out of him.
“It’s true,” Sageman says, reading my thoughts again.
“Ew,” I says. “That’s so creepy.”
He bows his head. “My apologies.”
“I think I liked you better when you were evil,” I say frankly.
&n
bsp; Dr. Katterfelto bustles up. “If you don’t mind, is now Ms. Nagazy’s turn.”
And then I’m up in front of the wall of light.
“My goodness,” Dr. Katterfelto says.
“What?” I demand. “You’re scaring the poop out of me.”
I see him hit the print button on the machine, and he calls me over to the table.
“Vill you look at this. You haff been busy in so many ways.”
“Busy?”
I look at the picture. As before, I see a mass of colors radiating from a female silhouette. Dr. Katterfelto takes a pen and points to the silhouette’s crotch. “Chakra one.” I start blushing. He starts drawing a curvy line up, up toward the head. “You see? Ve haff done some reorganizing, hm? Some house-cleaning?”
“What?” I say. I’m staring at the picture. “I can’t make head or tail of this.”
“You recall your original colorimetry reading vas completely reversed. Zen, two days ago, ve see the heart chakra and down here also,” he taps the silhouette’s belly, “haff flipped around, causink you much confusion, no?”
I remember now. This was after I’d been kissing Nick. Katterfelto had said I was in love.
“Is not unusual,” he says, as if he, too, is reading my thoughts, “to see such confusion in a voman in loff.”
I look over at Breck and Virginia. They’re coloring with crayons at a table across the room.
Breck looks up and calls to Sageman. “Come see my aura,” and Sageman ambles over there as if he is a laid-back seven-year-old.
“Listen,” I say to Katterfelto in an undervoice. “You know stuff about me.”
“I know the coin turned you into an energy vampire,” he says calmly.
My eyes pop and I slap my hand over his mouth. “Shhh!” I look around. Breck and Sageman are arguing over something, and Virginia is coloring her own picture, as solemn and focused as a child.
I look back to Katterfelto and to Nick. “Listen, Doc — there’s something odd going on between Nick and me.”
Nick looks at me, pained. “Is that any of his business?”
I shush him and haul him up in front of the psychespectrometer. “Come over here. Stand here.” I take my place beside him. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the rainbow colors blazing out from my form on the wall behind me.
Dr. Katterfelto looks at us. “I am watching.”
“Now watch this.” I take Nick’s hand without looking at him. His body is like a second sun in the room to me. I do what I have been doing since I met Nick. I sip at his prana. It’s so good, so perfect, I want to dive in, but I behave myself. Knowing what its effect is on him, I just sip.
Yike. He’s got a woody again. If I ever met a hornier guy.
“Well?” I say. I can’t see Katterfelto’s expression. There’s too much light blazing off the psychespectrometer.
Katterfelto is making clucking noises. “Interesting! So very interesting!”
We stand there for ten minutes, while he takes pictures and prints them and has us move to face one another and then back to back, and then he takes Nick’s picture alone, and then mine alone, and back together. If he were a real doctor, I’d be embarrassed. What happens between Nick and me seems too intensely private for anybody to be able to see, and yet there it is, in blazing color. Finally Katterfelto waves us off the platform and over to a table. He gets busy with the pen again.
“You see, Mr. Jones, the younk lady has had a trouble all her life viz the chakras, they are entirely reversed.” And by God, he pulls out a file folder with my original printout in it. This is feeling more like a doctor’s office every minute. But Katterfelto is in such a good mood, I — this is weird — I trust him.
“You see?” he says, pointing with the pen. “Ze wheels, zey turn beckwards. Unt now.” He hauls out my picture from two days ago. “After you haff been, vot is word, spooning, she has begun to turn the other way.”
I look. Damn. My once-reversed chakras are now running normally.
“Al-zo,” Katterfelto says, tapping on the new picture of Nick and me, “Mr. Jones has a stuck solar plexus chakra. So much self-control is not always goot.”
Nick scowls at the picture. “My solar plexus chakra is stuck.” He’s doing the white-guy thing, trying to sound like he gets all this.
“I remember now,” I say. “I was using your prescription for Breck. It happened at practice. I was skating hard, and all of a sudden I heard myself chanting under my breath, ‘Straighten up and fly right,’ and next time I came in here—”
Katterfelto’s little blue eyes widen, and he bows. “So that worked.”
“What do you mean ‘so it worked?’ Didn’t you expect it to?”
He shrugs. “One is groping all the time for an interface with the patient’s inner physician,” he says, falling into gobbledygook again. “I must talk to you, and you must talk to yourself, on zis level,” he taps the picture with his pen. “I cannot cure you myself. I can only point the way for you.”
I’m speechless.
“But here,” he says, and he points the pen at Nick. “Look vot is happening between you.”
We bend over the printout again. This one is the one of Nick and me standing side by side.
“Interesting, interesting.” Katterfelto draws his snaky line. This time, the curves are much wider. Somehow they cross the space between my body and Nick’s, then turn around and head back toward the other person.
“Vot do you see here?” Katterfelto says, all mad scientist.
“Wiggly lines and colors?” Nick says.
“It looks,” I say cautiously, “like our chakras are synched up.”
“Yes, yes, go on,” Katterfelto says, pleased with me.
I know what’s happening, I think, but I’m not going to tell him about the beyond-sexual rush I get when I touch Nick, when I tap into his delicious energy.
“Vot you cannot see from a photograph,” Katterfelto says, “is ze motion. How ze light pulses. It moves.” He takes a pink highlighter and draws over the snaky line that connects my aura with Nick’s.
And then I get it. “We’re exchanging energy,” I say numbly. “It’s going in both directions.”
“Fascinating, no?” Katterfelto says.
Nick is frowning at the picture. “That’s what that says?”
I understand a lot now. I know now why I can’t drain Nick dry. I know why he gets a woody every time we breathe the same air for five minutes. I know now why I can’t kill him. I know why it’s safe for me to make love to him again, and I burst out crying like a Kansas thundercloud. Not just little dewy girly tears. Big, gobby, snotty sobs. I cover my face with my hands.
“Oh my God,” I sob. “Oh. Oh my God.”
“Hel,” I hear Nick say.
I’m too overwhelmed to stop crying.
“It is the shock,” Katterfelto says.
“Is Ms. Nagazy okay?” I hear Virginia say.
Little Breck says calmly, “She found out she doesn’t have to die.”
That kid’s becoming a menace.
“Really?” the kid Sageman says. “That’s nice.”
I turn my back to them, sobbing. Nick’s arms circles me from behind, Nick’s deep chocolate energy wraps around me, Nick’s lips touch my ear. “Hel, Hel.”
He lifts me and then I’m sitting on his lap and he’s all wrapped around me.
I can cuddle Nick. I can hold him forever and nothing bad will happen.
This makes me sob even harder.
He holds me like that for a long time. I hear Virginia and Breck take leave of Katterfelto. Sageman follows them out, talking to Katterfelto about energy transfer mechanisms. As the door closes behind them, I think, I want to have sex.
Nick’s woody is poking me underneath as I sit on his lap.
“Let’s go back to your house,” he murmurs in my ear.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“But don’t you see,” I say, when we have stopped at Fist Kist’s place for my cat an
d we’re on the way home in Nick’s Cherokee, “it explains why I can’t drain you dry.”
“You came close this morning,” he reminds me.
I shudder. “We were both pretty beat up. I don’t think we had much energy between us. What did my teamies do to you? You looked awful.”
He hunches a shoulder. “Ask them.”
“C’mon!”
“I’m a guy, Hel. We don’t whine.”
I roll my eyes.
“Just put it like this, they didn’t have to use their hands,” he says.
I nod. “Legal hits. Training runs deep.”
“It’s legal to knock somebody headfirst into a parked car?”
I say, “Oo, headfirst? That’s a back block. Sixty seconds in the sin bin for that girl.”
“They did that about five times. And they trapped me between them and kept pounding me with their hips. One of ’em’s got hip bones like an ice pick,” he grumbles.
“That’ll be Sacker Tart. For a skeeny beetch, she can hit.”
He says, “And one of them dodged in front of me and popped up somehow and—”
“Flipped you over on your back like a turtle. Can opener. Which one was it?”
“The big fat one.”
“Dom-De-Dom-Dom? Six foot high, refrigerator with a head?”
He frowns. “No, more like five-ten. She looks like somebody’s baby sister.”
I squeal delightedly. “Fist Kist did a can-opener on you? Off skates? I’m so proud of her!” I clap my hands. “Now I owe her a strawberry margarita.”
“Congratulations, Fist Kist,” he says glumly. “I fell and hit my head on a tire.”
“Oh, c’mon,” I say, giving him a shove just so I can put a hand on him. “There are no apologies in roller derby.”
He smiles but he doesn’t look at me.
I pop my seat belt and snuggle up next to him. “I’m sorry they beat you up.” I feel like such a teenager. Swoony with love, safe, happy, with my whole life ahead of me.
When we get to my apartment, I lock all the front door locks and then I turn to Nick.
“There’s something I have to show you.”
I wait for the inevitable flare-up of his boner after this remark, which, like most things I say to Nick, comes out a double entendre.
A Taste of You Page 21