A Shiver of Wonder

by Daniel Kelley

  Had he just forgiven Bill? Did he have any right to offer forgiveness to Bill?

  David hadn’t offered forgiveness, though. Only a type of solace based in understanding.

  Would Bill take it overly hard when David handed in his own 30-day notice? Would he see it as a comment on all that had occurred, not to mention his role in it?

  But how could what had occurred within the walls of the Rainbow Arms not play into David’s decision to move? Bill would understand, hopefully. He’d be hurt, but he would accept it, eventually.

  David knew that a part of him would be sad to depart his cozy home on Piston Avenue. He had grown here, he had become his own person here. And yet he also knew that he had little choice in the matter. The time was ripe. The time was now.

  He barked out a small, uncomfortable laugh. The time may have been now, but it was also impossible! Where could he move immediately? Genevieve’s? She’d never even lived with Todd, and presumably the two of them had enjoyed at least a touch more stability in their seven-year relationship than she and David had experienced thus far.

  Johnson would be happy anywhere, so that wasn’t much of a concern. He had certainly handled with admirable aplomb the myriad changes that had led to their residency at the Rainbow Arms. Nary a complaint after his first foray about the courtyard, nary a whimper regarding the tight quarters in apartment 1F.

  David smiled to himself as he moved toward the gate that led to the courtyard. They’d be all right. Everything would end up being fine. It was just another change for them, but a positive one. He knew what he wanted now, what he and Johnson needed to live, not to mention thrive. They’d been happy with less. Having more, at least in moderation, could only be an enhancement to their lives.

  He pulled the gate toward him, and stepped into the courtyard.

  And then David’s heart froze for the second time in a single afternoon.

  Clair was standing a few feet away, facing him. Her eyes were focused on his, her demeanor was calm but intense. Behind her, the water in the fountain played in the sunlight, burbling and spitting silvery tongues of spray into the various basins as though it were the most ordinary of days, as if the weapon that had been utilized to bash in the head of a man named Hector Vance wasn’t right at this very moment a part of it, ironically protecting the engine that kept the water circulating.

  “Hi, David,” she spoke quietly. Her gaze hadn’t shifted an iota, and as David began to breathe again, he studied her, seeking any hint as to what she could want of him. She was wearing a prim white blouse over a black skirt, her saddle shoes the perfect accompaniment for these, a simple velvet bow in her hair a fitting ornamental topper.

  The gate had swung closed behind him. He reached to his side to grasp a fencepost, but didn’t move toward her. Clair hadn’t budged at all.

  “Hi, Clair,” he finally replied. His voice was thick, his two words laced with more than a touch of defensiveness.

  A wan smile appeared on her face.

  David wasn’t comforted.

  “Can we talk for a few minutes?” she asked him.

  “About what?” he thrust back.

  Her voice lowered. “You know,” she said with that air of familiarity that had always both vexed and intrigued him.

  David’s hand fell from the fencepost, and he leaned back into the gate. His pose may have been casual, but he knew that he wasn’t fooling her for even a second. “Actually, I don’t know, Clair,” he stated. “Truly, I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?”

  As he’d spoken, her smile had begun to grow. “What would you like me to tell you?” she replied, almost sweetly.

  But David was in no mood for games. This wasn’t some elementary school version of Guess Who? or Simon Says. When he spoke again, his tone was rough, his words forceful. “Why don’t you tell me how you arranged for Janice’s boyfriend to be murdered?” he demanded. “Why did you tell Bill he could get away with it?”

  Her smile had disappeared. Her expression was sad, her eyes hurt. “It wasn’t like that,” she said faintly.

  David took a step forward before he jerked to a halt again. He couldn’t stop himself from practically yelling at her. “Then tell me what it was like, Clair! Tell me how it is that you got Janice to go visit her mother, you got Bill to murder Heck, and everybody seems to be chasing their tails around trying to figure it all out, when the center of everything always seems to be you!”

  Her face was starting to crumple, but David wasn’t buying it. “I didn’t tell Bill to do it,” she said.

  “You did! You as good as did!”

  “No, David. I didn’t.” She was pleading to him with her voice, her hands, her eyes.

  “But you knew what would happen, didn’t you? You knew what could happen if Janice was away, if Bill was told that he could repeat the same crime he’d committed all those years ago without getting caught. You knew all of this before you said a word to any of them! How can you stand there and tell me you’re innocent, when you know that everything I’m saying is true? Who are you, Clair? Who are you?”

  Her hands had sunk back to her sides. A tear began to roll down one of her cheeks, followed seconds later by a counterpart on her other cheek. A breeze alit in the courtyard, toying with Clair’s hair, lifting the tired bushes higher while pushing the fallen leaves about in circles.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t know who I am.” She sounded pathetic, lost. Her eyes were beseeching David, though he knew not what for.

  “How do you know so many things about all of us, then? How can you know so much about everybody? Are you able to look into our minds? See the future? Make the future?”

  “No!” she answered immediately, shaking her head. Her countenance was becoming a crazy quilt of tears. “No, I can’t do that.”

  “Do what?” David burst out. “You can’t make the future, but you can do all the rest? Tell me, Clair! Please, help me to understand what’s been going on here!”

  Clair’s eyes closed for a few seconds. The breeze was dying down, and David steadied himself, inhaling deeply as he tried to tamp down his frustration and anger.

  And then she was meeting his gaze again. A hand rose to swipe at both sides of her face, but her eyes never let go of his. “I’ve always known things,” she said quietly. “Things I didn’t want to know. They just… appear to me.”

  “Like the pronunciation of Genevieve’s name.” David was grateful to find that the edge in his voice was softening, flattening.

  “Yes. I knew about that from the minute I started talking with you.”

  “Her last name is MacGuffie,” David stated. “But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”

  A brisk shake of her head. “No,” she answered as a guilty smile emerged. “Will you forgive me for continuing to ask?”

  He nodded. “Yes. For that. How did you know about what Bill had done all those years ago? Or about Mrs. Jenkins’ daughter?”

  Her head tilted slightly higher. “Mrs. Jenkins wore her sadness up front. It was what she was always thinking about. With Bill, it took a while, but I think he could sense that I was reading his thoughts, and he tried to bury what he had done. Which only brought it right out into the open.”

  David was confused. “But Clair, knowing things about people isn’t all that is… weird about what you do. Mrs. Jenkins told me what you said to her, about the purple skies. Did you make the sky purple for her that night, so she could set her grief aside?”

  Another shake of her head. “No. I told you, I can’t do that.”

  “But how did you know that her daughter was all right, how could you possibly know anything about that? And how did you know that Mrs. Jenkins would go outside at all that night? Or that doing so at that exact time would make her feel so much better about everything?”

  Clair’s smile was back, albeit a paler version. “I don’t know. Truly, David. As for her daughter, I just felt that she was at peace. I could perceive this. And I wanted Mrs. Jenkins to
know, because it was important to her. I knew that that Thursday night would bring a rare color to the sky, and that she would step outside and see it. And so I said to her what I did.”

  “So you can tell the future. You can’t make it, but you can see it.”

  “Sometimes. Not all of the time.”

  “And you tricked Mrs. Jenkins into feeling better, using this knowledge you have of the future to do so.”

  Her right hand took hold of a pleat in her skirt. “Was that so wrong?”

  “How old are you, Clair?” Her grip on the skirt tightened along with the muscles of her face, and David felt the stirrings of the breeze again. “You never answered me when I asked you a few months ago.”

  “I’m young,” she replied quietly.

  “You’re not seven, or eight, or nine. And your language today is far more complex than I’ve noticed before. You’re using an adult’s vocabulary, not words that a first grader would pick up in the classroom, or on the playground of an elementary school.”

  “I’m young,” she repeated. “And I don’t really want to talk about this.”

  The breeze gusted, and David winced as dust and dirt flew into his eyes. “Are you making this wind happen, Clair? Are you creating this?”

  The wind instantly kicked in harder. “You are!” Clair exclaimed. “I’m not trying to create anything!” Her face was defiant, her chin jutting outwards as her fingers continued to maul her skirt.

  “Okay, okay!” David appealed, holding his hands out toward her. “I’ll ask about something else! We won’t talk about your age.”

  The flurries immediately died down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a much gentler voice. “There’s a lot I don’t understand. There’s a lot that I want to understand. I don’t mean to be so curious, but I can’t help it.”

  “I don’t really understand a lot either,” Clair conceded as her chin lowered and the breeze calmed before ceasing entirely. “But this is part of the reason I like talking to you. You’ve come to understand so much about your own life in a very brief period of time. You… you’ve become a better person than you were. And you did so consciously.”

  “It’s not as if I had much of a choice,” returned David. “I couldn’t have remained who I was. I offered nothing to the world. To myself, or to anyone else.”

  “But you do now.”

  He nodded. “I’m trying. I’m still trying. May I… may I ask you about a couple things, Clair?”

  Her gaze was cautious. “Yes. I’ll do my best to answer. This is good for me, to explore like this. With you. I’ve always told you that I like you.”

  David wasn’t sure what to make of that, or whether he should even try to comprehend. “Why Heck?” he said. “Why him?”

  Her eyes were keen; he hadn’t needed to ask a more detailed question. “Because of Janice,” she answered. “I didn’t like what he was doing to her.”

  David looked down at the ground. “I guess I don’t have to ask how you knew about it. But Clair… Bill will have to deal with the burden of what he did for the remainder of his life.”

  Her tone was clear as she answered: “I knew about it because it was obvious to anyone, not just me. You knew. You actually knew for longer than you think you did, but you had ignored the signs. Bill knew all along. And as for his burden, your talk with him just now relieved a good portion of it. Time will ease the rest, as it did for him the first time.”

  David looked up again with a sigh. It was as if she had been in the cottage with the two of them just now. But in a way, this was only fair: Bill had eavesdropped on at least two of Clair’s conversations with others himself.

  “What about Stacey?” he asked. “Janice’s friend.”

  “Stacey?” She appeared momentarily baffled. “Oh, Stacey. Yes.”

  “How did you know to tell Janice to stay with her until the bus came? You hadn’t met her, I’m assuming. So how could you know about her ex coming after her that night?”

  But Clair’s head was already moving from side to side. “I don’t control it. I can’t control it. Janice was moving past me as she was leaving the building, and it just came to me, what would happen. I didn’t like what I saw, so I told her to wait. I knew that it would keep it from happening. And it did.”

  “So you didn’t cause Janice’s mother to have her asthma attack?”

  She winced. “No. No! That was going to happen anyway. You don’t want to believe me, do you, David?”

  She looked pained, and as the bushes began to sway again, David shifted gears.

  “How many others have there been?”

  The breeze fizzled out. “How many other whats?”

  He expelled some air while doing some quick thinking. “People. Towns. Lives saved, lives taken.”

  She hadn’t appreciated the last part of his question; a frown had appeared. “I’ve lived in a lot of different places. And I’ve known a lot of people.”

  Her inability to directly answer a question had not been affected by her desire to explore, David noted. “What I mean is, do the same things happen to you everywhere you go?”

  A slow nod. “Yes.”

  “But do they end up as… complicated, for lack of a better word, as they have here in Shady Grove?”

  Another nod, along with the wince again. “Yes. Not always. But… yes.”

  David kept working ideas over, unsure of how he could discover more explanations without stepping into the foxholes. “Is Mrs. Rushen always with you?” he asked.

  A genuine smile came forth. “Yes. She takes care of me. She always has.”

  “Are you always in the first grade, though?”

  She beamed. “Not during the summer! But for a while now…” Her visage was dimming, dimming. “For a while now, I’ve been in first grade.”

  “But why? You could easily be moved ahead! You could learn other things: math, or music, or other languages…”

  “I would still see the same things, in any language,” she replied sadly.

  “But wouldn’t you – ”

  “I like being in first grade,” she interjected. “It’s the life I wish I could have. A real life. A normal life.”

  And to that, David found that he had no response. It was what he’d wished as well when he’d been young, that his family could have been normal. No more distressing ups and downs, no more unsuccessful attempts to make friends. No more covert moves in the middle of the night, let alone the middle of the school year. Clair and he did have similarities, even if the two of them had little in common outside of those.

  He phrased his next question with care. “What you’ve said to me, Clair. Here, in the courtyard, as well as at the school yesterday. What did you mean?”

  “I’ve said a lot of things to you, David,” she replied evenly.

  He took a breath. He took his time. “About my knowing myself. About the four things you said I would lose. Four things that I love.”

  She studied him as he fumbled about for a better approach to this, a less cumbersome means of getting her to throw some light upon her own words.

  “It will happen,” she said. “All of it.”

  “But it frightens me,” he returned, realizing that what he was telling her was entirely true. “After all that has happened, after all that you’ve just shared with me, how could I not worry? How could I not think about your words and wonder if what’s in store for me is something terrible? Something far worse than what I could even imagine right now?”

  She took a single step toward him, the first movement her feet had made since David’s arrival in the courtyard. He wanted to retreat; every instinct he had began to scream at him to stay away, to get away from this crazy, incomprehensible girl.

  “They might be good things,” she asserted, her eyes pleading with him to stay calm. To believe her, to believe in her.

  But David was suddenly immersed in doubts. He saw Bill’s face as he cried, the body bag containing what remained of Heck Vance being wheele
d out of the Rainbow Arms on a stretcher, Detective Ormsby’s sneer as he sadistically acted out his anger with David for something that had had nothing to do with him whatsoever.

  “You don’t know that,” he stated to Clair. “You don’t know where things can lead. You can’t follow each action to see all of the reactions that occur when a person changes their behavior because of something you’ve said to them. You can’t know that what ensues will be good or be bad!”

  The wind was back. It was instantly strong, kicking up clouds of dirt and pushing the falling water straight out of the fountain.

  “I don’t want things that I do to be bad,” Clair said, her voice strained with a tinge of petulance.

  “But Clair, what you’ve done isn’t all good!” David couldn’t hide his irritability, and the growing turbulence in the courtyard wasn’t helping matters any. “You can’t turn men into murderers! You can’t mess with people’s lives just because you’re able to! What you did for Mrs. Jenkins was incredible, but what if Stacey’s ex had pulled out a knife that night and attacked Janice instead?”

  “No! No!” Clair shrieked. “That didn’t happen!”

  A gust so strong that it almost knocked David off his feet swept the length of the courtyard. A scraggly rosebush flew out of the ground and right over the back fence; the water in the top tier of the fountain appeared to be fleeing, streaming in fifty directions at once.

  “But you don’t know who you are!” David declared forcefully. And then a fragment of his conversation with Carol Jenkins slammed into his thoughts. “Are you trying to figure out if you’re good or bad?” he shouted. “Do you have any idea at all if you’re good or bad?”

  “I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW I DON’T KNOW!” Clair screamed.

  The fountain toppled over, but any sound that it made was covered by the roar of the wind. David had once again grasped the fencepost, but this time with both of his hands.