“Everything all right, Evan?” Cat asks, tossing her hair behind her shoulder and leveling a stare at Dylan that would ice over the cafeteria’s vegetable beef soup.
Jennifer takes a step toward the other kids. “Back off, you little maggots,” she snaps. “Catch you bothering our brother again and get ready to eat your damned basketball.”
Two of the kids turn and walk off, fast. Besides being two of the prettiest girls in the junior high classes, Jen scares people and Cat intimidates the hell out of everyone. I beam at them both and step closer. Jen feints at the remaining kids, and they all turn and run off. I look up at my sisters. “How’d ya’ll know?”
Cat leans down, hands braced on her knees. “You glow, Ev.” She flicks her eyes up to my blonde hair and grins. “When it’s sunny out, you’re hard to miss. We saw you come out and we saw the basketball game slow down and break up.”
“We keep an eye on you,” Jennifer adds, still glaring at the knot of kids who are back to dribbling and shooting the basketball and casting worried looks over at her. “Besides, we were watching for you because you haven’t been out at recess for a couple days.”
“I’ve been in the library.” I walk between them as we head across the playground. I know they need to get back to the upper field or they’ll get in trouble. “Sort of research. But I need the computer.”
“Yeah? We’re doing Reading Buddies with you guys this afternoon. How about if I tell your buddy to take you to the library and you guys can get on the computer? That’s allowed. I did it with my third grader a couple weeks ago. You can read articles.”
“Really?” I bounce in place. “That would be awe-some! Will you ask her?”
“Sure. You’ve got Terry, don’t you?” She turns as Jennifer tugs her arm and nods toward the junior high teacher crossing the upper field. “Whoops, see you later, munchkin. We’ve got to get back up top.”
We’re almost at the jungle gym. I nod, happy with the new plan. “Thanks,” I call after them as they walk away up the hill. They both wave and Jennifer calls back, “and stop talking like that.”
I just smile, and walk to the bars. I climb up about halfway, then settle in, draping my arms over the crosspiece at chest level. From above, a girl from my class peers down at me. Rachel. She treats me okay when no one else is around to hear her be nice to me. I smile at her.
She looks at me, then at my sisters walking away, then back at me. “Your sisters are wicked pretty,” she finally says.
I nod. “I know.”
My Reading Buddy, Terry, is awful nice. I wish I could spend all my time with my sisters’ classes. Their friends are even nicer to me than they are. I remember when I was little, a couple years ago, I used to think that I’d get to be in classes with their classmates when I got to the grade they were in. Then it finally occurred to me that everyone keeps moving up the grades, not just me. So I would always be with this group of kids I’m with now.
What a depressing thought.
But Cat talked to Terry and she takes me to the library and gets us onto the computer. I’m so excited it didn’t even occur to me that Terry would be watching what I looked up. The thought finally hits me as I call up the browser. I pause. This is going to be interesting.
“So what do you want to look up?” Terry asks.
I try to think fast. Speed isn’t my strong suit and I don’t lie well at all. All I can think of is my sisters calling me weird for watching the TV preachers. “How about . . . something strange and kind of, you know, out there,” I offer tentatively.
Terry grins. “Cool! Like UFOs? Or Bigfoot?”
Huh . . . Bigfoot twice in one day. I wonder what that might mean. Before I can get sidetracked, I force myself back on task. I get distracted way too easy. It’s one of the reasons I don’t pay attention so well in class. And it sounds like my ploy is working, so I need to focus. “Yeah, like that. Like . . . people who heal with their bare hands.”
“Oh, I’ve heard about that,” Terry points to the screen. “Put in ‘faith healers’. Or maybe ‘healing hands’.”
I’m already typing. The hits are immediate and plentiful. Terry helps me pick out which ones to click. The words start jumping around right off, so Terry also helps me read, which is another big plus to this whole Reading Buddy thing. I really owe Cat big time for thinking of this. With Terry reading and helping me decipher what all the website articles say, this is going a lot faster than if I did it alone. As a rule, letters and numbers just won’t stay still for me. When I first tried to explain that to the teachers, they thought I was dyslexic.
I’m not. They just move. If I concentrate real hard, and go very slowly, I can get them to settle down, but sometimes they don’t settle down in the right order.
At least half of the hits are all trying to sell something. Either a healing hands massager, or a book, or natural medicines, or an appointment with someone who has golden hands and charges $90 to put them next to people. I wonder if his hands are really gold, and if he paints them. Terry and I both start giggling when we get to the part where the website says that one of the side effects is women experience firmer, more erect boobs after sessions with this guy. They even use those words . . . boobs.
I really don’t think I want to spend my life giving women firmer boobs.
We agree that we should have expected the sales pitches, the internet being what it is.
With Terry’s help, I get past the advertisements to the articles. The browser doesn’t distinguish between the pro and con articles, and it looks like there is no middle ground with faith healing. This makes me wonder. None? How can that be? The articles are very clear though. They are split right down the center, with a little more than half of them going off about how all faith healers are charlatans (my new word for the day . . . Terry and I both had to look it up) and con-people and even dangerous because they keep sick folks from getting real help. The authors are frank in their disgust, and the stories range from silly to scary. Doctors and stage magicians wrote them, and people who research fakes.
The positive articles are almost all personal testimonials, talking about “true stories.” Where the doctors and research people tried to document things all scientific-like, and did definitely find some frauds, the pro side of the arguments are mostly people talking about what they’ve seen or felt, and making a strong connection between the power of the healer and the healer’s faith.
There are women in both sets of articles. That’s the first big difference I notice, even with the horror stories crowding my brain. Not just men in suits. That’s a relief. I don’t know why, but that part was really worrying me. Religion is still all over the place, though. I’m not sure how to take that. Some of it is very “New Age,” according to Terry, but it’s all still connected with a “Higher Power” moving through the healer and touching the sick.
I’m not sure it felt like some force moving through me. It felt more like something already inside me, coiled up and ready to stretch out and get bigger at any moment.
On the whole, the internet gets me a lot more information, but doesn’t leave me any more convinced I want to jump on board with these people who call themselves faith healers. The people who are against it make rational arguments and the people who are for it sound all kooky. Terry and I both get a little depressed with it all and we switch over to stories about Bigfoot.
For the rest of the afternoon, the thought hangs in the back of my head that maybe I imagined the whole thing. Maybe I’m a fake just like the internet said about everyone else. They made really good cases and some of the researchers went in with open minds and tried hard to find someone doing real healing. They just ended up disappointed and watching “healers” pretend to pull bits of cow and pig intestines from sick people’s guts.
I feel a little sick to my stomach. By the time I head for home I’m downright miserable.
The following week I’ve got another check up appointment with the doctors the school told Mama about. Last t
ime they put me in a big machine that made a lot of noise and they let me listen to music on headphones. They said they were scanning my brain, which I thought was so cool. I had to stay very, very still. They were surprised at how good I was at being still, and I think they thought I was going to be really scared. I just thought it was kind of neat.
We drive over to Keene to see them. Now that they’ve ruled out me being dyslexic, they are still trying to figure out what I am.
Me too.
The teachers and doctors don’t understand because I can talk fine—just a little slow—and I guess sometimes I say things that make them think I’m really smart but that doesn’t make any sense with the rest of me. Or at least the rest of me as they experience me. People see me staring out the window or trying to work out a math problem and they hear me talking slow and they just jump to conclusions.
As we’re driving through town we pass the little restaurant on Canal Street and there is a big easel sign out front that says STOP STUFFED CABBAGE AND CHICKEN FINGERS. I giggle. Stopping stuffed cabbage sounds like a fine idea, but I don’t have any thing against chicken fingers. I know what they meant—they wanted people to stop and eat—but they didn’t put in any punctuation so it looks like a protest sign. I laugh all the way to Keene about the idea of people marching against stuffed cabbage. I feel bad for the chicken fingers though, caught up in all the vegetable anger.
Thinking about food puts me in mind of how Mama always buys me jelly donuts after going to the dentist. Or a cookie as big as my hand, from the bakery downtown. But this isn’t the dentist, so I don’t know.
We get to the medical center in Keene, go in, and find the elevator. Mama doesn’t really like elevators, but the directions to the doctor’s office told us to use it, and we don’t know how to find the office using the stairs. It’s like a little maze over here. Well, a big maze. This is one of those really expensive places, you can tell by the smell. And the carpet. Mama and Daddy were really worried about that until the school people said they could help us because the state would pay for the tests they wanted me to have.
We get on the elevator with two little old ladies and a guy in pink pajamas wearing a big name tag that means he works here. His name is David. I can’t make his last name stay still long enough to read it. I also can’t help but stare. He has dark hair and really blue eyes behind glasses with black frames.
Instead of telling me to stop looking at him, he smiles at me. He looks nice. “Hi there,” he says.
“Hello.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “Why are you wearing pajamas at work?”
He coughs and grins. “They do look like pajamas, don’t they? They’re called scrubs. Lots of people who work in hospitals wear them.”
“Ah.” I nod my head and he smiles again. Mama’s hand closes on my upper arm and she gives me a stern look. Mama always tells me not to talk to just any person I see but sometimes I can’t help it. I’ve tried to explain to her that it’s okay, that I know who to talk to and who not. Everybody has dots around them. Some people have bright shiny yellow dots and they shine like little individual suns. Other people—the people I don’t tend to talk to—have little swirly dots around them that look like itty-bitty violet purple tornados. Some people are sort of a mix.
Even the kids at school have dots. Usually kids are mostly bright and shiny but some of them have dark spots, too—like Dylan. It’s a little unusual to see somebody my age looking that dark that early, but I’ve seen it more than once. Sometimes I think I’ve almost got it figured out why some kids are so much darker than others. But then it slips away.
One thing I have definitely figured out is that other people don’t see the dots. So I stopped talking about it a long time ago.
Either way, the guy in the pink pajamas is all shiny. I’d like to keep talking to him, but he gets off on another floor.
We get to the doctor’s offices and as usual they have me sit in a little room with books and toys while the doctor talks to my mom in his office. The door is open and I can hear them but I always pretend I’m not listening. Today is interesting. My brain is normal.
For some reason that strikes me as really funny.
“I’m sorry I don’t have anything more conclusive, Mrs. Trevalyen. The good news is the scans look great. Developmentally his brain is fine. From our previous tests, he’s obviously intelligent. We’re thinking perhaps his thought processes just work in a slightly different way than we’re used to . . . and that he needs a little more time than most kids. He can obviously reason and come to conclusions. His conclusions are just . . . very different.”
My mother snorts. “That’s all well and good, Doctor, but the school isn’t so convinced of his obvious intelligence. They still want me to take him out and enroll him in a special school.”
Ah, a special school. For special kids. Like me. I smile down at my book about bees and giant jam sandwiches. It’s really old, but I like it, and I dig it out of the basket every time I come here.
“Well, I understand the school’s concerns, given he isn’t truly operating on his grade level despite his innate intelligence. He doesn’t seem to come at learning in a direct, logical progression. In some ways normal development is definitely off. The bottom line is there doesn’t appear to be an organic brain issue at work, though, which is good news. I still believe we’re looking at a form of learning disability, that just isn’t easily quantifiable.”
Quan-ti-viable. I need to remember that one. Another one to look up. I’ll get Cat to help me, and I’ll clomp beast her leg if she doesn’t.
“There’s so much about the brain we still don’t understand, Mrs. Trevalyen.”
“And there’s so much about my son no one seems to understand. He’s still saying completely nonsensical things. We’re in the grocery store and the woman—who is a perfect stranger, mind you—this woman next to me is saying something about the green beans to me and Evan looks up at her and says ‘Don’t worry. He still loves you. He’s just really angry right now. Give him a little time.’ I thought the woman was going to burst out crying. And now? He’s started speaking in a southern accent. He says it’s going to be expected of him.”
I can’t hear the doctor say anything. His silence actually sounds pretty funny to me.
“We are Vermonters, Doctor. We do not speak in Southern accents.”
There is another long pause and I can almost see the doctor’s face as he struggles to find something to say. Finally he says, “I’d like to arrange for further testing.”
I sigh.
Now Mama is the one who is silent. Finally I hear her voice. “I don’t think testing is what my son needs.”
“But an extended study . . . your son is obviously different, and we may yet be able to determine what’s going on. There are more extensive imaging tools.” There is another, shorter, awkward pause, then the doctor clears his throat. “In the meantime . . . have you considered therapy?”
“My son does NOT need therapy.” My mother’s voice is ice, and I can hear exactly where Cat gets that tone.
I can also almost hear the silent “we are Vermonters, Doctor, we do NOT need therapy.” I think the doctor can too, from the way he hurries on.
“I understand your hesitation, but I have some excellent referral sources, and I think-”
“I think we’re done, Doctor. Thank you for all your . . . help.” I hear the chair scrape as Mama stands up, then her heels are clicking across the floor and she’s back in the room with me. “Ready to go, Evan?” She holds her hand out to me.
“But Mrs. Trevalyen—”
Mama walks out, my hand held tightly in hers. I glance back at the doctor, standing there with a distressed face, watching me walk away. Even though I don’t want any more tests and I want to jump up and down that Mama said no, I still feel bad. His dots are yellow, they’re just really faded, so they’re almost beige. I smile at him, and wave. The corners of his mouth lift, and he waves back.
As we walk back to th
e elevator I look up at Mama. She’s got her worried face on. Mama worries too much. I tug on her hand. “Can I have a jelly donut?” I ask hopefully.
She looks down at me, and smiles. “Sure. Let’s go to the cafeteria.” We know where that is too, because when I had to come over for tests they didn’t let me eat before. So they gave me a free breakfast after. We ride the elevator down, walk around two corners, and find a table. “Sit and wait here. I’ll go get the donuts,” Mama instructs.
I nod and sit. The cafeteria is busy. At the table next to ours an old man with hearing aids just like Daddy’s sits with an old woman in a bathrobe, with a cane leaned up against her chair. He’s got a worried face just like Mama’s. He holds the woman’s hand and I can see from here that she has his gripped so tight her knuckles are white.
Pain. Pain is everywhere in her face, and her dots are practically wincing with every breath she takes.
Something warm uncoils in my chest. Reaches through my arms, spreading like the heat of the wood stove in the middle of our Vermont winters. And I need to go to her.
When the man leans over and says something to her, she nods, and he rises with both her cup and his own, and heads for the table of juices and coffee and tea. I’m standing beside her without any memory of moving.
She smiles at me, a pained stretch of her lips that tries hard to climb to her eyes. “Well, hello there.”
“Hello.” I smile back at her and my hand is settling on her arm, gently. I feel the heat stretch and grow, arching like Gherkin after he’s just taken a nap in a sunbeam. I can almost picture the heat inside me stretching out paws and kneading like Gherkin does. The sizzle is in my hand and bursting from every finger and finding her bones and going straight to her hip. I can feel it, I can feel the burst of fire when it settles in her hip and explodes, healing the bone that has collapsed from something called avascular necrosis and I don’t know what that means and I don’t know how I know the words at all but it’s just there and all that really matters is the reformed bone and the look of surprise and relief flooding her face.
Children of Magic Page 5
