“Lightning. Yep. Got it.”
She made a half-circle motion with her finger. “Let me sit there.”
“What? Why?”
“This is not a negotiation. I need to face the door. Move.”
I wished she had said something before my bones and muscles had unwound a bit and relaxed. With a groan for effect, I clutched my bag, got up, and switched booth seats with her. Right then I realized all the times we’d gone out as far back as I could remember she’d done the same thing and watched the entrance. My entire life, she’d been in protection mode. All this time I thought she suffered from OCD, needed a date to unwind or a strong drink.
By the time the bald waiter with diamond stud earrings got there with a steaming coffee pot, in my mind, I’d switched orders ten or twelve times. My DEFCON 1 hunger made me consider shoving the greasy laminated menu in my mouth and calling it a day.
“Hi, ladies.” His obnoxious gum chomping furthered my irritation. “My name’s Charles, uuh-huh, and I’ll be taking care of you this morning. What can I get you?”
Mom pointed to the silver carafe Charles carried. “We’re PMSing and running a marathon later today — ”
“Mom!”
“So we’ll be carb loading and eating our feelings. There’s a big tip for you at the end if you can keep up without asking too many questions.”
His raised eyebrows and eyes read annoyance and “what does that have to do with me?”
“Start us off with a few regular coffees.”
He reached over the diner counter for two white mugs, poured dark liquid into them, and placed them at our hands. Oil sludge from our transport’s conversion engine couldn’t have been darker. My lips puckered at the thought of letting it pass my lips without intense dilution. Four hazelnut creamers and five spoons of sugar did the trick.
Charles waved his hand. “I’ll give you two a few minutes to, you know, mmm, figure out your situation and what you two are gonna eat, okay?”
He walked far enough away not to hear what I said to her. “PMS and a marathon?”
While I sipped, Mom leaned in. “I needed an excuse for how much we’re gonna order. A woman would offer us ibuprofen and sanitary napkins. He’s not going to wonder now.”
My new powers didn’t include the ability to dissolve into the floor. Otherwise, I would’ve used it. “Yeah, well, let me make the excuses next time. Yours are terrible.”
“Go heavy with protein — eggs, steak, and chicken. Twice as much as you think is normal.”
I’d do what she said, but I didn’t think I could swallow that much and keep it down. Chemo had sapped my appetite. I never lost much weight because of it, and whatever I lost, it came back once I resumed eating. No one said “I wish I lost more weight because of my cancer,” and I felt ashamed and shallow for thinking it. But seriously, all the vomiting, radiation, chemo, starving, and raw food dieting I’d done, and ten pounds was it? No more than half a dress size and not an inch off my hips? Fine. I’d gorge myself more than ever before and see what happened.
“Can you put a call into your friend and check on Nat?” I asked her. “I’m worried.”
Mom folded her hands. “I know you are. Me, too, but Isa’s good at what she does. She’s taken care of me after some bad scrapes. We have to let her work, and neither of us will be worth much of anything to either of them unless we refuel right now.”
I didn’t doubt that, so I patted my suit’s pockets down for my holo. “Then, let me call Mr. Gupta real quick to let him know her condition.”
Mom gave me a cutoff sign and a stern warning. “Don’t.”
“Why not? He could think she’s — ”
“He’s better off thinking that way until she’s no longer in danger. Trust me.”
“Not likely.”
“I know what I’m doing. Your geolocation — ”
“I’ll turn it off. Problem solved.”
“Won’t matter if the police set up a trace. We don’t want that attention. Until you learn your emotional triggers and how to control them, you’re like a bomb with a short fuse.”
Valid points, but Mr. Gupta would be climbing the walls over Nat’s whereabouts.
“Any decent parent would want to know their kid is alive.”
The irony of my words wasn’t lost on me considering my search for a father who might or might not be worth the salt I thought he should be. Mom clinked a spoon against her cup, as if she knew I was talking about both Mr. Gupta and her ex-boyfriend. Nat could’ve left a note or a message that pointed to us. Then, Mr. Gupta could go to our place, see the destruction, and already think she was dead.
Say I reached him. “How’s she doing? Is she alive?” he’d ask.
What could I tell him, besides “Sort of, I think?” What would he do after discovering she was hundreds of miles away? Call the cops. And I hate cops. I’d end up burning them like I had done back at the house. Mom was right. I bit my lip to keep from admitting it or cursing.
“Shouldn’t we at least — ”
“Acting on emotion will get you hurt.”
I didn’t miss the waver or the crack in her voice. I’d never seen my mother emotional. Then again, I didn’t really know her or at least this version of her. Throughout my life, Mom hadn’t expressed anything toward me beyond anger, disappointment, and the occasional flash of warmth. However, the more time we spent with one another, the more sides of her I saw.
“Is that what you did?” I asked her. Were they the reason her[XW52] and my father’s relationship never made it? Or did her actions drive him away? That’s what I had assumed until she explained.
“He would’ve been there for me, for us, if I had let him be.”
I tried pushing without sounding as pissed off as I was at her for her decision. “Why didn’t you?”
She sipped coffee so long I wanted to slap the mug clean out of her hands. “He was in love with another girl. I didn’t want him staying with me or coming back out of obligation or because he thought he should because it was the right thing to do. Once the opportunity to set him free presented itself, I took it.”
Over the course of time, I’d imagined acceptable reasons why he was absent from my life. He was at war or a foreign diplomat — some occupation where human contact was unreasonable. When Mom told me he didn’t know I existed, I did the same for her. Maybe he had another family behind her back or he was a criminal. Because she did not want him to be around had never crossed my mind, and it was unacceptable. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve lost my appetite, but I was hungrier than ever.
Finally, Charles returned. My mother gave her order first and listed enough food to feed three people: nine scrambled eggs with cheese, three side orders of bacon and sausage links, three orders of hash browns scattered with onions and ham, a side of chicken fried steak and an orange juice. His eyes bulged as he scribbled especially the part where he wrote to the bottom of the sheet and she indicated that was for her and not us.
I hadn’t ordered yet.
Despite my better judgment[XW53], I copied her order except for the chicken fried steak which I substituted with a medium well T-bone.
“All right,” he said after filling the second sheet. “I’ll be back in a minute with more coffee.”
I waited until Charles was out of earshot. “Whether you think I did or not, I deserved a father,” I hissed, “and you took that from me.”
My words stabbed her as deeply as I had intended them to. “I did what I thought was best.”
“Best for me or best for you?”
Mom’s eyes drifted to the silverware wrapped in a napkin near her left hand. “Both. But that’s not all you wanted to ask, so ask.”
I paused mid-swallow. “Ask you what?”
“The questions behind your eyes. You haven’t looked me in the face since the cabin.”
Hadn’t I? Maybe she was telling the truth. I traced the brown pattern in the table with my fingers. At its center was a vintage photo
of the Chicago Transit Authority train from thirty years ago and a short, typewritten history about how an unnamed benefactor had restored it following a derailment. Not any derailment ---the 2013 CTA Fourteen terrorist derailment. The food scents I inhaled were hypnotizing. I’d almost forgotten to ask her. “This was you?” I asked her while pointing at the laminated history.
She nodded. “Your father and a couple friends. Six, not fourteen. Clones don’t count.”
Clones? “You’re a freaking terrorist?”
“No.”
My stomach clenched. “What else aren’t you telling me?”
“The media didn’t understand what we were, so ‘terrorist’ was the label. It wasn’t us. Dangerous man we had to stop. We lost good friends that day.”
We continued to chew in silence. Media or not, my mother was an at-large terrorist.
“You’ve used your powers to spy on me, too, haven’t you?”
From the twist of her lips, I could tell I’d offended her. “Let’s discuss this later in somewhere not so public.”
The silverware rattled when I slammed my hand against the table. “What else is there to talk about? A discussion means you’re adding one more thing to the long list of things I can’t do with my own life.”
“You don’t get it,” she angrily whispered. “This…our lives…isn’t a game — ”
“So, it’s okay if you did it?”
“Yes,” she spat out. “Whenever you’d had chemo and bio-locked your door, I had to be sure you weren’t dying.”
I suspected I wasn’t alone lots of times. How many times was I not alone? What about after I showered and shaved, stood in front of my floor-length mirror, and moaned about my thigh fat? That’s sick and way creepy. My ideas on how deep this could go stacked on top of one another like layers of dirt on my skin.
“And when I wasn’t in the middle of a chemo cycle?” I managed to stutter out.
She bit her lip and stared into her coffee mug. “Not much.”
I leaned in and lowered my head. “That’s it. I’m out of here. Get Nat home safely, please.”
“Wait.” Mom set her mug down. Her face said I really didn’t need to be alone as much, which was unacceptable. “Use more.” She slid the sugar across the table. “This stuff is rocket fuel. And on your grandmother, I swear I watched you maybe five times besides that.”
Yeah, right. I challenged her. “Name them.”
The list read backward like this: she’d quantum tunneled, or ghosted, through my wall most recently to help me when I got sick a week ago. The other four I immediately mind dumped as unimportant. The last one, which was the first time she’d said she spied, was three years ago when I’d had my first period and barricaded myself in my room because I thought I was bleeding out. I believed her, not because I trusted her but because she was a horrible liar on the fly. I, on the other hand, was a pro who had lied my way out of countless citations and disciplinary referrals.
“You have major trust issues,” I told her while bottoming out my mug. Sugary whitish-brown slush lined the cup’s insides.
Mom took a sip from her cup. “So do you. You get that from me. Your mouth and stubbornness, too.”
She continued lecturing me as I stared through the square window to my right. The parking lot was empty except for a compact transport and a rusted blue pickup. Strange. All but a booth or two were full with patrons. I guess they had walked up like us. “Yeah? What do I get from my father?” I asked her.
“Your temper,” she said without hesitation. “And your heart.”
Not a minute too soon, Charles arrived with backup to deliver our food. By the time they finished jamming the plates onto the table, we had no choice but to pile food on a few plates and eat our way from the top down. Which worked out well once I figured out how to stack them. I had three mountains of hash browns and cheese eggs with bacon and sausage layered onto my steak. Charles happily refreshed our coffees and laid the check next to Mom’s mug. I was surprised he didn’t insist we pay before eating. The way his eyes bulged, he probably thought we’d die before we could eat all the food.
Mom led me in a prayer and the sign of the cross. Then, she added pepper to her eggs and started eating. She ate at a steady methodical pace, and before I had time to assess how she’d done it, one of her plates was completely clean. This phenomenon was too much for me to handle, so I took a forkful of egg and swallowed it. They were good, but I didn’t feel anything special. I kept eating and swallowing until my plate, too, was empty. I was still hungry, like I had eaten a couple of crackers and not three eggs and the equivalent of a full entrée. Excited, I dove in for more and conquered my second plate in half the time of the first.
Charles placed his hands on either side of his face and opened his mouth at what Mom and I were doing to our entrées and sides. Holo in hand, he encouraged me to pose, which I did with a forkful of steak and a smile, I’m sure, had ketchup-doused egg on it. I didn’t mind. After this, I didn’t anticipate bumping into him, and my internet presence couldn’t get more negative than it had recently become. I resumed eating until he motioned at me. “Came out blurry,” he said. “Can we try it again, sweetheart?”
This time, Mom noticed us. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” I had a mouth full of hash brown, ham, [XW54]and onion. “He wants a picture of me.”
Her smile had a hint of hesitation to it. “Why are you taking pictures of my daughter?” she asked him. “She’s fourteen, Charles.”
I shot fire from my eyes. A guy taking a picture of me was the least of my concerns. He was harmless, but neither his response nor his tone sounded harmless. “For my boss. He wants proof that one of the CTA Fourteen is here before he arrives.”
Mom reached across the table, grabbed my hand, and thrust her shoulder hard into the diner wall. She couldn’t ghost through it. Her strength alone should’ve blown a wide hole in the train car’s surface or at least dented it. Pain registered on her face. Ramming into the wall had hurt her? I don’t think her adrenaline boost wore off that fast. Something else was at work. I didn’t know an emotion to kick-start my powers, and fear wasn’t working.
I fought back tears. “What’s happening?”
“Goshenite.” Mom winced and let go of me. “White stone that takes away our powers. They must have some.”
They? The well-meaning elderly people?
“Run!” she shouted.
The group stood and crowded together to block our path to the front exit. Wait, had they gotten taller? I was near Mom’s height, but they appeared to be at least six and a half feet which was a foot higher than us. I noticed the similarities in their long, thin graying physiques. Wiry but solid and intimidating. Their bloodshot eyes stirred fear deep inside of me. Perhaps it was my hunger when we first arrived, but I’d glossed over their appearances.
We could take them, though, right?
Mom had missed it, too. Or she hadn’t. A feeling was how she described it, and I didn’t listen to her. Again. And it had gotten us in a bad situation. I hated when she was right, but I really hated it when I was wrong and there was no way around admitting it.
“Are we gonna die?” I asked her.
“Not today,” she told me. “Don’t move.”
How was I supposed to do that? Tingling flowed up and down my fingers. It had to be my powers. They disabled Mom’s abilities, but mine were operational. I clenched my fists and hoped smoke wasn’t coming out of them to give my secret away. Eight of them formed a two- person deep barrier between us and the exit. Trying to melt the train car’s wall enough to escape would be risky even if I could burn hot enough to do that.
Whatever I had inside of me, I had to unleash it and burn our way free. “Give me a — ”
“Wait.”
Behind them, I saw the man with the cane had moved so that we could see him through the crowd. He nodded at us. Was I supposed to know what that meant? Mom mirrored what he’d done and whispered, “Don’t.”
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I closed my eyes, quieted my arguments, and backed down. After all, if I wasn’t going to admit she was right, the least I could do was obey her without question. Once.
Suddenly, I detected the scent of rotten eggs. Gross. I lost my balance. Next thing I knew, I’d been handcuffed to a chair in an unfurnished loft apartment above the city’s skyline. I bent over and threw up, thankfully, into a trash can between my legs and not onto my feet or the wooden floor. The older man wiped my mouth with a facial tissue and pushed a peppermint candy between my lips. The minty freshness helped my breath and stopped my nausea.
Beside me, Mom sucked in deep breaths and struggled against her restraints. The afternoon sun shined through the wall-length windows until he commanded them to blacken. Good idea considering an angry gang of muscular senior citizens was after us.
“What is this?” I asked him. “Who are you?”
The disguised form of the man we knew from the diner suddenly melted away into Moses. He had changed clothes as well — the airport uniform blues had become a black set of cargo pants, gray combat boots, a white shirt, and a black utility jacket. He wagged his finger at my mother and tapped his temple. “Won’t be getting up here again, Anibel.”
Hold up, my mother did something to his mind? I flashed back to the way he followed her directions without question back at our burning house. Mind control. What other superpowers was she keeping secret? One more to the growing list of reasons not to trust her. I yelled and yanked my wrists apart. The binds bit into my skin, and I cursed a blue streak.
“Where is he, Moses? He wanted to kill us so badly — let him do it himself. Where is he?”
Her face flushed as she growled and yelled. Behind us, someone cleared their throat.
Using my legs, I rotated the chair around until I faced him. He’d been behind us the entire time. He leaned on his cane’s handle and limped between Mom and I while struggling with a wet sounding cough. He hacked into a white cloth handkerchief covering his left fist. So nasty.
“Didn’t recognize me in the diner? His wheezing, high-pitched voice warped like he’d swallowed a tall glass of acid. “Burns healed over, and cancer chewed my muscles. Made me like this.”
The Nuclear Winter Page 9
