by Lena North
Then the door opened behind Dante’s back, and a cranky voice called out to us.
“Excellent, there you are. Lunch has been ready for quite some time, and why it would take so long to walk such a short distance I do not know,” Mrs. C said, but added snootily, “Although I can guess.”
***
I leaned back in the wooden deck chair and looked at Mrs. C, thinking about how things had changed in the time that had passed since I moved back.
The first couple of days I slept, and she let me. She had a big swinging couch with soft pillows in her garden, and I spent the days there, telling myself that I would spend time thinking things through to get a grip of what went wrong and what I needed to do to move forward. Every time I put my head down, I simply fell asleep, though.
I’d worried about the nights because I’d relied on Dante to be there when I woke up, to pull me closer into his strong arms and murmur softly that I should go back to sleep. It turned out that he still did that, in a way, even when he wasn’t in the room with me. I didn’t even have time to wake up properly before I sensed him, brushing my mind and I knew it was impossible, but it still felt as if he whispered softly in my ear to relax and go back to sleep. So I did.
Then one morning when I stumbled out on the back porch there were no pillows in the swing. Mrs. C told me that she’d asked one of the women in the village to clean them and that she had carrots that needed peeling. Since the pillows had been spotless, I guessed that this was her way of putting an end to my days of wallowing, and then I peeled carrots. Slowly she made me do more and more around the house, and soon I was weeding the flower beds and her vegetable garden, polished her silver cutlery and helped her cook. She had not been lying when she told me she could do bland and do it well. We ate mostly fish and vegetables with rice or soft dumplings made from mashed potatoes. Nothing was fried, and she used mild herbs but no salt, and it tasted amazing.
We talked a lot about simple stuff but through it, little by little, we learned about each other. No one visited, and I found that a bit sad but since I was happy to be left alone I didn’t question it.
It was a bit foolish, I knew, but I missed Dante. When I asked Mrs. C if I could walk over to his house to thank him for his kindness and let him know I was okay, she just snorted and said, “He checks in every day, Jinx. He can wait a little bit longer.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant. Was Dante coming to the house, and not seeing me? I’d thought… when I stopped to think about Dante, I had to accept that I had no clue what I’d thought although I’d started to realize that I’d been wrong when I assumed that he had wanted something more than just helping me. He was a good friend to Mac and Wilder, so of course, he’d want to help me for their sake.
Mrs. C’s knitting needles made soft clicking sounds, and it had started out soothing, but was beginning to grate on my nerves. I was getting restless.
“Will you teach me how to knit?” I asked, having absolutely no desire to learn but thinking that it would be something to do.
“No,” she replied calmly.
“Can we talk about something while you work?”
“No,” she replied, even more affably.
“Am I just supposed to sit here?” I asked sourly.
“Yes.”
“Doing nothing?”
“Yes.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t,” she countered with a small smile, and I smiled back because she was right. I didn’t.
I’d come to like her and discovered that even though she was cranky and sometimes gruff, she was also kind, patient and had a witty, dry sense of humor. This surprised me, and I couldn’t reconcile the awful man that had been Wilder’s step-father with the old woman I was getting to know. She continued knitting, and I sat there, slowly relaxing, and as I did, my mind started wandering.
I could see how things had been bad since my first encounter with the scientific community when I was ten, but it had begun to spiral out of control when I accelerated my studies to allow my parents to leave me behind in Prosper. I’d started to push myself as hard as I could because of their fight, but they didn’t know that, and I’d never given them a chance to explain, so I didn’t blame them. Neither of them had been keen to leave me, and it hadn’t been easy to talk them into going, but I’d come up with good arguments, and I’d pushed them until they had to give in. If I’d wanted to, I could instead have persuaded them to take me with them on a road trip, but I never even tried. I realized that I’d never truly wanted to go with them to the places they loved so much. Strange hippie festivals in obscure villages far away from everything didn’t interest me, but that wasn’t their fault or mine. It just was.
When I thought about the years I’d spent in University, unwanted memories of some of the things I’d said and done kept coming back to me, and I cringed. Dante had said that Miller was wrong to call me overbearing, but the label hadn’t been inaccurate. At least not entirely. I had enjoyed being smarter than everyone else, had reveled in the feeling of superiority, and I knew that I’d often been condescending. Most of the time I hadn’t meant to be, and not realized until I saw how upset people were with me, but sometimes it had been deliberate. Maybe even because it made me feel good?
“What are you thinking about?” Mrs. C asked quietly.
“I’ve not always been friendly to the people around me,” I answered honestly, wanting her to know this about me.
She started chuckling.
“Oh, Jinx,” she murmured. “What a child you are sometimes. No one is nice all the time.”
I turned slowly to look at her, and her laughter died when she saw the look on my face.
“Give me an example,” she ordered.
Slowly I told her about how I’d gone to listen when a scientist presented his doctoral dissertation. He’d made remarkable progress with his research on the application of microbiologically enhanced substances in electrical transmissions of neutrons, and it was a topic I found fascinating. During his presentation, I’d realized that he’d made a calculation error, and I’d pointed this out. We’d ended up in front of a whiteboard where I’d gone through the formulas and in front of the audience, I’d shown him where the error was. Then I’d gone back to my seat, not thinking more about it because the error had not changed the facts in a way that made his conclusions incorrect.
“But what was wrong with that?” Mrs. C asked.
“I should have waited until after the dissertation, and talked to him privately,” I replied, and clarified, “It wasn’t a big deal, and it could easily have been fixed as a late correction. Instead, the professors were going to reject his work, and he was furious with me.”
“But he’d made an error, so –”
I sighed and tried again to explain, “I made him look like a fool, Mrs. C. He was almost thirty years old, and I was half his age. I tried to make amends, so I talked to the professors…”
She waited while I gathered my thoughts, and then I continued, resolutely, “I told them that it was an incredibly dumb mistake, but that it didn’t change the fact that his work was good, and that I’d be happy to check his further research for errors.”
She made a strangled sound, but I pushed on.
“They passed his dissertation, but they told him what I’d said and suggested he should thank me. I meant to be nice and to help him, but he wasn’t…”
I didn’t know what to say, and then Mrs. C started laughing.
“Yes, Jinx. I can see that he wouldn’t have been very appreciative.”
“This was not the only time I did something like that, and everyone always seemed to know about it. Some were good about it, though, and I checked a lot of papers for errors.”
“They used you,” she said, suddenly sounding angry.
“Perhaps,” I replied. “I didn’t mind, Mrs. C. I got my brain for free, without doing anything to deserve it. Helping others seemed like appropriate payback.”
“Humph,�
�� she snorted.
“It also made me feel good.”
I whispered this admission, not wanting to meet her eyes, worrying about what she’d think.
“Some people are beautiful,” she said, and I looked at her in surprise. “Some are fast runners. Some are talented painters or musicians. Most of us are ordinary. We’re all born the way we are.”
She glared at me, but I got the feeling that she wasn’t angry at me.
“You got your intelligence, but you do not have to pay back in any other way than using it for whatever makes you happy. Your life is your own and what you do with it is no one’s business.” She took a deep breath and continued, “You do not have to make excuses for feeling good about your talents, and no one has the right to use you for anything, Jinx. You have to stop letting them.”
Our eyes held for a long time as I processed what she said.
“Though, you could probably work a bit on your social skills,” she murmured, and there was a glint of humor in her eyes.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Thank you, Mrs. C,” I added softly, and I meant for her words just then but also for the time we spent together.
“I failed with my son, Jinx, so if anyone has a need for payback, it’s me,” she replied.
I didn’t say anything, hoping that she’d explain but not wanting to push.
“It’s a long story, but I’ll shorten it for now,” she started and turned to look out over the garden. “I loved my first husband, and when he died, I wanted to die too. He was older than me, and his son from his first marriage was already grown up. It felt like I had no purpose. No reason to go on, and I got into my second marriage quickly, thinking that it would take away some of the loneliness, but Donny Fratinelli wasn’t…”
She trailed off, and I took hold of her hand.
“He wasn’t very nice,” she concluded simply. “Paolo was born less than a year after the wedding, but that just made me fall deeper into despair. I didn’t get out of bed most days, and for years it felt like I was living in a fog of grief and sorrow. When I finally got out of it, I’d lost my son. His father had made him into the man he later became and nothing I did could reverse that.”
I squeezed her hand, but she kept talking.
“I tried again when Donny died, but it was too late. Paolo was a young man by then, and I wasn’t strong enough… So, I gave up and let my son do what he wanted to do. I didn’t know exactly what he did because I didn’t want to know. I always suspected he did something illegal, and his father probably did too, but I was weak and a coward, thinking that I had nowhere to go and no money.”
She made a pause, and I murmured an inane, “Mrs. C...”
“I could have pushed for him to bring his step-daughter to Marshes, but I never did,” she said resolutely. Then she stopped speaking and kept her eyes on her garden.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked softly.
“My son wasn’t a good man, and I thought it would be better for the girl to spend as little time as possible with him,” she answered promptly.
I knew admitting that had been difficult for her, and her words had shaken me.
“I never thought about it like that,” I whispered, and added, “Neither did Wilder.”
“Of course not,” she said. Then she turned to me, and her eyes were sad when she spoke again, “I’ve been so ashamed, Jinx.”
“But you did nothing wrong?” I asked.
“I should have –”
“No,” I cut her off. “Would you have been able to stop him?”
“Probably not,” she replied. “I could have… should have tried, though.”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “But you didn’t, and neither did his wife.”
“No,” she sighed. “Neither did his wife.”
We sat in silence for a while, both deep in thought.
“Will you let someone go through Paolo’s office?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied, sounding surprised. “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just locked the door, and left it like that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let Dante go through it. He’ll be fair about whatever he finds, and you can trust him to decide what the right thing to do will be.”
She started nodding, but suddenly a thought struck me, and I straightened.
“That day, when I got sick. Someone had gone through my things, and you said that it wasn’t you?”
“Of course it wasn’t,” she scoffed, and I hadn’t believed her when I asked her before, but this time I knew without a doubt that she was telling the truth.
“Someone did, though. I need to let Wilder know,” I murmured. “It could be about me, but it’s more likely that it has something to do with the research I do for her.”
“Why would it be about you?”
Mrs. C immediately locked on to the one thing I didn’t want to explain, of course.
“Some of my patents are used in surveillance equipment, and some others are used in voice recognition devices,” I answered evasively, and when she kept looking calmly at me, I added, “Some people might think that I’m working on extensions to that.”
She got to her feet immediately and turned to me. Her lips were pressed together, and there was a small frown between her eyebrows.
“Some people?” she asked.
She looked angry and worried in equal measures, so I tried to reassure her.
“Don’t worry. I’ve dealt with them for years and –”
“I’m calling Dante, and when he gets here, you’ll tell him what he needs to know.”
I started to speak, but she promptly walked into the house, muttering sourly to herself, or maybe to me, “Stubborn girl. Dante will call that pretty boy, and he’ll tell the girl’s father, and they’ll all come here to sort you out.”
“Wilder can help me,” I shouted after her, half laughing. She really was from another generation than me. “We really don’t need the men to help us, you know,” I added but she only waved her hand and disappeared.
I shook my head and wondered if I could get hold of a phone and call Wilder myself. For the first time, it didn’t hurt to think about explaining to Wilder what had happened. I wondered why I hadn’t trusted her to understand before because I knew she would. She wouldn’t have judged me, and she would have backed me up with whatever I asked for. Somehow my brain had gotten so muddled up that I hadn’t even known that.
Chapter Nine
Permission
“Hey,” a voice whispered.
I looked around but didn’t see anyone. I could hear faint sounds from inside the house, but the voice hadn’t been Mrs. C’s.
“Hey, Jinx,” the voice said again, and then I saw the top of Daniele’s head pop up above the high brick wall around the garden.
“Hey, Danny,” I exclaimed.
“Shhh,” he hissed, and I heard how he murmured something.
Then he appeared quicker and higher than before, bending forward and ending up hanging on the wall. With a swift move, he swung his legs over and then he jumped down, landing heavily on his good leg and stumbling a little. Then he walked toward me with a huge smile on his face.
“Hey, Jinx,” he murmured.
“Why are you climbing over the wall, Danny?” I asked.
“Dante has gone completely off the rails,” was his weird reply.
I stared at him as he sat down in the chair Mrs. C had left.
“He has threatened bodily harm to anyone who contacts you, and scared poor Mrs. C into locking both her front and garden doors.”
What?” I asked.
That was weird. Kind of cute, but really, really weird.
“Even Snow is forbidden to visit, and believe me,” he snorted, “she is pissed with a capital p, and very vocal about it.”
“Okay,” I said, although I did it with a giggle because he was smiling, probably enjoying the situation in Dante and Snow’s home. I could readily imagine the discussions they had about Dante’s highhanded ways.
“How are you doing?” he asked cautiously.
“I’m fine. More than fine,” I hastened to assure him, and it wasn’t the fake kind of assurance I’d given so many times before. I actually felt good. “Mrs. C is taking such good care of me. I’m sleeping a lot,” I added, not sure what Dante would have said about my illness.
“He told everyone it probably was a case of food poisoning,” Daniele murmured. “But it wasn’t just that, was it?”
I shook my head slowly, holding his thoughtful gaze. Then I decided that I had nothing to be ashamed about and that I wouldn’t try to hide what happened.
“I kind of fell apart,” I said calmly, and went on, “Into a million pieces, Danny. I’ve worked too much for such a long time, my stomach was so bad, and there’s been too many…” I trailed off not knowing exactly how to explain everything. “I just broke,” I repeated.
“I’m so sorry, Jinx,” he said. “Did my –” he cut himself off, but then he braced and continued talking, “The way you helped me, Jinx. Was that part of it? Did we ask too much –”
“No,” I protested.
Oh, God. How could he even think that? I leaned forward and put a hand on his arm.
“This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about you, Danny, or any of the others in Marshes. It was all about me. I haven’t been well in a long time.”
“Okay,” he sighed.
“I’m getting better each day. Dante has been…” I trailed off, not wanting to talk about Dante or Mac and how they had been in my mind.
“He’s in your head?”
“Yes,” I answered.
Of course, Daniele would know.
“Good,” he said.
“Yes,” I repeated.
We were silent for a while, and I wondered if everyone in the village knew about Dante’s abilities. If he ever visited, I’d have to ask him.
“He’s a good man,” Daniele suddenly said, but he spoke slowly, clearly measuring his words. “The d’Augustines has led this village forever. They used to be royalty, but a few hundred years back they chose to change that to being Mayors instead.”
I pulled in air, thinking about the stories Wilder had found in her grandfather’s house. Stories that told about a man called Valerian who had been the king in Marshes a thousand years ago. Was Dante his descendant? Probably, I decided.
