by Amira Rain
“No cry, Mama. No cry.”
Back home in Briarwood, we had a pediatric growth specialist flown in from Switzerland. She was supposed to be the best in the world. She spent two days with Alex, putting him through a battery of tests and studying his eating habits. Not surprisingly, at least to me, she couldn’t come up with any diagnosis. She suggested we put Alex on a completely organic, gluten-free, vegan diet. We did, and he grew two inches in three days, consuming bowls of mashed potatoes so large they probably would have made an adult feel stuffed.
Hillary, who’d worked as a nutritionist before coming to Briarwood, suggested that we put Alex on a high-protein, Mediterranean-style diet, citing studies where people on such a diet didn’t gain weight, even when allowed unlimited portions. Alex ate enormous fresh spinach salads topped with grilled chicken, feta cheese, and Kalamata olives, all drizzled with olive oil. He ate an enormous tuna steak and two helpings of broccoli in one sitting, followed by a cup of Greek yogurt topped with honey and walnuts. He ended up growing an inch and gaining a pound within forty-eight hours. He also learned to run, being about the size of a two-year-old now, maybe even a bit bigger. All his baby fat had seemed to melt away overnight, and he was now strong enough to climb his way up to sit on top of the island, using just a few drawers as “stairs,” as he did one day when I had my back turned to him for about ten seconds.
One day in late September, I awoke early while Alex was still sleeping and took a mug of coffee out to the sunroom. Soon, standing while looking out one of the wide windows, I saw Ryan returning from running morning patrol, emerging from the woods in the distance in wolf form. Once clear of the dense trees, he shifted into his human form and began walking toward the house with a slow, heavy sort of step, head bowed. He hadn’t used to walk this way, but he had been doing so more and more as of late.
Stepping through knee-high wildflowers, he passed a tall sycamore with a thick trunk near the edge of the vast backyard. Then, suddenly he stopped, turned, and just stood staring at the tree trunk for a long moment before suddenly slamming a fist into it. Stunned, I watched while he proceeded to punch the tall tree several more times, until it actually seemed to sway slightly, clearly not a match for Ryan’s shifter strength. It was only then that Ryan began walking toward the house again, a scowl on his face visible to me even from a distance.
My heart ached for him. He was struggling with feeling helpless, I knew. I was, too. However, knowing he’d be coming in through the front door in the kitchen soon, I took my coffee, left the sunroom, and started cracking some eggs for his breakfast. For some reason, I didn’t want him to know that I’d seen him wailing on the tree. It had struck me as just too private of a moment. I knew he’d probably be embarrassed.
Eating breakfast with him up to the kitchen island, Alex suddenly frowned, pointing to a bit of scraped skin on Ryan’s knuckles, which I was pretty sure was from the tree.
“Oh no. Daddy, look. You got booboo, Daddy.”
Ryan smiled, though the smile didn’t reach all the way up to his eyes. “Daddy’s okay. Daddy’s just fine.”
Not seeming convinced, Alex began trying to wrap a folded paper napkin around Ryan’s hand for some sort of a makeshift bandage. “Now all better, Daddy. Now okay.”
Alex’s speech was quickly approaching that of a three-year-old.
With his eyes a little shiny I thought, Ryan pulled him onto his lap, clearing his throat a bit, and kissed the top of his head. “Thank you, little man. You helped Daddy’s booboo get all better.”
Smiling, Alex patted Ryan’s “bandage,” which he still had wrapped around his hand. “Good, Daddy. Good.”
That evening after dinner, Jill came over, insisting that she babysit Alex while Ryan and I went out to take a long walk in the woods behind the house, just the two of us. “Come on, you guys. Free babysitter. Pretty leaves all turning orange and gold. I had this idea that a nice fall nature walk might do the two of you some good, and by golly, you’re going to take me up on it.”
I protested, never wanting to spend a minute away from Alex, feeling as if his precious toddler years were flying by at warp speed, which really, they were.
Jill wouldn’t take no for an answer, though, eventually literally pushing Ryan and me out of the front door with a hand on each of our backs. “Sorry to put my hands on you like this, Commander Wallace. It somehow feels a little disrespectful to be giving a commander a little shove, but you haven’t really given me much choice.”
Having taken a real shine to Jill weeks earlier, and seeming enthused about the prospect of her babysitting him, Alex just waved to Ryan and me from the floor where he was playing with Jake. “Bye, bye, Mama! Bye, bye, Daddy!”
It was a warm evening, and once out in the woods with Ryan, hand-in-hand, while the setting sun made the trees glow with fiery light, I began to enjoy myself just a little bit, realizing that I hadn’t had enough fresh air recently.
After taking a long, slow, meandering sort of walk, not really speaking much, we somehow wound up just holding each other, which eventually led to us kissing, hands roaming freely. Even though I’d long since fully recovered from giving birth, we hadn’t yet resumed making love, being too anxious about Alex’s growth to really get into things. That was how I had felt, anyway. But now, with Ryan’s strong hands kneading my rear, my desire returned, and I told him I wanted him to make love to me.
“Right here…right here in the woods, just like on our wedding night.”
Just a short while later, I was bent over a waist-high tree stump, completely naked, while Ryan made love to me from behind, gripping my hips while thrusting his rock-hard pole into my slick depths. With the forest slowly being blanketed in darkness, I soon reached orgasm after only a few minutes, moaning out Ryan’s name while he growled out his own release, draping his body over mine.
Afterward, front-to-front, and skin-to-skin, we embraced silently while our breathing slowed.
However, before too long, Ryan spoke in a low, husky voice near my ear. “Everything’s going to be okay, Julia. I’m not going to give up, and I know you’re not, either. We’re going to keep fighting, and we’re going to find a way to help our son. I promise you. He’ll be okay.”
With tears suddenly prickling behind my eyelids, I nodded with the side of my face against his chest, praying he was right.
CHAPTER 13
When Ryan and I returned to the house, Alex was fast asleep in one corner of the kitchen, curled up with Jake in Jake’s dog bed. Jill was leaning over the island, frowning at a sheet of paper and running a few fingers over something written on it in what looked like blue crayon. She didn’t even seem to realize that Ryan and I were in the kitchen until we’d been in the kitchen for several seconds.
“Guys, look. Look.”
Ryan and I came over to the island, both asking what she wanted us to look at.
She held up the sheet of paper, pointing to an inch-high line of what looked to be a line of barely-legible lowercase letters. “Alex did these. I had the idea to teach him how to write the letters a, b, and c, so that I could have a look at his handwriting. Just look at it. I mean, it’s a little sloppy, yes, but he held the crayon all by himself, and just look at everything that’s there. It’s like his own mind knows what’s happening to him on some level. It has to. Because it’s all right here in the letters. They’re all saying, like….”
Frowning, Jill returned her gaze to the letters but didn’t continue.
I resisted the urge to give her a little shake, begging her to tell us what was wrong with Alex. “’Like’ what, Jill? What are Alex’s letters saying? Please tell us.”
She didn’t even look at me, just continued looking at the letters, still frowning. “They’re saying, like….” Chewing her lip, she began slowly running a finger across the top line of letters. “What’s happening to Alex isn’t anything medical. It’s nothing a regular doctor can fix. It’s more like…something outside of him is doing something to him…or di
d something to him that just kind of keeps going on, like how you throw a stone in a lake, and the ripples just go out, out, and out. All of Alex’s letters are rippling. And the thing…the thing that was the stone…it’s just going out, out, and out.” With her finger having stilled atop a letter c, Jill just frowned at the paper for a long moment before suddenly pushing it aside and standing upright from her lean over the island. “What’s happening to Alex isn’t something from this world, at least not from the normal part of the world with science in it and everything. It feels almost like something magical…like something from Harry Potter.”
Ryan and I begged her to tell us more, to keep running her fingers over the letters until she could determine what exactly was happening to Alex. Jill obliged us, trying to “read” the letters until the crayon started to smear from the warmth of her fingers. Even after that, she still continued looking at them, frowning, muttering a few things every now and then, things like, “Well, he’d definitely be sorted into Gryffindor; I can tell you that,” and “He wouldn’t like Snape much. Not with his stubborn, independent streak. He’ll always try to rebel against authority.”
However, after maybe a full half-hour of studying Alex’s writing, Jill looked up at us with a sigh. “There’s no more, guys. I’m sorry. I’ve pulled as much as I can, and I don’t think I’m going to get any more, no matter what I do.”
Devastated, I asked Jill if she could have Alex try to write more in the morning. “Maybe you’ll be able to ‘read’ something else. Maybe you’ll be able to be more specific about the whole ‘magical’ thing, so that we can figure out how to help Alex and stop him from growing too fast.”
Jill nodded slowly, chewing her lip and running a hand over her small baby bump. “Maybe. But no matter what, I’ll keep trying, even if I have to get him to write me something every day for a week. A year, even. Hopefully, eventually….”
With her eyes suddenly appearing to lose focus, like she was somehow zoning out in some way, Jill didn’t finish the thought. Then, after a brief moment, her eyes widened and she gasped, one hand flying up to her mouth.
“Guys. That old lady up in the Porcupine Mountains in the FDS. That old lady who lives up on Mount Arvon all by herself. Have you heard of her? Hillary told me about her. She’s supposed to be a hundred and eleven years old or something, and they call her a mystic. Even back when all the land up here was the upper Peninsula of Michigan, people would go up on Mount Arvon to visit her, and they said she was a psychic. She could tell a person his whole life story, and his whole future, just by praying over a glob of his spit or something. Some people would run back down the mountain screaming, Hillary told me. I guess they must have thought their futures sucked or something.”
After standing up from a bar stool, Ryan braced his hands on the island, frowning. “I’ve heard of that woman. Her name is Willow, no last name, and she’s been up on Mount Arvon for decades. Some say even since she was a teenager. No one really believes all that, though, all that talk about her being a psychic. The people who started saying that were college kids who started making trips up the mountain in the sixties. I have a feeling a lot of drugs were involved.”
Jill shrugged. “Well, I don’t think Hillary really believes it all, either, but she was reading some old self-published book from the seventies, something about spiritual hiking trips or something like that, and there were lots of stories about the lady on the mountain in it. Hillary kept saying it was all really interesting, like maybe she believed it just one percent. Then I heard her talking to Steb about it, and he said that someone from the FDS told him once that the mountain lady is still up there, and she’s a hundred and eleven years old. So, shouldn’t someone at least try to go up there and contact her? Like, let’s just say that there’s even a one-half of one percent chance that she is really a psychic…a psychic that could tell you guys exactly what magical thing is going on with Alex and how to stop it. Isn’t one-half of one percent chance still a chance? I mean, if Alex were my son, I’d go talk to the mountain lady just in case her psychic powers were really real. Because just think about it…I have some sort of ‘powers’ with ‘reading’ handwriting…so is it really that far-fetched to think that some old lady could really be a full-on psychic?”
With my heart filling with hope, I looked at Ryan. “She’s right. I think she’s right about everything. This lady Willow really could be a psychic, and I think we should try to find out.”
With the muscles in his strong jaw working, Ryan nodded. “I’ll see if we can get one of the dragons to go talk to her and ask her if she’ll come see us to try to help Alex. If she won’t leave the mountain, maybe we’ll try to bring him to her. We’ll offer her anything for compensation, whatever she wants.”
Jill pulled a cookie jar over to her from one side of the island, flipped the hinged lid open, and took out a sugar cookie. “Offer her a box full of jewels…that seems like something a mountain lady psychic would really go for. And add in something just purely fun to the deal…like offer to bring her a crate of pop in old-fashioned glass bottles every fourth of July for the rest of her life or something. All different flavors. I bet pop is a real treat for someone who lives up on a mountain.”
Later that evening, I relaxed in a bubble bath while Ryan spoke to the leader of the dragons on the phone in our bedroom. When I emerged from the bathroom in my pajamas, it seemed that Ryan had just ended the call, and he set his phone on the dresser before telling me that the conversation had gone well and that everything was all set.
“A dragon named Tom, who’s spoken to Willow a few times in the past, will fly up to the mountain tomorrow to talk to her. He says she’s an odd sort of woman, as one might expect, with something of a cold demeanor sometimes, but that she seems to have a bit of a soft spot for kids. Once, she asked to see a picture of Tom’s little girl, and then she told him how she’d used to enjoy making toys and dolls for kids in her hometown back when she was a young woman, just because she liked seeing kids happy. So once she hears about Alex, I think she might be willing to help. If she really can, anyway. If she’s really a true psychic.”
Wondering if Willow really was a psychic, and praying that she was, I hardly slept that night, only able to finally fall into a deep sleep around dawn. When I awoke around ten in the morning, Ryan was gone, but next to me in bed, Alex was curled up with Jake, who was faintly snoring. Smiling at the two of them, I reached out a hand and very gently smoothed a wayward lock of Alex’s dark hair, which was the same extremely dark brown as Ryan’s. Then, not wanting to wake Alex up, I planted a feather-light kiss on his forehead, hoping against hope that by the end of the day, Ryan and I would have some answers about what was happening to him. I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to go on if we didn’t.
*
Around noon, Ryan texted me that Willow had agreed to come to Briarwood to see Alex. She’d said she needed to lay a hand on his head, then have him spit into a cup. Tom will be flying her into the village around three, landing right in our backyard.
When Ryan stepped in the front door exactly at three with a tiny, wizened, gray-haired woman I assumed was Willow, Jill and I hopped down from bar stools at the island, where we’d been sitting sipping lemonade. Jill had begged me to let her hang out all afternoon so that she could “super casually just happen to meet Willow,” as she said. Being something of a psychic herself, Jill was intensely curious about her.
Ryan made introductions, and Willow dipped her head in small nods toward Jill and me, not returning our smiles but not looking at all hostile in any way, either. The expression on her wrinkled face was one of perfect neutrality. I hadn’t offered her my hand to shake because for some reason, maybe a little psychic intuition of my own, I’d just sensed that she wouldn’t like it. Jill hadn’t offered her a hand, either.
However, kind of usurping my role as lady of the house a little bit, Jill did offer her a glass of lemonade. “Or there’s pop, too, if you might want that instead.”
I said of course, got a glass, and began filling it. Ryan led Willow over to the island, asking if she’d like to have a seat. While I brought her glass of water over to the island, she hopped up on a barstool in a way that I thought was pretty sprightly for an elderly woman. The movement had also been somehow graceful, and her walking from the front door to the island had been graceful as well, the few steps I’d seen of it. She seemed to have glided across the hardwood rather than walked.
While I refilled our lemonade glasses and filled a glass for Ryan, Willow thanked me for the water, took a drink, and then surveyed the kitchen with her expression still perfectly neutral.
“This house is lovely, but man-made houses are funny. Natural homes, like caves, are much better. There’s more music in them.”
Surveying Willow, Jill nodded in agreement. “I can see that. Especially if it’s the sort of cave that has a few spots of dripping water in it. I bet it’s pretty relaxing to hear. Probably a lot more relaxing than some of the rock music that’s popular these days.”
Willow took another drink of water, this one a long one, seemingly studying Jill over the rim of her glass. She then set the glass down, her gaze still on Jill. “You’ve got the gift. Your talent is in seeing into people’s minds through their fingers…how they write…how their energy curves lines. This talent hasn’t even begun to fully develop in you, and it won’t until you’re much older. Start meditating now while you’re young, to help things along.”
