by Gina Linko
Dad pulled away first. “So are you going to move forward with this thing?”
“I think so. Maybe,” I told him. “I might want to interview a few of the scientists. See about some help. Take it slower.” A million little yeses, I reminded myself.
I was listening to Beethoven cranked up high on my iPad, and I knew that I was sketching Rennick’s face, I knew that. But I was in that zone. I wasn’t really thinking about it. The square jaw, the little scar in his eyebrow, the lashes over those dark blue eyes.
It took me a while to get the fwoof of his hair lifting off of his forehead, but I did it, and then I was finished with the pencil sketch. I began to add some color. My mind was back at Rennick’s garage, though: the feel of his skin beneath my hands, his lips on my collarbone.
At the same moment that Mom came bursting into my bedroom, I realized what I was doing and dropped my pastel.
“What in the world?” I said, yanking the earbuds out of my ears. I could see in Mom’s face that something was very wrong.
“It’s Rennick!” I screamed, taking one last look at my sketch. His eyes were not right; they were flat, unseeing, but it wasn’t just that. I had colored his face, shadowed it, with white and with blue. He looked … gone.
Lifeless.
“Tell me in the car.”
Mom flew, going well above the speed limit, out to the wharf, to Crescent Charters. As soon as we pulled into the gravel parking lot, I jumped out of the car before it had even stopped. I could see the knot of people standing on the small dock, their heads bent in reverence, their shoulders slumped, their voices silent.
I ran. I had to get there. I had that feeling again that I could see these things, and they registered, yet they were so very far away. I heard the slapping of my running feet against the wet boards of the dock, and that brought me back into myself a little, but when I saw his face, ashen white, with blue eyelids, his chest not rising or falling, that shocked me back into myself in a moment, in a flash. In that second, my world focused into a pinpoint on those beautiful eyelashes, holding drops of seawater.
My mother had explained it on the way to the wharf. He had been fishing. Dodge had been short of breath, but they had become stuck in the weeds, the cattails, out near the swampy edge of Egret Inlet. Rennick got nervous, surely thinking of another heart attack for Dodge. He dove in to dig out the propeller from the seaweed or whatever, instead of just rowing. Dodge didn’t know how it happened. But Bouncer began acting weird, whining as they waited in the boat, his tail between his legs.
And Rennick never came back up.
He had drowned. My Rennick. He was gone. How long had he been without a breath? He would not be that fucking cricket. Never.
I watched the paramedics do their rescue breathing, the pressure on his chest. How long had they been at it? Were they still hopeful? I gave them five seconds. Six.
The sharp jut of his Adam’s apple. The black-oil color of his hair. The unseeing eyes. I couldn’t wait any longer.
I pushed through them. Risks. Guilt. Perfection. Control. None of it mattered. Only he mattered. Some things had to be charged at, saved, worked for, again and again, if need be.
All this talk, all these issues, none of it really mattered. Because Rennick was gone, and I had this power. A=B.
I knelt down next to his body, spied Dodge’s face above me filled with panic. Bouncer was at my heels, nudging me closer to Rennick with his snout. Mom had joined us, but these things didn’t matter. I only had to think his name, all he had come to mean to me, all that he was, and there it was. The indigo lens in front of my vision. The crackling spark of life inside my ribs. Like an explosion of heat from the heart of me.
I held on to his hands, both of them in mine. They were cold, so cold. I placed them over my heart, held them against me with my palms. And I couldn’t help it, I was bawling.
He had believed in me when I hadn’t even believed in myself. He had saved me.
“Please, please. Rennick, please,” I said between gasps.
And then it was there at its height, plateaued and waiting for direction. And I let it go, I let it move freely, surging and charging into my beloved Rennick.
And in that moment, time stopped. It’s like I was there, but I wasn’t.
I hold Sophie’s body in my lap, cupping her face in my hands, the blue surges through me, in her. It brings her back. I saved her, I think. Here it is. I remember it now. The part I could never quite account for. The lost time. “I got you, Sophie. I got you.”
She smiles at me, shivers. “You saved me,” she says, lisping her s through that gap in her teeth.
“Did I?” I say, flummoxed, holding on to her face. I am exhausted, and we lie back on the rocks. Her eyes close as she lays her head on my chest.
I awake to her teeth chattering along with mine. It’s darker, colder. And I see that Sophie is pale again. Why had we not left? Walked back? I remember the surge of electricity through me, the exhaustion.
Sophie’s eyes roll back in her head then, her body jerks. Not again! But then things change, the power pricks back up inside me, and I reach for her, to cup her face again, to fix her.
But the wrong thing happens. The white light explodes around me, in me.
The lightning.
One lone bolt of lightning emerges from the atmosphere around us, blinding us, a terrifying and powerful glow around us, bathing us in current, jolting us, electrifying us. I absorb it and I don’t. Not enough. Sophie doesn’t recover.
I smell the ozone in the air. The crisp Lake Michigan air. It is just a storm.
I saved her. Lightning killed her.
I woke back up to where I was now. Here in my life without Sophie. Holding Rennick’s hands to my heart. The physio-electric life churned through me, out of me, into Rennick. I shuddered with exhaustion.
For all my power: I could heal, I could fix Lila Twopenny, I could maybe save Rennick, but I still wasn’t all-powerful. I still was not in charge. I couldn’t fix Mia-Joy. I couldn’t control lightning. I couldn’t do a lot of things.
It was good and it was bad. I was just a human Leyden jar.
“Please,” I said out loud, and I could feel the surges rack my shoulders, press against my ribs, exit my hands.
And then I snapped my eyes open because I could feel the current change, plunge from deeper inside of me. This was when I would normally stop, what I had come to recognize as the time to let go. But Rennick was not back yet. I couldn’t give up.
It pulled from inside me, deeper in my core, and I pushed it, willed it out of me.
Rennick coughed once. And then he was still. I wanted to pull back, but I couldn’t. Rennick needed me. Needed the blue.
I had it. He needed it. I gave it all.
And then it went black.
I watched Rennick gasp, cough, and wretch. Beautiful, gorgeous, life-affirming coughs. He vomited water and green stuff. He doubled over and coughed some more, and my heart swelled. Rennick. Alive. He turned on his side and curled his knees to his chest, coughed again.
By now I realized that I was watching this from an odd angle. I was above him, far above him. I could see him, but I couldn’t hear the noise that his coughs made. I reached out to him, but I could not see my own arm. I was air. I was wind. I was space. I was nothing and everything. I somehow hovered above it all, outside of myself.
This alarmed me, but not much, because Rennick was okay. He sat up now, the scary pallor of his face only a memory.
He turned his attention to the small knot of people to his left. They were surrounding someone. Rennick got to his feet quickly, swayed, then pushed his way into the center.
It was me. I was down there, lying on the dock, and it was my turn to be ashen. Empty. I had used myself up. Just as I had promised not to do. And if I had been careless before with my power—arrogant, even—well, I was so sorry now. I struggled against nothing and everything trying to get myself back into my body, back down there, back with Rennick.
When I had so much and so many had so little, I should be hanging on to my life, tooth and nail. I realized this now.
One of the paramedics performed rescue breathing on my body, but Rennick pushed him aside, and the medic let him. Did the medic think it was useless? I watched Rennick in a panicked state. He cleared my airway. He pressed on my lifeless body. It was so white. And it looked so small from up here. Again I tried to push myself nearer, but … nothing. If anything, I floated farther away, up higher.
I struggled more from my vantage point to move, to get there. But it was all in vain, because I was nothing. I was gone from myself.
Rennick pinched my nose, breathed into my mouth. A sad and desperate last kiss. I struggled, but it was useless. Then he began to press on my chest, three even compressions just like they teach you in CPR class. But something changed. I could feel them, the pressure on my sternum, on my rib cage, right there, right at the source of all of this. And with the pressure came the spark.
My vision tunneled and it all turned indigo, a blinding indigo flash, and then all was silent. For what seemed like a very long time. All I knew was the indigo. I was surrounded by it, bathing in it, tasting it, hearing only it.
Then it was his face, just his face so close to mine. And I wondered, was this heaven? But then, no, I saw salt water dripping from his hair, like it was happening in slow motion. A bead dropped from his forelock onto his eyelashes, then onto my face.
The first breath burned hot in my throat. He moved his mouth, but I couldn’t hear him yet. He smiled that smile. I reached up a shaking hand, and with one finger I touched that spot, those teeth, that overlap, and he was saying something over and over. And gradually a din, a little rustle of sound, then his voice. And it was in my ear. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”
I threw my arms around his neck, pulled myself up to him, and he held me against him, cradled me in his arms, in his lap.
After a long time, I opened my eyes, and he pulled back to look at me, the sun glinting off of his hair. A crash of thunder jarred me back into myself.
“I used myself up,” I said.
“I know.” He didn’t seem mad, didn’t seem anything but relieved. He kissed the tip of my chin, each of my eyelids, my nose.
“Guess I’ll have to keep you around.” My voice was a scratchy whisper. “You’re getting good at this lifesaving thing,” I said.
He laughed then, a glorious, booming sound. And when he kissed me, the sky broke into another boom of thunder, and rain began to sheet down on us, the sun still high in the sky.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“I have a present for you,” Rennick said, holding out his hand as we stood by Sophie’s headstone. In his palm was a delicate silver chain, but instead of a charm there was the most magnificent rock, a tiny polished yet uncarved blue stone, sparkling in the September Chicago sun.
“Rennick—” I said, my heart fluttering in my chest.
“I found it on the shore of Pontchartrain. That Fourth of July. It’s quartz.” He smiled. I picked it up and admired the way the sunlight hit the surface of the rock.
“It’s the most perfect color.” It was just this side of purple, just that side of blue. Indigo. I rolled it around in my fingers. “Thank you.” And I thought about something. “What does indigo in an aura mean?”
“We don’t want to inflate your ego or anything,” Rennick joked. “Wisdom,” he said, eyeing me. “Bravery.”
I flushed. I couldn’t hear this about myself. “Could you put it on me?” His fingers graced that spot on the back of my neck and I shivered. “When we first met, you said you knew I was stubborn and generous … kind. Which color of the aura goes with those?”
“I didn’t know any of that from your aura,” Rennick said, finishing with the necklace.
“No?”
“That’s just from watching you, seeing how you operate.” He smiled, squinted at me playfully. I thought of that first day I met him, that first time I looked in those eyes. The day at the Crawdaddy Shack, the sun shining along with the rain. And then again that day on the dock, when we saved each other.
I saw now that this was what life was. I looked down at Sophie’s granite headstone. And I looked up again at Rennick. The sun along with the rain.
And it made me think of what Mom had said when I told her and Dad about the lightning.
“It’s the price we pay for love, honey. It hurts this much because we love so much,” she had told me, holding on to my hand. “We are not in control of things. Ever. We only have that illusion. The death of a loved one shatters that.”
The lightning had killed Sophie, stopped her heart, and shattered me. There had been no other signs, no burns, nothing on Sophie’s body, but that was how lightning worked. It was haphazard. Random. Messy. Like so many things in life. In a way, it seemed worse, not better, to know that I had had nothing to do with it. Worse because it was just so arbitrary. Unpredictable.
But I had nodded at Mom. “The thing we learn, though, is that we still have to keep going. Even though it could happen again. To me. To someone else.”
Mom added, “We love anyway. Even with death around every corner. That’s hope. That’s faith.”
And wasn’t that the biggest decision of them all? Behind everything in life? Wrapped up in every step of our journey? Every chance we took? Faith. The question and the answer.
A million yeses.
I fingered the blue stone. “Thank you,” I told Rennick, feeling the blush rise in my neck. “For the necklace, for visiting Sophie’s grave with me, for so many things.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and he tipped my chin toward him.
I stood on my tiptoes, kissed him on the lips. He smiled. And the look on his face, it was … something. The tender, hopeful gaze of his eyes. What was it? Pride?
And in that instant, I knew. It was love.
I pressed my face into the hollow of his collarbone and inhaled his laundry-fresh scent. So this is what it feels like.
I bent down on my knees then, did what I came here to do. I said a prayer for Sophie, for her soul, for where she was; to God, or to that power greater than us, than me, than the touch, greater even than lightning. “I love you, Sophie,” I said.
I opened my case, withdrew my violin in the chilly September sun. I stood up and played for Sophie, Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, which I couldn’t bring myself to play at her funeral. It spoke of love and loss, sadness and grief, but also hope and remembrance. Tranquillo. I played it all, my eyes closed. And I felt it all, with every note, with every push and pull of my bow, the symphony of emotions I held so close for Sophie, for all she meant to me, for all I wanted to tell her.
And when I finished, I opened my eyes, and I saw Rennick, his eyes closed too. He was feeling too. He knew what it all meant. He didn’t live only on the surface.
“It’s your voice,” he said. “That violin is your voice.”
I nodded. Because for so long, I had been silent. And I had so much to say. To everyone. To Sophie.
I sat on the grass, tracing Sophie’s name on her simple marble headstone. I spoke to her in my mind, told her I was sorry, told her I loved her, told her goodbye. I pictured her then, not on the rocks of that beach, but on Christmas morning, her curls a mess. Learning to ride her bike without training wheels. The elation on her face when she succeeded. Sophie living. Sophie jumping in. Sophie being happy.
This was what I held on to. It was just a storm.
And when I was ready, Rennick stuck out his hand to help me up from the ground, and I grabbed it, my palm thrust against his. And there it was again, that human touch, that spark, that simple kindness, a helping hand when you really needed one.
Just like I had needed it so long ago, when Rennick first placed the crawdad in my palm. He didn’t have to care. He could have ignored my colors. He could have ignored me. He could have given up on hope. Given up on faith in the face of so many everyday deaths: apathy, f
ear, pride.
Sometimes that touch, that squeeze of a hand, that arm around the shoulders, it tells us that we are not in this alone. And for me, Rennick made all the difference.
We were in this together. I knew that.
We’d figure out what to do with the burning coil beneath my ribs, that power, always ready, always there. I would use it, I knew that, to help others. One day at a time. There was no big master plan that needed to be made. Not just one decision. But rather a million little decisions made each day, over and over. A million yeses.
This was my life. In flux. Always. The aura of my life being painted and repainted daily, unfolding itself as a thing of beauty in the process. With me working and learning and hoping, so that each stroke, each color, each decision might add a little more beauty, a little more peace, a little more hope. Adding up to a piece of wonder.
I took in a deep breath of the cool autumn air and held it there in my lungs.
The possibilities now seemed endless.
And I was caught off guard by my optimism, here, in the moment. How impossible it had seemed such a short time ago, to be on the other side of the paralyzing grief of losing my sister.
But here I was. Here we were. It wasn’t the size of the circle; it was who was in it.
And that made all the difference.
So many thanks to those who’ve made such a big difference to me as a writer and to this story: Chuck and Judy Simonich, Caryn Wiseman, Chelsea Eberly, Suzy Capozzi, and the entire team at Random House Books for Young Readers.
To my circle—my colorful, lively, brilliant circle—I love you all so dearly. Thank you for your constant humor and inspiration: Cooper, Clarke, Maddie, Alex, Rebecca, Hannah, Jonah, Jacob, Henry, and, of course, Jack, Maia, and Zoe.
Last but not least, for Greg, a million yeses.
GINA LINKO has a graduate degree in creative writing from DePaul University and lives outside Chicago with her husband and three children. She teaches college English part-time, but her real passion is sitting down to an empty screen and asking herself, “What if …?”