“So, how far are you into this story so far?”
I drag my arm out from under us and look at my watch. “Oh, I’d guess about forty-five minutes.”
“What? You just made it up?”
“Yep.”
She sits up. “Seriously?”
“Yes. I just made it up.”
“So, what are you actually working on?”
“You know I don’t talk about it until it’s finished.”
She lies back down. “You don’t trust me.”
“We’ve been over this a dozen times. Artists don’t reveal their work-in-progress. It’s full of ugly boils, wet paint, and black holes.”
“Humph!” She snuggles close and I pull the comforter back over us before the chill sets in. It is only a few minutes before I sense her drift off. I think about the fact that the house will be full again tomorrow with the return of both girls. Christi I miss. I look forward to seeing her smiling face again. Becky is another story. I miss who she used to be, but who she is now, I don’t know. She’s changed so much in the last six months. It’s been a relief having her gone.
“She’s a good kid, Zach,” my neighbor said the other day. “My theory is, and it’s been proven to me over and over, including my own three, that if they’re a good kid when they go into that ugly time at the end of their youth, they’ll be good adults when they come out. In the meanwhile, close your eyes, pray, and try to sleep.”
I pray all right. I pray that he’s right. How many years before she comes out of it?
I worry about that for a time and then wake Tanya before we end up spending the night on the floor. She may like a hard surface to sleep on, but even with that I’m certain she would not be feeling good in the morning. I know I wouldn’t. She complains and then heads up stairs.
Chapter 5
The plan is to pick up Christi at the Lutheran church when her bus comes in, and then rush to the airport to meet Becky’s plane from Cancun. Just as we start out the door, we get a call that the buses are running about an hour late. After verbally drawing straws as to who will meet who, I lose and head for the airport.
I expect that Becky will be in a good mood after her vacation, so I don’t spend too much time preparing myself for her abrasiveness. While I wait I chat with Sarah’s mother, Beth.
“I talked to Sarah yesterday,” Beth says. “She said Becky didn’t have a very good time.”
Tanya and I hadn’t talked to Becky at all in the week except for the first day when she made a short, clipped call to say she arrived. We weren’t exactly sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. “Did Sarah say what happened?”
“No. I think the two of them had a fight.”
There are other parents standing around. One of them waves at something and then I see bits and pieces of overloaded backpacks through the deplaning crowd. I don’t see Becky.
“Did Sarah have a good time?” I ask Beth.
“I couldn’t tell. It was the only time I talked to her all week.”
I feel less guilty. Then I see Becky. She’s with Sarah. “Maybe the fight’s over and they’ve made up.”
“I certainly hope so,” Beth says. “She’s hard enough to live with as it is.”
“The week without Becky has been bliss.”
“You’re telling me. We’re ready for Sarah to go away to college.”
I smile at that. Okay, we do have something in common with the wealthy.
Becky approaches. “Hi, Sweetie,” I say.
“Hi.”
“I can take that if you like.”
She adjusts the lay of the strap over her shoulder and says, “I’ve got it.”
“Okay.” We silently follow the signs to baggage claim, then stand around looking bored for fifteen minutes. I study my toes until I notice that her toes are normal, not fluorescent. Odd. Several of the kids are gathered together talking expressively with a couple of parents. Before, Becky would have been a part of them. Now she stands like an outcast . . . alone, abandoned.
Just before the baggage starts dropping into the rotating bin, she says, “What color am I?”
I don’t understand the question. “White with a reasonably nice tan.”
“No . . . I mean . . . what color is my aura? I’ve heard you and Mom talking. I know you can see auras.”
“Eavesdropping.”
“I’m a kid. I can’t help it.”
I laugh, relieved. It’s a secret we thought we were keeping from the girls. “Why do you ask?”
“If you can see aura, then you can see mine. I never knew it came in different colors.”
“Tired navy.”
She pulls a small paperback book from her pack. Luggage starts sliding down the chute. She pages through the book until she finds what she’s looking for. “Navy is not a color.”
“I’ll have to beg to differ with you.”
“It’s not an aura color. This has red, green, orange, yellow, indigo, violet, magenta, lavender, crystal, blue, and a bunch of tans. No navy.”
“I’ve never studied the science of aura. I call it as I see it. Normally you’re blue.”
“Oh!” She studies the book again, flips a page.
I point. “Is that your luggage?”
She looks. “Yes. And that one over there.”
I grab the one, wait until the second one comes to me, and then manhandle them both out of the crowd. “You ready?”
She’s still reading. “It says that I’m creative.”
“Especially when you’re looking for reasons to go places with your friends.”
She studies me seriously. “Yeah. I guess so?”
I feel a father/daughter bonding talk bubbling up. Don’t blow it, I say to myself. Maybe if she knows more about me, she’ll have a little respect for me. Or maybe she’ll be embarrassed to be the daughter of a weirdo.
“It says I’m physical and sexual.”
“How about we skip that part,” I suggest.
“Why?” We’ve made it only a short distance. Tired travelers are dragging themselves around us. Businessmen are bustling by. Sarah goes past without saying a word, glancing at the book in Becky’s hand. Weird! I feel the word tumble off her aura.
“What do you mean, why?” I ask Becky.
“Why do you and Mom freak out whenever the word sex comes up around me and Christi?”
“Christi and me,” I correct.
She rolls her eyes. She did that to Tanya one time and Tanya told her that if she ever did it again she’d slap her eyes right out of her head. They had both suddenly looked at me as though Tanya had just treaded on the sacred ground of my acrylic eye. I laughed and then soon we were all laughing, and the argument disappeared. “And if you don’t freak, you conveniently change the subject.”
I start laughing. I don’t know why. It just pops out.
“What’s funny about it?” she demands.
“I’m sorry. I remembered when your mother told you she’d slap the eyes out of your head.”
“Oh. Did I roll my eyes at you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
Is this my daughter? “It’s okay. It bothers your mom a lot more than it does me. It’s just that anytime I see you do it, I remember that statement and I want to laugh.”
“And change the subject.”
I stop laughing. “I guess I did. You want to talk about sex.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Why would I want to talk about sex with my dad?”
Now I’m confused.
“We were talking about my color. It says I’m physical and sexual.” She looks at the book again, and then flips back a page. “Oops! I’m sorry. Two pages stuck together. That was red. I’m not physical and sexual.”
“Thank God!”
She laughs. “It says that different shades of blue mean different things. Dark, muddy blues can mean worrying or over sensitivity. Deep blues are loneliness. Sky blue is good intuition and
imagination, a survivor. That’s where the creativity is.” She looks up. “Which blue am I?”
“If I had to put a name on it, I’d say sky blue, though now you lean toward a muddy sky.”
She smiles. “I like sky blue.”
We’re now sitting outside on a bench. The book is lying on her lap. “According to this we could all see auras as babies and very young children. It’s a wider range of our visual world that very young eyes can see. For most of us, the range narrows as we grow up. It also says we can train ourselves to see it again.”
“We can?”
“How come you can see it?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s been there as long as I can remember. I thought it was something that everyone could see, until I was in high school. I mentioned it and my friends thought I was weird. Then, when I started talking about my psychic capabilities, I was ostracized.”
Becky is suddenly looking at me as though I’m wearing an extra ear on my nose. “What psychic capability?”
“Ah. . .” We’d never told the girls that either; figured it’d confuse them, maybe ostracize them as well if they were to open their mouths about it at school. I lean back on the bench. “That was a slip. I guess, though, you’re old enough to know. After all, you’ll be seventeen in a week.”
She waits, blessing me with her beautiful eyes, a pass down from her mother. I have her attention without angry words. Maybe it was time for her to know everything about her father. Did I have any choice in any case? I’d already cracked the door. There was no closing it.
“This is not to be shared with your sister. Give her a few more years.”
“Okay,” she says softly. “Is it crazier than the aura thing?”
“That all depends on what you consider crazy.”
Chapter 6
“There was a time when I could have been burned at the stake for my abilities,” I say. “There are still people today who might be so inclined, figuratively anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone could ruin me as a serious writer by attempting to expose me and thus getting me labeled as a nut case, a weirdo at best. People might not want my wife to clean their teeth. Your social structure would turn upside down. Those who you thought were your best friends, would disappear, and those who you might otherwise never talk to would gravitate toward you, the daughter of the man who is psychic.” I suddenly realize how vulnerable and impressionable my oldest daughter is. Could she take this wrong, or am I making too big a deal about it? “What happened in Cancun?”
We are sitting at angles, facing each other, looking directly at each other, the best for me to read her aura. It looks healthy and strong, as much as I know what healthy and strong auras are. I’ve read a little about seeing diseases in one’s aura, but I’ve never pursued it any further. Although I’ve seen unhealthy aura, I have no idea how to interpret it. She looks away at my question. “Nothing!” Her eyes come back to me. “Why?”
“I talked to Sarah’s mom. She said you and Sarah had a fight.”
“Oh.”
“You’re different. It’s as though you went from sixteen to twenty-five in a week. Something took place down there, there’s no doubt in my mind.” I’m using everything I have to read her, but nothing is coming. Often I get impressions from people; bits and pieces of entire histories; family; relationships, snatches of thoughts. I get nothing from Becky but a soft blue glow with flashes of orange; no thoughts. But her eyes harden and her jaw tightens.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Dad. You tell me about your psychic thing, and I’ll tell you what happened.”
I’m trying too hard. Normally visions come to me without my permission, like snapshots or vignettes. I relax my mind and maintain the eye contact. Still nothing. I used to be able to read my daughter. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
Sunday afternoon traffic around Dallas/Ft Worth International doesn’t seem all that much different from a weekday. I navigate my way around to I-635 then head east. I get off at the Northwest Highway exit and then pull into Grandy’s. I figure it would either be quiet enough or noisy enough that we could hold a private conversation.
It is the former. There are a couple of lone truckers, an older couple, and two families of four. We take the most isolated table and order ice tea. We barely have the menus open when the waitress is back with the drinks and standing over us with a poised pencil. “Are you guys ready?”
I start to say, “Give us a second,” but I’m anxious to get on with the father/daughter chat. “A cheeseburger with everything and a side of onion rings.”
“Same with me but with fries,” Becky says.
The waitress goes away.
I push the menus aside. “I have several abilities.”
She picks up the menus and puts them in their holder behind the sugar rack. “Psychic abilities?”
“Psychic is what I’ve always called it. I don’t know if the term is proper. I guess it is. First of all, I can’t see aura in everyone.”
She points to the book she carried in with her. “According to this everyone has an aura.”
“Maybe. But I can’t always see it. Some people are more guarded; others are like an open book. I had one person, a CEO of a company, who had absolutely no aura. As we began to talk one day, it started showing up. When our conversation went south, his aura glow virtually disappeared. I also lost any other read I had on him.”
“Other read?”
I lean forward. “It seems that when I can see aura, I sometimes get impressions of that person. It’s like I can reach into their memories and pull out pictures. It was during that very short time, with the CEO, that I learned that I was in danger.”
“Was that when you lost your eye, in Montana?”
I nod my head. “Victor Vandermill. The CEO of Sans Sanssabre. I was just using that as an example of how, for me, the aura can come and go. According to your book, you say, everyone has the capability of seeing aura, that it is a real, physical phenomena, if you call light waves physical. The psychic part for me is what sometimes comes with it.”
“The mind reading,” she says.
“I don’t know if I’d call it mind reading.”
“Clairvoyance.”
“Clairvoyance of some sort. I call it historical impressions, although with Victor Vandermill it wasn’t historical. It was real time. To be truthful with you, I don’t pay much attention to the auras since I’ve never studied the science to understand the meanings of the colors. It’s the impressions that are most meaningful.”
“Can you read me?” she says slowly.
I laugh. “Not now, though I used to get little things. I always tried to ignore them. Christi is pretty open. I used to be able to read your mom, but not anymore; or maybe I do but the pictures I get are also recorded in my own mind so I don’t recognize it as being from her. That may be the same with you guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if I get a picture of two children playing in the backyard, is it hers, or mine. I have no way of separating it.”
“Oh.”
“Family is too close to distinguish.”
“Hmm.” She sits back. Our eye to eye contact has been constant since the waitress walked away. Suddenly she says, “You’re blue.”
I blink a couple of times.
“Sky blue. Like me.”
Chapter 7
Neither of us has touched our tea. I suddenly find I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out and take another. “You can see my aura?”
“I have to work on it; focus hard. It’s difficult to do while you’re holding a conversation.” She drops her eyes and seems to relax. She sips her tea. “I remember being able to see it when I was little, but it went away. The book says that’s because of television and artificial light. It also said it’d take weeks to learn to see it again. I did it in a couple of days.”
“Is that what the fight was about between you and Sarah?”
“Not exactly. That might have been part of it, I guess.”
She sips at her tea again and then says nothing more. I probe. “I told you about me. The deal was that you’d tell me what happened in Cancun.”
She smiles. “I was expecting you to tell me something really weird, like being able to start fires or make things levitate.”
I laugh. “No. Nothing quite that out-of-this-world.”
“Or . . .” The long pause is broken by another suck on her straw. “Or, being able to know when something bad is going to happen.”
I don’t laugh. Does she know more about her dad than she lets on, or did she suddenly discover a talent of her own in Mexico? Either way, this is what she wanted to talk about and I don’t need a psychic read to tell me so.
The hamburgers arrive. Ketchup, mustard and little bags of mayonnaise appear.
“Can I get some ranch dressing?” Becky asks.
“Certainly.”
The waitress goes away and we fiddle with our hamburgers in silence until she returns with a small bowl of ranch dressing. By this time I’ve taken a bite of my sandwich. I chew and swallow. “My perception is that you had a feeling that something was going to happen, and then you witnessed it actually happening.”
“It was very weird. None of us wanted to go to this stupid zoo. Why would anyone our age want to go to Cancun to look at snakes and crocodiles?”
“Who set that up?”
“I don’t know. One of the parent organizers I imagine. We were done with school. We didn’t want to do anything that would be construed in any way to be educational.”
“Understandable.”
“But stupid. It was the first day we were there. Maybe we could have gone there after a few days, but not the first day. Anyway, we were at this zoo, bored out of our skulls, looking at huge, ugly snakes, when I suddenly had this feeling in the pit of my stomach. There was going to be a snake demonstration with a cobra in this one area; the King Cobra Show. There was just a table and a stool at the time. At first I thought I had just eaten something bad, but I suddenly had these visions around the table, like fuzzy . . . what would you call it?”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 42