by Gina Linko
I could try to reel myself in. Keep things going, but in moderation.
All of this seemed impossible to me. It was like the touch was the only thing keeping me from going back to my guilt-ridden world, and I had to use it, keep it in motion and alive. I knew it didn’t make a lot of sense, but there it was.
I must’ve dozed off eventually because I awoke to a one-note whistle, the gray-yellow light of an overcast sunrise filling my room. I got up and looked out the window, and sure enough he was there. When I went down to greet him, I knew I looked like a hot mess.
But I didn’t care. He opened his arms to me, and I was in them, folded into him, resting my head on his chest, his chin on the top of my head. “Corrine,” he said. He kissed the top of my head.
I could smell the leaves of the banana trees out in the wet dew of the morning. And I could smell the scent of Rennick, his laundry-fresh skin.
“You told my parents,” I said into his chest.
“I had to.”
“I’m trying not to be mad at you.”
“And I’m trying not to lay you down on this grass and get us both into more trouble than we need.”
This made me chuckle. I lifted my face to him, and he kissed me, slow and soft. “Mmm,” I said. “Good morning.”
“What do you say we go to Jackson Square today, maybe ride the ferry? We only have so many free days till school.”
I shook my head. “I’m going back to the Shack. Come with me?” I readied myself for an argument.
He sighed deeply, and I braced myself. “Corrine, I think your parents are right when they say that you have to walk a thin line here.”
“They are talking about moving.”
I watched him closely, to see if he knew this, but when this registered, his face blanched and he had difficulty recovering. “We gotta play by their rules. I want you here.”
I nodded. But I knew I had to do what I had to do. “Let me shower, and meet me in the kitchen in ten.” I pulled myself away from him, but he held on to my hand.
He shook his head at me. “Corrine, I told myself I wasn’t going to come here and give you ultimatums. I wasn’t going to try to pressure you. I figure you got enough of that on all sides. But going right back there this morning?”
I nodded, jutted my chin out in defiance.
“Do you still have a fever?” he challenged.
“No.”
“Are you still shaking?”
I held my hands out in front of me and, thank God, they were steady. He rubbed at his jaw, pulled me over to Sophie’s garden, and sat us down on the little cement bench. “Why can’t you let it go?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t kill your sister.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I couldn’t hold his gaze. He continued, “Is that what this is about? Trying to make up for allegedly killing Sophie?”
“No.” But it felt like a lie, and the heat kicked on under my sternum.
“Because I think that’s what this is about. I watched you yesterday, and it was like you didn’t give a shit about what happened to you. You just kept going and going. It’s like you didn’t even want to have time to think. You just wanted to do.” His eyes pierced me.
I rubbed my knuckles against my lips. I knew there was some truth in this. I hadn’t really been able or willing to put words to it, but I knew there was a part of me, a huge, self-destructive guilty part that knew there was truth right there. A seed of it in everything Rennick was suggesting.
“I can’t say no to anyone.” My voice sounded small.
“How many will it take to make up for Sophie?”
I shrugged and fought against the tears in my eyes.
“A hundred? A thousand?”
I said nothing.
“Or will it only be even when you use yourself up and kill yourself in the process?”
It fired up, roared, and I swallowed it back down. Rennick reached for me, just a tiny gesture, a hand to tip my face up, but I pushed him away. Pushed him hard. I got up and walked back into the house.
I hated him. Because of what he’d said.
Because it was true. Every word.
The Crawdaddy Shack opened at seven, but there were already a few people out front when I came biking up. “Morning,” I greeted them.
“Good morning, Corrine,” one middle-aged man answered. The rest sort of chimed in.
None of these patrons had any requests for me, so I went into the kitchen when Mrs. Rawlings opened up, and she was all up in my business from the get-go. “You are not going to make me a party to this when you know good and well your parents are taking issue with you setting up shop here.”
I ignored her as much as I could. I greeted Casey and grabbed a deep-fried donut from the cooling tray, poured myself some coffee. But Sarah Rawlings did not suffer being ignored.
“Girl, you better look at me when I’m talking to you.”
I turned around, looked into her face. “I have to do this,” I answered.
To my surprise, Mrs. Rawlings looked more empathetic than I had expected. “You got till noon. Then I am kicking you out.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Granny Lucy used to help a lot of folks. You girls, you laugh at the old tinctures she used to put together. The spells. But there was something to them. She had herself a way, Corrine. She kept it on the down low.” She eyed me. “You’ll learn.”
I heard Mia-Joy’s barking laughter from out front, and then she was calling for me.
The little restaurant was filled again, and there was already a small crowd around the bistro table from yesterday, front and center. “This woman here, she’s got lupus and lymphoma,” Mia-Joy whispered to me.
“Ma’am,” I said in greeting, sitting down at the table. One look at this poor woman’s face and I knew I was right to come back here this morning. She still had all her hair, but her cheeks were sunken, her skin sallow, her fingernails yellow. She looked seventy-five if a day, so when she began speaking, no wonder the flames erupted inside me.
“I’m only forty-four,” she began, and I fought against a gasp. “I don’t have insurance. I didn’t get any treatment, and I know I’m almost at the end of it here. My children don’t know that, but I know it,” she said. And the matter-of-factness in her voice leveled me.
I gripped her skeletal hands and let it rise, brewing and growing, swelling into one powerful wave. The woman’s eyes, they had a flat look to them, of things borne, endured. I wanted to help her. I let the current reach its frenzied peak. And when I focused the flame, when I directed it into this woman, something happened. It left me in a different way, not in a smooth current but in jolts. I couldn’t see anything different. It was all still indigo blue, but it felt different, spastic and uneven.
The woman jerked, fell to the ground, and seized with ugly convulsions. Like she was being electrocuted. Just like in the movies. Horrible jerky movements.
I broke the connection, let her hand go. I held my hands out in front of me, watched them for a moment before I bent down next to the poor woman at my feet. Was it my imagination, or could I see little sparks of something crackling off the tips of my fingers, flaming indigo?
I heard the gasps from the other customers. I saw Mia-Joy running toward her, and I heard Mrs. Rawlings screaming for 911, but none of this really registered. It was like it was all happening far away from me.
“What was wrong with her again?” This was a paramedic in his blue uniform. He was right next to me, kneeling. How he got there so quick, I didn’t know.
“I have the touch?” I told him.
“We know about you,” he said. “But what is her ailment?” He was listening for breaths as he spoke to me.
I racked my brain. I could sense that I should know this, that I did know this less than five minutes ago. It was there, on the very edge of my brain, but I couldn’t grasp it. What was wrong with her? What was I fixing
?
“She has lymphoma and systemic lupus,” Mia-Joy answered, eyeballing me and pushing me down into my chair. I sat there, watching the events unfold around me. The saving of this woman’s life. The sideways glances from the other patrons. The clucking of Sarah’s tongue as she brought me a glass of ice water.
Then all of a sudden it was like I lost some time, because Rennick was next to me but I didn’t know when or how he had gotten there. I looked around and saw that the woman and the paramedics were gone.
“It was akin to a mild electric shock. She just passed out,” he was saying in a soothing voice, over and over. Like a repeat sign at the end of a measure.
He reached for my hand. I yanked it back.
“You should be glad about this,” I snapped. “Now it’s all gone to shit. They can just move me back to Chicago. Everyone can forget about it all.” I got up so quickly that I knocked my chair backward.
“Corrine!”
I didn’t turn around. I stalked out to my bike and rode home. Confused. Hot. Frayed. Guilty.
I retreated to my room. It was like I didn’t know anything anymore. I played Angry Chipmunks on my iPad and listened to music through my earbuds as loud as I could stand it, and I forced myself, tried desperately at least, not to think.
Mom and Dad tried to talk to me. Mrs. Abernathy was fine. Rennick had been right, it was only a moderate electric shock. She had not been cured, but she was getting treatment, thanks to the donations Mia-Joy had been collecting. And thanks to a handful of generous doctors on her case. But I hadn’t saved her.
I had expected a quiet relief on Mom’s face or in Dad’s demeanor, because maybe people would leave me alone now after such a public failure. But no, there was none of that. They were my parents, after all. It made me feel guilty for thinking that they could so easily be appeased by the situation when they knew it made me miserable.
The next morning was Sunday. Dad went with Mom to her church, and I stayed holed up in my room. When the doorbell rang, I looked out my window and saw Rennick’s Jeep.
I waffled for a long minute, but eventually I let him in, and we stood in the foyer awkwardly. He looked at me with those eyes, those eyelashes, and I wanted to cross the distance between us. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck. But I didn’t trust myself. My hands. My body. What lived underneath my ribs? I didn’t want to hurt him.
Was I back here? Really? Had I ever left?
“How are you?” he said as he moved into the living room. I backed away from him, but still he stood only a foot away from me.
I shifted from one foot to the other. I tried to hold it together, I really did. But a couple of tears slipped down my cheeks. I wiped them away quickly with the back of my hand. I looked up at him, shook my head. My lip trembled.
“Baby,” he said. He moved forward to pull me toward him, but I backed away.
“I can’t.”
“Corrine.” And when I looked back up at him, I saw there were tears in his eyes too, his face, his beautiful face, a study in pain. “Baby, let me hold you.”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he said, and settled on the couch. I sat down across from him on the loveseat. “You didn’t hurt Mrs. Abernathy.”
“It’s too risky. All of it.”
“Corrine, how can I make you see it like I see it?” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Listen, you know with auras? We’re not all one color, right?”
I nodded.
“There’re all kinds of colors in there. Some traits are positive, some negative. Some a mixture. But the overall auras themselves, they are just—”
“Beautiful.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, they are real. They are life. Us. It’s all we got.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“None of us have total control of anything. Not you, not me, not anybody. And we’re all taking risks, every day. Nothing’s promised.”
He came over to the loveseat then, sat down next to me. I let the tears fall down my cheeks, and I thought about what he said. He brushed his hand through my hair, and the hairs on the nape of my neck rose. It was like the first touch ever, so real to me, exaggerated for some reason.
“I’m taking a risk right now,” he said. “But it’s worth it.”
“The risk of being electrocuted?” I said.
“No, Corrine, the risk that you won’t love me back.”
My heart swelled at the word, and I turned to him, my eyes meeting his. His beautiful face, his gorgeous eyes, watching me, seeing me, only me, the real me, searching me for what? An answer to the unasked question?
I swallowed against the dryness in my throat. And then I answered him. “I will.” I wanted to sound brave, but it came out small.
He leaned forward, kissed my eyebrow, kissed away my tears, and then his lips were on mine, and we were kissing. His mouth against mine, our connection. Soft, gentle. Questioning. And I let it happen, and I wanted it, I wanted him.
“Touch me,” he whispered. “Put your hands on me, Corrine.”
“I can’t,” I said. And I pulled away, a promise unfulfilled. He sighed, raking his hand through his hair. After a few moments, he stood up; he left me something, a piece of paper, on the coffee table, but he left wordlessly.
It was more than just my heart knowing him. My heart loved him.
I took the paper upstairs to my room, unfolded it. It was a beautiful chalk drawing: an aura, a version of the one aura that had most populated his garage. His favorite subject. The colors were rich and jewel-toned, like the leaves of a Chicago autumn, maroon and orange, purple and gold, bright red and indigo. I flipped it over and he had signed it in bright blue ink.
My name and the date. I had been right. This was me.
My heart ached because I couldn’t agree with this rendering, this beauty. I felt weak and paralyzed with the complications of this touch. I was not worthy of this power. Of Rennick’s attention, his admiration. His love. He had used that word. Love.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I made myself really look. When would I quit hating myself?
When would it be enough?
I thought of Paganini’s La Campanella. The power of it. The strong start. Right from the first measure. So sure of itself. I thought of how Mrs. Smelser had first assigned me this piece on the violin back in sixth grade. As I had been waiting for the student ahead of me to finish, I sat down at the piano in the school hallway and began to play it, but different. Not allegro. I slowed it down. Ritard. Gave it more of a nocturne flair. Just playing around with it.
I had really lost myself in the playing of it. Transforming it. And when I finally opened my eyes, I flushed at seeing Mrs. Smelser and her other student standing beside the piano. I had apologized, explaining to her that I knew that wasn’t how it went, that I was just messing around. I insisted on playing it for her on my violin. The correct way.
“Corrine, don’t forget this, though,” she told me afterward, sticking her pencil into her messy silver curls. “Music isn’t static. Don’t ever apologize for making something beautiful. Don’t be scared of what you alone can add.”
I left Rennick’s drawing on my desk and knelt down, looked under my bed, and took out my violin. I tuned each string, turning the knobs at the scroll just enough. I applied the rosin to my bow, tightened it to exactly the right amount of tension. I brought the violin to my chin, rested it in the familiar little nook of my collarbone.
I played Canon in D. My fingers remembered the notes, and my soul remembered the music. I played for a long time. Sousa. Mozart. Piece after piece. Not for any reason other than I needed to play. I needed to remember what it was like to be my real self.
I was still playing when I heard my cell phone ring for the fifth time in a row. I gave up, put my violin down on the bed, and reached for the phone. Mrs. Rawlings’s phone number.
“Hello?”
“I’m at the hospital with Mia-Joy,” Sarah said calmly. �
�It is not an emergency, but please come. We will explain.”
She hung up. Obviously her phone call had been planned specifically so that I would not freak out, but what I was actually doing was freaking out. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” I repeated, pacing around my bedroom before I could make a cohesive plan. And, of course, in the back of my head I had more guilt. Hadn’t Rennick predicted this? The rip in her aura? And hadn’t I just let it all go?
I didn’t have a car. Mom and Dad turned off their cells at church. Biking out to the hospital would take at least an hour.
Rennick.
I called his cell and he answered on the first ring. He was in my driveway within ten minutes, and I was in his car, trying to explain the situation.
He clenched his jaw. “We’ll get there in time,” he said, driving faster than I’d ever seen. I knew what he meant. No matter what was going on, I could fix her. I could heal Mia-Joy.
My stomach clenched. How was I supposed to use this thing when I didn’t have control, really?
I tried to remind myself of the mouse, of how sure I had seemed after that. It didn’t help.
As soon as we walked into Mia-Joy’s hospital room, I knew that this was a different kind of situation than I had expected. Tenuous in a different way. She sat in her hospital bed, and her face was pinched and angry, defiant. That famous Mia-Joy scowl. But if she looked scary, Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings looked downright terrifying.
“You want to tell your friend here? Or shall I?” Sarah barked at Mia-Joy.
Mia-Joy broke then. She looked out the window, and I saw the cover, the mask, dissolve for a second; I moved to go to her, but Mrs. Rawlings was already there, holding her in her arms. She pressed Mia-Joy to her ample bosom, rocked her back and forth. She whispered things to Mia-Joy, and I fought the tears back too. I had to look away because of what this did to me. It undid me. This show of kindness.
So powerful.
Mr. Rawlings got up and motioned for Rennick to leave with him. Rennick looked at me for the okay, and I nodded. Mrs. Rawlings finished comforting her daughter and turned toward me. “She wants to tell you about it herself.”