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The Meaning of Isolated Objects

Page 19

by Billie Hinton


  They never told Scott for sure what happened, but suddenly his assignments had changed. He was asked to interfere in future events. And he began to get caught up in that idea. If he could affect the future, might he be able to affect the past? Keep Lynnie alive, shift things completely? But then she’d come to him, while he was working, and told him to stop. She wanted him to leave things alone.

  The voice in his head had seemed so real.

  It’s not bad that you see things, Scott, but it isn’t okay to change them. You don’t have the right to do that. You can’t see the whole picture yet. How everything you do affects something else.

  He had never revealed Lynnie’s words to anyone, but afterwards he’d balked at doing what was asked. Every time he was given a site to view, he saw what he needed to, but he also saw Lynnie. She stood in the darkened room with him and he had smelled her and wanted her. His focus shifted to what might be possible. How to have his dead wife back again.

  When his boss saw what it was doing to him, he mentioned Wendell. What was best for her. His removal from the unit had been good-intentioned, he didn’t doubt that now. Back then he had been bitter and confused. He suspected only a few people knew the details of those final studies. One of them he knew to be dead from a brain tumor. Scott had asked at the time if there were side effects, if doing that kind of work affected the brain. They had said no, and he’d come to think the ability to remote view had always been in him, triggered by the training and the work he’d done. Couldn’t stop doing. He now knew differently. He too had a brain tumor. And now he was on the clock again. He had to find Wendell before they got her too deep in the work. And before the tumor began to affect his ability to carry out this last, most important, job.

  They stood in the kitchen. Tag filled a plain tall glass and drank half, then passed the water to her. They had gotten quiet and she felt the opening, a way back to their intimate way of being.

  He led her to the bathroom and held the shower curtain aside as she stepped in. The faucet handle jammed and he fixed it. Water sprayed across her face. Water falling like rain, if it would only rain, the real thing, but thus far it hadn’t done so. Tag waited outside the plastic curtain while she washed clean of sweat and other things. Fear and doubt.

  When he got in with her they stood, taking turns beneath the spray, as if they needed to be wet, caught the solace of falling water, even if it was from a showerhead.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the sun, maybe they had sunstroke or maybe it was the mountain’s magic, but what happened next was nothing she had known. They spoke without words. His skin pressed against hers. They knew every single thing, but without language. No telling involved.

  The tips of his fingers fit themselves to hers and the world tilted. They moved in slow motion, to go fast would have been too much.

  There was sex between fingers, the backs of hands, the tracing of delicate and tender flesh. Sometimes one of them asked the other to stop, it was so intense.

  When they moved to the bedroom, dry finally, the air around them expanded. The center of the universe became the center of her orgasm. They were mountains, apart and then together, fitting perfectly.

  When it ended, hours later, she was illuminated and drained, dizzy with the rush of energy, a power line buried beneath the earth, coursing with electricity.

  “Where did you come from?” she whispered and he whispered back: “The same place as you.”

  Tag woke her with just the sound of his breath. Neither of them moved. There was no distance between them.

  She wanted to ask questions, the things that lovers knew of one another: his full name, his birthday, the name of the first dog he’d owned as a boy. What music moved him, the kind of pie he hungered for in the middle of a sleepless night. Details that meant nothing and everything, facts like stitches in a tapestry, some small part of the bigger image.

  A magical, delicate connection that could not be severed by any of the usual things: time, distance, circumstance. Absence.

  After he left for work, she moved through the day dazed with wonder and then confusion. Everything she saw, from the army wives across the street having coffee in lawn chairs to the dull green of military vehicles lumbering by, was stunning and beautiful. But edged with doubt and laced through with a vague sense of mistrust.

  She didn’t know what came next. She knew he was waiting for her, that unknown people were waiting on her to make a decision. She also felt her father, waiting someplace else. His hope that she made a different choice than he had made.

  Tag arrived home at the usual time. They ate dinner together, did the dishes. She washed, he dried. They put them away, navigating the small kitchen with ease, his body turning in sync with hers so that there were no collisions. They seemed to move perfectly together.

  Everything seemed more potent: the warm soapy water, the handing over of a clean plate, a glass, the easy way they worked together. No talk, except in the new dialect discovered between bodies, the graze of a hip, the slide of an elbow. A look, the blue of his eyes, the curve of his mouth. Simple gestures.

  They walked the neighborhood until close to dark. Back at the house they lay in bed with windows open, pressed close beneath the sheet.

  “I feel your heart beating.”

  “Me too.”

  She resisted the urge to grab hold of him, sex for comfort, in some desperate attempt to make things different than what they were.

  She had made sketches of missiles. He had to turn them over to the people he worked for. She had put the sketches away, and because of their intimate, private connection, he was waiting. She knew they were nearing the moment when he’d have to ask. And that he wouldn’t accept no as an answer.

  Worse, once they saw the sketches, they would demand more.

  When Wendell got up, Tag was quiet, and then he sat down at the dining room table with a pencil and paper. She thought he was making a sketch, but he was writing what turned out to be meticulous directions.

  He handed the page to her and she read. “Why are you giving me this?”

  “It’s a special place,” he said. “Where you can find me if you ever need anything.”

  It sounded like he was saying goodbye, but he didn’t. He simply kissed her and said he had to get to the office. But she knew. It was a chance he was offering. To leave, with the sketches, if she wanted to take them.

  He had shown her the mountain, he had shown her what she knew how to do. Told her how that skill might be an asset, and who wanted to pay her for it. But now he was leaving the final decision up to her. Or at least that’s what he wanted her to believe.

  “I want to try it.”

  Tag had come home from work and was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling a peach. He turned and smiled.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.” Wendell accepted half the peach and they ate side by side, leaning over the edge of the sink so the juice wouldn’t get all over the floor.

  After dinner he took her to the place she’d be learning. The viewing rooms were dim and comfortable, and she sat back in the chair he’d offered and closed her eyes. “So this is where you come every day.”

  “Most of the time. For now.”

  “Can we try something?”

  He handed her a pad and pen, and brought in a target sealed in an envelope. “This one was for tomorrow, but give it a shot now.”

  He left her and she closed her eyes. After a few minutes she began to sketch, but was distracted by images that were so potent and real she couldn’t really draw them. She switched to making notes, jotting down words and phrases that described what she was seeing.

  It was a hospital room. She couldn’t see the faces on the people, but there was a woman in a bed, a man close by, a doctor, two nurses. She became overwhelmed by the sadness, the man seemed to be almost melting with grief.

  There was a lamp and the woman in the bed was looking at the light. Then she became the light, and there was a baby. The man cried.<
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  Wendell realized her own face was wet. She dropped the pen and wiped the tears off with the back of her hand. She pushed the pad to the floor.

  It had been her own birth. The death of her mother.

  She got up and left the viewing room. Tag was sitting in a small area set up with chairs and a sofa. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t believe you did that to me.”

  “What?”

  She kept walking, headed for the door that led to the parking lot outside. He followed. When she didn’t stop, he took her arm and spun her around.

  “What happened?”

  “It was my mother’s hospital room, the day she had me. The day she died. How could you give that to me? What are you trying to do?”

  Tag looked shocked. “Come back with me, let me see what’s in the envelope. That wasn’t the target, Wendell. We would never have given you that as a target.”

  She wanted to believe him. She followed him back to the room. He ripped the envelope open. The target photo was a building with a red cross on front.

  “It appears to be a hospital, but there’s no way it was where you were born. Sit down a minute.”

  She sat and he looked at the photo again, and at what she’d written down.

  “I think what happened is you saw the target in your head but for some reason you went to a different hospital.”

  She shook her head. “Is that normal? Is that supposed to happen?”

  “Not really, but it can. Until you get better control. Let’s get out of here and relax. Tomorrow will be better. We’ll go more slowly.”

  During the night she dreamed the scene again. She woke up crying. Tag wasn’t there. She took her bag, packed the sketches, and left.

  Scott’s cell phone rang. It was Wendell. For once he was waiting for her call. He was exactly where she needed him to be.

  When she knocked on the door of his hotel room he opened it instantly. She looked terrible. Her face was blotchy and her hair a mess. Eyes weary and swollen from crying.

  They sat apart, one on each bed. His fingers wound tight on the wood bed frame. The sharp intake of his breath as Wendell cried, the sound of a woman who had lost control.

  He asked her again to tell him what had happened. She repeated the story while crying. It sounded like she had done a session that went wrong, she had been in the hospital room when Lynnie died.

  His anger nearly overcame him, that they had put so little structure on her first formal session. He watched her cry and felt his own control slipping.

  He heard the roar of Blackhawks in the air, where the hell was he anyway. When he looked at the woman on the bed he thought it was Lynnie. He thought she had been in his bed with someone else.

  Her perfect pale skin, the red hair fanned out over the edge of the mattress. Her face contorted. He was so confused.

  The room blocked itself out in his mind: window, door, the bag that he recalled did not have his gun in it. Why didn’t he have his guns? Slow, like sourwood honey sliding along a spoon, it came to him. He had come looking for Wendell. This wasn’t his bedroom. This wasn’t their house. That woman was not Lynnie.

  He let out his breath, but his eyes remained riveted to the bed. The woman lying there was, and it came as a jolt, his daughter. Wendell looked up at him. “I just want to forget all of it.”

  His heart cracked in pieces.

  He wished he could make it all go away.

  For the first time in years he shared a hotel room with his daughter. Wendell had cried when he asked her to get another room, threw a shoe at his face when he persisted. He gave in. Maybe she was right. Maybe if they carried on as if nothing had happened, the earth would tilt back the right way.

  Her stuff was piled on the floor by the closet. His eyes fell to her pack, the one he had bought and outfitted for her all those years ago, her sleeping bag, some ragged paperbacks Tag had loaned her. She had stacked them in an orderly pile, off by themselves.

  She sprawled sideways across her bed, perusing the room service menu. He wondered if she would say it and she did.

  “Can I get anything I want, Daddy?”

  His turn to answer: “Anything, Wendell-girl, the sky’s the limit.”

  In the late night of New Mexico, her father slept in the bed adjacent to hers. She seemed to be full of holes. Her mother, Tag, the ragged one left by the drunk man across the room. He had gone out and gotten a bottle of bourbon after dinner. She had considered saying something but held back. It had been a rough night for both of them.

  He smelled like he always had, but for the first time, she named the scent. He smelled like whiskey and men.

  She threw the covers off and stalked quietly to the door. Other than Tag, her father was the one man she couldn’t sneak out on. His voice cut through the blackness. “Don’t go.”

  She knew how upset he was over what had happened at White Sands. He was angry that they had sought her out, that she had fallen in love with Tag. That there was still something holding her.

  The path to the place she’d avoided for so long with her father cut through grief and sharp, unspeakable sadness. Like a tide that had caught them both up. She wanted to follow it, look for some shore of safety, a resolution. But the grief was what bound them. It was so much easier not to go.

  They each cried in the darkness of the motel room. She listened as he turned away from her in the double bed a few feet away. She wished he would turn back.

  Sometime in the night he asked. “What do we do now?”

  She went downstairs and slept in a chair in the lobby, and dreamed that in order to find herself, she had to fend off the crow, Corvus, a bird known to reveal secrets.

  For a moment in her hand-colored dream, there were two Wendell’s facing one another, hands extended. And then the two women merged, a slow and numinous combining of elements. Alchemy.

  She also dreamed of her mother, who gave Wendell her heart, tiny and warm and beating inside a white flower the size of a fist. Wendell accepted it with great tenderness and trepidation.

  Her mother’s hair blew back from her face, held aloft by a soft breeze that came out of nowhere. She did a little dance around Wendell and the dream ended.

  They didn’t want to stay in Albuquerque. Just like when she was young, they packed the rental car and set forth. She had no colored pencils and no sketches to make, but in other ways it was like old times.

  Ahead, khaki hills sprawled, dotted with dark green bushes and creosote. The distant hills seemed singed with black, as though burnt from above by a passing torch that dipped too low and lingered too long.

  Her father talked about the columnar formations, lava and basalt. The car windows were down and she leaned her head out for a moment. The rush of air blew full in her face.

  “You look more like her every time I see you.”

  They were back in painful territory. It cut deep, unspoken and unnamed, but she recognized the ache, the shape of feelings that had no names, just angles and sharp edges. She didn’t know how to talk to him. Nor how to answer him or describe what she had missed or what she had known.

  She reached over and squeezed his forearm, hard corded muscle, skin leathery from years of sun exposure. Kept her hand there for a long time. Neither of them spoke.

  Santa Fe was adobe and statues and galleries, flowers by the sides of every street, brown-eyed susans, or maybe some kind of sunflowers. They found a place that suited them to spend the night.

  Wendell wanted to walk and see the shops. Although Scott just about hated the thought of an entire day squeezing past people in narrow aisles and gazing at paintings of the outdoors when they could be seeing the real thing with their own eyes, he did it.

  The looking seemed even more pointless when she didn’t buy anything, but Wendell had never been extravagant that way. She didn’t need or want much stuff in her life. She had always liked her living space free of clutter. Empty air “to breathe in,” he recalled her saying once.

  She se
emed dressed for Santa Fe: black cowboy boots dusted with pale, dry earth, short skirt, bare legs. A turquoise blouse that opened at her neck. She walked ahead of him. Lifted her sunglasses rimmed with tiny beads to look at something hanging on the wall of the shop they were in. Her hair was twisted into a knot tied up with ribbon, and strands of hair had come undone and coiled across her forehead and down the back of her neck. When she turned her head quickly the long sparkly earrings swung through the air like tiny pendulums. It took his breath away.

  He followed her up and down the streets, in and out of shops, and held her purse when she asked. She let him pay for coffee, but not for the bracelet she bought, silver filigree with amethyst wrapped in every few centimeters. She untied the tiny tag and handed him the bracelet, extended her bare wrist and waited while he hooked.

  He watched men turn to stare when she breezed by. In some odd way it made him proud that she seemed not to notice, or care.

  It was getting dark when they realized they were starved. Down past the hotel a little house on a hill above the sidewalk had been converted into a pizza joint. There were wood tables on the porch. They both spoke at the same time. “Let’s eat here.”

  After they ordered, a longhaired man in a fringed leather jacket set up to play. The guitar was a thing of beauty, the tobacco-brown color of autumn leaves. The strings shone in the dim light. He recognized the first song before Wendell did. He used to sing it to her when she was little.

  wild horses couldn’t drag me away

  There had been no dragging. He’d been running. From the one thing that would have healed him, had he only allowed it.

  There was no need to say any of this out loud. It was remarkable how many things could be expressed with a glance, or the holding of hands. Which is what they were doing.

  Her hand was no longer tiny and swallowed up by his. It was a woman’s hand, soft and capable. Her grip was strong. Her fingers wrapped easily around his.

 

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