by Gina Linko
“Tell me.”
He waved the moment away, laughed nervously. “I watched you, in school. Around.”
“Around?” I said. “So tell me. How do you explain our supersenses?”
“The pineal gland,” he said.
“What’s that?” I hadn’t been expecting a real answer.
“A tiny section of our brains, shaped like a pinecone, deep in the brain stem. Controls all kinds of stuff, but there’s evidence cited in a few scientific journals the past few years that a large percentage of people experiencing extrasensory phenomena have a more advanced, larger pineal gland.”
“Really?” I said. I didn’t know how this made me feel. To think it was magic was one thing. To hear a scientific explanation of sorts hit me another way. Scarier? Was it really part of me?
“The pineal gland kind of links the right and left sides of the brain more than in normal brains, gives us more cohesion between the hemispheres.”
“I’m both-handed,” I said, kind of shocked, thinking of when I broke my wrist in third grade and could write with my left hand nearly as easily. Until then I hadn’t realized it was something most people couldn’t do.
“Some scientists call the pineal gland the third eye because it gives us another sense,” Rennick said. “I like to think of it as us being Leyden jars. The pineal gland makes us more in tune, helps us hold on to the energy around us. But why specifically in New Orleans, I don’t know.”
Leyden jar? Where had I heard that before? “So there are more of us here? Different senses.”
Rennick nodded. “Yeah, a few. Seers. Psychics. All over it’s happening, but there are clusters in a few places. Here is the biggest, I think.”
“Clusters,” I said, trying to fit together a few puzzle pieces. “Like cancer clusters?”
His eyebrows shot up. “Maybe. Something in the environment like that. Or maybe we’re all just evolving.” He got self-conscious then. “I don’t know. I just have theories. I don’t mean to sound nuts. Or like a know-it-all.”
“But why New Orleans specifically?” This part bothered me.
The waiter reappeared, placed our dishes in front of us. The scallops were humongous and looked delicious, but Rennick’s crab legs looked even better. He caught me looking at them. “Let’s halve it,” he said, picking up four or five of his crab legs to put on my plate.
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Thank you, though. Let’s back up. Keep going with what you were saying before. After you stalked me at school. Around.” I could tell I was embarrassing him, but I loved it.
“I kind of asked around, got your story—”
“Googled me.”
“Yes,” he said, “I Googled you.” And I saw the color rise in his cheeks for the first time, just for a moment.
He cracked open a crab leg, dipped it into the butter, and held it out to me on his fork. “Haven’t you ever just given into something, just known that it seemed right?”
I leaned forward then, listened to the crescendo of the piano in Beethoven’s sonata. I let Rennick feed me. The crab was decadent, so buttery. I savored the taste, savored this moment here with him, this new beginning for me. “Yes,” I said. “Sometimes things just feel right.”
For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me, and I both wanted him to and was extremely scared. But then he looked away and the moment was gone.
We continued to eat, and he grabbed a crayon, the blue one, and wrote on my side of the tablecloth.
What is wrong?
I read this and considered, popping another scallop into my mouth. I picked up the red crayon. I didn’t know exactly why this seemed safer than talking, but it did.
I still don’t believe it all.
It was kind of hard to write upside down, but I didn’t want to stop.
You are so pretty, Corrine. This one caught me off guard. I couldn’t help but smile.
I bet you say that to every aura.
He laughed at that. I took a drink of my Coke. I watched him patiently, traced the planes of his handsome face with my eyes.
Tell me, he wrote.
I smiled to myself and pressed the red crayon to the paper, but before I had formed a thought, he wrote again.
Why don’t you believe in yourself?
What a loaded question, I thought. I sighed, took a sip of my Coke, and realized that we were both leaning toward each other again, the laundry-fresh smell of Rennick filling me up.
I’m afraid of things. I’m only one for two in the lifesaving department.
Rennick dropped his crayon then, looked up at me with such empathy. This leveled me. That he cared so much. I stabbed a scallop, dipped it in his butter.
When I looked back up, when I had quelled the urge to cry embarrassing tears, I saw that he was still watching me. Same look. Same eyes.
“Corrine, you didn’t kill your sister.” He reached across the table for my hand. I pulled back, sucked air through my teeth, immediately afraid. He sat back instantly, stricken, but recovered quickly.
“I’m trying,” I said, but I sounded pathetic, and I hated myself for the whine in my voice.
“I have theories,” he said matter-of-factly. Obviously switching topics for my sake. “About auras. They’re like magnetic fields of energy, attracting and repelling forces in the universe.”
I nodded. He was telling me about himself. The tenor of his voice told me that he was letting me in. I had the sense that he was going to bare himself for me, show me what no one else got to see, so to speak. I leaned closer, listened intently. What was it that made this guy tick? Because there was just something about him. I felt like maybe if I could get to the bottom of him, if I could see how he operated on a philosophical level, then maybe … maybe I could figure myself out too. There wasn’t really a lot of logic to that feeling, but I held on to it. With a choke hold. Because really, what else did I have?
“Growing up, Cale hated me a lot of the time. We were brothers. I’m sure lots of brothers torture each other in creative and sadistic ways. We did.” He rubbed his chin, squinted. “I’ve never talked about this with anyone.”
“Tell me,” I whispered.
He considered and waited for a long moment, fiddling with the empty crab shells on his plate. I didn’t know if he was going to continue. Finally he did, but in a different direction. Hopefully, obliquely getting back to himself. Underneath it all.
“Cale blamed me for Mom’s death. And for a long time—”
“Why?” I asked, but he just waved my question away.
“Dad and Cale are cut from the same cloth. They’re harder. Tougher than me. Not worse. Not better. Just different. It got harder in high school. I didn’t meet the old man’s expectations.”
“Go on,” I urged.
“It’s not a new story, or even really interesting. I wasn’t the son that he thought I should be. That was Cale. Football player. Tough kid. Went straight into the Army.”
Rennick shook his head. “Me, I was a nerd. Art classes. Science garbage all over my room. It’s not like it was my dad’s fault. It’s not like it was Cale’s, but I could feel myself rebelling against Dad. Little ways. He got his back up. Bottom line, after Dodge’s heart attack, Dad was going to make him close up the charter business. And then Lila had to be put in the home, and I could really see it all killing Dodge. So I chose—I offered—to come live here. It was good for Dodge, and good for me too. Just healthier for me.”
I played with the straw in my now-empty Coke can. “Dodge gets you,” I said. And Rennick nodded. I tried to read the emotions on his face. I mean, what was it? Was he embarrassed that he was not the tough-guy persona that everyone at Liberty had made up for him? Did he think he was soft or somehow less for not being the typical guy, if there was such a thing? And what kind of father couldn’t see the beauty and greatness in this guy?
“So the rumors? Ren from the Pen?” I asked.
Rennick smiled. “Things aren’t always what they seem, C
orrine.” He stared at me hard.
“I hardly think that that applies to me and Sophie.” It sounded harsher than I had meant. Rennick just nodded and signaled to the waiter for the check.
“I should’ve known you weren’t a brawler,” I said, looking at his hands drumming on top of the papered table. His long, brown-from-the-sun fingers, the absence of scars on his knuckles. They were gorgeous hands, really, thin but strong-looking, like him.
“Why’s that?”
“Your hands are way too pretty. They’re an artist’s hands.”
“Speaking of pretty,” he said, with this gorgeous, flirty smirk. But he didn’t get to finish. The waiter chose that moment to place the bill on the table and ask us if we needed anything else.
Rennick took out his wallet.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I really can pay for myself.”
“No,” he said, leaving some bills on the table. “I mean, it’s a date, isn’t it?”
He stood up then, and I couldn’t help but smile. “A date. Sure.” And I noticed that he definitely watched for my reaction.
Rennick drove us home like a bifocals-wearing grandpa. As we got nearer to the house and turned down Manderly, I saw that the reporters and their interest in me had not waned at all. If anything, the news vans had multiplied. I had Rennick pass my house and take a roundabout way to the back alley. The narrow gravel pathway was just wide enough for a vehicle. Rennick pulled up to the back of the garage and hid the Jeep from view.
The sky rumbled and a handful of thick raindrops plopped on us when we got out. We ducked behind the lilac bushes. “You are awfully popular.”
“Just stay down.” We crouched low and, thanks to the banana trees and the lilac hedge, were pretty hidden as we ran up the back steps. Loud thunder boomed through the air, the rain coming down in a sheet of cool water. I put my key in the door. “We made it!”
“Excuse me, Miss Harlowe?” A reporter came from around the front of the house, but I turned the key in the lock and threw the door open.
Rennick stepped in behind me, and my flip-flops squeaked on the kitchen floor. He shook his gorgeous hair, and I heard voices. I had figured that Mom would still be home, but that was it. Rennick shot me a look, and I shrugged.
I stuck my head into the family room.
“Honey?” Mom’s eyes apologized to me even as she beckoned for me to come. I did so hesitantly. Rennick followed close behind.
Dad stood up from the couch and offered his hand to Rennick. I heard Mom introducing them, but my eyes were glued to the couch. There sat a hollow-eyed young couple and a gangly kid of maybe ten or eleven years old. His face was swollen and sad, his head cancer-bald, with a violent red and purple scar from his left temple to the top of his head.
“I’m Seth Krane?” His voice was so small, so high.
“I know,” I said, and then I placed him. Declan Krane worked for my dad. This was his son and he had cancer, something rare, in his blood, I thought. There were little cans with his picture on them collecting donations all over the Garden District, at the Starbucks, at the Circle K. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Seth’s mother cleared her throat and got up from the couch, offering me her hand.
“I can’t,” I said, shaking my head. I backed up a step and bumped right into Rennick. He pressed a palm flat on my back, between my shoulder blades. A gesture in support, I thought.
“We are so sorry to bother you, Corrine,” Seth’s mother said, her words tumbling out fast and desperate. “We have no other hope. It’s critical, they say. Just keeping him comfortable.”
Her words were atrocious and difficult to hear, but inside I was freaking out. Was this what it meant to have the touch? What if I killed that little kid instead of helped him? My brain kind of shut off. My mother’s voice was audible, but it sounded far away from me. She was explaining what had happened to Sophie, how uncertain I was. But all I could really focus on was the pressure of that hand on my back. I took several deep breaths and refocused my eyes.
I studied Seth’s face, the hazel eyes buried deep under his hairless brow, the crooked teeth answering my gaze with a smile. A smile for me, with empathy and understanding, as if I was truly the one in the most messed up of situations. My mind reeled. What did it feel like to know you were at the end? How could he have such a look of peacefulness on his face? Acceptance?
I opened my mouth to explain myself, to politely decline. And that’s when Seth’s father stood up. Balding and slight, he spoke quietly in a low baritone. “Miss Harlowe, we know we have no right to ask what we are asking. But we … Seth wants you to try. And we understand there are no guarantees.”
I listened, and as I watched the father look down at his fragile little son, I saw how he gazed at him, that loving, adoring hand stroking the boy’s face as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world. And the father bent down then and gave Seth’s ragged scar an absentminded kiss. And the look on his face, it was pure and gorgeous and familiar.
This was how my parents had looked at Sophie.
And the dark hollows around Seth’s mother’s eyes, these were my own mother’s eyes not so long ago. The look of grief and loss. Unspeakable loss. The worst loss.
The pendulum had been swinging for me. But right now, for this moment, it stopped. It was decided.
And then I found myself speaking before I had even decided to. I sat down in the old rocker across from the couch. “I can try, but even I don’t quite understand it.”
“Thank you, God!” the mother gasped, and clutched at the little boy, pulling him to her bosom.
“We appreciate this, Miss Harlowe,” the father said, looking right into my eyes. “No matter what the outcome.”
The man turned and spoke to my father in low tones, and my dad clasped his shoulder. When I caught Dad’s eye, he nodded at me slightly.
I knelt in front of the seated boy on the couch. I held both my hands out, and I asked him to place his hands in mine. I stole a look at Rennick, who was watching from behind me. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what to do.
Hadn’t Rennick said that his own mother had only been able to summon it about half the time?
I closed my eyes and focused on Seth. I thought about him, what was going on with his own body turning traitor on him. I focused on myself, my insides, yearning for that small, indescribable spark to generate inside my ribs. I focused on the indigo light, on the feeling and sensation of being a conduit.
I held this pose, kneeling in front of Seth, reaching within myself to find the start of it all. But nothing.
“Your hands are sweaty,” Seth whispered.
“They are,” I laughed. I opened my eyes, but I didn’t let go of his hands.
I tried to remember the feeling of it, right there, under my sternum, the wispy flutter of the first few sparks, and then the full burst of flames. But nothing happened.
I tried for a long while, but in the end, nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The mother wiped tears from her eyes. “Don’t apologize,” she said. “You tried.”
“It’s okay,” Seth said, and he placed a small hand on my cheek. Inside, I broke. Just a cleaving away from all that made sense. At that moment, I believed. I knew I had the power to help this boy, to save lives. I had this.
I just didn’t know how to control it. Yet.
“We very much appreciate it,” the father said.
“I don’t know how to start it,” I said. “It’s—”
“It’s okay.” This was my mother’s voice.
“I think I can do it, though. I just need—” But Mom was already ushering them out the door. Dad was shaking the man’s hand again. And I was so enraged at how helpless I felt.
Rennick came and stood close to me, his head bent over mine, an intimate gesture. “You believe it,” he whispered.
“I believe it.”
The tapping on my window woke me in the morning. The new light of
the day was just starting to eke into the room, all purple and blue in the slants between the pear tree branches. In my dream, Seth Krane was knocking repeatedly at my front door, but when I woke, I knew the sound immediately. Pebbles at the window.
I patted at my hair as I leaned my forehead onto the cool glass of the window, my hand already opening in a wave. There he was, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, a box in his hands, his face full of something. Purpose.
I threw my blue fuzzy robe around myself and found Mom and Dad in the kitchen drinking coffee, Dad dressed for work and Mom looking a lot like me.
“He could’ve just knocked,” Dad said with a smirk. “What’s all the stuff? Is he planning on moving in?”
“Very funny,” I answered. “I don’t really know.”
I opened the back door and stepped out onto the stoop. The morning was really something, cool for New Orleans, with dew-wet grass and birdsong in the air. I could’ve just let him into the kitchen, but there was a part of me that wanted him and his visit all to myself.
Even with so much on my plate, and even with my morning breath, my tangled hair, my ratty old bunny slippers, I couldn’t help how I reacted to him. But there was something about him this morning, Rennick in all of his glory. Oh God, the shape of his shoulders through his T-shirt, the corners of his mouth as they turned up just as he raised his head to see me, the plane of his jaw. His hair was disheveled and he had on faded jeans, a tattered T-shirt. He was in full science-geek mode.
“Hi,” I said.
“We have to figure this thing out. Ourselves. You’ll believe it wholeheartedly. You’ll own it.”
I loved the way that sounded. Own it. “Then I can go find Seth Krane.”
“So you’re accepting this?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, grabbing the box from him. “What are we going to do?”
“Make a Leyden jar, for starters.” We moved toward the back door.
“We gotta have some rules,” I said. “I call the shots. If it gets too much. If I feel it getting … out of control, you have to listen to me and leave.” I had my hand on the doorknob and looked back at Rennick.