Mira opened one of the cabinet doors, looking for something she could use to hit the window, to try to break it. She picked a can of black beans. She set the can on the hospital tray, lowered it as far as it would go, almost even with her knees, pressed down on the brake to keep it in place. Then she swung her good leg over it, straddled the hospital tray as she would a horse, and released the brake. She pressed her bare feet to the floor to move the table.
The edge of the table bumped up against the wall and Mira maneuvered it until it was parallel and pressed down on the brake again. She reached under the table for the lever and raised it to its full height. Then, moving carefully, she brought her feet up onto the table and slowly raised up into a crouch and finally to her full height, the can of beans gripped in her right hand.
She set the can on the windowsill and rubbed her palms against the cold glass, trying to clear a space so that she could see outside. But the tinting on the window was too dark to make out much of anything except bushes. She picked up the can and drew her arm back and whacked the glass. No cracks, no fissures, not even a hint of weakness. It was like trying to dent steel with a toothpick.
Even so, she whacked it twice more. The can ruptured at the seams and black juice sluiced down the inside of her arm. Disgusted and frustrated, she dropped the oozing can, moved into a crouch again, brought her legs down on either side of the table, lowered it, and released the brake.
Okay, so Wacko apparently had told her the truth about the glass.
And now that she had wasted untold minutes or hours or however long this had taken, she would have to clean up the mess. She scooted back toward the bed, then over to the counter, finding it easier to get around like this than walking. She drew up next to the counter, dropped the can into the trash, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and wiped off the juice.
Now what?
She helped herself to a bottle of water and an apple from the small fridge and sat there, drinking, munching, thinking.
Shatterproof glass, nothing in the basement to use as a weapon, one exit. Maybe she could break through the door somehow. Yeah, right. And what the hell would she use? Another can of beans? She already knew Wacko had locked the door when she’d left; Mira had heard the click of the dead bolt.
Forget the door, forget the windows. Was there another exit here that Wacko didn’t know about? Unlikely. But she had to look.
Mira pressed her bare feet against the floor again. She pushed herself away from the counter, past the bed, toward the computer on the other side of the room and into the alcove. Here she hit the wall switch and a dim overhead light came on. She put on the table’s brake and got off. Washing machine, dryer, hamper. Nothing, nothing. “Shit, suppose there was a fire down here and the main door was blocked? How would anyone get out?”
She planted her palms firmly against the top of the washing machine. A metal washing machine. Give me something.
No, no, this was wrong, she decided. She never got anywhere by demanding. She had to go back to the basics. Inhale right nostril, exhale left nostril, five times on one side, five times on the other, clear the mind, be calm, be calm. She had learned this technique from Nadine when she was five or six, and when all else failed, she returned to it like a homing pigeon. The will controls the mind, Nadine always told her.
The shift in her consciousness was subtle this time, no shocking impressions, no blazing lights, no urgent rush of information. Instead, her body seemed to hum like a tuning fork. Well, it was a start, right? It was more than she’d felt in a long time from just touching an object.
Mira twisted her bare feet against the floor, one way, then the other, three times, six, grounding herself. She visualized a circuit of light around her body, heels to hands to skull, until she was surrounded by the circuit, encased inside of it…
Bright sunlight against water.
Warm boards under my feet.
Thick letter in my hand.
No last name, just a first name and an address on Tybee, a convenience store. Should I read the letter? I want to, I want to know. But that’s somethingAl would do, so I refuse. Ha-ha, Al, too bad, Al, fuck you, Al.
Mira pulled her hands away from the washing machine and felt like cheering. It worked, she could still read objects. But apparently she could only read objects related to the man who owned the house, not to Wacko. Even so, it was costing her. Already, sweat seeped from her pores, the pain in her leg had awakened, her body ached, the rattle in her lungs had grown more pronounced.
Tell me, Nadine’s physician had once asked. How is the physiology of a psychic different from that of other people? Or is there any difference? It was the one question that Wacko apparently hadn’t considered and now Mira was paying for it.
Mira couldn’t speak for other psychics, but she knew that for herself, Nadine, and even Annie, some drugs could complicate a physical ailment, making it worse. Certain types of drugs could send their spirits soaring—and leave their bodies back here on earth to wallow in shit. The three of them were sensitive to certain types of foods and additives, something a doctor would tag as an allergy, but it was about assimilation, not allergy. Bottom line? There were pronounced differences, but it might not be related to anything psychic. It could just be genetic.
Regardless, her thigh was a mess, her lungs—though improved—still sounded as though she should be on a respirator, and she was getting nowhere fast down here in the basement.
Use what you’ve got. Right. Okay. Use it even though what she had was running at about an eighth of its usual power. Mira rubbed her hands against her T-shirt, then rubbed them together hard and quickly, working up a heat. So who was this man? Wacko’s uncle? A cousin? Brother?
Brother.
She brought her hands to the surface of the washing machine again.
Two men, one standing one sitting. They look like Vikings, both handsome and blue-eyed.
She pulled her hands off. She recognized the younger man, she knew that face. But from where? She fought to retrieve the memory, but the only thing she got was a fragment of something weird, of herself with Tom and this man, the younger Viking. Still, she was pretty sure she’d never met this guy.
This sort of thing had happened to her occasionally in the past when she glimpsed the face of someone who hadn’t entered her life yet or, even more rarely, the face of someone she later discovered was dead. Mira brought her hands slowly to the washer.
The older man paces restlessly around the room. “This is wrong “he bursts out. “I’m going in there now to speak to your attorney, to tell him—”
“No.” The younger man shoots to his feet. “You promised, Keith. You gave me your word that you wouldn’t bring her into this.”
“These bastards are building their case to convict you for something you didn’t do, Dean, and they need to know you’ve got an alibi. They need to hear it, from her. What the fuck ‘s wrong with her, anyway?If she loved you, she’d be here.”
“It’s not that simple. “Dean sinks into the chair, brings his fists to his eyes. “She’s underage. A runaway. Her parents would take away the baby and—”
“The baby? What baby?”
“Forget it. At the most, I’ll get three to five years. I’ll do the time. And once I do the time, I’m free to live my own life.”
The older man—Keith--grabs his brother by the shoulders. “What baby? Who is this woman, Dean? Where is she? What the fuck is going on?”
And just that quickly, the vein dried up. Even though she kept her hands to the machine, nothing else came to her. She moved her hands to the top of the dryer, to the cabinet doors, to the plastic hamper. Disappointment, terror, panic: all of it poured through Mira. She rubbed her hands over her face, her eyes, and squeezed back the hot sting of tears that threatened to fall.
She slung her good leg over the table again, pushed herself out of the alcove, paused at the computer. She really didn’t think Wacko would be this careless, but she was out of choices, out of ideas. Her
ability, the one thing she had been able to count on always, now seemed capricious, whimsical, as unpredictable as the weather. She didn’t know why, didn’t give a shit about reasons, didn’t have the energy to puzzle through it.
Mira dismounted from her silly wooden horse. She plugged in the computer, turned it on. While it booted up, she jerked open drawers in the desk, looking for the phone cord. She found it in a bottom drawer, under a supply of paper, still in its wrapper. She tore open the wrapper, connected the cord to the computer, and plugged it into the phone outlet. When her fingers touched the keyboard, it came to her, an entire scene, a mother lode of information....
Keith, pacing. Dean, standing with his back to a wall. And now a third man in a three-piece suit hurries into the room with Allie.
“We need to talk, Dean,”this man says. “Allie tells me you’re married, that there’s a woman who can provide an alibi—”
“I’ve told you everything Jim. Allie’s dreaming.”
Allie looks helplessly at Keith. “He’s married, he told me as much. And you’ve known about it all along and never said a goddamn thing “Hysteria makes her voice crack. She sounds like a shrew.
Keith looks away from her, down at his shoes, and says nothing.
The lawyer paces. “Dean? You want to say anything more?”
“Nope.
Allie’s explosion sweeps through the room like a hurricane. “For Christ’s sake, Jim. Use it anyway. Say it. That way the jury hears it. Dean was with his wife the night of the accident.”
“But I don’t know that, “Jim snaps.
“You’re fired, “Allie shouts, her entire body shaking, her face bright red.
“Go fuck yourself, “Dean hisses, and looks at the lawyer, at Jim. “I’m guilty of what they say I did. It was my car. I was there. I ran. The rest. . . everything the I told you. . . it’s bullshit, Jim. That’s all you have to know. And you’re not fired.”
Allie shouts that he’s lying, that he’s lying to protect this woman, this whore, this...
Gone. Mira brought her hands down hard against the keyboard, begging the keys to give her more, to finish the story, to tell her what she needed to know to escape. But nothing else came to her. She was like some prospector from the Old West who hits a vein of gold, only to find that the vein has gone dry two inches later.
But now the desktop screen was up. Her eyes flicked across the icons. Not a single online service. She brought the cursor to the start button, left-clicked, scanned the column of options that appeared.
Nothing.
Frustrated, Mira pushed away from the computer, got back on her silly wooden horse, and looked around the room for something else she could read. The refrigerator? The cabinet against the far wall? She had touched both, but she’d been looking for information on Allie, not her brother.
She scooted the table across the room, dismounted again, put on the brake. She crouched in front of it and placed her hands on the door....
Hundreds of people file through a room where a small coffin is displayed, the lid open. Men and women weep openly, a woman at the front is overcome with grief and collapses.
The funeral of a child, the brother Ray. No, she didn’t want to experience that. “Take me elsewhere,” Mira said quietly, and brought her hands to the fridge again.
The two brothers, Keith and Dean, sit on a tall diving board that overlooks a massive swimming pool. It’s lit at the bottom and now, in the dark, resembles some pristine pond in paradise.
Keith lights a joint, puffs, passes it to Dean. Sobbing drifts out into the night air from an open upstairs window in the house behind them. Keith shakes his head and blows out smoke. “I realized that we’re a family who lives in total silence.”
“You and I don’t, “Dean says.
“We do, but not as badly as the others.”
“Everyone talked when Ray was here.”
“Not enough. Allie always interfered.”
“I wish she would go away forever, “Dean remarks. “She thinks she’s my mother.”
“She thinks she’s everyone’s mother, even Mom and Dad’s.” Dean opens a cardboard box he has carried up to the diving board with him. “You ready?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
From the box, Dean removes a flower from the funeral, a slightly withered red rose, a key chain with a panda dangling at the end of it, a little house made of Legos, and Big Bird. “You first, Keith.”
Keith picks up the red rose and tosses it out over the pool. “For you, Ray,” he says quietly, and they watch the rose as it tumbles down toward the gleaming blue water.
Dean picks up Big Bird, whom Ray loved so much. He presses it between his hands, then hurls it out over the pool. They finish the joint and are about to toss the last two items when Allie’s shrill voice shatters the quiet.
“Dean, what the hell are you doing at the top of that diving board? Get down from there this instant!”
“Chill out, Al, “Keith calls down. “He’s up here with me.”
“And that’s supposed to reassure me?” she shouts.
“Let’s jump, “Dean says, giggling from the pot.
“Good idea, man.” Then, more loudly: “Hey, Al, we’re coming down.”
Dean stands, strips off his clothes, walks with great assurance to the tip of the diving board, and executes a perfect swan dive. Allie is shouting, Dean is laughing, and Keith strips down to his shorts, scoops up the remaining items from the wooden box. He runs to the end of the diving board, leaps, and pulls his legs up against his body so the splash will be huge. When he surfaces, Allie is standing by the side of the pool, her perfect clothes drenched, her face ravaged with rage.
Dean is doubled over with laughter at the shallow end. Allie marches toward Dean, grabs him by the arm, and slaps him so hard across the face that the noise seems to sting the air. Keith literally sees red. He scrambles out of the pool, runs toward the hitch, grabs her arm, and spins her around so fast she doesn’t even know what has happened.
“Don’t you ever touch him again, “Keith hisses, and then he does something he has always ached to do. He swings and knocks her flat.
Mira kept her hands there a moment longer, but this vein had run dry as well.
But seeing Keith knock his sister to the ground had done something for Mira that nothing else had. She suddenly knew that her only way out of here was to catch Wacko by surprise.
Chapter 16
The Lakeview Nursing Home sprawled across five acres of prime Savannah real estate and was painted a soft, inviting yellow. In the spring and summer, Allie thought, that color blended in with the blooming wetlands, the vast savannas.
But it was winter now and the wetlands and the savannas looked dead, the lake was frozen. In the winter, nothing looked like it should, which was probably why the curtains on the picture windows were closed and why the blinds in every room she passed were lowered. In this wing the patients lived in a perpetual winter, a nowhere land stripped clean of memory, their pasts as dead to them as the land outside.
Allie moved quickly through the hallway and the day room of wing A, carrying her father’s food tray. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, but he hadn’t eaten anything today, the nurse had told her, except for a can of Ensure. So she had gone into the resident kitchen and prepared him a meal herself, using what was available. Now she would feed him. Now she would change his diapers. Now she would do for him what he had done for her when she was an infant, a toddler, the first kid in the Curry household.
Once upon a time there had been four kids in the Curry family. Once upon a time there were six Currys, one too many, so then there were five. Now there were only three: one who was permanently out to lunch, another who still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, and herself, the only functional human being of the lot. And I’ve got a shitload on my plate.
In the day room, a woman whom everyone called “Jane Russell” rushed over to Allie, her black high heels tapping ou
t a code against the tile floors. She was dressed in a designer wool suit and a knee-length leather jacket that probably had cost seven or eight hundred bucks. Flung around her neck was a beautiful wool scarf. Leather gloves covered her hands. The strap of an expensive leather purse hung from her shoulder.
Tagging along behind her was Jane Russell’s entourage, several ladies in various stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s who lived in the same wing. One of them, Lillian, had wild white hair and wore a bathrobe and Bugs Bunny slippers. The other was put together all wrong, left brow higher than the right, that glazed, distracted look in her eyes so common among Alzheimer’s patients, her flab rolling out from under her halter top and shorts. She looked as if she’d crawled out of a bad novel.
“Honey, so good to see you, “Jane Russell gushed, flicking her beautifully cut hair off the collar of her leather coat. “How’ve you been?”
“Just great, Jane,” Allie replied. “How’re things here?”
“So glad you asked.” She was always scrupulously polite. She leaned forward, her tone of voice conspiratorial, hushed. “Where can we get a cab around here? We’re due in the city for a play. No one gives me the right answer.”
Lillian, the woman with the Bugs Bunny slippers, broke into hysterical laughter. “Yeah, right. My son took my money, too.”
Jane rolled her soft brown eyes. “They overdosed her on the meds,” she confided.
“You and your friends will freeze to death outside,” Allie said. “It’s cold out there.”
“Oh, we’ll do just fine. All we need is a cab, honey.”
“The cab’s waiting out front. I saw it on my way in.” A light winked on in Jane Russell’s eyes. “Your father has been asking for Allie and Dean all day. I know you’re
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