“All right. We’ll see what we can do,” Uncle Alexis said. He looked at everyone else. “Let’s let her rest. She doesn’t realize how tired she is and how all this has affected her.”
“Alexis is right. Just rest,” my mother said. “Later, we’ll all gather for a celebratory dinner and for the rituals that will bind you to us and us to you. Every day from now on, you’ll learn more and more about us, what we believe, how we help each other, and how we can help others. Nothing more will be kept from you. I promise.”
Uncle Wade stepped forward again and kissed my cheek. “Now you will be another magician in the family,” he said.
My father kissed me, too. “I always believed in you, Sage, always.”
They all turned and walked out slowly.
I lay back on my pillow. Uncle Alexis was right. This confrontation was mentally and emotionally exhausting. My head felt like my brain was overflowing, pouring thoughts and images out so fast it made me dizzy. It was like overeating and waiting for it all to digest. I closed my eyes and drifted off, but not for long. Something getting very hot stung me and woke me. I had left Summer’s pendant in my bed. Slowly, I picked it up and looked at it.
Could I just forget him despite what I knew about him? My father wasn’t as confident about what he knew and didn’t know as my mother was. This pendant didn’t just turn warm. He made it turn warm, I thought. He was calling to me. I rose slowly and went to my window. It was nearly two o’clock. I had promised to meet him at the lake. If I did, would my new extended family think I was betraying them? Was it possible to do anything they wouldn’t know about?
I looked toward the lake. The partly cloudy sky was playing hide-and-seek with the sun, but the rays made the water a dazzling silver. A lone crow flew close to the water and then turned into the forest as if something had frightened it. The breeze strengthened and seemed to shake the trees. Just as suddenly, it stopped, and all looked still, more like an oil painting framed in my window.
My father had said I shouldn’t worry about Summer or his father. “What needs to be done about them will be done.” What did that mean? Was Summer already gone? What about the pendant and what I had just felt? I strained to look closer at the lake. He’s there, I thought. He’s waiting for me. He has to be. He was just as much a victim of his father as I was. Yes, he did bad things, and he was far more capable of doing them than I was, but I must have seen something good in him to care about him even now, even after I had heard the truth.
I stepped out of my room and listened. Everyone was in the living room talking. What was it Summer had said? He walked on a breeze? I imagined it, imagined myself doing it, and descended. Softly, I opened the rear door and slipped out. Then I hurried around the house and toward the lake. Half of me hoped he would be there, and half of me hoped he wouldn’t. I followed the path Uncle Wade and I had taken when we had our little talk not so long ago.
Farther along, there was a place on the shore that jutted out a bit into the water. The narrow land looked like a natural dock. To the right, the forest had a thicker patch of trees and bushes, but the leaves had dried and fallen, creating a rug of dark orange and brown. I waited and listened. Foolishly, I had come out without a jacket or a sweater, and the cooler air stung my cheeks. I hugged myself and was ready to turn back when I heard him say my name.
I turned and saw him standing at the edge of the woods. He wore a black sweatshirt with the hood up and had his hands in the pockets.
“I knew you would come,” he said, stepping toward me.
“Do you know who I am, who we really are?” I asked. I had no time to build up slowly to my important questions. Everything was going to happen quickly now.
He stopped but held his smile. “Of course. I knew who you were from the first day I entered the school,” he said, with that cool, confident smile I had at first admired. Now it filled me with dread.
“How did you know?”
“I would have known just looking at you, listening to you, and seeing the way you looked at other people.”
“But that’s not the way you knew,” I said.
“No.” He stepped closer.
“Our father told you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but what difference does it make now?” He reached out to touch me, and I stepped back.
“What difference does it make now? We have the same father, Summer.”
“That’s why we’re special people, Sage. The rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to us.”
“Not that rule.”
He didn’t lose his smile. “You’ll get over that,” he said. “We’re the prospective parents of the wonder generation to come. What we can do, what we can see, will be nothing compared with what they will do and see.”
“Your father’s told you lies. He seduced your mother, just as he did mine. He’s not a good man.”
“No. He’s a great man.”
“You’re wrong. He’s hurt you deeply, taught you all the wrong things to do and believe. You used your gifts to hurt people, Summer.”
“Please. You can’t feel sorry for them. Besides, what I did was for you.”
“Me?”
“To protect you, to keep you close, and to win you to me. It’s right that we have the power to enjoy each other. We deserve whatever we can get. They don’t matter. We matter.”
“I can’t think like that.”
“That’s because you were brought up by them,” he said, nodding at our house. “They’re stuck in the old ways. They’ll die out. You’ll see. We’re the future.”
“Is this what your father has been telling you?”
“I told you. Our father’s a great man with great vision. They’re jealous of him. That’s all. They know he doesn’t need them, and they can’t tolerate it. You belong with him, with me.”
“No. The family is what keeps us strong. I know that now. Your father’s alone, and you’ll be alone.”
“Not if I have you.”
“You won’t,” I said.
His smile changed quickly to a grimace of incredulity. “You can’t really want to stay here, be with them, after all they’ve done to you, Sage.”
“They did what had to be done. I believe in them.”
His incredulity turned to raw anger, his eyes reddening, his lips taut. The bones of his jaw and his cheeks pressed up against his skin. I could feel his rage flowing out of his body, but I held my ground. I locked my eyes on his. I had grown stronger. He couldn’t make me back down, and he knew it.
“We’re going,” he said. “We won’t be back. My father won’t let me return.”
“Then don’t go. Come inside the house with me, and meet those who can help you, change you, make you a part of the family.”
“Part of that family?” He shook his head. “You’re a terrible disappointment, Sage. You’ll make my father see me as a failure. I was supposed to bring you into our family.”
“He’s the failure, and you’ll be one, too. I can see your future. It’s dark and full of unhappiness and pain, but you can change it.”
He shook his head. He looked like he was going to cry now.
“Summer, please, listen to me.”
“No,” he said, stepping back. He looked up at the house. “I’m going. You’ll be sorry. No one will love you like I do.”
“Yes. Someone will,” I said.
“You can’t see your own future.”
“I can see his. He’s out there for me.”
He turned and started back toward the forest. Before entering it, he looked back at me. Then he looked toward my house and started to run deeper into the woods. I watched him disappear in the trees, run into a shadow of himself, as if his body had been vaporized. I took a deep breath and started back to the house, pausing when I looked up and saw them all standing out front, looking my way. That was what had made him run, the sight of them gathered, the power of their combined energy sent in his direction. I walked faster toward them. They waited for me, bu
t no one was smiling.
“Why did you meet him?” my mother asked immediately.
“To see if you were right that he knew who I was. I had to know for certain. I won’t live with doubts. Not anymore,” I said, with a firmness they recognized and appreciated.
“Well? What did you learn?” she asked.
“You were right, but it isn’t all his fault.”
“He is what he is now,” my father said.
“We can’t change that,” Uncle Alexis added. “It’s beyond our powers. Many things are. You’ll learn the limits.”
Yes, yes, I thought with exhaustion. I’ll learn everything. I looked back at the woods. “Where will he go?”
“Where he has already gone . . . into the darkness,” Uncle Alexis said. “It’s where he would have taken you, too.”
“Despite what you’re saying, I want you all to know that I can’t help but feel sorry for him.”
“That’s the goodness in you,” Aunt Suzume said.
“Soon he’ll feel sorry for himself, too,” my mother added. “Come into the house now, Sage. We have things to teach you, things for you to do.”
She held out her hand. I glanced one more time at the forest shadows, then took her hand and started to walk with them.
I suddenly stopped. “Wait,” I said, letting go of her. “I have something else to do first. I’ll be right there.”
They looked at me a moment, and then Uncle Alexis nodded at the door, and they all went inside.
I went to our garage and got a shovel. Then I walked fifty paces toward the north and stopped to dig a hole in the ground. Instinctively, I knew how deep it had to be. When it was deep enough, I reached into the pocket of my jeans and took out Summer’s pendant. I dropped it into the hole and covered it with dirt and small rocks forming the shape of a pentacle.
After I patted it down, I looked out at the lake and the woods. The crow had come back. It was flying its own patterns over the water, feeling free and alive again. When it reached the farthest end of the lake, it looked like a large dot moving through the air. I glanced back at the covered hole.
“He’s gone,” I whispered to the breeze that embraced my words to carry them off. “He’s gone for good.”
Silently, I walked back to the house to join my family and become one of them forever.
Epilogue
I stood off to the side in the girls’ section of the department store and watched her with her two daughters, one fourteen and one ten. There were clear resemblances to me in her, I thought. Our hair was the same color. Our noses and mouths were the same. She was very pretty, and so were her daughters. I was confident that in time, I would look more and more like her, and what in me that resembled my biological father would retreat into some small, dark pocket of my very being, never to resurrect itself.
My adoptive father and Uncle Wade were standing off to the side like two mother hens. They had come with me, expecting that all I would do was look at her and then turn around and go back with them, but I wanted more. I approached her and her daughters. They were sifting through a rack of blouses.
“The fashions change so quickly these days,” I muttered as I sifted through another rack close to the one they were at.
She turned to look at me, and her daughters did the same, but the girls quickly went back to their perusal of the blouses.
She smiled. “Which is what makes it harder for the mothers of girls who are too eager to grow up,” she said.
“That doesn’t change even when they grow up.”
“No, I suppose not. I like what you’re wearing.”
“Thank you. I like what you’re wearing, too.”
“I want to try this on, Mom,” her older daughter said, holding up a mint-green jeweled sweater.
Our mother looked at the price tag. “Just like Tara to pick out the most expensive one on the rack,” she said with a smile.
“Tara? You’re a fan of Gone with the Wind?” I asked, and she laughed.
“I’m surprised you’re aware of that. Most teenagers these days haven’t seen it or read it, but Tara will someday, won’t you, Tara?”
“Just to stop you from nagging me about it,” my half sister said. I smiled at her, and she laughed. She reminded me a lot of myself at her age.
“Go on. Try it on,” our mother told her, and she and her sister headed for the changing room.
“What’s your younger girl’s name? And don’t tell me Scarlett.”
“No. My husband wouldn’t put up with two from the same novel. She’s named after his mother, Grace.”
“Sweet. They’re both very pretty.”
“Thank you.” She looked at me curiously for a moment. “Have we met?”
“No. I’m just visiting an aunt in this town. I live in Massachusetts.”
“Oh. I have a cousin in Boston.”
“I’m in a smaller city, Dorey,” I said.
“What grade are you in?”
“I’m a senior now.”
“How wonderful. These are the best years of your life. Don’t rush them,” she advised.
I shrugged. “We don’t listen. Someone once said that youth was wasted on the young.”
“George Bernard Shaw.”
“Oh, you know.”
“I’m a community college English teacher,” she said. “I don’t volunteer that information,” she told me, leaning toward me to whisper as if we were sharing a state secret. “As soon as people learn that, they watch how they speak. Some don’t speak.”
I laughed. “I know exactly what you mean. I had an English teacher who would pounce on anyone who left out a consonant, like saying ‘mou-in’ instead of ‘mountain.’ ”
“Exactly. Where do you hope to go to college?”
“Probably somewhere in California, like Occidental or UCLA. Maybe Stanford.”
“What do you want to study?”
“Humanity,” I replied, and she laughed. “The arts.”
“Something tells me you’re going to do well. What’s your name?”
“Sage,” I said.
She blinked her eyes. “I almost named my older daughter that. I mean, it came to me, but my husband thought it was a little too different. He was wrong, of course. It’s a beautiful name.”
“Thank you.”
I looked off to the right. My father and Uncle Wade were moving closer. Both looking very concerned.
“Well, I guess I had better go look for my aunt,” I said. “It was very nice meeting you.”
Tara came out of the changing room and stood in front of the mirror.
“Oh, she looks good in that,” I said.
“I know. I’m not ready for what’s coming.”
“Yes, you are,” I said. I knew. I knew she would be a wonderful mother and a wonderful grandmother for both her daughters’ children.
She looked at me strangely. “You sound so confident when you speak about the future, Sage. You have a fortune-teller’s eyes,” she said, and out of some instinct that no woman could subdue no matter what, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek before turning away to go to her children.
For me, it was as if I had traveled through time and for a moment lived and understood the life I would never have.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t even feel sad.
We had touched.
And really, that was what was most important after all.
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