Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1)

by Julie Drew

  “We do have a choice,” Finn said, his jaw muscles clenched. “We keep her here, safe, and we figure out a way to code her heartbeat into the machine so that it will work without her. Then someone else can go.”

  “You say that like it’s easy!” Sam said, his voice raised for the first time.

  “I didn’t say it was easy,” Finn snapped. “Think about it. It’s not as though we’ve tried to do it and it hasn’t worked. No one had any idea until just now that Tes’s heartbeat was a part of this, and so no one has tried! For all we know, Joley could step into the time machine, play that old cassette tape of her heartbeat, and he’d make the jump himself! Don’t you think it’s worth a try?”

  “Oh, mate, I’m not going. Just to be clear,” said Joley quietly.

  Sam ran his hands through his hair, almost as if he still had the boyish haircut Tesla knew, thick and blue-black, the too-long bangs that fell in his face, instead of the bristly, short hair he now wore. “I don’t know,” he said, and it was the first time he’d hesitated since he’d stepped out of the shadows to find Tesla.

  Tesla, who, like everyone else in the room, had sat silently as the two men argued, could not have said why she suddenly looked at Lydia, but she did. Lydia’s expression revealed how torn she felt, how unable even she was at this moment—she, who was so completely and irrevocably in charge, no matter what the circumstances—to decide on the right course of action.

  Lydia sensed Tesla’s scrutiny and their eyes met. After a brief moment, in which neither of them said a word, Lydia smiled a small, inexplicably sad smile, and Tesla stood up from the couch. Sam and Finn became quiet, and all eyes in the room were on the red-haired girl, her arm encased in turquoise.

  “Finn, I appreciate the concern. And if these tapes allow someone else to make the jump, fine. But it has to happen immediately. I won’t spend another day of the time my dad has left—and it might not be much, let’s please be honest about that—in an attempt to fool the machine when I can just do it. I’m sorry.”

  Finn looked at her, and without a word turned and walked out of the room.

  “He looks really mad,” said Max.

  “He’s not mad, don’t worry,” said Joley. “Having to include other people in decision-making is still rather new to him. I’ve known him for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to figure him out. Trust me, it takes some time. He just doesn’t share everything until he’s ready.”

  Max thought about that. “Okay.”

  All of the energy and drama of the moment seemed to have left with Finn, and within moments people started to drift away, to get a few hours of sleep though the sun had just come up.

  “Tesla, I’m not sure at all that this is the way to go, but I believe it was your decision to make,” Lydia said.

  “I agree,” said Jane. She turned to Tesla and smiled. “Your mother would be proud of you.”

  Tesla nodded, suddenly unable to speak past the lump in her throat, and Jane, always observant, stood up. “I assume there will be no activity today?” she asked Lydia briskly.

  “You know as much as I do,” Lydia said serenely. “We’ll move on this later tonight. Tesla needs to sleep.”

  “Good. In the meantime, Tesla and Max, let’s head back to the house, shall we? I imagine it’ll be nice to sleep in your own beds. You must both be exhausted.”

  Max nodded and moved toward the door, clearly relieved, but Tesla found herself oddly reluctant to go with Aunt Jane. She felt that quiet, breathless sensation you get after an explosive event, when there’s nothing to really say or do in the calm that follows. It had descended upon her when Finn left the room; she knew she couldn’t have made any other decision, but she was filled with a sad, hollow emptiness, nonetheless.

  “I’ll take you over there later if you’re not quite ready to go yet,” Sam said quietly to Tesla.

  “Aunt Jane, you and Max go ahead. I’ll be home soon,” Tesla said immediately.

  Jane noted the pale cheeks, the suggestion of shadows under Tesla’s eyes. “Sure,” she said. “You need to sleep, though. You look tired, and you should be rested and ready when you go.”

  When Jane and Max had left and the sound of her aunt’s SUV had faded, Lydia said she, too, was off to get some sleep and excused herself from the room as the others filed out as well.

  Tesla and Sam were left alone.

  “Do you want me to take you home now?” Sam asked.

  “No, not yet. I don’t think I could sleep. I feel…I don’t know. Like I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I thought all I wanted was to go home, but now I don’t really want to. My dad’s not there…it’s all different now….” She trailed off, and then laughed at herself, but the sound didn’t hold any humor. “Forget it. I’m being ridiculous.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “Come on.” He took her by the hand and led her out the front door, down the steps, and back toward campus in the soft gray light of dawn. They walked for ten minutes in silence until they reached the lot where Sam had parked his motorcycle. He unlocked the storage compartment in the back and took out two helmets, laid one on the seat and put the other one on Tesla’s head.

  “Chin up,” he said, and when she tilted her head back, he fastened the strap under her chin.

  “You’ve upgraded,” she said simply as she took in the black and chrome Harley while Sam fastened his own helmet.

  He grinned at her, and then swung his leg over the bike and sat down. “Get on,” he said, and she did, and when she put her right arm around him and leaned forward, just enough to comfortably rest her broken arm in between their bodies, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against his back, the warmth and solidity of him against her cheek.

  The sun, risen just enough to illuminate the ribbon of road that stretched out in front of the motorcycle, began to shimmer in the air with a soft golden light. Tesla was lulled by the steady throb of the Harley and the nearness of Sam, almost to the point of falling asleep. She was so tired. She sat up a little straighter and looked around her, somewhat surprised to find that they were in the country, on a narrow, two-lane road.

  Sam felt her shift away from him and break the contact they’d shared as she had leaned into him for the past half hour, and he felt the loss of warmth against his back where they had touched. He slowed the bike and turned his head to the side to ask over the sound of the motor, “Recognize where we are?”

  Tesla looked more carefully around her, at the sunlit summer grass, thick stands of oak and maple, and masses of wildflowers that undulated like yellow and lavender waves in the sea of fields all around them.

  “Isn’t this…is this where we were last night?” she asked.

  The bike had slowly decelerated until they moved so slowly they could have walked at the same pace, and Sam pulled the bike off the right shoulder of the road, rolled to a complete standstill, and turned off the ignition.

  “Yes, but for me it was eight years ago that we came here, after that brief encounter with your father—and yourself—at your old house on Webber.”

  Tesla slid off the bike, undid the clasp on her helmet and removed it with her uninjured hand, while Sam took his off as well.

  “Why did you want to come here?” Tesla asked.

  Sam shrugged. “I remember that you were upset when we saw your dad, and we wound up here, and you felt better. Simplistic, I know, but I’ve always thought this place had a good vibe. It’s kind of special to me.”

  “Oh.” Tesla wondered if she was supposed to say more. Feel more. “So, you’ve come here again, since then?”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Sam said with an odd smile she could not read. “Come with me, I want you to see this.” He held out his hand to her, and after the briefest hesitation she took it. They walked across the field, through purple flowers that reached past their knees, toward a thick copse of enormous pines about one hundred yards ahead.

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nbsp; They didn’t speak until they reached the trees, where Tesla peered into the shadows beneath their thick, leafy boughs. She could just see the shape of a small structure nestled between the trunks of three huge old pines.

  “What’s this?” she asked as she paused and pulled back on his hand when he continued to walk.

  “What’s what?” He turned back, her hand still in his and a grin on his face.

  “This. This field, this house. Why are we here?” She didn’t want to sound suspicious, but she didn’t know him, not really. She had felt close to the boy Sam, despite the short period of time they’d spent together, but this Sam—this grown man, so sure of himself, so determined, so gorgeous—seemed different, and Tesla was suddenly very aware that they were alone, out in the middle of nowhere. She felt completely out of her depth, and she never had learned how to tread water.

  “Okay, I can see that you’re nervous,” he said and immediately let go of her hand to face her where she stood at the start of a vaguely marked path through the trees. “This is no big deal. This is the meadow we stopped at back then. I love this place. I own it. I built a little house here, it’s where I live. I thought you might like to see it, especially since you were at a loss as to where to go, where you fit in, just now.”

  Tesla looked again, tried to make out the house that stood in dappled sunlight and shadows beneath the trees.

  Sam watched her. “We can leave right now and go back to your house, or wherever you want. Just say the word.”

  “No,” she began, hesitant at first. “It was nice of you to think of it. I want to see your house. It’s cool that you built it here.”

  “Okay, let’s go.” He picked up the pace as they entered the path and the cool shade, where a soft carpet of pine needles cushioned each step.

  Sam took her hand again and gently pulled Tesla along behind him. “It’s not much, you know—an apartment, really. But it’s so quiet out here, and you should see it when it snows—here, come look at this.” They had reached a small clearing, just in front of the house, that Tesla hadn’t realized was there—she’d assumed the trees grew close and crowded the house, but that wasn’t it at all. The house had plenty of open space and air, and even sunlight around it, but it was all so subtle, so uncontrived. Instead of planting things around the house that needed to be trimmed and shaped and manicured, like some suburban dreamscape, Sam had opted instead to work with only the materials that he found on the site. Sandstone, and some fairly large, warm-hued boulders had been carted to a spot in the clearing where the early sun broke through the trees in brilliant shafts of light that contrasted starkly with the shade all around. He had shoveled rich black topsoil into all the crevices between the rocks and boulders that formed a mound almost five feet tall, a mound of rock that looked like nothing so much as an avalanche that had occurred millennia ago, and then within and on top of those mostly hidden crevices, now filled with rich nutrient soil, he had strewn seeds from the wildflowers that grew in the meadow. The warmth and light of the summer sun had brought forth an explosion of color, petunias and periwinkles, marigolds and dahlias, snapdragons and more, velvety purple, yellows and oranges so bright it hurt your eyes to look at them, soft pinks and the cinnamon and reds of the autumn that would eventually change everything, as autumn always did. The flowers grew in and around the rocks, at various heights, and looked as though they had sprung fully-formed from the rocks themselves. It was gorgeous, and wholly natural and, as Sam pointed out, required zero maintenance. He just had to let nature do its work.

  He spoke with a quiet pride and a hesitant hope that she would find it charming. And she did—but he didn’t realize that the place he had created here told her much more about him than he would ever have been able to tell her, even if he could have seen himself in this way. It was a place of beauty: she saw his appreciation of color everywhere, the comfort of balance and proportion that seemed accidental, unstudied, unaffected. The little fence that edged the back of the clearing, just behind the house before the trees became dense again, was made from found branches of different colors and woods, chosen and placed for maximum interest as white ash and birch contrasted with weathered, dark oak. Each piece of wood was bound to the next by what looked like copper bands that had begun to turn green in spots as they oxidized in the open air.

  “Wow,” Tesla breathed.

  “Do you like it?” Sam asked. “Really?”

  “Yeah, of course. Who wouldn’t?” she asked, a little scornfully, the sincerity in her voice unmistakable.

  “Come see the inside,” he encouraged, and led the way up to an arched oak door set in a wall of stone. There was a small window in the door, framed in the same greening-metal as the hardware on the fence.

  As they walked in the front door, Sam watched Tesla to catch every expression as she took it all in. The huge logs that made up the exterior of the house were visible on the inside, as well; he had not covered the walls with plaster or sheetrock. Instead, the stained wooden beams, with some hardened white material between each one, made the walls airtight and were their only ornament. Just inside the door was a coat and boot closet, and on the opposite wall a small mirror and the portrait of his family that Tesla had seen at his parents’ house.

  There were two steps down to a sunken room just big enough for a round table and four straight-backed chairs, a cherry-red sofa and a comfortable old chair and hassock. Open bookshelves lined the walls behind the sofa, and what were probably medical books, notebook and pen littered the rough-hewn coffee table where Sam no doubt studied. Instead of a TV, there was a stone fireplace, and to the left of the entry was a small but open kitchen, with a sunny garden window over the sink where clay pots of herbs grew. The roof was steeply pitched and open, the structural beams revealed, and the entire back wall was solid glass, with French doors that opened onto a small deck. Tesla gaped at the view. The land behind the cottage in the woods fell away to a spectacular valley, and from the glass wall one could see for miles the beauty of the natural world.

  “Sam, I’ve never seen anything like this,” she began as she turned to him, her eyes bright with appreciation and excitement. “It’s so beautiful! You’re actually an artist, you know—”

  Sam was kissing her before she could finish her sentence. He had taken one purposeful step toward her as she told him how much she loved the place, taken her face gently in both his hands, and covered her mouth with his own.

  CHAPTER 23

  Startled by the sudden kiss, Tesla paused for a fraction of a second, her unspoken question, yes or no, clear to both of them. She reached up with her right hand, placed it on top of his that cupped the side of her face, and kissed him back.

  Yes.

  He wrapped her in his arms and pulled her in close to him with unexpected intensity. He made a low, soft sound, and she pulled away, her heart hammering.

  “Sam, I—”

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” he hastened to say, both hands up in surrender. “I hadn’t intended that, I swear. That’s not why I brought you here.”

  “I didn’t think that,” she assured him. “It’s just that…I’m a little confused…I’m not sure….”

  “I understand,” he said. “I don’t want to scare you away, but I won’t pretend that I haven’t waited years for this.” His eyes were direct and without pretense, and Tesla felt a shiver roll up her back as his gaze held hers. “You, on the other hand, have not. Believe me, I am nothing if not patient.” He smiled, and while she knew from the tightness around his mouth what the admission cost him, she also believed he meant exactly what he said.

  “Okay,” she said, uncertain if that was the appropriate response. “Thanks.”

  They stood there, awkwardly at first, and then he said, “Let’s not let a simple kiss ruin the day. C’mon, let me show you the rest, and then I’ll get us a cold drink.”

  Fifteen minutes later Tesla nodded on the red sofa, her glass of lemonade tipped precariously in her hand. Sam reached ov
er and gently took the glass from her and set it down on the coffee table.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled as she fought to keep her eyes open. “I’m so tired all of a sudden.”

  “So take a nap,” Sam said. “It’s barely eight a.m. Just tell me what time you want to be out of here and I’ll make sure you wake up in plenty of time.”

  “I don’t know….” She hesitated, looked longingly at the comfy couch, and then back at Sam.

  “I’ve got some stuff to do around here, so you’re free to sleep.” He got up from the sofa and headed toward the kitchen. “You won’t bother me.”

  She needed no additional encouragement. Tesla pried off her running shoes and lay down on the sofa, a soft feather pillow, covered in some deep, dark green fabric, under her head. She closed her eyes, breathed out in one long, deep exhale, and was sound asleep.

  Sam sat in the worn, overstuffed chair across from the couch where Tesla slept. Slouched down low in his chair, he watched her, a brooding, unguarded look on his face. It freaked him out, that she looked the same after all these years. She was the same, he reminded himself, because no time had passed. He had grown up, and the vision of her he had carried in his head all these years was right in front of him—but now she was the kid, not yet eighteen. Christ, he could be arrested for what he was thinking. He knew he should walk away, but he didn’t know if he could. When it came to Tesla, he still felt like that awkward teenager who would’ve given anything—anything he had, or would ever have—to be with her.

  Sam tensed when Tesla stirred. She rolled, just slightly, from her back onto her side and faced him in his chair only a few feet away. Her breath slowed and deepened again, and she slept on. He realized that he held his breath, and shook his head, a silent laughter in his mind. You’re such a fool, he thought, though he never took his eyes from her face. The tangled mass of her hair shone brilliantly in the sun that streamed in through the wall of glass beside her and turned it from a deep blood-orange to honey-gold as it curled over her shoulders and spilled across the green pillow and halfway down her back. Her lashes were thick auburn fringe against her pale, smooth skin, cheeks with the barest hint of pink echoed in the slightly deeper hue of her lips. Her small, round breasts were outlined by the tight little T-shirt she wore, with its swirls of psychedelic blue-green-purple-white that rode up just enough to reveal two inches of her taut, flat stomach above her low-rise, somewhat tattered jeans. She had kicked off her shoes, and he saw that her toenails were perfectly lacquered with hot-pink polish, a note of unexpected whimsy that somehow broke his heart.