“Vignettes.”
“Right. Fuzzy vignettes of a huge snake biting someone, and the person dying.”
If she didn’t have my full attention before, she had it now.
“I told Sarah about it. She thought I was being weird. We decided to go to the show. There were only a few of us—me, Sarah, and Shane, Sarah’s boyfriend, plus a couple of others. About a half dozen other people showed up, including this guy who appeared and smelled like he hadn’t taken a bath in a week. He was on drugs or something. Just before the show began I realized where I knew him from. He was in my vignettes. He was the guy getting bitten by the snake. I told Sarah and Shane and they laughed at me.
“A woman brought out a bunch of poisonous snakes and talked about them while she handled them. Snake Sally, she was called. It was a lame demonstration, until the end. The last one she showed us was the king cobra, which was in a basket to the side the entire time. When she took the top off the basket, it stood up about three feet. She told us that snake charming was accomplished not with the sound of the flute, but with the flute itself. The cobra naturally stands up and follows the motion of the flute, she said. She demonstrated with a stick, moving it back and forth in front of the snake. The snake moved back and forth with it.
“And then it happened. The weird guy jumped from his seat and ran over and grabbed the stick, yelling something in some other language. It wasn’t Mexican. The cobra struck him on the arm, and then everything went crazy. Everybody jumped up and ran away. I didn’t want to. The woman was trying to get the man to back away from the snake, but he pushed her away, knocking her down. Then he went for the snake again, and it struck him again. Sarah and Shane grabbed me and dragged me away. The weird part about it was that I wasn’t scared. I actually had a thought about helping subdue the man, or the snake. Stupid I guess. I was probably lucky that they made me go.” She stops and then takes another bite of her sandwich.
“Did it happen exactly as you had foreseen it?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says around her hamburger. “We found out the next day that the guy had died. He was high on PCP. That was when Sarah and all of them started backing away from me. That really hurt because Sarah has been my best friend since sixth grade. Best friends are supposed to be there for you.”
I reach across and touch her hand. “I’m sorry.” Like father like daughter.
“Sorry about what?”
“Apparently, you’ve inherited my talents.”
“How you guys doing?” The waitress is suddenly standing next to us.
“Fine,” I say.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No thank you.” I unsuccessfully hide my impatience. She goes away and I bring my attention back to Becky. “That’s my other talent.”
“What?”
“Knowing when disaster is about to strike—usually someone’s death.”
She swallows what she had been chewing, sips at her tea and says, “So I get this from my father? I’m a freak because of you?”
I know teenage girls are not known for their tact, but it cuts deep anyway. “I’m sorry.”
“And I can give you credit for the sabre-toothed cat thing, too. It seems that when sh . . . ah, crap happens, it comes in threes. Did you know that?”
“What about the sabre-toothed cat thing?” I say.
“I should have known better than to open my mouth. The zoo had some kind of prehistoric museum. There was a stuffed replica of the sabre-toothed cat there. Not Smilodon, but one of the smaller varieties. I pointed at it and said that my dad had seen real ones.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh no is right. I was made fun of in fifth grade because of that and learned a lesson. Why did I forget it? I graduate from high school and swoosh,” she makes like air passing over her head, “all common sense is gone.” She gulps some of her tea. “How do you handle people making fun of you, Dad?”
I consider the question for a moment. “I guess because I know what I saw, and I know that I’m right. I also stopped bringing it up or writing about it.”
“Is there any possibility you could be wrong, that it could have been some other kind of animal, like a mountain lion or something?”
“You doubt me, too?”
“No. I believe you. But that’s the kind of questions I got. I need to know how to answer them.”
“If it’s any help for your own peace of mind, there were nine of them. It’s not like I got only a glimpse of one. I observed them in their environment for long periods of time, and then wound up in a situation where your mother and I were pursued by them. That’s when I lost my eye and she broke her back, and we both nearly froze to death.”
She takes a bite of her sandwich and chews in silence for a half minute. “Can I read your journal sometime?”
“I don’t think so.” My journal is like a woman’s diary. It’s very personal, and during my time at Sans Sanssabre there were some very personal things going on that had nothing to do with Smilodon, things that my teenage daughter has no need to read. Despite all attempts by Victor Vandermill to destroy my journals, I managed to create a complete accounting in the last few days. By that time he didn’t care what I wrote because he had total control of my ability to communicate anything out, and he had no intention of ever letting me leave alive. I gave that to the FBI on a floppy disk the day I escaped. Although my laptop received a bullet, I was able to recover my hard drive, and thus the complete new journal. That’s what she wants to read and what I’d rather she doesn’t. But I don’t want to break this connection we suddenly have.
“Okay.” She washes down her hamburger with the tea. “Anyway, hardly anyone would talk to me. They went off to the beach and left me sitting at the hotel. That’s when I went out to a bookstore and found this.” She holds up the book, What Color Is My Aura? “When they came back I was sitting in the hotel garden reading it. Sarah made a big deal about it. Normally she would have thought it was cool, but after the snake and the sabre-toothed cat, she thought her friend was going over the edge. Bye-bye best friend, and every other friend I’ve ever had.” She sniffles. I grab some napkins and push them her way.
Suddenly the waitress is looming over us. “Is everything okay over here?” Waves of suspicion role off of her. She thinks this young girl is my mistress.
“My daughter just came home from her senior trip. It didn’t go very well.”
“Oh!” She stands there as though she deserves more detail, her suspicions only moderately squelched. “Is there anything I can do for you, dear?”
Becky wipes at her eyes and then looks up at her. “You were on your way to table six. We’ll wave if we need anything.”
She steps back and looks at the table of four on the other side of the room, and then down at Becky. “Yeah.”
“After that you’d better call your mother. You’ve been worried about her all afternoon.”
The waitress nearly knocks over a chair as she turns and briskly walks away.
Becky looks at me. “That’s another thing that’s been happening to me for the last two days. I’m picking up snippets of peoples thoughts. Just like you. Nobody knows about that though.”
“The waitress does. Maybe we’d better go.” I grab a bite of the hamburger, wrap the onion rings in a napkin and get up. Becky does roughly the same thing, except in reverse. She stuffs a few fries into her mouth and wraps up the burger. I drop a twenty on the counter and catch the waitresses’ eye who is talking to someone who looks like a manager. I point to the twenty, and we walk out the door.
Becky watches out the back window as we leave the parking lot. “It’s like God flipped a switch in me. Last week I was a normal, rebellious teenager. This week I’m a teenage freak.”
“It’s really not that bad.” I force the car into interstate traffic. “It’s a matter of learning self discipline. It might be fun now and then to do what you just did back there, but you have to be careful. It’s very easy to get labeled.”
“You said you have to work to see the aura.”
“It’s a matter of increasing the sensitivity of my eyes by making the photosensitive cells work a little harder. I’ve had to expand my range of visible light.” She opens the book and flips a few pages. “It says that we see in the range from point three to point seven micrometers.”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s violet to red.”
“What in the heck is a point three micrometer?”
She closes the book. “It’s the wave length of the frequency that our eyes can see. A micrometer is one millionth of a meter. That’s the length of a wave. . . ah, one 360 degree oscillation of a single sinusoidal wave.”
I’m off the interstate now, sitting in a turn lane at a red light. “Apparently you learned something in your years of academics. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. What is 360 degree of sinu something or other?”
“That’s one oscillation of the sine wave.”
A memory clicks in my head. Oh yeah. I knew that. Science was not my strong suit.
“Everything in the universe vibrates at some rate of oscillations per second. Sound that we hear ranges from twenty to twenty thousand cycles per second, the lower end of the radio wave frequencies. After that it’s microwaves, infrared, and then the visible, which is the stuff that we can see. That’s everything from red to violet and is a very small portion of the entire spectrum. At the top end of the spectrum are the ultraviolet, x-rays, and then gamma rays and cosmic rays.”
A horn honks behind me. I accelerate and turn through the green arrow. “I remember some of this from my school days, but to be truthful with you, it pretty much went over my head.”
“Science was my area, Dad. Don’t you remember the display I did for the science fair showing the frequency spectrum?”
“You mean when you took over the garage and left the mess behind I had to clean up?”
“Yeah. That’s it. I got an ‘A’ on it.”
“You got an A on just about everything; my sixteen-year-old who’s already graduated from high school. I didn’t think you retained any of it.”
“I didn’t think I did either. Anyway, so what I had to do was increase my sensitivity to the light by doing an exercise given in this book. And it worked! It’s so cool!”
“You realize what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“What?”
“First you complain because you’re a teenage freak, and then you say how cool it is.”
“Seeing auras is kind of cool . . . and normal, really. The other stuff is freaky. I don’t want to read people’s minds, and I don’t want to know when someone’s going to die.”
I understand what she’s saying. I pull into the driveway next to Tanya’s car and she says, “What are you going to tell Mom?”
“Everything you told me. Don’t worry. She won’t see you as a freak, at least no more than she sees me as one. As a matter of fact, we’ll tell her together. We’ll have to get rid of Christi first, though. She doesn’t need to know any of this.”
“Fine with me.”
It’s a quarter of midnight before Christi winds down from tales of a very exciting Girl Scout camp and showing of all the pictures she took. There must have been two hundred, some of them very good. She has a natural photographer’s eye. She said that she’s going to build a slide show so she can show them to Aunt Suzie. She wants to be an Eagle Scout. We advise her that only the boys have Eagle Scouts. She doesn’t care.
When Christy finally crashes and goes to bed, Becky passes me a look and I call a meeting at the dining room table. Curious as to the reason, Tanya looks between her oldest daughter and me. She whispered to me earlier about Becky gracing us with her presence all evening, saying very little about her own trip; asking if I knew anything. I only shrugged.
Becky looks at me.
“It seems,” I begin, “that our eldest daughter has developed a few talents in the last week.”
Tanya is holding her breath. She’s worrying that it’s something like shoplifting or smoking pot. I go straight to the point.
“Becky has discovered that she has the ability to read minds and forecast death.”
Tanya blows out a lungful of air with the words, “Oh God!” trailing off the end. “I thought it was going to be something normal, like she was pregnant.” She takes in another deep breath. “Oh God!” She looks up at the ceiling and then over at Becky. “How did this happen?”
“What do you mean, how did this happen?” Becky points at me. “He started it. When I started my period you didn’t ask me how it happened. This is the same thing. But this is not because I’m female. This is because I’m his daughter.”
I take that as a personal attack, but I say nothing. How can one defend a red wall against being called red when in fact, it is red? It seems like I’ve had to defend myself from being a man most of my life when in fact, I’m a man. Now I have to apologize for being a father.
“I’m sorry,” Tanya says. “What happened in Cancun?”
Chapter 8
Becky recounts the entire week, telling more than she told me, and ends with Grandy’s Restaurant.
“What are we going to do?” Tanya asks when she’s done.
“What do you mean, what are we going to do?” I say. “There’s not much that can be done. She’s going to have to learn to live with it, just as I have.”
“Live with it! You’ve done a great job living with it. You lost an eye because of it, and I broke my back, and we nearly got eaten by a bunch of prehistoric animals. On top of that, when you found someone else who was like you, you . . . you . . .” She didn’t say it; couldn’t say it in front of our nearly seventeen year old daughter. “You cheated on me,” is what she wants to say, or maybe words stronger than that. Instead she flushes and then mutters, “You got her killed.”
“That was eight years ago,” I argue. “And my abilities didn’t have all that much to do with it.”
“How can that be? It’s that sixth sense of yours that drives you into everything. Look what happened at Grandy’s. That should have been a nice little dinner with your daughter. Instead you had to run out of there like a couple of criminals.” She turns to Becky. “Don’t even believe him when he says you have to get used to it, that you’ll learn to live with it. Remember when we went down to Corpus Christi for the weekend and your dad was frantically walking up and down the beach?”
Becky remembers.
“He’d had one of his feelings and was certain he could save the person’s life. A thousand people on the beach and he’s trying to find out who was in danger.”
“The shark attack?”
“Yes. Your father knew it was going to happen three hours before. He didn’t know it was going to be a shark, but he knew it would be something, and it would be violent. In twenty-four years he hasn’t saved one single life.”
“Then why do we have this?” Becky asks. “Why do we have this ability if we can’t do anything but stand around and watch? When the cobra bit the guy everybody ran except me. I couldn’t move a muscle to either help him or to run away myself. What’s the purpose?”
“We’re witnesses,” I say.
“Why? Who do we report to?”
I can give her no answer, and more apologies seem useless. I stand and get a beer from the refrigerator. The women sit in silence while I’m gone. I sit down and pop the tab.
“What happened in Montana?” Becky asks.
We both look at her.
“I know that you fell off a cliff and nearly froze to death. Were the sabre-toothed cats chasing you or something? And who is this other person who died?”
“Oh boy,” Tanya said. She pushes her chair back. “I need a beer, too.” She walks into the kitchen.
“I could use
one, too,” Becky calls.
I laugh.
“Worth a shot,” she says. Nice to see her sense of humor is back.
Tanya returns with a beer and a Diet Sprite.
“Where shall we begin?” I say.
“We! It was your lunatic adventure. I’ll jump in when you get to my part.”
I pull a slug on the beer. “There was a company hidden away in the Flathead National Forest, in the Northwest corner of Montana. It was called Sans Sanssabre. I was invited there to write about what they did. They cloned the sabre-toothed cat from DNA found preserved in a cave in Southern California. What they didn’t tell me, but what I found out later, was that they were also making babies to order, cloning them using the same methods developed for the sabre-toothed cat.”
“Babies to order?” Becky was shocked.
It is a long night that starts in the Price dining room and then migrates into the living room. When it is done, Becky knows it all, or at least, nearly all. To my surprise, there’s a lot of it she already knows because she read my Pulitzer-nominated piece about the recreation of the sabre-toothed cat in the Flathead National Forest. As it was, I was not taken very seriously by the Gods who selected the Pulitzers. Imagine if I had mentioned my psychic visions. I have the nomination framed and hanging over my desk, even though I have no idea how I got nominated.
“It’s nice to have my daughter back.” Tanya and I are lying in bed, both of us still in that keyed-up zone that won’t allow sleep. “But I didn’t want it this way. I think I’d rather have the one who was rebelling.”
“She’s stronger than me,” I say. “A lot stronger.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never been able to know who was going to die. I always only know that something is about to happen. And that thing at the restaurant. I could read something of the waitress, but not like she did. I couldn’t believe it.”
We talk for another half hour. “I would still rather have my old daughter back,” Tanya says and rolls to her side.
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 43