But of course she couldn’t hear me. No one was going to hear me for a long time.
CHAPTER
•
TWENTY-EIGHT
HELGARDH
The Land of the Dead. I’d called it right. This was my home now.
I had no phone, no iPod, no TV, no stereo, no laptop. There was a radio in my room, but Dad was writing a book, so I was only allowed to play it at a sound level so low that I practically needed a stethoscope to hear it.
He was there in Mim’s house in New Town with me 24/7, writing about medieval troubadours and giving me the fish eye whenever I came downstairs.
Mim had offered to get me a job in one of the Wonderland stores, but I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, and my father wasn’t about to let me get one. I asked him if I could apply at the Starbucks down the street, but he’d only snorted and turned away, as if I’d suggested working as a pole dancer. Then he’d gathered up an armful of the most boring books he could find (which is saying a lot, since basically all of Dad’s books are dull enough to put bacteria to sleep) and thrust them at me.
“Read these and we’ll talk,” he said.
I looked at the titles: Josephine de Beauharnais at Malmaison. Bauhaus: Revolution in Design. A Sailor’s Book of Knots.
“What’ll we talk about?” I asked. “Knot tying?”
“I daresay it will be a better use of your time than the activities to which you’ve evidently become accustomed,” he answered blandly. “Though probably not as entertaining.”
Silent and seething, I went back up to my room.
He was never going to give me a break. He was even talking about taking me out of Ainsworth School. It was only Mim’s intervention (and genuine alarm about having me live with them full time in New York) that had kept him from making the arrangements then and there.
The worst thing was that I wasn’t even sure that I’d done anything wrong, not really. I couldn’t believe that loving Peter was a bad thing. Even if I was forbidden to see him or talk to him, I dreamed about Peter.
Nearly every night I had the same dream—the one that I first had at Imbolc: Peter sitting in a chair with his shirt off, his back covered with cuts and welts, pleading with someone to stop torturing him. I knew that a psychologist would have said that I was talking myself into a state where I would believe I needed to be with Peter, when really I just wanted to see him again.
And maybe that was true. Miss P had said that it’s hard to tell the difference between what we perceive and what we want to perceive, and there was no use denying that I wanted to be with Peter again. All I’d learned from the whole episode was that I loved the touch of Peter’s mouth on me.
To pass the time I practiced my skills. Pushing—telekinesis, or teleporting, as the practitioners in Whitfield called it—was fun, and the better at it I got, the more fun it turned out to be. Not only could I move items, I could send them sailing around the room, dancing around each other, going wherever I wanted them to.
The psychometry was trickier. First of all, I didn’t know where it came from. I could always push; I hadn’t even thought of it as much of a gift. But I’d never read anyone’s thoughts before I held my mother’s wall hanging. And before coming to Whitfield, I certainly hadn’t been able to feel anyone’s emotions just by physically touching them.
Well, maybe I had. One of the reasons I’d never liked parties was because I’d often felt overwhelmed in the midst of a lot of people. And I’d never been much of a toucher. My father wasn’t a touchy-feely type, either, so I didn’t think anything was strange about that, but now that I think about it, I just didn’t like the baggage that touching people brought. I guess I’d always had certain gifts. It’s just that I’d never used them.
Until Peter. For the first time I wanted to touch someone. I wanted to be close to him, to know him. I wanted to feel what he was feeling, think what he was thinking, to touch his skin and his hair and his mouth, and to have him touch me. But even with him the transmission of feeling was too much for me, too overpowering. I had to learn to control the gift so that I only picked up messages from people and objects when I wanted to. So I practiced.
There was a little telephone table in the hallway outside my bedroom with very neutral vibes. It must have come with the house—Mim had put most of the furniture in storage and replaced it, but not all. When I put my hands on the table, I could feel its history: A few screaming fights, a lot of loud kids, an old man who spent months walking back and forth in the hall. The table gave off a fuzzy, sleepy emanation, very low-key, more like a buzz than a sensation. I actually had to strain to feel it, so this was a good piece to practice on.
Over the following days and weeks, I tried it with almost everything in my room. Tapping in, then shutting off the feelings. Most of the stuff was new, so it didn’t have any human vibes on it except for those of the decorator who’d placed them there, and those were faint and indifferent. It was vastly different from the Ainsworth house, where every object was so steeped in the emotional past that the place practically glowed with personality.
I knew I’d succeeded when I touched one of my father’s books and felt nothing. I’d been avoiding that because I really didn’t want to look deeply into Dad’s soul. It would have been like him seeing me with Peter on the beach—embarrassing to the point of death, and vaguely horrible in all sorts of ways that I didn’t even want to think about. So when I put my hands on Urban Governance in 12th Century England and felt nothing, I disengaged with a sense of accomplishment and relief.
I knew I was making progress, and that mastering my skills would keep me sane; letting me feel when I wanted to feel and protecting me when I didn’t. But that didn’t mean I was happy with my life. That is, if I’d had a life. Which I didn’t. Trying not to feel was my principal occupation. Not exactly the thrilling summer I was hoping for.
To make things worse, I was also starving. Mim had decided to go macrobiotic, which meant that all our meals consisted of weird grains like quinoa and millet flavored by seaweed and fermented plums.
“I’ve lost four pounds,” Mim announced proudly. I’d personally lost fifteen, and was beginning to look anorexic. Dad was looking pretty raggedy too. He normally didn’t care much about food one way or the other, but I could tell he was getting to the end of his rope.
One evening, while Mim was rhapsodizing about how clear her skin had gotten since implementing her policy of eating nothing that hadn’t been prepackaged into cardboard containers at the health food store, Dad was picking desultorily at his seitan and wakame salad.
“What’s wrong, Harrison?” Mim asked brightly. She always got perky after her first glass of wine. Apparently, abstinence from alcohol wasn’t part of her new healthy lifestyle program. “The seitan’s supposed to taste just like turkey.”
“I want a steak,” Dad demanded truculently.
“Drink your juice, darling. The juicer cost eight hundred dollars.”
“The price of the juicer, unfortunately, does not affect the flavor of toadstools,” he said quietly, holding up a glass filled with taupe-colored liquid.
“It’s reishi mushroom, not toadstool.”
“It’s shit,” he said, balling up his napkin and throwing it on the table. He pushed his chair back with a lot of noise and went upstairs to his office.
Mim waited for him to leave, then opened a drawer in the hutch and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Men don’t understand the importance of weight loss,” she said, blowing out a plume of smoke.
“Er . . . right,” I agreed. It was getting to be time for me to finish up my delicious repast and retire to my room before Mim degenerated into drunkenness.
“Well, anyway, I’m kind of glad that you and I can spend some time together without your dad. I’m so busy, I don’t usually have much time.” She gave a little shrug. “For you, I mean.”
“Yes, I got that.”
The crazy thing was I could tell she was trying. After that horrible
groundbreaking, she was actually making an effort to be friends with me.
“So.” She burned half an inch or so with a huge drag on her cigarette, then looked for a place to dump the ash. Since Mim didn’t admit to smoking (“just one, once in a while, for my nerves”), there were no ashtrays in the house. By the end of the evening her dinner plate was filled with butts swimming in the remains of her meal. “What’s shakin’, bacon?” she asked, flicking the ash onto the plate without looking at it, so that it would appear to have fallen there accidentally.
“Huh?” I had been too engrossed in the drama of Mim’s addictions to pay attention to what she was saying.
“What’s going on in your life?” She leaned forward to rest her chin on her hands, half closing her eyes against the smoke.
“Er . . .” I felt my hair standing on end at the prospect of spending girltime with Madame Mim.
“Stop saying ‘er’.”
“Okay.” My gaze wandered toward the stairway and my room, where I had just finished reading Josephine de Beauharnais at Malmaison. Nothing awaited me there now except for Bauhaus: Revolution in Design. Suddenly, the thought of reading about German furniture in the 1920s seemed irresistible. “I’m reading. A lot. Actually, I’m very busy . . . reading . . .” I trailed off. “All right. I’m not doing very much, Madison,” I admitted. “Since I’m not allowed out of the house. Or my room, really.” She smiled and nodded at everything I said, as if I were regaling her with tales of my fascinating and totally interesting social life. “Not a lot going on.”
She shrugged. “That’s what you get for getting caught,” she said. “Next time you’ll be more careful.”
I didn’t know if she was serious or not.
“Won’t you?”
I swallowed, then nodded slowly.
A slow smile spread across her face. “So who’s the guy?”
“Excuse me?”
“Peter,” she said with a wicked smile.
I bristled. I wasn’t about to talk about the love of my life with my father’s tacky mistress. “He’s a friend from school,” I said.
“Friend, right. Listen, girlie, I know you were having a good time on the beach, but you’ve got to learn when and where to give it up. I mean sand really scrapes, you know what I mean?” She poured herself another glass of wine. “Want some?” She raised the bottle along with her eyebrows.
“No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” She put down the bottle with a thud and then drained her glass in one gulp. “They all want the same thing,” she said, gesturing broadly with her cigarette. “Not that it’s a bad thing.” She winked at me.
Winked. There was just no limit to her grossness.
“The trick is to know how much to give them, and what you’re going to get in return.”
I blinked. “Like . . . money?” I asked, bewildered.
“No, not money. Duh.” She poured herself another glass, which emptied the bottle, then yanked the second bottle out of the ice bucket. “Unless it’s a whole lot of money,” she added, reconsidering. “No, not even then,” she decided. “Marrying money is more trouble than it’s worth, in my opinion. There’s always a family raising a lot of legal issues.” She leaned forward on her elbows. “What you want to look for are intangibles. Advancement. Prestige. Introductions to the right people. You don’t want your social life to be a waste of your time.”
This was bringing up something I’d been wondering about ever since Dad first brought Mim home. “Er . . .” I began.
“Ah-ah-ah.” She held up a finger.
“Sorry. I was just wondering . . .”
“Yes?” She popped the cork on the second bottle with practiced ease and poured out a big glassful.
“Well, if what you say is true, then . . . why are you interested in my father?”
She laughed so hard that she coughed up wine into her napkin. “Jeez, have you seen the size . . . oh.” She cleared her throat. “I guess he’s just so darn cute,” she said.
I nodded. He was that, all right. Cute as a button, and a moron about women.
“And he’s terribly intelligent, you know.” She lit another cigarette, even though the first one was still burning on the edge of her plate. “None of my friends even know what he’s talking about.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
“There you go.” She finished her drink. “You know, you’re a pretty girl, Kathy . . .”
“Katy.”
“See? That’s what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying?”
“You’re a pretty girl, but sometimes you get this attitude. I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to prep school that does it.”
I almost laughed out loud at that. Not only was Ainsworth the least preppy school imaginable, but I didn’t even fit in with the uncool kids there, let alone the preppy ones. For most of the past year, my idea of a rocking weekend had been hanging out with my great-grandmother.
“I think I’ll clean up the dishes,” I said.
“I just wanted you to know the truth.”
Oh, yes. Mim the Truth Fairy. “Thanks for enlightening me,” I said.
“See? See what I mean? The snottiness.”
I took a deep breath. It was time to leave, any way I could. “I’m sorry, Mim. I wasn’t trying—”
“What did you call me?”
Gaah. “I don’t remember.”
“Mim. You said, ‘Mim’.” She poured herself another glass. “As in Mimson. That’s cute.” She smiled fuzzily. “I like it.”
I said nothing. There was no point in telling her that I’d named her after a cartoon witch. Especially since I’d grown to like witches.
She stared, grinning beatifically at her reflection in her wine glass for some time. “I never had a nickname,” she mused.
I’ll bet you had plenty, I thought. Just none that anyone used in front of you. “Can I take your plate?” There had to be something in the kitchen that could substitute for an ashtray.
“Don’t go,” she said, so quietly that at first I thought I’d misunderstood her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I beg your pardon?” she repeated, mocking me.
I started toward the kitchen, but she grabbed my arm. There was a brief explosion of emotion and a swirl of images—an alcoholic father, an abusive mother, three brothers, and she was never going to wash another dish in her life. Secondhand shoes that squeaked. Having nothing for the collection plate in church. Casting off her family like a pile of dirty clothes, hoping they’d never find her, wanting, wanting . . .
I subdued the messages until they were blank. Her hand on my arm, white and manicured and conveying . . . nothing.
“Your father is a wonderful man,” she said woozily.
“Uh,” I grunted. It was as noncommittal a response as I could muster.
“He’s smart and gentle and sweet.”
“Okay.” I just wanted to get away.
She yanked at my arm. “No, you don’t get it, Kath—Katy. He tries to stay out of your way because he thinks you don’t want him in your life.”
She had it backward. It was Dad who didn’t want me in his life.
“He never got to go to private school. He was the first person in his family to go to college, and he had to fight for that. His people wanted him to drop out of high school and go to work to bring in money. They don’t talk to him anymore, did you know that?”
I didn’t. Dad had never mentioned his upbringing to me. He never mentioned much of anything about his past. But I was beginning to see that he and Mim had more in common than I’d thought.
“And then he married your mother and had to change his name because of some weird family tradition, and from everything he tells me, the Ainsworths were a bunch of wackos, anyway—”
“They are not!”
“Okay, that was harsh. But you know about your mother, don’t you?”
“He can’t blame my relatives for what she did.”
“It hurt my aunt and great-grandmother, too,” I said. “Hardly anyone will talk to them anymore.”
“Yeah, it isn’t fair.” She lit another cigarette. “I’m not saying it is. I’m only telling you why he acts the way he does.”
“Like not giving a crap about me until I do something wrong, and then acting like I’m a criminal?” I was already sorry I’d said so much. I didn’t want to have a conversation with her.
“I think there may be something else. The boy, maybe. I don’t know. He won’t talk about it with me.”
I picked up the dishes that I’d put back on the table. “I need to get back to my room,” I said.
“Please, Katy.” She didn’t seem drunk now, or at least not insensate. “There has to be some kind of communication between you two.”
“Why? We get along fine the way things are.”
“Because he loves you. More than anything in his life. And he thinks he’s losing you.”
“He has you,” I muttered.
“That’s not the same. A lover is a measure of what you want to be. But your child lets you know what you are. Everything about Harrison Jessevar is wrapped up in you, Katy. And when he sees you withdrawing, pulling away, trying to find comfort in sex, not fitting in anywhere, never revealing anything about who you really are . . . well, he sees himself, and it hurts him even more than it did the first time around.”
For a long moment I just stared at her, the dishes balanced in my left hand, as if she’d been speaking a foreign language. How could this . . . this psychobitch barracuda presume to know anything about me? Or my father, for that matter.
“Have another drink,” I said, and walked away.
With a little mirthless laugh, she poured the rest of the wine bottle into her glass and sat nursing it, her elbows on the table as if she were at a bar. Within a few minutes, I knew, she’d be in a mean stupor. Fifteen minutes after that, she’d be asleep, if everyone managed to stay out of her way that long.
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