by Dima Zales
“Okay, so I said there are ground rules,” Graham said as we turned into Ben’s neighborhood. “They’re pretty simple: don’t tell anyone about the S-Em or about the Seconds living among us. Not anyone, for any reason. No exceptions. Don’t tell anyone about your abilities or about anyone else’s you happen to know about. Don’t talk about essence or workings or anything like that.”
I waited for him to go on, but apparently there wasn’t any more. I was surprised.
“That’s it? I would think rules like that would be common sense. Otherwise you’d all be in mental hospitals, or maybe top-secret government research labs.”
“Yeah, you’d think,” Graham said. “But we take these rules very seriously, so it’s important to make them explicit.”
He gave me a searching look.
“It means you can’t tell your brother, all right? If you get married one day, you can’t tell your spouse. You can’t even tell your priest.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. A small loneliness washed over me. “Sounds like the rules would make marriage and family pretty hard.”
“That might be why we tend to pair off with one another,” he said, and gave me a little smile.
Was he flirting with me? No, he couldn’t possibly be.
“But seriously,” he continued, “you have to be really careful. Don’t keep any images that show Seconds in their true form. Delete them without putting them on your hard drive, and reformat the card they were on. Don’t do internet searches on terms like ‘Second Emanation’ or on the names of any Seconds you get to know. Don’t keep a diary. Not an accurate one, anyway. Always be certain a person is one of us before saying anything incriminating. At least a few governments around the world have suspicions about this stuff, and you don’t want to give information to an undercover agent by accident.”
I nodded. I hadn’t really thought about how many ways there were to slip up. It occurred to me that I’d already broken the rules in a big way by showing the picture of Bob’s foot around Pete’s, but if Graham didn’t bring it up, I sure as heck wasn’t going to.
“So,” he said, “why don’t you make that call to your boss. Let’s think about what you’re going to tell him.”
As Graham coached me, I realized I was going to have to get used to lying a lot more. His advice was to keep it simple — a straightforward excuse or explanation was easier to remember and often more convincing. It could also be helpful, he said, to blame yourself. That way people spent their time being annoyed at you instead of questioning your story.
“The thing is, I don’t know if Dr. Nielsen will have found out about how I left town and then was questioned by the police about Justine. If he knows about that, it’s going to get complicated.”
Graham pulled into a space a few houses down from Ben’s. “How could he know about that? It’s a police matter.”
I rolled my eyes. “Clearly, you’re not from a small town.”
He laughed. “Well, let’s think of how you might handle either situation. That way you’ll be prepared to follow the conversation wherever it goes.”
After some discussion, I called Dr. Nielsen at home and told him I still wasn’t feeling well and might need to take another sick day on Monday.
“Beth, that’s fine,” he said. “Head injuries are unpredictable that way. But why didn’t you call earlier? I was expecting you back on Thursday. I’ve been worried.”
“What, really? I thought I said Monday, not Thursday.”
“Janie and I both thought it was Thursday. She was really worried, by the way. You should call her.”
“I must’ve been so out of it that I said Thursday when I meant Monday. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, Beth. You did seem a bit disoriented when we spoke. Please let me know how you’re feeling Monday, so we know whether to expect you Tuesday. In the meantime, Judith is happy to fill in.”
I thanked him and hung up. When Graham nodded his approval of the conversation, I went ahead and called Janie.
“Oh my god, Beth, I’ve been so worried about you,” she said. “When you didn’t come in Thursday, I called your house. By the end of the day, I was tearing my hair out! I went to your place and knocked and knocked, but you didn’t answer. Friday, too. Where have you been?”
I gave her my story, explaining that I’d been home but must’ve been on pain meds and sleeping heavily when she called and dropped by. I apologized profusely and tried to sound embarrassed instead of guilty.
“Jeez, don’t worry about it. I can totally understand doing something like that. And,” she said, lowering her voice, “I think Mrs. Nielsen is sort of enjoying being back at the helm.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I bet.”
Judith Nielsen had been her husband’s receptionist from when he opened his practice in the early ’80s until four years ago. That’s when she’d decided she wanted more leisure time, and he’d hired me to replace her. She was sort of a dragon lady, so I suspected Dr. Nielsen had been a little relieved at her decision. He certainly got away with being a lot more crotchety with me than he had with her.
“Hey, is it really true that Justine up and left Ben without even telling him?” Janie asked. “I heard it from Suzanne yesterday. I’ve been dying to ask you.”
“Well, I don’t really know what happened between them. I guess she might’ve left him.”
“Wow.” She paused. “Are you psyched or what?”
I laughed. “No, not really — she sucks, yeah, but Ben loves her, and the kids must be so upset.”
“Yeah, yeah, you would take the high road,” Janie said. “Mama always said you were too nice for your own good.”
I laughed again, though the compliment wasn’t justified — I might be the reason Justine was gone, after all. She might even be dead because of me.
“Okay, I’ll see you next week. Feel better, okay? Let me know if you need anything.”
“Will do, Janie, thanks.”
I hung up and looked at Graham.
“Very good,” he said. “The one thing I’d change is that you said, ‘I’ve been at home’ when you were explaining yourself. But if you were really making the call from home, you probably would’ve said, ‘I’ve been here,’ right?”
I looked at him, surprised at his recall of what I’d said.
“Yeah, I guess I would.”
“Also,” he said, “a word like ‘here’ is more flexible. If you get caught in the lie somehow, you can always say you meant something else by ‘here’ — not your home, say, but a friend’s house.”
“Wow, you’ve really thought about this stuff.”
“In our line of work, it’s an unfortunate necessity. And it’s often the small stuff that catches you up — stuff you say without thinking because it seems so unimportant.”
He waited until I nodded my understanding.
“Okay, we should talk about how you’re going to handle your brother. That’s going to be a more challenging situation.”
But the visit with Ben turned out not to be so challenging after all, at least not in the way Graham meant. Ben was too wrapped up in his own fear and sadness to be interested in what I’d been up to for the last few days. He was just angry that I hadn’t been there for him. He did say the police had told him I had an alibi for the time Justine disappeared. Beyond that, it was all about his situation — whether their fight on Sunday might’ve driven Justine away, where she might’ve gone, whether someone might’ve kidnapped her, whether she was dead.
There was also a lot of focus on how the kids were handling their mother’s absence. The short answer was “not well,” but I didn’t get the short answer.
We both did a lot of crying, Ben from grief, me from guilt. It was awful. Worst of all was glancing up and seeing Tiffany peeking around the banister to watch her father cry. The look on her face was unbearable.
“Denny’s?” I asked, confused.
After leaving Ben’s, I’d gotten in Graham’s ca
r, and he’d kindly left me alone with my misery. I hadn’t paid attention to where we were going. He’d driven most of the way to Wausau, and I hadn’t noticed.
“Sure. Thought we could get a bite to eat.”
As soon as I thought of food, I realized I was starving.
“Okay, yeah.”
We were seated and got our coffees. It occurred to me that Graham might be able to help with Justine, beyond just asking his contacts if they knew anything. He talked about Williams as if he’d known him a while. Maybe he could make some educated guesses on places the bastard would stash someone he’d kidnapped.
Unfortunately, we’d been seated in the center of the main dining room and were surrounded by people. Asking about it here would probably break the rules.
The main course passed pleasantly enough. I could tell Graham was trying to distract me from my worries. He asked about my family and my experiences growing up in Dorf. He touched on a sore spot when he asked about my father, and I had to admit I’d never known him. But he recovered artfully and quickly steered the conversation onto safer ground. He really was quite charming. I sure didn’t have the social graces he did. I mean, I could eat a meal without dropping food on myself, but that was about it.
I asked Graham about himself and found out he’d been born in North Carolina and had grown up on the Outer Banks. It seemed like an exciting place to be a kid. When I said as much, he got to talking about shipwrecks and hurricanes. And also beach parties, where “all the girls ran around in bikinis.” I could’ve sworn he glanced at my chest during that story.
Dessert arrived — a piece of cherry pie each. After a few bites, Graham sat back and eyed me. Then he asked if I minded a personal question.
“I guess not,” I said. “I mean, you can always ask it, but I might not answer it, if it’s too personal. But I probably will. Answer it, I mean.”
I felt myself blush. I really could find the most awkward way to handle anything.
He just nodded. Then he said, quietly, “Have you been diagnosed with panic disorder?”
I leaned back, surprised. True, I’d had that near-attack at the cemetery, but most people had never heard of panic disorder.
In answer to my unspoken question, he pointed at the rubber band on my wrist. I fingered it self-consciously. It had been the suggestion of one of the shrinks my mother took me to when I was a kid. When an attack started coming on, the pain of snapping the band was supposed to disrupt whatever physiological chain reaction was causing it. It only worked for me sometimes, but sometimes was better than never.
“Yeah. I was diagnosed when I was six. It’s really kept me from doing … well, anything.”
I looked down, annoyed at myself. I didn’t want to sound whiney, but the disappointment was so close to the surface. Sometimes it was hard to keep it in. I loved Dorf, but I also hated it. It was safe and easy, and it kept my attacks at a manageable level. Sort of. But being stuck there was hard. I’d accepted the situation, but acceptance and happiness are different things.
When I looked back up at Graham, he was smiling at me kindly. “I think you’ll find you don’t have panic disorder, after all.”
Annoyance welled up. If I had a dollar for every person who’d told me my panics were either imaginary or my own fault, I’d have a new car. Well, okay, not a whole new car. But new brakes in the Le Mans — definitely.
I took a slow breath and tried to pack away my irritation. “That sounds like wishful thinking to me. So far, it’s pretty much dictated my life.”
“Yeah, I bet.” He paused and looked around. “Let’s talk about it in the car.”
Curious but guarded, I followed him out. He opened the car door for me, then got behind the wheel and turned to me.
“People like us are in a terrible position before we begin seeing what’s really out there,” he said. “Even before we can see workings, many of us are able to sense them on some level. Fearfulness, anxiety, panic attacks — that kind of stuff is common in the pre-sighted. The mind doesn’t react well to getting contradictory information from the senses, especially about something that could be a threat. Do you see what I mean?”
“So you’re saying that every time I have a panic attack, there’s a Second nearby that I can sort of sense, but can’t see?”
“Maybe. Or it might not be a direct cause-and-effect thing — a Second gets within a hundred feet of you and, bang, you have a panic attack. It is that way for some of us. Others just live in a state of heightened anxiety, and panic attacks are sprinkled in randomly. But in general, the more we’re exposed to things we can’t see — Seconds, workings, even someone like me, if I’m using a halfing-disguise — the worse the effect. It’s very lucky you live in such a small town, where there aren’t many Seconds. If you lived in a more populous area, your mind would’ve been destroyed by now. Late bloomers just don’t survive unless they grow up in the boonies.”
I sat for a long time, mulling it over. Finally I said, “Have you ever been to Madison?”
“I live there. It’s regional headquarters for the Upper Midwest.”
“Are there lots of Seconds there?”
“Tons. They like college towns. A transient population makes it easier to blend in.”
I sat there, totally at a loss. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know how to feel.
My life had had two central constants — my mother and my illness. I’d already lost my mother. Now the other constant was being rewritten, maybe erased. Losing a bad thing should be a good thing, but instead it was profoundly disconcerting. Like I was losing who I was.
After a few minutes, Graham said, “Elizabeth, I know this is very difficult. You’ve had to deal with being pre-sighted for far longer than most of us do. It’s a testament to your strength that you’re as sane and stable as you are.”
I nodded dully, not really feeling the compliment.
“But just think,” he continued, “real panic disorder can be treated, but sometimes it doesn’t go away. If that’s what you had, you might’ve struggled with it all your life. But that’s not going to happen to you. Your problem was situational, not biochemical. Your panic attacks are going to stop, now that all your senses are on the same page.”
“They’re going to stop?”
“Yes, almost certainly.”
“They’re going to stop.”
It was starting to sink in. They were going to stop.
I could date. I could go back to school.
I could leave Dorf.
Lost in a reverie of what my new, panic-free life might be like, I didn’t remember to broach the issue of Justine until we were more than halfway home.
“Graham, I know you’re checking with your contacts about my sister-in-law, but I wanted to ask you something else about that.”
“Yeah, what is it?”
Just at that moment, someone rear-ended us, hard. I was pressed back into my seat, and the fields around us lurched backwards. Then we slowed suddenly, and my seatbelt cut into me. Finally, there was a crunch-bang as we hit a highway sign post and the airbags deployed. We ended up in a ditch. The road sign, which helpfully told us that Dorf was fifteen miles away, was on our windshield.
I looked over at Graham, who groaned and rubbed his head. I saw he’d been wearing his seatbelt as well, thank god.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “You?”
“I’m okay. We’d better check on the other driver.”
Or drivers, plural, I thought. The road between Dorf and Wausau was four lanes. The moron who hit us could’ve caused a real pile-up.
Fortunately, the other driver wasn’t hurt, and hers was the only other vehicle involved. Some witnesses had pulled over and gotten her out of her car. By the time we walked up, she was sitting in someone else’s back seat, babbling about her accelerator getting stuck.
“Yeah, sure,” a guy standing next to me said under his breath. “Probably drunk.”
“In
the middle of the day?” someone else said.
“Couple of years ago, everyone’s accelerator was getting stuck. Remember that?”
“Dang foreign cars,” a fourth person said.
The conversation continued as we waited for the police.
It took more than an hour for things to get sorted and for Graham to get a tow truck. I watched his car being winched out of the ditch. It looked totaled to me. Graham was sitting in the back of a police car, rubbing his neck — whiplash. I seemed to have gotten off lighter.
Graham had the car towed to Dorf. One of the cops gave us a ride back to town. It was nice of her. Or maybe Graham was also a super-secret FBI agent, like Williams. That’d explain why none of the police on the scene looked twice at me, even though I’d been the prime suspect in a possible kidnapping a few days earlier and was now thought to be part of a meth ring. Christ almighty, how was I ever going to get my reputation straightened out?
As we drew into town, Graham asked if I had a car. I told him I did, but that I’d left it parked in front of the police station on Wednesday.
“Mind if we go pick it up?” he asked. “I think we need to have one on hand, and it’ll take me a while to get a rental delivered.”
“Sure, no problem. Hopefully they haven’t impounded it.”
Unfortunately, they had. It took more than two hours of dealing with a pretty surly Dorf PD, plus a fine, to get my car out of lock-up. As far as the local cops went, I clearly hadn’t been forgiven for allegedly getting mixed up with drugs, making false charges against an FBI agent, and worst of all, wasting their time.
“Hey,” Graham said as we finally pulled out of the police impoundment, “if you haven’t been home since you left town, maybe you’d like to spend the night there instead at Callie’s house?”
“Oh my god, that’d be great!”
“Cool.” He turned left and headed toward my neighborhood. “This is good. Not only can you relax and get some fresh clothes, but this’ll keep Callie from starting another argument about taking you to the fire.”