Indigo (17 page)

I closed my eyes and focused on Seth. I thought about him, what was going on with his own body turning traitor on him. I focused on myself, my insides, yearning for that small, indescribable spark to generate inside my ribs. I focused on the indigo light, on the feeling and sensation of being a conduit.

I held this pose, kneeling in front of Seth, reaching within myself to find the start of it all. But nothing.

“Your hands are sweaty,” Seth whispered.

“They are,” I laughed. I opened my eyes, but I didn’t let go of his hands.

I tried to remember the feeling of it, right there, under my sternum, the wispy flutter of the first few sparks, and then the full burst of flames. But nothing happened.

I tried for a long while, but in the end, nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The mother wiped tears from her eyes. “Don’t apologize,” she said. “You tried.”

“It’s okay,” Seth said, and he placed a small hand on my cheek. Inside, I broke. Just a cleaving away from all that made sense. At that moment, I believed. I knew I had the power to help this boy, to save lives. I had this.

I just didn’t know how to control it. Yet.

“We very much appreciate it,” the father said.

“I don’t know how to start it,” I said. “It’s—”

“It’s okay.” This was my mother’s voice.

“I think I can do it, though. I just need—” But Mom was already ushering them out the door. Dad was shaking the man’s hand again. And I was so enraged at how helpless I felt.

Rennick came and stood close to me, his head bent over mine, an intimate gesture. “You believe it,” he whispered.

“I believe it.”

The tapping on my window woke me in the morning. The new light of the day was just starting to eke into the room, all purple and blue in the slants between the pear tree branches. In my dream, Seth Krane was knocking repeatedly at my front door, but when I woke, I knew the sound immediately. Pebbles at the window.

I patted at my hair as I leaned my forehead onto the cool glass of the window, my hand already opening in a wave. There he was, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, a box in his hands, his face full of something. Purpose.

I threw my blue fuzzy robe around myself and found Mom and Dad in the kitchen drinking coffee, Dad dressed for work and Mom looking a lot like me.

“He could’ve just knocked,” Dad said with a smirk. “What’s all the stuff? Is he planning on moving in?”

“Very funny,” I answered. “I don’t really know.”

I opened the back door and stepped out onto the stoop. The morning was really something, cool for New Orleans, with dew-wet grass and birdsong in the air. I could’ve just let him into the kitchen, but there was a part of me that wanted him and his visit all to myself.

Even with so much on my plate, and even with my morning breath, my tangled hair, my ratty old bunny slippers, I couldn’t help how I reacted to him. But there was something about him this morning, Rennick in all of his glory. Oh God, the shape of his shoulders through his T-shirt, the corners of his mouth as they turned up just as he raised his head to see me, the plane of his jaw. His hair was disheveled and he had on faded jeans, a tattered T-shirt. He was in full science-geek mode.

“Hi,” I said.

“We have to figure this thing out. Ourselves. You’ll believe it wholeheartedly. You’ll own it.”

I loved the way that sounded. Own it. “Then I can go find Seth Krane.”

“So you’re accepting this?” he asked.

“I am,” I said, grabbing the box from him. “What are we going to do?”

“Make a Leyden jar, for starters.” We moved toward the back door.

“We gotta have some rules,” I said. “I call the shots. If it gets too much. If I feel it getting … out of control, you have
to listen to me and leave.” I had my hand on the doorknob and looked back at Rennick.

He nodded. Did some kind of crossing-his-heart, Boy Scout salute. He wanted me to smile, but I couldn’t. My mind’s eye kept flashing to Sophie’s little face. The goggles, the rocks in her hand, the empty look of her death on the Lake Michigan shore.

“ ’Cause I believe it, but I’m still scared. Of hurting someone,” I added, averting my eyes. “Seth Krane. Anyone.
You
.”

“You’re scared to move on from this.”

I rubbed my knuckles on my lips, opened the back door. I nodded just once. There was some truth in that. I couldn’t deny it.

I expected Mom and Dad to be in the kitchen, all greetings and raised eyebrows, but I heard Dad’s truck pulling out of the garage, and so I assumed Mom was upstairs. I was getting privacy. They probably had talked about this. What had Mom called my friendship with Rennick, my attempt to help Seth Krane?
Good for the soul
.

I didn’t know about that. But I had to do something.

“One more rule,” I said, unloading the box onto the kitchen table. I turned to look at Rennick, who was pulling all kinds of stuff out of his gym bag. Lengths of wire. A roll of tinfoil. A small cooler.

He looked up from under the fringe of his lashes. “Anything.”

“I can’t touch anyone yet. I just can’t do that for …”

“Got it,” he said, and continued to unload stuff onto the kitchen table. I watched him for longer than necessary. Did I imagine that he swallowed hard against that comment? Did he care about this? Me not touching him? What was I to him? Who was he to me?

I pushed these thoughts away.

He pointed to the glass jar on the kitchen table, the roll of tinfoil, a bottle of carpenter’s glue. “I already spoke with your parents. I hope that was okay. I just wanted them to know what we were doing.”

“What are we doing?” Oh Jesus, this sounded like a loaded question.

And something—embarrassment?—quickly flashed across Rennick’s face. “Only changing the world.” He gave me his most mischievous smile, and my mouth turned up.

He took this as encouragement. “We are going to plunge into this. Do some real work on this. Scientific stuff. Tests. My kind of thing.”

“I’m in, but—”

“You know, we could contact the Tulane lab, include the doctors working on—”

“No!”

Mom came in then to fill her coffee cup. “I can make pancakes?” she offered.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Sure,” Rennick answered at the same time. The two
of them chuckled. He gave me a wink. “Moms love me,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “Of course they do.”

“You need to eat too, Corrine,” Mom said as she began to take ingredients out of the cupboard.

“If you say so.”

“So what are you going to make here?” she asked, eyeing the glass jar.

“A Leyden jar,” Rennick answered. “It’s part of our scientific approach.” He smiled easily at my mom.

I didn’t share in the smile. I did, however, resist—over and over again—the urge to close the space between Rennick and me, to sniff the scent of him, the sheets-dried-outside-on-the-first-day-of-spring smell that seemed to emanate from him. I wanted to kiss him for showing up this morning with all of this. For his plan of action. For his dedication.

And I wanted to kiss him for other reasons too. Just draw him near, run my hands through that ridiculous rock star hair, lick the stubble on his chin.

I absolutely loved him for showing up this morning, for coming back and trying.

I took the scissors from Rennick and began to cut the tinfoil as he instructed. “Just glue it all around the jar,” he told me. “It’s like an early battery.”

It felt right to be doing this in my kitchen, working at something tangible. This was good, productive, and maybe a little dangerous.

*  *  *

When we were finished with the Leyden jar—and the pancakes—he opened a cooler.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“Corrine, they’re crawdads. We’re not using lab chimps.”

I looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath. “I’ve read as much as I could online. There isn’t much.”

“I know.” He sat across from me. “But let’s get serious. The first step is that you have to control it. Whatever it is, you have to own it. Maybe summon it.”

I tried not to balk at this. Summon it. “Can you summon the power to see auras?”

He seemed to consider the idea. “Yeah. I see them always. But sometimes I want to see them more clearly. Focus. Anyway, that’s what you are going to do. Try and bring that feeling—whatever it is—back.”

“I have always spent so much time and energy praying for that feeling to stay away.” My voice sounded puny.

“You are in control,” he said, and looked at me sternly. “You gotta believe that, Corrine.”

I bit my lip.

“We can stop anytime.”

But could I?

He took out a small crayfish. Placed it on the coffee table, atop a paper plate. “He’s fresh. Hasn’t been dead long. Less than an hour probably. What can you do?”

Rennick sat back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and smiled, watching me.

I closed my eyes and focused on the symptoms, the things that usually preceded the indigo lens. I thought about the churning in my chest, the engine of power flickering to life under my ribs, and I concentrated.

Nothing.

“It’s probably going to take a while,” Rennick said.

I tried. I really tried. For the better part of an hour, I tried to get myself into some kind of Zen state, some kind of meditation mode that might bring about the power so that I might possibly dream about harnessing it. But nothing. Zilch.

Truth be told, it was difficult to concentrate with Rennick’s eyes on me. It was difficult to do anything except focus on not touching him.

I vowed to myself to try to summon it on my own. Alone. Later.

We played backgammon instead. Rennick won. Of course he won. All three games. When he was packing up his dead bugs and crayfish, he grabbed a sketchbook from his box of goodies and tossed it across the coffee table at me. He made it seem nonchalant, but I caught the look out of the corner of his eye. “For you,” he said. “You can look at them later. I have to go help Dodge out at the dock.”

“Thanks,” I said, knowing that “thanks” didn’t really
cover it. He was letting me in, even as I kept my proverbial distance.

“And Mia-Joy is coming with us tomorrow.”

“She is?”

“She is. I saw her at the Shack. She wants in.”

“Of course she does. God forbid I do anything exciting that Mia-Joy might not be a part of.”

Rennick chuckled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and headed for the stairs, because right then, right when I wasn’t concentrating on it, it had switched on inside my rib cage. Just a little spark, but it caught me off guard. And I felt open, scared. Not in charge. I balked. I had to get away.

Later that night, I sat on my bed, the Leyden jar on my nightstand. We had painstakingly glued tinfoil all around the inside and the outside of the jar, filled it with water, and then put an electrical charge in it and measured the voltage. It was really nothing, just the first in a long line of ever-improving batteries. A visual for how Rennick liked to think of the physio-electric power that we somehow tapped into. “It’s like you hold on to a charge—electricity,” he said, “but more than that. You hold the spark. Give it away through the touch.”

I looked at the Leyden jar, the flame in my chest now gone, and I tried to summon that flame. To bring it, that power, back to the surface. Conjure it. Own it.

Nothing.

I listed in my mind the reasons why I had to move forward from here, the reasons I knew it was safe to at least try. Number one: I knew when it was coming, i.e., the indigo lens. Number two: Maybe I could learn to control it. Number three: I could heal?

I focused and meditated, tried and tried. Nothing.

I had given up and was playing Angry Chipmunks on my iPad when I heard the pebbles at the window.

I couldn’t go down there, because I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t want to be near him in the dark.

I got up and slid my window open. “Hey,” I called quietly, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark, searching the shadows for his form. Rennick stepped into the soft light from the streetlamp.

“Hey, you.” He smiled a tender smile. “I didn’t say it earlier, and I just have to say it.” He rubbed at his chin and looked up at me through his lashes in that flirty way. “You’re
so brave
, Corrine.”

“Rennick,” I said, but that’s all I could get out. I had to swallow against the emotion in my throat.

“Good night,” he said, and he left through the back hedge.

I stayed awake a long while, trying to summon it, reinvigorated by his visit. And when I finally fell asleep, exhausted from the exertion, I dreamt of Sophie again. And this time, when we were on the beach, she played on the rocks, digging for fossils with Rennick.

*  *  *

“I didn’t know there was going to be an entire zoo’s worth of dead bugs involved.” Mia-Joy turned up her nose at Rennick’s collection of roly-polies and other dead insects spread out on the kitchen counter.

“We’ll start smaller.” Rennick looked serious today. There was an edge to his voice too. Something had changed since yesterday. He showed me the crawdads in his cooler. “I brought minnows too. I don’t know.” He ran his hand through his hair, then kept bringing out more stuff.