Indigo Read online

  “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.

  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 c
an 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.