“What do you mean nothing? You’re rushing somewhere.”
“Dinner. I’m hungry so I was heading down to the kitchen. Want me to fix you something?” Stop it Reba. Get the happiness out of your voice. Two days ago you were still morose over your mother, and this morning you were bickering with him over the University. He’s going to suspect something’s up if you act so damned happy.
“Yes. That’d be nice.”
“What would you like?”
“Whatever you fix will be fine. I’ll be in my office, catching up on the mail, paying the bills, and figuring the budget.”
“Sure.” I continue down, turn the corner, and then snap around. “Dad!”
“What?”
“Ah . . . can we . . . ah . . . go over the forms I have to fill out for college? They look kind of complicated.”
“Now?”
“I’m already behind. I need to get it all in tomorrow.”
He runs his hands through his hair. “I guess the budget can wait.”
The forms don’t take as long as I thought. We sit at the dining room table, Dad’s signature glaring at me from the bottom of one page. “So, what are you thinking about taking?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Basic required courses to start with, like general studies. After that, will see.”
“Your mom would be proud of you.”
“I know.”
He starts to rise.
“Dad. Tell me about when you and Mom met.”
“You’ve heard that story many times.”
“From Mom. You’ve never told it. I want to hear it from you.”
It’s still early enough that he may try tackling the budget again, maybe go online and look at the accounts. He sits down and I breathe easier. A sad smile plays on his face and I suddenly become glad that I asked. He laughs under his breath. “It was a blind date with your Aunt Suzie. I had never done a blind date before. I was kind of cornered into it by a couple of college buddies. I almost backed out at the last minute. I show up at the door and your mother opens it, a skinny girl I had absolutely no interest in. Too young, was my first thought, figuring it was Suzie. ‘Suzie has the flu,’ she says. I’m actually relieved. ‘Oh. Okay,’ I say. I turn around to walk away. ‘I’ll go out with you,’ your mother says. Brazen and bold, skinny, but beautiful, and too young. ‘No thanks,’ I say and continue walking. ‘What? You’re good enough for my sister, but not me?’” Dad laughs out loud and shakes his head. “That’s your mother.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s Mom. But it didn’t work out, did it?”
“No. She was a bare nineteen. I was twenty-four. We went to a movie that turned out lousy, hit a new fast food place that made hamburgers out of cardboard, and then sat and tried to have a conversation. I bored her and she bored me. It had to be the most miserable date either of us had ever been on.” He picks up my forms, juggles them into a neat pile and sets them back down. “Good memories.”
“Then what happened. I don’t imagine there was a marriage proposal soon after.”
He laughs again. “Eight months later I’m taking flying lessons, sitting in the pilots’ lounge poking through a magazine, when suddenly there is this gorgeous thing in a white molded-to-fit jump suit standing in front of me. ‘Hi,’ she says. Her face is familiar but I can’t place it. ‘Tanya,’ she says. ‘We dated once.’ And then I remember . . . the date from hell. She tells me she’s taking gliding lessons and points outside to a glider nearly as beautiful as her. We agree to meet after our lessons for lunch. That’s where it began. Three years later, you came along.”
“Mom was pregnant with me during her senior year of college.”
“Yep. Thought you were going to be born in the middle of graduation, but, happily, you were stubborn. Still are.”
I smile. If he only knew. I reach out and take his hand. “Thank you, Dad. I think I really needed that.” I’m very sincere. I think he needed it, too. “Help me with dinner. We’ll throw something together. I want to hear more stories about Mom.”
“Sure. I’d like that.”
And so together we work in the kitchen, father and daughter talking good memories; probably as close as we’re going to get for a very long time.
Just after midnight I transfer the last $9,000, study the road map one more time with the orange highlighter marking the route to Bozeman, Montana, and then make three quiet trips to Mom’s car. On the last trip I drop a note in front of Dad’s door, and whisper, “I love you, Dad. I’m sorry.” Will he ever forgive me?
Chapter 3
August 6, Wednesday
Bozeman, Montana
I’m sitting on a bench in the middle of a park in the middle of the Montana State University campus, drained by the two day, fifteen-hundred mile trip, but absolutely in awe by the majesty surrounding my new home. It is like a postcard and my camera sits, broken, on my desk in Texas. I must get a new one. I can’t let this time in my life go by without it becoming a part of my digital scrapbook. To the west are streaks of yellows, golds, bronzes and reds, accented by wee wisps of clouds. In one place golden rays shoot high into the sky; a heavenly light show. To the south, east and north giant mountains loom over me, their tops lit by the setting sun; one actually has snow. I want to call Dad and tell him what it is like. I talked to him once, from Colorado, and then turned my phone off. He was angry, but he wasn’t coming after me. I didn’t think he would. As much as I want to share this, I can’t face his words again, not yet, especially since the next time I talk to him he will probably know about the money. I have no one else to talk to. I used to be close to Aunt Suzie, but that has all changed. All my friends have dumped me. I am all alone.
While my computer boots up I watch the constantly changing sunset, take deep breaths, suck in the smells, and bask in the warm, dry air against my skin. This feels so right that I almost can’t stand it. My journal comes open and I look toward where I think Mom is, off in the northwestern edge of the glow in the sky. It is like she is there, smiling down at me, approving of what I’m doing, watching over me. Maybe I’m not completely alone. My hands fall naturally onto the keyboard.
Mom,
Please don’t be angry with me. I had to come here. It was meant to be. I’ll be up to see you as soon as I’m sure I can handle it, as soon as I’m sure I’m ready. I had to take the money; Dad wasn’t being rational. I promise I will use it wisely, just as you would have wished. I am who I am and this is where I’m meant to be at this time. I have no doubt in that. There is more journey yet to go. I am here to learn about life, about death, about Smilodon. I have to study them, these great cats. They are part of me, and I a part of them. When I go to visit you, I will be visiting them as well. No choice. I have to do it before they are gone. There is a reason I have the abilities that I have; I just don’t know, yet, what it is. Everything that has happened to this day has been designed to bring me to this place, right now, right here, and this place shall prepare me to continue on to someplace else I am meant to go.
Tears flow, unchecked, down my cheeks. There is no one to see except Mom, and He who paints the sky, and I hope and pray that they both understand. I turn my face back down to the keyboard and type.
The journey has begun.
Chapter 4
December 25, Thursday
No beautiful sunset today, but the snow is awesome. If it was summer I’d want to pack it into a cup and pour strawberry syrup over it. It is not summer. The clouds hang low and heavy. It is eighteen degrees. It’s supposed to get to zero tonight. Wow! Talked to Dad a little this morning and talked to Christi even less. She was cold. I miss her. I miss home. I miss Mom. I miss our family Christmas. Dad is still angry with me.
Talk about stubborn.
There are only a small handful of us hanging around the campus during Christmas vacation. The lonely. The unwanted. Carla found a local friend to spend Christmas day with in Bozeman. I really don’t know Carla. Don’t know much about Mandi either, though she’s
the only friend I have in Bozeman, in the entire world, actually. We only became friends when break started so before that I was totally friendless. She’s a walker and is probably out walking to the other side of the town and back. She’s from Canada; acclimated to these temperatures. You’re not going to catch me out walking. I don’t care how much clothes I put on, I’m still cold. I’ve been warned that there will be days when zero will be the high. I hope they’re joking.
Already had to put money into Mom’s car. It almost froze to death a couple of weeks ago. Had to get it winterized and a heater put in the engine block. I have to plug the damn thing in if it gets really cold. What do they mean by really cold and where the hell am I going to plug it in? Whoever heard of plugging in a car anyway, unless it runs solely on batteries? Give me a break! Now it’s buried under snow. I hope it’s alive come Spring.
I close my journal and push my computer aside. I’m snuggled under blankets in my room on the freshman floor in Hapner Hall, the girls residency dorm. I don’t like it. It’s weird but you’d think I would. In high school I had lots of friends, was semi-popular, enjoyed crowds and big groups. Ever since Cancun it has all changed. Cancun was my senior trip. It’s where I started reading aura, and where I foresaw a guy getting bit by a snake and then dying. It’s where I discovered that I was weird. It’s where my friends, my best friend, discovered I was weird. I wasn’t so popular all of a sudden. And then I decided I had to know for sure that the sabre-toothed cats that Dad tangled with eight years before, really did exist. I had to see for myself. So off I went to Montana where I did in fact prove to myself that sabre-toothed cats roamed in the Montana mountains. The trip from hell, no doubt about it. First Dad came after me and then Mom came after me and then suddenly we’re being chased around the mountains by men with semiautomatic weapons and night-vision goggles, Victor Vandermill’s killers. Sam, Samantha Sikorski, was his target and it’s because of me deciding to crash in her place that he was after her. Before I knew it he and almost all of his men were dead, along with Matt’s dad, Sam and my mom. And now . . . now I’ve inherited a combination of Dad’s talents and Sam’s. Dad’s talents were reading auras and forecasting deaths. Sam’s talent was telepathic communications both with humans, and with . . .
. . . I sit here in the middle of a huge university campus hardly believing that I’m even thinking this. It’s been long enough, five months, that I could probably convince myself that I made it all up, that I’m crazy. The thing is though, I’m not crazy. I’m weird; out of this world weird, but I’m not crazy.
I can talk to the animals.
More precisely . . . I can talk to the sabre-toothed cats. In a way, they are my friends, my family. If I were to go to them now they would accept me as one of their own. Worse yet, they’d accept me as their leader.
That’s weird beyond description.
I’m wearing a regular pair of socks under another thermal pair that’s good to below zero, long underwear, warm up pants, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a sweatshirt with Bobcats, the MSU mascot, in huge letters across the front. I’m considering a hat and gloves now that I’m not typing on the computer. I’m always cold. Even when I’m warm, I’m cold. At this moment, besides me, there may be only one other person in the building, Kristina. She’s manning the front desk. I have front desk duty later this afternoon.
I need a new computer; have thought about it a lot lately. I pull open my current computer again and search around some more for some good notebook deals. I vowed that I’d spend the money from Mom wisely and can’t convince myself that a new computer is wise. When it comes right down to it, this one is doing fine, even though it is three years old. It’s not as fast as a new one would be, but I don’t have anything too memory intensive on it. Still, one of those cool tablet PCs would be really nice. I see a tablet, one of the Fujitsu models, 240 GB, 4 pounds, 6 hour lithium-ion, pretty. I drool and try not to notice the $2,800 price tag.
Drat!
I close the computer and set it aside. I’m bored. Tired of reading. Tired of writing. Tired of surfing. Tired of being cold.
Suddenly there is a rumble in my stomach that jumps to my chest. I fly off the bed and onto my feet. The rumble turns into a tightness that makes it hard to breathe. My room disappears and another appears in my inner vision, Mandi’s room. She is not out walking. She is here, in her room, six doors down, and she has a gun.
“No!” I scream.
She puts it in her mouth.
“No!”
She pulls the trigger. The walls, curtains, bed, her pretty little lamp, turn a deathly red. There is no sound, no shot, because it hasn’t yet happened; the inside of Mandi’s head has not yet exploded. This is what I’ve been afraid of; this is what I so desperately wanted to avoid, prayed that it had gone away. I saw death in the mountains five months ago, seconds before it happened. I saved lives when I had time to intercede, saved Mom’s life once, failed the second time.
To be burdened with such a talent.
“Mandi no!” I yell as I blast out my door. I slide to a stop at her door. It’s locked. “Mandi! Don't do it!” Blood and brains slide down the wall. I can barely breathe. I step back and kick the door once . . . twice . . . the third time it crashes open and I rush in. Mandi is sitting in the chair with the gun in her lap, staring at me, her mouth hanging open.
“Don’t, Mandi.” I slowly walk to her. “Please. For me. You’re the only friend I have.” Her mouth closes. I pick up the gun and set it on the bed. And then everything releases. All the tension and fear and pressure burst out of me, and tears nearly explode from my face. I am very glad at that moment that I possess this talent to forecast death, to be able to stop it. I pull her to her feet, my arms go around her, and we remain rooted in place in the middle of her room bawling like babies on each other’s shoulders until there is nothing left.
Merry Christmas to us.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say.
“Okay.” She looks around her room, finds warm clothes, boots, gloves, scarf, ear muffs and hat. I guard the gun. I take her hand and we go down to my room where I find the same, doubling up on anything I can.
We step out.
My breath creates icicles on my nose. We walk for an hour and a half without saying a thing, out to Church, south to Kagy and then west to Eleventh and all the way North past Main. We keep on going. We turn east on Durston, at this point better than five miles into our journey, I’m sure. We stop at a corner.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay. It’s what friends are for.” We walk on. I’m not as cold as I expected to be. It actually feels good in some sadistic way.
“How did you know?”
How did I know? Tough one. “I’m psychic?”
“No. Really. How did you know?”
“I had a feeling.” We may be friends but we aren’t that close yet. Don’t know if I could ever be close enough to someone to share my weirdness. It destroyed friendships in Texas. “Why did you want to do it?”
She doesn’t answer.
“What’s so bad that you want to end it all?”
We cross two streets before she answers.
“I was raped.”
I stop and grab her arm. “When?”
She looks at me and then drops her eyes. “A year ago . . . today.”
“You were raped on Christmas Day? Jeez!” I feel sick. “Who?”
She starts to cry again. I put my arms around her. “My stepfather,” she says.
Suddenly the rape fills my head. She struggles against him and he slaps her, and punches her in the chest. Clothes are ripping, buttons popping, and then he is in her, ramming and pounding. She flops like a rag doll until he is done and he steps away. “I’m sorry,” he says twice and then a third time before he disappears from my mental video. She can barely do much more than crawl up the stairs to her room where she locks herself in.
We stand on the street corner embraced until I start to worry that the tears are
going to freeze on our faces. I make a motion and we start walking again. “Did you tell anyone, do anything?”
She shakes her head. “Not until March. I was ashamed and scared that I’d be pregnant. I wasn’t. He didn’t touch me again. I think he was ashamed of himself.” We walk in silence for a time before she continues. “I had a boyfriend, Justin. We . . . ah . . . well, he discovered that I wasn’t a virgin. He wanted to know who. I tried not to tell but he made me.” She takes a deep breath. “Oh, God. He went and beat up my stepfather. It turned into a big mess that got Justin thrown in jail, got my stepfather in the hospital, and got me kicked out of the house . . . by my mother. I did my last two months in high school at my cousin’s house.”
“Your mother didn’t believe you?” I’m shocked.
“No.”
I have the picture. No family. No friends. No self esteem. So here she is, an international border away from people who don’t want her, with no one to be with or talk to on Christmas day. Add on top of it the bad memories on what is supposed to be the happiest day of the year, and it sounds to me like a pretty good reason to stick a gun in your mouth. I don’t feel so bad about my life now.
“How are you paying for school? Does your mom still send you money?”
She shakes her head. I have some scholarships, a few small grants. My cousins family is really well off. They send money every month. My aunt has become more like my mother.”
“Okay,” I say, stopping to turn her toward me. “Here’s what we need to do. We need to get you to the happiest day of the year. You know when that is?”
“No.”
“December twenty-sixth. That’s forever going to be your happiest day because that means you made it though the saddest day, that you faced Christmas Day and you won.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 90