Cornerstone 02 - Keystone

by Misty Provencher

  “Oh, um…all the storage sheds? There’s two, side by side, at the U-Store on May and Ferguson and there’s one at the Stop and Lock on Morgan and Burnett. There’s one way out in Clare, on Ellison Street…”

  “How about one at a time?” Shred says, throwing it into drive.

  “How many does she have?” Mrs. Reese asks as we pull out from the hotel. She’s scanning the street and her tone is distant and distracted.

  “Seventeen,” I say.

  “You know where they’re all at?”

  “Yeah. We went around every other weekend to pay on them.”

  I had always dreaded the weekend trips. My mom tried to make it fun at first, taking me to McDonald’s when we were through, but that wore off quick. After a while, I would sit in the car, glaring at her over the dashboard, as I watched her go in and pay at each office and then drive around back to check on her sheds. I was furious every time she insisted I go with her, telling her how crazy it was to think that anyone would want to steal her boxes of curling, yellowing paper with what I thought were unfinished lines of stories written on every sheet. I never realized that they were the Memories of the dead. I didn’t know she was waiting, hoping that if an Ianua sign turned up that I’d choose to be one of the Simple—before she would chance any involvement in the community to have the Memories blessed. I didn’t know how much she worried that Roger was watching, and that any connection with the community would bring him back. I didn’t know he’d killed my grandfather. I didn’t know he might try to kill my mother or me. I didn’t know anything back then and that’s why my mom panicked when I was gone too long and made me go most places with her, including the storage sheds.

  When we pull up to the U-Store, I wipe the corners of my eyes, as if they ache instead of sting. I give Shred the first of seventeen gate codes that I know by heart.

  Shred drives us down the aisles, taking turns as I tell him. Every storage-shed door is white. Every aisle looks the same. But I know my way.

  We stop in front of F8 after Garrett and his mom go through a whole ceremony of scouring the area before they let Sean and the Addo and I out of the van. Once out, I punch in the code that unlocks the shed door. Garrett slides the door up on its track and the exposed papers inside flutter like a roost of nervous pigeons.

  The Addo stands on the threshold instead of going in. I watch his gaze roll slowly over the hills of boxes and loose piles. He follows a stack of plastic totes to the shed rafters and then back down again to the floor. I’d swear he’s taking measurements. Sean watches the Addo. Mrs. Reese keeps watch down one end of the aisle, while Garrett watches in the opposite direction. I feel pretty useless, so I look back at the Addo.

  He closes his eyes beside me and whispers, “I see you.”

  I lean over and mumble to him, “Me?”

  Addo’s eyes pop open, confused. I stare back at him, mirroring his expression. When he doesn’t repeat himself, I say, “Were you talking to me?”

  “Of course not,” he chuckles. “I see you all the time. I was talking to them.”

  He motions to the paper piled inside the shed.

  “Them who?” I ask. He just smiles. “Don’t you have to open the boxes or something?”

  “Nopity nope nope. Blessings are simple things. I know they’re here. And now they know I’m here. So we’re all set.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you do?”

  Addo chuckles. I must look blank because he adds, “I suppose it would be more of a hoot if I had a wand, but, this is the nature of it. No one ever believes me when I tell them that I bless the dead the same way the living crave to be blessed, but it’s true. A blessing consists simply of acknowledging an existence in my world, with gratitude.”

  “So can anybody do this?”

  “Sure,” Addo chuckles. “You want to give it a whirl? Do the neighboring garage?”

  Sean starts coughing behind me, an insistent, barking cough that barely disguises his words: don’t. do. it. I ignore him.

  “Okay,” I tell Addo. And, just to be sure I didn’t miss anything, I say, “I just have to tell them I see them, right? That’s it?”

  Sean’s coughing no, stop behind me, but I follow Addo to the shed next door. Garrett looks from Sean to me.

  “I don’t know about this, Nalena,” Garrett says. The worry in his voice nudges me back to my senses, but Addo already has the shed door open.

  Then Mrs. Reese adds, “Is this such a good idea, Addo?” The worry is in her voice too and it dissolves any interest I had in trying to do a blessing. But Addo takes my hand.

  “I’m not trying to teach a lesson here,” He says loud enough for all of us to hear. He lets go and spins on the toe of his sandal. “But I am trying to test an ability, if you don’t mind.”

  Sean’s not coughing anymore and everyone else is silent. Addo gives me a funny little grin and scoots out of the way.

  “Floor’s all yours, grasshopper,” he says. My legs are numb, but I move forward and stand in the wide opening of the garage. It looks the same as the last, fluttering with papers and stacked with boxes.

  I do what Addo did. I scan from the left edge of the shed, trying to see everything. But as my eyes move over it and I concentrate on seeing, something weird happens. It’s like I’m suddenly underwater in a deep pool of clear pudding. Everything slows down and things drift up, not fog and not tattered ghosts, but ideas that I know have passed. The thoughts are so individual I can almost see the faces that surrounded them once. There are so many.

  Every box and stack my eyes pass over, the thoughts accumulate, bumping into each other, louder and louder in my head. I’m only a quarter through the room and the thoughts rise up and begin shouting in my head, competing to be heard. Every voice pushes against my skull like the world’s worst headache. My brain is swelling to let them out. In a panic, my gaze skips to the middle of the garage and the crowd of thoughts becomes a needy mob that jump up so quickly, I stumble backward. I throw my hands over my ears, but it doesn’t stop the thoughts because they’re in my head, all of them, scrambling over one another to be heard.

  “Stop!” I shriek and my eyes dart following a stack of Rubbermaid’s up to the ceiling. The voices triple, as if shuffled from the stack of boxes. I scream again, and stumble backward into Garrett. Even with my head so full of voices, I still feel the vibration of Garrett’s voice through my back, the same way I used to hear my mom’s voice when I was little, my ear pressed to her chest. Once I touch Garrett, the thoughts seem to mute a little, but not enough. I still can’t hear what he’s telling me. I grasp my head harder and my eyelids pull downward against my will.

  They pull. As if someone’s got a fishing hook attached to them and is pulling them toward my feet. I’m frightened to close my eyes and have to focus on all the voices. With my eyes open, my senses are evened out, but with my eyes closed, I’m afraid the voices will overwhelm me and my head will explode.

  My eyelids drag again and I can’t take it anymore. Then, I hear him.

  “Let me help,” Garrett’s voice is gentle, warm through my back. I let my eyes close and his hands rest on my temples.

  The voices vanish.

  Poof. Gone.

  I keep my eyes shut and let the peaceful feeling of being inside my head all alone, drift back. I swallow and can’t believe how good it feels.

  “You alright?” Garrett asks. I just hum back, mmm hmm, as I open my eyes.

  “Well, that shoots that,” Addo says, dusting his hands together. In my head he adds, Your Vision might be jamming up your ability to offer blessings. Sorry, kiddo.

  I send the thought back, Would’ve been nice to know ahead of time.

  The Addo gives an amused harrumph and turns to Sean. “You’re up, batter.”

  “Okay,” Sean says. Mrs. Reese steps between her son and the Addo, looking Sean square in the eyes.

  “If you’re not sure, then you shouldn’t do it,” she says.

  “Oh, let him try, Miranda,
” Addo tells her. “There’s no other way of knowing if he’s ready to progress in the Addoship.”

  That’s all it takes for Sean to step up in front of the storage shed. His head swivels to the left side of the shed, just like I did, as if ‘Seeing’ is just like reading from a sheet of paper.

  I wince, waiting for Sean to start screaming, to grip his head, to fall over, but he doesn’t. He stands a few feet away, his eyes moving slowly and his head shifting as his gaze sweeps up and down and sideways, across the garage. He pauses once and I see the muscles in his jaw jump, but then he continues. His eyes move methodically and when he’s finished, he says, “I see you.”

  Addo steps up and claps him on the back. “That calls for cookies! Good job!”

  Sean sways on his feet, but he lets out a little whoop.

  “I did it!” he says. “I actually did it!”

  Garrett tags his brother on the back and Mrs. Reese puts her arm around Sean’s shoulder as they walk back to the van together. I’m happy for Sean and kind of embarrassed for myself that I even thought to try. Addo waddles along beside me toward the van.

  “The first time is not always charming,” he says.

  “I don’t want a second chance at it,” I tell him. “It was kind of stupid for me to even try it anyway. I’m not an Addo. I’m Contego.”

  “Oh yes,” Addo says as he scrambles into the van. “That’s what I said too.”

  “You were Contego?” I ask Addo, once the van door is closed and we’re on our way to the next storage shed. But Addo just grins at me and says,

  “Where do you think the Addo come from? Pulled out of the ground like potatoes? We’re all Alo or Contego, but with an extra kick. The world is a flexible place, Nalena.”

  I take my seat in the van. I thought Addos were a whole separate bloodline and that you either were or weren’t. But then, I’m a Contego, born from an Alo family, and Sean is Simple and technically an outsider, but he’s being tutored to become an Addo. Things like Sean and I aren’t supposed to happen, so I figure Addo having been one of the Contego isn’t too crazy either. Except that when I glance over at Addo, with his mushroom cap hairdo and his gray sweats bunched around his chunky middle, it’s hard to see the Contego in him.

  Shred takes us to each of the storage garages, and for all seventeen of them, it would be quiet in the van if Sean wasn’t with us.

  He asks Addo a billion questions about every aspect of the Blessing and why it works and how often do the Alo let the Addo know that they need them done and how those are done and why they work the way they do and on and on and on. He asks about what happens to the sheds full of paper and I half-listen. As obvious as Sean’s excitement is, it’s even more obvious that he’s going to be an awesome Addo and he’s going to know every aspect of the Addoship that he can squeeze out of our Addo now. It makes me proud somehow, as if Sean’s enthusiasm belongs to me too.

  When we finish the seventeenth shed, it’s getting dark. Garrett speaks up the minute Sean takes a breath.

  “Are we heading back to the hotel?” he asks, leaning between the Addo’s seats and mine.

  “We have just one more,” Mrs. Reese says. “We need to visit the shed that has all the belongings from your old apartment, Nalena. So you can get anything you need.”

  Shred pulls up in front of B8, at a storage facility my mom never used. The doors are all plain silver, but the floodlights overhead cast a funny tint on everything. When I hesitate to slide open the van door, Mrs. Reese reaches back and puts her hand on my knee.

  “We can get what you tell us and you can stay in the van if that’s easier, Nalena,” she says. I thought all the sadness was gone, but knowing that all the remnants of my old life are stacked up behind this shed door, brings up a whole different kind of grief. But when I open the van door and have to step out so everyone else can get out, I can’t make myself get back in. I drift over to the aluminum door behind Garrett.

  “Do you want me to do the Memories in this one too?” Sean asks the Addo. But then Sean glances over at me and I can tell he’s embarrassed and trying to put a lid on the excitement. I reach out and take his hand and Sean squeezes my fingers in his palm, like an apology.

  “It’s all yours,” Addo says.

  “We’ll do it together, okay?” Sean keeps hold of my hand as Addo recites the code for this unit himself, one number at a time and Sean punches it into the keypad with his free hand. Sean pulls up the door, looking over one shoulder at the Addo, a question forming on his lips, but it’s all blocked out as letters jump up and burst in my face. D-pop-A-pop-N-pop-G-pop…the stream of letters is blown aside by the gangly man who lunges through them, sinking his teeth into Sean’s shoulder.

  Sean shrieks.

  My field deploys so fast, I’m hurled out of my body like I’ve got rockets attached to my ankles. I throw myself on top of the man who’s clamped his teeth onto Sean shoulder, and we all go down in a pig pile of arms and legs. My fingers are around the guy’s forehead. I pull back as hard as I can while Sean squeals, “Get him off! Get him off! Get him off!”

  Mrs. Reese shoves the Addo back into the van as Garrett materializes beside me. With two fingers, he jabs the air beside the man’s temple. As if he unplugged a machine, the guy drops against Sean, unconscious. I peer up at Garrett.

  “How did you do that? You didn’t even touch him!”

  At the bottom of our pile, Sean howls, “Just…get him…off!”

  From behind us, Mrs. Reese yells from the van door, “Get him in the van, Garrett!”

  “You gotta get outta here, brother,” Garrett says, hauling Sean to his feet. He hustles his brother to the van and pushes Sean in beside the Addo. The door hardly slams shut before Shred guns it out of the storage lot, leaving Garrett and I behind.

  I’m frozen, about four feet away from the collapsed man. It all happened as if I was caught in a tornado—the guy jumping out and Sean screaming and everyone taking off in the van, besides us.

  Garrett and I stand in the middle of the empty storage lot aisle, the paper inside the opened garage flapping. The tiny breeze even stirs a few oily hairs on the Fury Man’s head, as he remains flattened out on the black top. I keep circling him, waiting for the man to hop up and attack again. But he doesn’t. It’s deadly quiet.

  Garrett walks over and flops the guy onto his back. I look into the Fury Man’s face from over Garrett’s shoulder and I get this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to look away if I wanted to. But all I want to do is see what we’re up against.

  The man doesn’t look that old, even with his sunken cheeks, full of acne scars. He’s got a black goatee, that doesn’t match the color of his hair or his blond eyebrows, and a white line of a moustache that floats thinly over his thick upper lip.

  “I wonder how long he’s been waiting for us,” Garrett says.

  “Then the Fury knows we’re here?” I glance down the storage lot aisle, expecting the Fury to come charging at us from one end or the other, but my eyes are drawn back to the man, out cold, on the cement.

  “Not if this is the only guy that was going to let them know.” Garrett laughs, but it sounds almost too easy. “Finding one of the Fury usually isn’t any big deal, Nali, but we aren’t taking any chances with attacks on the Addo. It’s pretty normal to have one of them show up like this. The Fury always sends out scouts to try and keep tabs on where we’re at and what we’re doing. Sometimes they get lucky and actually find us, like this one. But more often, Fury scouts have a really consistent habit of wandering off to the bars or getting sidetracked by the opposite sex or just running off to do something that is more interesting to them. Unless there is something directly in it for a scout, 99% of the time, they don’t see any point in finishing the job.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The Fury aren’t the only ones that keep tabs.”

  “Then why didn’t this one wander off?”

  “Don’t know.” Garrett shrugs. “Sometimes it’s all
about bragging rights. Someone bets someone else that they can’t find a Contego and take one down on their own. This one could’ve stuck around if he was homeless or if there was something in it for him.”

  Garrett’s voice drifts away.

  “Something, like the Key?” I say. A cold flame flickers through my veins. “Would the Fury think it was here?”

  “It’s a shot in the dark theory,” Garrett says. “We won’t know unless he comes to.”

  I can’t stop looking at the Fury Man. His mouth is still hanging open.

  “Are they coming back for us?”

  “They will, once the Addo is safe.”

  I nod, kind of shocked that I didn’t get shoved in the van too. That Mrs. Reese would consider me part of the line of defense even though I haven’t been trained yet, says something. It says I really, really am Contego. I’m not The Waste anymore. It’s a big thing to go from being a no one to being someone who can look after everyone else. I’m not sure how many times I’ll have to remind myself of what I am before it sticks.

  “Is he breathing?” I ask. I’ve been staring so hard at the man that I can’t make out the rise and fall of his chest anymore.

  “He’s alive,” Garrett grins. “Just checked out for a while.”

  Garrett leans down and grabs the Fury Man’s arms. My nerves shoot up, as if the guy’s going to jump up and take a bite out of Garrett like he did Sean.

  “Let’s move him inside, so we’re not out in the open,” Garrett says.

  “What if he wakes up?”

  “Oh, he’s not waking up,” Garrett says. “Guaranteed.”

  As much as it makes my skin crawl, I lean down and grab the guy’s ankles. He’s wearing shiny, leather boots that are slippery in my hands. The Fury Man’s head flops around as we drag him back into the storage shed. We dump him down inside and Garrett pulls down the shed door. It is as still and dark as a tomb until Garrett pulls his phone from his pocket, flips it open and texts something.

  “I’m letting Mrs. Neho know where we’re at,” he says. I watch the corner of his mouth lift in amusement as his face is lit by the phone screen’s glow. “Guess it’s going to be a busy night for her. She’s the only one available to do the rings.”