Indigo (9 page)

I walked up the white-painted porch steps and knocked three times on the door. No answer. I hadn’t been counting on this. I took a deep breath and knocked again. Nothing.

But I knew that I couldn’t just leave. I would lose my nerve, and he
knew
things. I had too much to talk to him about. Too much to ask. Too much that mattered.

I sat down on the porch steps and decided to wait. It was hot and clammy out, but the porch offered a little bit of protection from the sun. I cracked my knuckles and waited, making a mental list of what I had to ask him.

Your mother had the touch?

How can I control it?

What is it?

Who else do you know who has the touch?

How do you know it’s electrical?

I got up, brushed off the seat of my shorts, and walked along the side of the house, peered into the backyard. The far side of the property backed right up to the lake, with a small patch of woods to the west. A gorgeous little arbor sat down near the lake, with an old-fashioned swing hanging from it, magnolias creeping up on all sides. A chipmunk stopped in its path near a live oak, standing up on its hind legs to inspect me.

“Hi,” I said, and it scampered off. I walked into the backyard, eyeing the large vegetable garden, and noticed that even though the gardens seemed overgrown in general, they were all blooming and thriving like crazy, overtaking every possible walking surface—the sidewalk, the modest lawn, the small fountain near the shed.

I heard a voice then, and splashing. My first instinct was to turn around, go back to my car. But then I saw a figure, large and brown, toward the edge of the lake. My first thought was,
How did a
bear
get down here in Louisiana?

But a tennis ball came flying past me into the yard and the bear followed it, and by then I had put together that this was no bear, but just a behemoth of a dog. It was taller than my waist, its width ridiculous. Paws the size of oven mitts. It ran right past me, chased down the tennis ball. Then it stopped and shook itself, covering me in lake water.

“Sorry!” a voice called, and I put my hand to my eyes,
shielding them from the sun. I could see it was Rennick. A shirtless, soaking-wet Rennick.

I gulped hard, telling myself not to stare. “I’m sorry,” I began. “I just had to come. I want to talk.”

“Yeah, I’m glad,” he said. He stopped to shake himself too, not unlike the dog. I couldn’t help but notice that he was thin, yes, but wiry, built. Defined. And when he reached me in the yard, I tried to keep the blush from climbing into my neck, my cheeks, but I knew it was useless.

The dog joined us, tennis ball in mouth, as if awaiting an introduction. I was so glad to have something else to look at, something that wouldn’t turn me into a slack-jawed moron.

“This is Bouncer,” Rennick said, taking the ball from the dog’s mouth, throwing it farther than I could see in the sun. The dog took off. “Want something to drink? I have some stuff in the garage,” he said.

I nodded, trying to smooth down my ignored and frizzled hair. I wondered how he could seem so easy, so confident.

I followed him toward the small garage, stealing glances at his tanned shoulders, the way his hair curled up at the nape of his neck. I stopped abruptly when I got inside the door of what I first had thought was just a junky shed. I guess I expected lawn equipment, maybe a rusted-out Chevrolet, an old boat, something that screamed Louisiana hillbilly, but this was altogether different, although the old country honky-tonk music played softly from a radio on the counter.

The garage was a large, bare space, with a high ceiling
and exposed rafters. There were red-painted cabinets along the nearest wall, along with a sink and a mini fridge. In the middle of the room sat a long wooden table, just plywood on sawhorses. On it was a bunch of equipment, electrical cables, batteries, wires, things I couldn’t name. Books were everywhere. Piled in corners, stacks as tall as me. Books open on the table. Books on the floor, near the worn black leather couch in the back. But what really got me was the far wall. It was covered, absolutely covered, all the way up to the rafters, in canvases, papers, and tackboard. Painting after painting after painting. At first look, they seemed to be put up haphazardly, but if you studied them, they weren’t. Each one added to the ones near it. They built on each other. Some kind of messy, intricate design. They were all the same kind of painting, but each one was unique, just a study in color, in shading, in tone, in complements. They weren’t rainbowish, no. More like … descriptions.

Before I knew it, I had walked past the lab table and was standing right in front of the color wall studying the canvases up close, their brushstrokes, the technique. “They’re beautiful,” I said.

Rennick just laughed a little under his breath, but I heard it there, the twinge of nervousness behind his cool demeanor.

But for a second, it’s like I forgot why I was there. I forgot myself in those paintings. They weren’t rainbows, they weren’t color wheels, not haphazard combinations or streaks of colors, but rather descriptions of things. Things
that defied words and description, things that didn’t really have names or titles. They were something akin to feelings. Truths. Shown through patterns and movement, through the slightest variations of blues. Shown through the arch of a slow gradation from yellow to orange, through the fierce growth from white to red to purple.

I saw … friendship? Patience? Pride? No, those words only hinted at what was in these paintings. It was indescribable. Like the feeling you get when you’re eight years old and you wake up on Christmas morning, everything in front of you. Or how it feels to look into someone’s eyes and know that they just really
get
you.

Or how it feels to do something right, something selfless—that floaty feeling underneath your ribs. This was here, spelled out in his paintings.

I was mesmerized.

But then it kicked on. Inside me. That roiling flame in my chest, and I was right back inside myself. Right back to the same old problem. I cleared my throat and turned around, embarrassed by how caught up I had gotten in the paintings.

“They’re auras,” he said. He had found a T-shirt now and handed me a bottle of water from the fridge. He looked less sure of himself.

And I was aware of how these paintings, this place as a whole, was private to him.

“Your grandmother is Lila Twopenny?” I said. I fingered the top on the water bottle.

“Yes, and my mother had what you have.”

A beat passed until I realized I was staring at him, his dark blue eyes, the fringe of eyelashes. “How do you know about me? I’m sorry I’ve been … weird.” I blushed, not knowing where to look.

“I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”

“This is all just … kinda … an ocean of crazy for me. I think that I—”

“I heard what people said about you at school. I read some things. I kind of study this stuff.” He gestured toward his lab table.

“You think I’m electric?”

“It’s what we tap into, I think. All of us who are
extra
somehow. Physio-electricity. You’re a conduit.” He motioned around in the air. “It’s out here, you conduct it, and you turn it into something.”

“But how?”

“Now you’re asking questions I can’t answer … yet.” He smiled, back to his easy self.

“Have you seen your mom do these things?”

“No, she died when I was a baby.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I waited for a second, took a drink of the water. “Could I ask your grandmother? I mean …”

“Sure. But it’s all magic to her.”

“It’s not to you?”

“No.” I liked his certainty.

“Do you know anyone else who can—”

“I did, years ago, when I was a kid.”

I let out a sigh. I so wanted to be able to have someone who had all the answers. A guru of physio-electricity. But I figured that would be too easy.

“So what is this?” I asked, motioning to the stuff on the table, the equipment.

“Experiments.”

“I see.… What are you testing?”

“Electricity. Life.” He laughed. It was a good sound. “I just started copying the masters.”

I raised my eyebrow.

“You know. Early electricity. Leclanché. Franklin. Faraday.”

“In the hopes of …”

He smiled. Seemed amused. “In the hopes of … everything. I mean, why not? Seemed like a good place to start. I mean …” He paused and motioned to a contraption on his table. A silver ball, about the size of a soccer ball, hooked up to some wires. “It’s a Van de Graaff generator.” I shrugged at this. He flipped a switch and a barely audible hum filled the garage. The atmosphere shifted a tiny bit, and he motioned me over toward him. “When the masters first learned how to harness this, grab some of the static electricity out of the air, they were wild at what that could mean. The possibilities, ya know?” Rennick reached out for my hand. I shook my head. “Just put your palm on here.” He motioned with his own. I shook my head again. “It’s not going to electrocute you.”

“You take your hand away. Then I’ll try,” I said, giving him a look. I waited, and when he did, I placed mine on the ball. It felt alive, in a very microscopic, tiny way. An electrical hum on the inside of my palm. Just as the ends of my hair began to lift up around me, I realized that I had seen this experiment in a video in science class. “The static electricity makes your hair stand on end,” I said, remembering. Rennick chuckled, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the window reflection, the top layer of my hair standing out in straight lines from my head. I took my hand away. “So what’s this got to do with me?” My hair floated back down. I smoothed it with my palms.

He nodded, sort of pushed his lips out, and I knew watching him that this must be his thinking face, his look of concentration. He switched off the silver ball, shook his head. “Maybe there’s more to electricity. A whole new layer, just out there, waiting for us to tap into.” He looked up then, gave a funny little laugh. “Or maybe some of us have already tapped in.”

“But I want to know what this all means to
me
. To the touch.” I didn’t want to sound impatient, but there it was.

He got excited then, held his finger up in a
just wait
gesture. He grabbed a couple of wires with metal clamps at the end, then pulled a bucket out from underneath the table. He pried the lid off, and the garage filled with an acrid smell. Formaldehyde or a preservative of some kind. And instantly Rennick was transformed, a crease in his brow, his whole
body full of tension, questions, but he looked strangely comfortable. This was a new confidence, a real one, not a facade. Rennick plunged his hand into the bucket and brought out a frog. A dead one, dripping clear liquid. He placed it on the table, and before I knew what he was doing, he had picked up a scalpel and slit its underside near the legs.

“Whoa … what are you—”

“Just hold on a minute. I mean, I could hook these up to dead frog legs, right? Make the muscles jump. Reanimate them?”

“Okaaay?” I answered.

As I watched, Rennick did just that. He secured the tiny silver clamps to the leg muscles inside the body of the frog, although I tried not to see exactly how, to keep my eyes away from the grayish-white frog innards and the bulging, glassy eyes.

Rennick pressed two live wires together and there was a spark. The legs of the frog twitched. He did it again, and I watched more closely this time. “It reanimates the frog. The legs move. Jump. But it doesn’t bring the frog back to
life
. It doesn’t restore that.” He looked at me hard. “Just mimics it.”

I thought for a second. “Do you think
the touch
mimics life?”

He shook his head, never taking his eyes from me.

“You think the touch
restores
life.”

“Yes.”

“So, how? That’s a pretty big difference.”

He just shrugged. “I agree.” We stared at each other in silence. “There’s a lot of things like that, a thin line between what we think we know and what we don’t, really. Especially with electricity.”

“I read about dirty electricity. Atmospheric too.”

“Exactly. I mean, you put your finger in a socket, that electric current is going straight through you, quickest route it can find. But lightning doesn’t do that. It kind of picks and chooses its route. Random. It can go in, wipe out the systems, organs, and leave not so much as a burn.”

“So you think what I have is like lightning?”

“No, not at all,” Rennick said. “I’m sorry. I got carried away. I just think there’s a lot we don’t know about tons of things, especially electricity. That’s all.” He gave me a sideways look. Plopped the frog back into its bucket, threw the wires on the table. “I just don’t think we should be scared of what we don’t know.”

He held my gaze then. I saw myself in the reflection of his eyes. I was wide-eyed. Deer in headlights.

“You know what happened to my sister?” I whispered finally. “What I did?”

He nodded, wiped his hands on a rag. Our eyes never left each other’s. We just held that gaze for a few beats. “I think you’re wrong about that whole thing,” he said.

It swirled too high then, the heat in my chest. It began to feel like hot coals beneath my ribs. “I have to go,” I said, the clear, sharpened edge of truth coming alive inside me.

“But I think I—”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Corrine, I’m glad you came,” he said.

I walked briskly back to my mom’s minivan, equal parts glad I came, scared by the connection I had made, and more confused than ever.

Mom asked me to go along with her to Chartrain the next morning. She had to visit a patient and said she could use the company.

I thought of her chin quivering. I thought of her at Lucy’s funeral, knowing what memories it had brought to the surface for her, of Sophie. So I agreed. And there was also part of me that knew I agreed to go with Mom because this was me trying. This was me wanting to take a step.

Of course, once we got to Chartrain, Mom told me
who
she had to visit. Lila Twopenny. Of course. Her hospice patient.