Awash in Talent

by Jessica Knauss

  She helped me wash up, and it wasn’t that bad. By the time Beth took her hands off me, it was hard to tell where the blood had come from. I was glad to see that any bruising was going to be under my clothes, as if Carlos’s wife had had the foresight and skill to land her blows in the most traceless way possible.

  The next morning, Beth made an appointment to talk with her prospective school’s principal. “Classes are starting soon,” she said. “We have to make a decision now.”

  I’d already made my decision, sure that the school was a clandestine gulag and Katarina must have misinformed Beth, or had a skewed perspective because she’d grown up in communist Russia or somewhere even worse. So I decided to take the situation back into my own hands. “I’ll go with you to meet the principal,” I said. “We’ll have a nice walk.”

  VI.

  “I obviously can’t work in a hospital that uses aluminum,” said Beth as we hiked up Hope Street, “but I think I’d like to apply my Talents to helping people somehow, something that wouldn’t interfere with my architectural studies.”

  “That will be great,” I said. I stopped in my tracks at Benevolent Street. “Hey, are you thirsty? I didn’t realize it was going to be so hot today. Hey, why don’t I stop in here and get us something to drink?” It was the recital hall building, so I figured there must be vending machines.

  “Do you have to?” she said, looking the clock on her cell phone. “I don’t want to be late.”

  “You stay here,” I said in my best casual voice. “I won’t be a sec.”

  Leaving her sighing with impatience behind me, I ducked in the side door and tried to divine where the vending machines were. My brain was filled with visions of how I would hide the aluminum can until I could get it right up to her mouth and scrub her lips with it. Even if she could still make it all the way to the school, her powers would be too depleted to demonstrate to the principal. They’d think she was a nutcase.

  I had taken the list of people like Beth from my mother, and in the confusion, they had left it with me in Ethiopia. By now, the desert sun had bleached its contents clean, if it hadn’t destroyed the very fibers of the paper.

  When my aluminum can action sequence was fully calculated, I found myself standing before the vending machine in the basement of the recital building. It sold orange Fanta, Coca-Cola, and Nestea products—no RC Cola to be seen—in plastic bottles.

  Damn the persistent, pernicious, progression of plastics into every aspect of our lives! I felt sick to my inner core, as if the absence of aluminum were my kryptonite. I wobbled out the same door I’d come in to find Beth patiently waiting at the corner of Hope and Benevolent. She waved and smiled. I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Beth, I’m feeling really sick. Do you think you can make it to the school on your own?”

  “What happened to you?” she asked as I came closer and used her shoulder for support.

  “I’ve got to get home, that’s all. The school’s right on Hope Street. You’ll see a great big grassy lawn surrounded by a wrought iron fence.”

  “Gee, if you’re sure you can get home, I guess I can get there.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I said gruffly. I turned away to make my point. I looked back to see her almost hop up the street with optimism I couldn’t begin to imagine. She would demonstrate her powers for the principal, and tour the well-lit school filled with unquashed creativity, and flourish in both architecture and health care, without me. I kicked the sidewalk and bumped shoulders with disoriented freshmen on the way back to the house.

  I was reminded of the first time I’d seen the new, expensive model of Homo erectus standing in the department’s museum. Made of wax, plastic, and human hair, it had an eerie presence as it stood there naked, just shorter than most of the museum’s visitors. It had been based on the actual skeleton of an individual unearthed by one of the professors on a previous mission to Africa. I had stared into the glass eyeballs and wondered what that anonymous person had ever done, all those thousands of years ago, to merit such everlasting fame at my prestigious university. What was so great about Beth that she could be literally awash in Talent, while I was only fair to middling at everything I did, even the dirty, dusty things I’d had such enthusiasm for? How could I ever hope to make a mark on the world, compared to my extraordinary sister? She couldn’t really be that extraordinary because I’d ignored her myself for the first thirteen years of her life. But still, here she was, six years younger than me and ready to start up her own architecture firm and magical health clinic while I was ready to . . .

  I couldn’t fill in the rest of the sentence before my door was there, demanding a key. I entered the house and looked wistfully at the apartment door across from ours. I was ready to give up entirely, maybe devote my life to helping out at Beth’s clinic, as I sat in the chair facing the window. My future lay before me, empty. I lived on Hope Street, but I had no hope.

  Until I saw that familiar threadbare car pull up in front of the window. Carlos’s wife got out and went around to the other side, and I held my breath for several long moments until she reemerged with a cheap plastic wheelchair she must have been unfolding. She wheeled it around, then opened the car door and, as if it were just another child’s car seat, set Carlos into it. I could barely feel my heart working away under a breathless sensation that my life had meaning again.

  She wheeled him out front, considered the three steps to the front door, and left him there. I glued myself to the wall next to the window so there would be no chance she would see me. I nearly jumped to the ceiling when she pounded on my door, but I was able to keep quiet. I was saddened that she still felt threatened by me. I patiently waited through her double and triple check that I wasn’t there to somehow ruin her precious life. When I heard her go into Carlos’s place, I returned to the window.

  Carlos sat in the wheelchair under the blazing sunlight. His face had no color, as if all the blood had drained away. All because of my terribly Talented sister. My legs twitched with the need to go out and meet him, but I prudently waited and saw that Carlos’s wife was bringing out some of their belongings, perhaps initiating the eventual move across town or across the planet or however far she thought would be sufficient. She laid some boxes in the back seat, then set a stack of textbooks on Carlos’s lap, as if to provide entertainment for him while she worked. When she darted back inside, I was drawn inexorably through the door toward him. Quietly, I approached him, noting that the drapes on their side were drawn, so she probably wouldn’t see us from inside.

  “Hi, Carlos,” I said.

  “Hi, Emily,” he responded.

  He still recognized me! His eyes were unfocused and he displayed a complete lack of interest in the books in his lap, but he still recognized me, the love of his heart.

  “Are you leaving?” I asked calmly.

  “Yes. For some reason my wife is obsessed with moving out of here. Maybe she found bedbugs or something.”

  Bedbugs had passed through Providence years before, not to return except to the houses where they’d sprayed with organic pesticides. His bizarre rationalization led me to believe that he didn’t remember my sister’s treachery. Adrenalin took over. I stood behind the chair and grasped the handles, looking for a moment at the dramatic part in his hair. Then I glanced at the blinded window one last time and pushed. It was hard going, so I stopped, lifted the books off Carlos’s lap and placed them respectfully on the ground. He made no remonstration, so I headed off.

  I wasn’t Talented or apt to become famous like Beth. But I was going to have something much more rare. I was going to have true love.

  I thought that if I could wheel Carlos to the medical school, I could claim spousal abuse and they could look him over. With his anemia and weird wounds, they would be sure to at least keep his wife away from him long enough to investigate. Within minutes, he would be mine to care for and nurse back to full, vigorous health.

  Then I heard it: the unmistakable sound of his wif
e’s voice.

  “Hey,” was all she could come up with. She even didn’t have the eloquence to state what was wrong with the situation. She really didn’t deserve someone as smart and refined as Carlos. Instinctively, I knew I wouldn’t have time to explain all that to her, so I ran. The right wheel began to wobble and squeak loudly, slowing me down while simultaneously announcing my presence to the neighborhood. My spousal abuse claim would be much more credible if she would only act a little more cavalier about who wheeled his chair around. I was going to have to shake her. I looked left to see whether I could dart into the street, but before I could make the turn, the chair stopped short. My sister stood in front of us, her hand outstretched in a traffic cop’s signal.

  “What’s going on here?” she shrilled.

  I tried to turn the chair within the small radius she offered, but she could see what I was up to, and I felt the handles slipping out of my hands. I gripped them more tightly, held on for dear life, as she tried to pry Carlos away from me. The pressure from that had barely ceased when I saw Carlos’s whole body lifted out of the chair into a semi-natural standing position. He was clearly too weak to stand on his own, and his limbs hung limply until, like a marionette, he started walking. My sister had a lot to learn if she ever wanted to perform telekinesis clandestinely, because Carlos walked impossibly, with his hands swinging in the same direction as his legs, instead of in the crosswise rhythm that has allowed humans to keep our precarious bipedal balance for thousands of years now. That said, I already noticed a marked improvement in her concentration. She was barely squinting when she flopped Carlos into the arms of his waiting wife.

  “Hey,” I said to Beth, indignant.

  “Hey what?” she said.

  “What right do you have to take away my only chance at happiness?” I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. I stopped when the strangest feeling overtook me: I was moving involuntarily. My sister lifted me up and placed me firmly into the wheelchair. From there, I couldn’t move, no matter what I did. I felt a strong bond with Carlos, who’d undergone that sensation of loss of control at the hands of my sister not once, but twice now.

  “I’m sorry, Emily, but I think you’re criminally insane.”

  “Insane? I’m the sanest person here.” I couldn’t even crane my neck to check on my love Carlos, on my one patch of goodness in a world that was rapidly becoming unbearable.

  Carlos’s wife must have called the police as soon as she saw me, because they were already pulling up. I expected the same two guys from the crazy night that set all this in motion, but two different officers got out of the car. They seemed to know of us, nonetheless: they approached with knowing grins.

  “Don’t arrest me. I’m a law-abiding Brown student. Arrest her. She’s an unregistered telekinetic.” I tried to gesture toward Beth.

  “I just registered at school,” she said to an officer.

  “You mean they took you as a student?”

  “That, too, but the director also helped me register legally. As of five minutes ago, I’m an official, government-recognized, Other-Talented Healer, telekinetic.” She pulled a cardboard slip out of her pocket with “temporary” emblazoned in red across the top. I’d never paid enough attention at the registration centers at the mall to realize that they received actual licenses or identity cards.

  While I was musing on that, they placed the cuffs on me rather more roughly than was necessary and forced me into the back of the police car. It was a more welcome feeling than the strange half-paralysis my sister had had me under. I guess they read me my rights, but I didn’t hear them. I looked out at Beth and Carlos’s wife placing him back into the wheelchair like a life-sized doll, and my elbow smashed awkwardly into the door as I reached futilely toward the object of my affection. The car started up. “Wait,” I shouted. “Isn’t my sister coming with me?”

  She lowered her face to the window and my life took on a distant quality, like I was watching a scratchy videotape of it long after the fact. I heard her muffled voice tell me something about working on my case and getting me out soon. I had to let her get away with such a lame explanation because I didn’t have a different option, and also I was going into shock. Only moments before, my life had been on the verge of a fairy tale ending. True love and happiness forever had been on my horizon, and I had been on the cusp of grabbing it with both hands. Now, my freedom hung in the balance of a scale apparently controlled by my unremarkable little sister.

  They put me in a cell by myself, probably because Beth had said I was sociopathic. It was antiseptic and uncluttered, and I had the notion that this was what it had been like for her to grow up in that plastic-encased, sanitized room in our house. “How can this be? How can this be?” I howled all night long.

  In the morning, feeling sheepish, I asked the woman who brought me my breakfast whether such night howling didn’t happen all the time here.

  “I’m sorry, miss, I’m not allowed to talk to you.”

  That left me speechless. Was I meant to spend who knew how long in this place with nothing to do and no one to talk to? I wasn’t sociopathic, but I soon would be.

  No one rescued me that day or the next. I was becoming accustomed to my new life, which consisted of pacing, crying, and imagining Beth going to the mall and doing all those stupid things she liked with Carlos and his wife, earning A+ grades at her new school, and learning the latest in fourth dimension design possibilities at RISD. My camera-ready tears gave way to clenched fists and a low, constant growl I couldn’t seem to suppress by the time they let me out and handed me a plastic bag with my personal objects.

  I walked out to the foyer and found that my rescuers were, improbably, my parents. They looked shabbily extravagant, wearing bright colors but with drawn faces and fast-blinking eyes. I suddenly preferred the blank austerity, the clean slate, of my jail cell. Through no fault of their own, the faces of these people only reminded me of everything I’d tried to leave behind when I came to Providence. I don’t think my face even registered recognition. When my mother embraced me, my growl reverberated in her necklace.

  “I think she’s still in shock,” she whispered to my father.

  Still? More like, constantly bombarded with new shocks. They loaded me into what I guessed was a rental car without saying anything to me. As we made our way up College Hill, I studied the upholstery in the back seat and recognized a stain I’d made grinding beach sand into the floor when I was twelve.

  “Did you drive out here?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said my mother. “It was the best way to bring everything we needed.” She held my hand in a reassuring manner and I realized she was sitting in the back next to me. My dad was concentrating very hard on driving. I couldn’t blame him for that. Californians often have a hard time adjusting to the Rhode Island rules of the road, which are nonexistent when you really come to understand them.

  “What all did you need to bring?” I asked.

  “Everything,” said my mother.

  I pulled my hand away and reached for the door handle, only to be thwarted by my mother’s surprising grip.

  “Beth isn’t old enough to be your legal guardian, so we’ve made arrangements and moved into the apartment across the hall from you,” she explained.

  “What?”

  “We thought it was an arrangement that would make everyone happy,” said my mother.

  In the driver’s seat, my dad said, “Well . . .”

  “Remember what the counselor told us,” snapped my mother, in a way that sounded like “Loose lips sink ships.”

  I could tell Dad was more receptive to reason than my mother, so I appealed to him. “Dad, what’s happening?” We pulled up to the apartment and the first change I noticed was a green neon sign stuck into the patch of grass at the front of our window, reading “Free Clinic.” “Dad,” I repeated, raising my voice, “what’s happening?”

  They said nothing, so I got myself out of the car, and somehow and a power larger th
an my reluctance opened the door only to show that my worst imaginings had come true. Our front door had a purple sign warning, “No Aluminum, Please.” I pushed it open and found our living room transformed into a waiting room by means of two rows of plastic chairs strikingly similar to the ones in the hospital in Ethiopia. Six of the ten chairs were occupied by patients variously injured and occupied watching our TV or leafing through the magazines tastefully laid out on our coffee table.

  “Beth,” I called in a calm but forceful voice.

  “Please sign in and then take a seat,” said a woman I hadn’t noticed near the door. She had a strong Portuguese accent and used a laptop on a folding card table to keep a log of visitors.

  “I’m not sick,” I said. “Eu não são enferma.”

  I rushed past the waiting people, ignoring all manner of protests, and opened the door to my room. Beth was on my bed, blithely massaging the hand of a woman who looked to be in her fifties. She actually smiled at my entrance.

  “This is my sister, Emily,” she explained to the patient. “You’ll see her when you come back for your elbows. That’s it for your hands, no more arthritis. Please make another appointment on your way out. Thank you.” She waved as the woman walked out, beaming.

  “Why aren’t you doing this in your bedroom?” I asked, reasonably.

  “I really need that space to study and to get away from all the ailments,” she said. “But this is still your room at night.”

  “What about the daytime?”

  “Well, we’re swamped with cases, mild and serious. I’m only one person, after all. You’ll be helping out here in the clinic. Mom or Dad have to take you if you want to go anywhere else. They’re working on a court order, but for now, it would be best if you cooperate. We’re all going to therapy, individually and as a family, and your matriculation has been put on hold while they investigate whether you’re stable enough to return to campus. But I doubt they’ll make that decision before Carlos finishes his degree and gets a job teaching somewhere else.”