The Ables

by Jeremy Scott

  It started small. A piece of tinsel here, a little snowman figurine there. With Henry’s help I was able to find the spot in the garage where all the decorations were stored away each year and bit by bit began to unwrap the knick-knacks and place them throughout the house.

  But once I started, I couldn’t stop. I lost myself completely in the pursuit of recreating what this time of year was supposed to feel like when Mom was around. Within a day or two, I was keeping Christmas music playing on the stereo around the clock—something Mom always enjoyed during the holiday season. The little village—which Mom used to put together one day at a time over the course of the month of December—I assembled in one hour flat, complete with the artificial “snow” and all the little townspeople figurines.

  By day three, I had gone through all the decorations in the house and began looking for other ways to bring the spirit of the season into the house. I lit cinnamon-scented candles and put out little glass jars of Hershey’s Kisses. I even hung an Advent calendar, though it was from 1995.

  I found out when all the usual yuletide specials were set to come on television and made sure to have them on when I was home—even when no one was watching them or when I was home alone.

  I spent an entire Saturday baking—a first for me. Probably a last, as well. Between my inexperience in the kitchen and my lack of sight, it was challenging, to be sure. I forced Patrick to read me all of Mom’s recipes and tried to follow them to the letter for holiday treats like candy-cane-shaped cookies, zucchini bread, and apple pie. I baked for five straight hours, and when Dad got home from work, the kitchen looked like a culinary battle zone, with delicious shrapnel strewn all over the counter, floor, and table.

  He set his coat on the back of one of the dining room chairs as he walked slowly toward the kitchen. His mouth was hanging open a bit, and he rubbed his temples furiously.

  At first, I thought he was going to be mad at the mess I’d made. He just stood there, wide-eyed, looking around the room over and over again. He looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before, which I now know was concern. At the time, I just thought he was in shock at the mess. “I’m going to clean it up,” I promised cheerily as I continued banging the pots and pans around.

  “It’s okay,” he said, still staring at me.

  It’s easier now, long after the fact, to look back and understand my father’s unique position. He had to have been just as upset about Mom as Patrick and I were, if not more so. This was his wife, his best friend, and his true love.

  And yet, he also had two kids to look after, which included things like getting us fed and off to school every day. But it also had to include concern and worry for our mental well-being. Seeing me go from zero to “Captain Christmas” in about forty-eight hours probably caused Dad to think I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had.

  He didn’t know what it meant or how to handle it. It’s not like there are guidebooks for how to cope with a spouse in a super-power-enhanced coma. He was making it up as he went. I’ve always regretted not being more mature and alert to his struggles during that time. I could have tried to make things easier for him.

  But to his credit, he didn’t get mad or show frustration about any of it. He didn’t get mad about the mess in the kitchen—though I definitely had to clean it up that night. He didn’t get mad about the decorations, the insomnia, or Patrick’s newly emerging nightmare problem. He just went about his duties as a loving father, all the while shielding us from his own worry and pain.

  In fact, I’m not sure my father got upset with us boys even one time in the weeks after Mom’s coma. To our credit, we didn’t do too much to rock the boat during that time either. Whether it was our own trauma, or just an instinctive sense that Dad didn’t need misbehaving boys to deal with on top of everything else, we were little angels for the most part.

  Christmas morning, we loaded up a picnic basket and several presents into the car and went to the hospital to celebrate with Mom. The ride wasn’t nearly as difficult as usual. It was the first and only time that visiting that room felt like a good thing.

  The nurses and staff on duty greeted us warmly, and even the hospital hallways had been decorated with wreaths and holiday greens. I think Mom would have appreciated that.

  The clunking machine noise in her hospital room faded quickly into the background, drowned out by the little radio I’d brought to play carols on. We sang carols while Dad clumsily strummed his old acoustic guitar—I sang the harmony part that Mom usually sang, though I missed several of the notes. We ate sticky bread and licked our fingers clean. It was almost a regular Sallinger Christmas.

  Almost.

  We only took a few presents to the hospital because of time and space, so there were still presents under the tree when we got home. And it was when we sat down on the living room floor to open the rest of the presents around the tree that I realized how poor a substitute that hospital room had been.

  As Patrick tore open a transforming robot—it also turns into a boat!—a realization hit me: this was the real Sallinger Christmas … the one at home … and Mom wasn’t around. The hospital celebration had been a mirage. Artificial. An approximation of the real thing but so far from what it should have been. This second celebration at home is the one that was meant to be. The one we deserved. The one we were stuck with.

  Christmas had come and gone, and fate had not restored my mother’s health. It was over, and there had been no miracles. Finch’s coma wasn’t bound by the traditions of family. It wasn’t bound by the emotions of a boy who missed his mother. It was bound only by his own selfish needs.

  How many more family moments would this man’s actions rob me of?

  It was the first time I considered a future where Mom never came out of her coma at all. I’d been operating under the assumption that, no matter how difficult or awkward life without Mom might be, it was always temporary—that someday, probably soon, she would wake up and come home to us, and life as we knew it would just pick right up from there. But sitting there watching Patrick squeal with glee as he leaped up to bear-hug Dad’s neck as a thank-you, I realized exactly how bleak things had become.

  And I started to cry.

  ***

  Christmas break typically goes by at breakneck speed. Long before you’re ready, you’re headed back to school.

  That was not the case this year, though it had as much to do with simple boredom as it did anything else. I was going absolutely crazy with the complete lack of things to do.

  It was Bentley’s fault, really. And Henry’s. Actually, it was their parents’ fault. They’d gone away for Christmas vacation. Superheroes apparently have friends and family scattered across the globe, just like normal folks do. So Henry’s family was down in Georgia. He said Christmas was a pretty big deal in his family and that over fifty relatives would be gathering on his uncle’s farm.

  Bentley, on the other hand, had gone to Goodspeed with his family. They had relatives there in the custodians’ capital city—a cousin, I think—but Bentley’s dad also had some official board business to attend to, even during the holidays.

  So I had two weeks off of school with my two best friends nowhere to be found. You can imagine how quickly I got bored.

  Almost out of necessity, I started spending more and more time with Donnie. He didn’t have anywhere to be for Christmas break, and I needed someone to hang out with that wasn’t part of my family. I also still felt bad about how much trouble he ended up in after trying to protect me from Chad.

  Most days, we just walked around town and talked. Or I should say, I talked. Donnie spent about 99.9 percent of Christmas break the same way he spent the rest of his life: quietly listening. I think that’s what I enjoyed about our one-on-one time, at least in the beginning. It was me getting some alone time to work out my thoughts without actually having to be alone.

  Around the house, I was much quieter than normal. I wasn’t sure about anything anymore. About Finch, Mom … none of it. I sp
ent a lot of time thinking, and I mostly just kept my thoughts to myself. But Donnie offered me a chance to verbalize some things without fear of reprisal. He almost never shared an opinion on anything. It was perfect, really. I had a sounding board for all the wildly changing thoughts and emotions I was experiencing, and it came with virtually zero risk.

  “I think maybe he knows more than he’s letting on,” I said, jamming my hands in my winter coat pockets. I was talking about Dad. “I mean, if the doctors told him there was no chance Mom would ever come out of her coma, do you think that’s something he would share with me? ‘Cause I don’t.”

  Even though Donnie didn’t offer much in the way of feedback, I still always paused to give him a chance to participate in the conversation. Seemed like the polite thing to do.

  He said nothing, as usual, so I just continued my stream of consciousness rambling. “I think maybe if Patrick wasn’t so young, Dad might shoot straight with me more often. But mostly I feel like he’s just trying to shield me from the whole ordeal. Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean, I was the one in that cornfield watching Mom get zapped … not him!”

  I wasn’t really mad. Just frustrated. I was a little kid who wanted adult answers, but no adult in their right mind was going to give them to me.

  “I just want her to be okay. But the only way that’s going to happen is if Finch decides to let her live. Or maybe they catch him somehow and keep him from being able to sever the connection to my mom. But Dad won’t talk about the investigation at all! He said he’s not allowed to talk about it because of work, but I’m not sure I believe that. I think he’s just trying to keep me away from the details.”

  Donnie grunted—something he did often. I wasn’t ever sure if it was his way of responding or if it was just a thing he did involuntarily to clear his throat. I chose to believe it was the former anyway.

  “He has to be keeping her alive for a reason, right?” I was back to talking about Finch again. I didn’t know if Donnie followed my sporadic ranting. “It just doesn’t make any sense at all to devote time or resources to doing that unless there’s a reason, you know? But I can’t for the life of me figure out what it would be. What possible reason does he have to keep her alive now that he knows the entire protection agency is after him?”

  I thought about that for a moment, letting it hang in the air. Was my mother somehow important to Finch’s plan? Or maybe it was my father who was? Regardless, something didn’t add up. Spending time with Bentley had taught me to examine the logic behind things, and in this case, Finch’s logic didn’t work. Something was missing, and it was something Finch knew that I did not.

  We reached the center of downtown Freepoint—a fact I knew only because the sidewalk under my feet had changed from concrete to brick. That meant Jack’s was only a block away, which gave me a sudden craving for cheesy breadsticks.

  “You feel like having some breadsticks?” I asked Donnie. He didn’t respond with a statement, but I heard him grunt, which I took as a yes. “Come on, then, my treat.”

  Donnie’s legs are quite a bit longer than mine, and there was a noticeable pep in his next few steps. I could tell he was excited about the unexpected treat, and I did my best to keep up. The thought of Donnie being so happy made me smile. “You know,” I said, as much to myself as to Donnie, “I can’t believe I haven’t talked to you about this before now, but I heard a rumor about your super powers.”

  Silence.

  “I was thinking … it wasn’t a very long time that you were gone. You took off and then found my dad and brought him back to the cornfield in an incredibly short amount of time. Too fast, really, for an ordinary person. The blue light-flash? And I talked to my dad about it, too.”

  Still nothing. We strode on. Jack’s was only a half block away.

  “And then there was that time when you went racing around Bentley’s guesthouse, remember that?”

  Donnie grunted again.

  “You know what I think, Donnie?” I asked with a playful tone. “I think you run fast. In fact, I think you run really fast … like, superhumanly fast. I bet you can do other things fast too, right, Donnie?”

  “Yeah.” It was the simplest of admissions, with no real emotion attached to it at all. He sounded almost sad, even. Like a kid whose mother just asked if he had any homework he needed to do before playing his video games.

  I was astonished. I’d known Donnie for almost four months, and I’d only heard him speak about four times. Anytime you got a word out of Donnie was an occasion to mark in some way.

  “I think that’s your super power, Donnie,” I continued, “speed.”

  We’d reached the sidewalk in front of Jack’s Pizza. The little bell on the door gave a ring, and a married couple shuffled past, carrying on whatever heated conversation had begun at their dinner table. I grabbed the door to hold it open as they went by.

  I finished my thought, whispering, “You have the ability to be extraordinarily fast, don’t you, Donnie?!”

  Donnie just stood there for a minute. I assumed he’d returned to his normal self, and I’d gotten all the spoken words there would be out of him that day. But he must have just been contemplating things, because suddenly, he spoke again. “Yeah … Donnie is fast.”

  And with that, he took his large frame inside the restaurant and headed straight for the nearest open table, leaving me to deal with the open door … and my open jaw.

  Chapter 20: Spilling the Beans

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be allowed to have a sleepover so spontaneously, especially on a night that Dad was working. Even the regular weekend sleepovers required planning and pleading that began weeks in advance. But we were fairly desperate. The next installment of the SuperSim upon us, and we felt we needed one more night to plan and prepare.

  Much to my surprise, Dad didn’t bat an eye; he gave me permission right there on the spot. I couldn’t believe it. I guess maybe he was giving me extra leeway because of the situation with Mom. Actually, everyone seemed to be giving me extra leeway lately—I was even getting grades on schoolwork that were better than I deserved, of that I was certain.

  The gang and I gathered at my house for one more powwow session before the second SuperSim. Dad had the night shift at work, off looking for Finch or patrolling for danger somewhere—he rarely told me any details about the cases he worked on, and when he did, it was always long after they’d closed.

  Thanks to stupid custodian traditions, we were forced to wait for Patrick to go to bed before we could discuss super-stuff. And that proved difficult any time all his older brother’s friends came over for a sleepover. After all, it’s the little brother’s job to try endlessly to horn in on an older brother’s social gatherings.

  Even Chad was present, having only been officially inducted as a member of our team after a tense debate and vote the night before. Henry had voted no. He continued to cast his wary eye in Chad’s direction every now and then, looking him over suspiciously and not being the least bit inconspicuous about it. For his part, Chad stayed quiet and mostly just tried to observe and not rock the boat.

  When I asked Patrick what time it was, he started stalling, giving excuses for why he wasn’t tired yet—asking him what time it is was my way of letting him know it was bedtime, and he hated it. I’ll let you guess how I felt about it.

  “I had too much caffeine at dinner, and I’m not even a little bit tired,” he whined.

  “Whose fault is that?” I shot back.

  “But I’m just going to be lying there looking up at the ceiling.”

  “Then maybe next time, you won’t drink two Cokes with your dinner.” Sheesh, kids. I heard Henry snort a little bit.

  Eventually, after much more lollygagging than Dad would have put up with, I lost my patience a bit and yelled at him. “Would you freaking go to bed already so that the adults can play?”

  He shot me that snotty look he’d earned medals for and stomped off to bed like the ten-year-old he was.

  “F
inally,” I exhaled. “Sorry about that, guys.”

  “No problem,” Bentley said, “but we need to get to it if we’re going to get any decent sleep tonight. And we need decent sleep, tonight of all nights.”

  “All right, let’s go over the plan again,” I began. “Bentley’s cameras are now all in place, right?”

  “Check. All one thousand two hundred thirteen of them.”

  “Holy crap, that’s a lot of cameras,” Henry said. “You didn’t say you were going to put up that many!”

  “Wait, what?” It was Chad, the only member of the team too new to have been told about the camera plan already.

  “We put up a bunch of cameras—“ I began before being cut off.

  “One thousand two hundred thirteen of them to be exact,” Bentley repeated, quite proud.

  “One thousand two hundred thirteen cameras, all around the city,” I continued. “And we’re going to use them to get an advantage in finding the crime for the SuperSim.”

  “Isn’t that, like, against the rules?” Chad inquired, just as I had originally.

  “You would think,” I muttered, “but Bentley says it’s not.”

  “Every camera is in a public place, filming public activities. And none of them are actually recording anything; they’re just streaming a live feed that only I can pick up.”

  “I don’t think that means it’s legal, but whatever,” I said, not wanting to have the same argument with Bentley yet again. “Regardless, it’s not against the SuperSim rules.”

  “Wow,” said Chad, sounding impressed. “That sounds like quite an advantage, indeed.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Bentley said, awkwardly attempting to give Chad a high five. It didn’t go very well, but I was pleasantly surprised to see him accepting enough of Chad to even attempt it.