Authors: Cáit Donnelly
She tossed it to him and he pulled out one of the disposable
phones and dialed. “Mike? 06-11 plus 3.42 and 7.91.” He shut off the phone and
turned to her.
“06-11 were the numbers you gave Tran,” she said.
“Last June, Mike and I spent a weekend a few miles from here,
smoking cigars and swapping lies.” He grinned. “Damned if it didn’t hail on us.
Good thing we hadn’t planned to go fishing.” He looked up into the sky. “It
can’t be much past noon. We’ve got a couple of hours, yet.”
Her mouth grew moist and her mind blanked out, and her center
grew heavy and wet. Just looking at him could do the most amazing things to her
body, and she couldn’t wait to find out what it would be like to have him inside
her, filling her, blending with her into something new and—she swallowed and
turned her head away.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said, “but there hasn’t
been time.”
Gemma heard the smile in his voice, and looked back at him. She
was only a little disappointed. And that was unusual, she realized with
surprise. The idea of spending time with this sexy, totally attractive male was
almost as exciting to her as making love to him all afternoon. Almost. “Do we
have time now?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He quartered the area again with flat, wary eyes, but
he smiled when he turned back to her. “We didn’t really get much talking done
last night.”
There it was again. She felt herself opening, a tingling ache
growing as she remembered the taste of his mouth, the feel of his hands on her
body. She looked up slantwise and caught his eye, then focused again on the
trees and the sound of the rivers rushing toward their collision a few hundred
yards beyond the campground.
“I’d like to get some idea of this
filing
thing you do,” Brady said.
She took a deep breath and a minute to clear her head. “Mike
and I used to talk about it, and we tried to convince ourselves we were the next
steps in human evolution. Talk about hubris! But it was very satisfying. And of
course, we had to keep it a total secret, because everybody knows the ‘Next
Steps’ get persecuted by the ‘Normals.’” She laughed. “We had this whole
vocabulary worked out, and everything. Then his abilities went away when he hit
puberty. We haven’t seen anything in Timmy, so I don’t know if it’s been passed
down after us.”
“But you’ve always had extra abilities?”
“Pretty much. We used it a lot when we were kids—he’d knock my
blocks over and I’d disappear his GI Joes. If he was being bratty, I’d
unfile
them someplace we weren’t supposed to go—like
Dad’s study or the china cabinet with Mom’s German figurines.” She chuckled as
she picked up a twig and began to doodle in the thick, powdery dirt. “Mom
finally figured it out, though, and then I’d get in trouble for it instead of
Mike.”
Brady laughed, and took another long drink. Gemma watched the
muscles work in his throat and cleared her own. “How about you? Is your family
gifted
, too?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know them very well. My dad
was from Chicago, and he didn’t have any family left alive. All my mother’s
relatives are in Canada. He came up and took me away from them when my mom died,
and never looked back. I was seven.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He used to say they were weirdos, so I’m guessing it came from
her. What about your family?”
She took a swallow of soda. “Mom’s side, too. She had five
sisters, and they’re a little bit psychic, all in different ways. Why is it so
hard to say ‘different’ about your family? Anyway, it’s mostly just a little
more of one thing or another. Nothing to interest the tabloids. Except one of my
cousins who has this theory about how the Star People seeded the earth by—do you
really want to hear this? I’d rather hear about you than talk about my crazy
cousin.”
Brady leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his pop can between
both hands. “I thought of myself as pretty normal until I hit puberty, but even
as a little kid I never understood why people didn’t just
know
whose socks, or matchbox cars or soccer ball they were holding.
Maybe I had a better than average b.s. detector, but nothing special. When I hit
twelve or thirteen, I noticed sometimes people’s faces seemed to change—the b.s.
detector got stronger. I didn’t really listen to it, though. It was more
remembering afterward and dork-slapping myself for not paying attention. So I
understand that part of your talent very well.”
They shared a look, but she broke it off before it gathered
heat. “But that changed for you.”
“Yeah.” He swirled the liquid in the can and stared into it for
a second or two. “Yeah,” he said again. “SEAL training made it a lot stronger.
Pushed it to the forefront, more or less. I think it’s because that experience
just peels your onion all the way down.”
Gemma blinked, then the image came clear to her. “Interesting
way to put it. I think you’re saying it stripped you to the core—took off all
the protective layers.”
Brady smiled slightly and tipped his head back against the log
with a sigh. “Exactly.” He scoped out the area again before continuing. “One day
just after Hell Week, there was a fight. A ‘he said/he said’ kind of stupid
thing. We were all beyond tired. These two guys started swinging. I got between
them—”
“Tsk.”
Brady grinned at her and went on. “I put one hand on each chest
to hold them apart, and as soon as I
touched
them, I
could see exactly what had happened. I could hear them, even when they weren’t
talking. So I called the one guy on his shit. He looked like he’d been
shot.”
Brady stopped talking as two teenaged boys cruised by on
mountain bikes, whooping over the dips in the dirt road. “It changed after that,
too.” He shook his nearly empty pop can and the last sip sloshed loudly inside
its miniature aluminum echo chamber. He looked at Gemma. “What I really want to
tell you, though, is—”
He looked over at her, and her breath came short. His eyes in
the dappled light were the color of bittersweet chocolate, compelling, and dark,
so dark she could barely make out the pupils. The banked-down heat in them was a
red glow somewhere in the depths. The pull in her solar plexus felt so good she
didn’t want to look away.
His long mouth smiled, and she shook her head.
Gemma waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. The silence grew.
“I guess...” Her voice came out a surprising contralto that startled them both
into laughter. Gemma cleared her throat and started over. “I guess it’s my turn.
Mom died when I was fourteen. It was one of those stupid accidents you think
can’t happen to you, to your family. Some wood came off a truck on the freeway
and smashed into the windshield, and she was gone. Just like that. Dad was on a
case in Korea, and it took him a day and a half to get home.” She jabbed the
twig into the dirt. “For a long time after that, I
filed
things left and right. It gradually settled down to just
happening when I was stressed or unhappy.”
“Like when you lost your temper the other day.”
“Yeah.”
“Shocked my socks off.” Brady grinned and slid his eyes toward
her.
Gemma gave a long-suffering sigh. “When I was a kid, I could
control it.”
“Puberty got in the way? You said Mike lost his abilities.”
She looked away. “No. His just left—mostly, anyway—except he
still knows when I’m in trouble. Mine was more like a punishment. It was hard
moving all the time. Sometimes we’d COS—change of station—”
He nodded.
“—two or three times in a single year, depending on how Dad’s
cases went. I hated being the new kid all the time. Mike didn’t seem to mind as
much. He was a jock, big, tall, tough. He fit right in, maybe after a fight or
two. I was shyer, and nervous because I knew I was different.”
She took a sip of cola. “I was twelve, we were stationed in
Norfolk. There was a girl in my class who just hated me on sight. I don’t
know—maybe I stole her boyfriend in a past life, or something. She was kind of a
bully, and very sexually knowing—always telling the rest of us girls stuff and
using words we had to ask her to explain. I know enough now to guess she’d been
abused, but back then it was so edgy, being around her, and she had this clique
that followed her lead. She started picking on me, and finally I got pissed off
and
filed
this little purse she always carried
around with her. It was beaded, really pretty. I filed it right off her belt,
and was feeling pretty smug. She made a huge fuss, accused me of stealing it,
but even her friends told Sister I hadn’t been anywhere close to her. Later that
day in Phys Ed she had an asthma attack. I was in Music class, so I didn’t know
about it until I heard she’d been taken away in an ambulance. She nearly
died.”
“Her inhaler was in the bag.”
Gemma nodded. “I didn’t know. When I found out, it was like
being hit with a car, or something. Since then, I haven’t been able to control
it.”
He tipped his head a little to the right, one eyebrow quirked
downward toward the bridge of his nose as if he were considering something. “I’d
be willing to bet you still can.”
He spoke with such assurance Gemma had to pause to think. “But
I can’t. That’s just it.”
“No. You can. You did. With the soup thing. So you can. You
just have to figure out how you did it.” He stood up in one smooth motion and
dusted off the back of his shorts.
Gemma watched as he wandered over into the scrubby dry plants
nearer the trees. He brushed at something with the toe of his boot, and bent to
pry a rock out of the soil. He came back toward her, brushing it off and rubbing
it clean between his thumb and forefinger.
“Have you ever meditated?” he asked.
Gemma shook her head. “It doesn’t work. I always fall
asleep.”
Brady flicked her an amused look and set the rock in front of
her. “You don’t have to use a rock. Anything will work. You just need something
to focus on.”
“You want me to
file
it?”
“I want you to focus on it. Size, surface, textures, colors.
See if you can make that rock your whole universe. And as you get there, you’ll
feel your muscles unclenching. That’s what we’re really after. You’ll block out
everything else—all the stressors—”
“But I need the stressors. That’s the only time it works.”
He shook his head. “You need to get all that out of the way,
because I want you clear to remember everything you felt back in the kitchen in
that instant when you knew you could get the soup can back. That’s where your
control is, Gemma. Down in the wellspring of that set of feelings. So you need
now to block out any other fear, worry, anger, and just put all the extra load
into that rock. It will hold it all, and more, so don’t worry. Your job right
now is to clarify yourself. Got it?”
She nodded and swallowed, suddenly uncomfortable. “If you start
calling me ‘Grasshopper,’ you’re dead meat.”
He chuckled. “Okay.”
“No ‘Padowan,’ either.”
“Okay.”
“And now you’re going to tell me you learned this from an old
monk.”
“He wasn’t a monk. Just an old guy who recognized what I am.
Concentrate. I’m right here, and I won’t let anything hurt you.”
“But—”
“The rock. Do it, Cavanagh. What else do you have to do?”
Gemma’s gaze dropped to his lips almost of their own accord.
Brady’s eyes lit, but he shook his head. “You need to work. Just don’t disappear
the bed,” he added with a half laugh.
She looked away and tried to control the raging flush she could
feel reddening her face and tingling her nipples erect.
“Don’t control it, Gemma. Let it go. Just let go of it. All of
it. Release it all. Open your mental fingers and let it fall.”
* * *
Brady strolled back over to the log and sat against it,
opening a second can of pop as he settled in to enjoy the warm mountain
sunshine. The outdoors always steadied him, made the world look a little
clearer. He couldn’t remember anything of his early childhood in Chicago—not too
surprising, since his parents got divorced when he was barely three. His
earliest memories were of growing up in Nova Scotia, surrounded by a million
acres of heaven and a million of his Métis relatives, of himself laughing,
shouting, fishing, running free with his cousins or alone, walking the beaches
or the grass meadows, playing King of the Mountain on the massive boulders or
just climbing to the top of one to sit by himself and watch the sea, or the wind
in the trees and long wild grass.
He remembered his mother. Her face was clearest in the dreams
that sometimes plagued him, but even awake, he remembered her quicksilver laugh
and the flash of dark, almond-shaped eyes. Michelle Sangrey had been the family
beauty, his aunts had always said, speaking together in the patois of Micmac and
Canadian French they saved for spicy gossip and family secrets.
He was seven when she died—he still wasn’t sure what had
happened to her. He remembered the funeral, the ritual smoke, the sobbing drums
and wailing women, the unbearable, ripping pain of loss. When his father came up
from below the Border a few days later, Brady had refused to talk to him, even
to look at him. Instead, he’d hidden in the back room, in the closet, refusing
to speak English, or French, muttering in dialect—much to his aunts’
consternation as they realized how much he must have overheard and understood
all those years.
Finally the tall man had opened the closet door and hunkered
down to Brady’s eye level, forcing the boy to look up for a startled moment. It
was enough. Brady had seen sorrow in his father’s clear blue eyes. Grief,
affection, and something he understood after all these years was fear—hope,
maybe, too, the boy would accept him.
Brady had reached his hand to meet his father’s, and the bond
was sealed. Knowledge crashed in on him, flooded his mind with things a
seven-year-old had no way to interpret. Things he only understood years later.
In those first moments, it was enough his father shared Brady’s crushing sense
of loss for the woman both of them had loved but couldn’t keep.