Indigo (10 page)

Random? No.

The idea of coincidence didn’t even seem to cover this.

I watched my mom carefully to see how she behaved. Did she know about Rennick? Had she been talking to Mia-Joy? As we entered Chartrain and Mom chirped hello to the staff and signed us in, I watched her face and it was mostly a study of worry—a furrowed brow, gray circles under the eyes. I knew I had caused them, and it didn’t seem like she was in cahoots with Rennick.

Mom seemed surprised when I told her I would like to go in with her to see Mrs. Twopenny. “I just listened to her story,” I explained. Mom gave me a look, but she didn’t push it.

The room was decorated in bright yellows and reds, a loud flowered wallpaper pattern, lacy white curtains on the window. Someone cared about Mrs. Twopenny. Someone helped her room feel more like home.

“Good morning, Lila,” Mom said.

“A visitor! Hello there, Leslie!” I recognized her voice and her face from my sketch. A burst of singsong laughter emitted from this tiny woman lying in the bed. “Introduce me!”

Mom smiled. “This is my daughter, Corrine.”

I wanted to ask questions but didn’t know how to begin. Could I possibly have some kind of curse that I could turn into a blessing?

Did the blue light similarity mean anything? Would my mom be seriously pissed if I started to interrogate this old lady? Should I have told my mom first?

“Say hello,” Mom said to me, a stern look on her face. Obviously, Mrs. Twopenny was a woman not long for this world, and Mom wasn’t going to bear me not saying hello.

I stood there dumbstruck, trying to figure out the best line of questioning. I ignored my silence rule. I didn’t even consider it, actually. “Hello, ma’am,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I took one more step closer to her, and when I did it was like I hit a wall of
feeling
. Energy.

It surprised me, and it froze me, so I didn’t see—didn’t really register—when Mrs. Twopenny’s long thin arm reached from her side toward me. Before I knew what was happening, Mrs. Twopenny’s frail-looking, age-spotted hand clasped onto mine. I stared at it for a moment before I could believe it.

I pulled back. My hand slipped from hers, but she grabbed my other one with both of hers. Tight, strong. She had sat up now. And that’s when the lens of blue shifted in front of my eyes, coloring everything indigo, but not just coloring it, making it glow too, my mom’s face, the flowered wallpaper, the now-blue lace curtains. The energy opened like a flower in my chest, pulsating and pushing through my extremities. I closed my eyes against it, the power of it, the surge. And I tried once more to loosen my hand from Mrs. Twopenny’s. The woman was strong. But it was more than that. I was leaden in my position, a conduit. Frozen.

I let the indigo current—not unpleasant, but definitely singular in itself—flush through me, out the tips of my fingers, through the soles of my feet, my eyelids, out of my open mouth. Time stopped around me, and I sank into the blue, felt and saw nothing but this power, this surge inside me, throughout me, around me. Into Lila Twopenny. C-sharp major. It felt like C-sharp major. My favorite key. Anything was possible in that key. I could always make music in that key.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Mrs. Twopenny first.
Her hand had dropped from mine, and her eyes had closed. Monitors beeped and blipped; an alarm went off. The lights flickered, once, twice, then went out. I turned to Mom. Her mouth was agape, and she pulled me to her, held me close. I didn’t think to push her away.

I took a deep breath, aware now that I had been holding it. The exhaustion in my limbs and spine weighed me down. I leaned against my mother, hollowed out.

The air settled in the room, the charge dissipating. Two nurses dressed in peach scrubs flew into the room, bringing us back to reality. They spoke in serious, professional voices.

“Check her BP,” the blond one said. “Check it manually. This machine is not working.”

“Everything’s shot in here,” the male nurse said, pushing buttons on the IV.

“Breathing is shallow.” The blond one turned to Mom. “Would you mind stepping out?”

Mom pulled me by the hand. When we reached the waiting room across the hall, we watched two more nurses pushing new equipment into the room, and next came a doctor, running, the soles of his gym shoes squeaking on the floor.

This didn’t look good.

I got my bearings, snapped back to reality. “I’m sorry,” I said, briskly pulling my hand from my mother’s.

I walked toward the nearest exit. My knees knocked and the edges of my vision blackened. I took a deep breath and
steadied myself at the nurses’ station. Mom caught up with me there.

She turned me around by the shoulders. “You listen to me, Corrine. I don’t know what happened in there, but this is ridiculous. This isn’t … you. You didn’t … She was a
hospice
patient, Corrine.” She said this last part softly but firmly. I knew she was trying to convince herself, probably even more than me.

“Now you know exactly how Sophie died,” I said. I spit it out, trying to hurt her, trying to hurt myself.

I just left. She didn’t follow me. I heard her sob once, but I didn’t look back. I walked out the twin glass doors of the Chartrain Hills Nursing Home.

I killed her
. This sentence ran through my mind on a loop.

I turned on my heel to go west toward home, but my knees wobbled, my lungs burned, and I heard a voice. “Hey!”

“Corrine!”

My knees gave. Someone caught me, and I was out.

I dreamt of my mother. She crept through St. Louis No. 1 cemetery, dwarfed by the aboveground tombs and crumbling mausoleums. She seemed to be looking for someone. The gravel on the pathway crunched beneath her feet as she slipped between two crypts. When I looked, though, the ground wasn’t covered in gravel. Instead there were thousands of honey-gold chips of rosin. It smelled like orchestra practice back in junior high. I watched my mother, who was now crying, as she crunched the rosin beneath her feet, looking all around, calling my name. I tried to answer her, but no words came. I sat high on my perch at the top of a granite mausoleum, and when I couldn’t take the sound of her voice anymore, the sound of her desperation when she called my name, I flapped my wings and flew away, realizing only then that I was a nameless, voiceless blackbird.

I awoke in the darkness, in my own room, under my own covers. I sensed someone in the chair next to me, a hand stroking my hair, and the touch was comforting, so comforting. But then, like being sucked into a tunnel, I remembered it all. Who I was. What had happened. Who I killed.

I felt instantly gutted. Hollowed out. What kind of monster was I?

I looked up at Dad.

He wasn’t even angry, just relieved to see me awake. A tender smile, and this hurt more. I sat up in my bed, scooted out of his reach, hung my head.

“I killed her,” I said.

“Sweetheart,” he said. And he waited for me to look up. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

His voice was soft and patient. And I thought of him picking me up from canoe camp. I had let Annaliese talk me into going when we were eleven. But I had been homesick and called for my parents to pick me up on the second night there. Dad hadn’t been mad. He hadn’t scolded me for the wasted money. When I had apologized, all he had said was, “Your mom and I are always here.”

Now he put his hand under my chin, tilted my face up to his, and I let him. I blinked back the tears, held myself together.

“Sweetheart, Mrs. Twopenny is fine,” he said. “She’s asking for you.”

For a minute, I couldn’t process what he was saying. “I was there. I saw …”

He shook his head. “Corrine, I swear on your granddad’s name. She just passed out is all, and all the contraptions had some kind of electrical surge, went haywire, and … well, you thought … Hell, Mom thought so too. But she’s fine.”

“Dad, I don’t know if I can believe you.”

He looked at me like I had slapped him in the face. “Honey, have I
ever
lied to you?”

“She’s really okay?” I said. I tried to consider what this might mean for me, for everything. I had not killed Mrs. Twopenny. She had survived the blue light. She had survived me. And in that moment, I knew I had to go back. I had to ask more questions. I had to find out more about Ruth, what Mrs. Twopenny could tell me.

“Do you want to go see her?” Dad asked.

“I do,” I said.

And then Dad put his hands on my shoulders and said, “That’s my girl.” And for some reason, that just did it, it broke the dam. I collapsed into Dad then. He hugged me close, hard. And I let him, leaned into him, let him share my weight. I had missed him.

“Dad, thank you for catching me. Why were you there? At Chartrain?”

I looked up at him, and he looked at me, confused for a second. “That wasn’t me, hon. That was that friend of yours. Rennick. Mrs. Twopenny’s grandson.”

And for the first time in a long time, there was a lightness inside my chest, inside my heart. The possibility that all was not lost. That I was not doomed. What was this kernel of feeling? Could it be hope?

We arrived back at Chartrain late in the night, the wee hours of the morning actually. Mrs. Twopenny lay sleeping in her room, a daffodil night-light giving off gold light next to her bed. The nurses asked me not to disturb her, and I didn’t. But she was indeed alive. I watched the rise and fall of her breathing, and I marveled at it. Four-four time. Repeat.

An old man with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair and an even shaggier beard slept in the recliner.

I turned to Mom and gave her a hug. Although I wasn’t near ready to leave behind everything about my self-imposed quarantine, I knew I had to break the rules, figure some things out, because now there was hope that maybe I could control it. Master it? I owed it to Mom, to Dad. It was odd to hug Mom and not pull away, yet somehow easy. I relished the smell of her shampoo while I held her tight. Coconut. My eyes stung, but I blinked back the tears. I had missed this, hugging my mother. I had missed normal life.

And even in the awkwardness of initiating the first hug in a long time, I thought of how easy it would be to return to a normal life of casual conversations and everyday physical interaction. In that moment, my mother holding on to me,
me hugging her back and watching Mrs. Twopenny there with a little more color in her ancient cheeks than earlier, I felt like it all actually might be possible.

And there was a part of me—probably a large part—that knew I was being foolish and naive to let this one moment, this one victory, symbolize a new start for me. I tried to temper my hope, to reel myself back in.

I knew I had to. So when I went home that night, I did not sit and talk it all out with Mom and Dad. I didn’t share the roast beef sandwiches at the kitchen table with them. I took my food upstairs instead, feeling their shared glances behind me.

I took the photo album off Mom’s shelf and made myself look at Sophie’s gap-toothed smile, made myself remember that although today had gone well—today had hopefully been some kind of game changer—nothing could bring Sophie back.

I took out her rocks. From that night on the beach: the Petoskey, the agate, two other rocks that I couldn’t name. Sophie would’ve known what they were. I had shoved these in my sock drawer in a ziplock baggie so long ago, when Mom had given them to me after the funeral. I hadn’t even wanted to look at them then. Or ever. But now it seemed so important. My last link to her. I rolled them around in my hand, wondered at their histories, their origins. Sophie’s last rocks.

Who was to say that the next time I felt that surge of energy, saw blue, it would turn out like Sophie or Lucy and
not
like Lila Twopenny? Or who was to say it wouldn’t be something else completely unexpected?

As I stared into Sophie’s nine-year-old Girl Scout portrait, the rocks still in my hand, I knew that I understood nothing more than I had yesterday about this “touch,” as Lila Twopenny had called it. Nothing except that I now had reason to stay and dig out some more information, some knowledge.

I knew I would have to talk to not only Lila but also Rennick.

As I bit into the hearty roast beef sandwich, I savored the salty taste. I hadn’t enjoyed food—or anything—for so long. It tasted good.

And when the telephone rang, near dawn, not an uncommon thing to happen in a minister’s household, I didn’t pay it any mind. But then I heard Mom’s footsteps coming up the stairs. I braced myself. Bad news? Mrs. Twopenny? Had it just been delayed for a few hours?

Mom knocked on the door frame. I sat up, bracing myself.

“Mrs. Twopenny’s not in hospice anymore.”

“She died?” I croaked.

“No, sweetie!” Mom said, sweeping into my room and throwing her arms around me. “They can’t find the spots on her lungs in the MRI. Not on her liver. Not on her spleen.”

Mom released me, stood there, waiting for a reaction, something.

“Holy shit,” I said, not meaning to swear but not quite able to absorb her words.

Mom laughed, this loud, jingle-bell laugh, and hugged me again. Dad joined us, and there we stood, all three hugging, the photo album open on my bed to Sophie’s smiling portrait.