There was a large mortar and pestle and a rack of little glass jars full of what looked like items from a spice rack intermixed with something you might find in a witch’s brew. She knew what some things were, like ginger root and cloves, but other things she couldn’t identify at all. There was an interesting smell lingering in the air. Something musty, or maybe just really old.
Under the soaped-up window on the far wall was a computer desk. The entire wall was lined with charts of various sorts. It looked like a professional workspace, but Helen suspected there was more here than met the eye.
When her gaze found Dr. Liu again, she was wearing a lab coat and blue latex gloves. She unwrapped a syringe and laid out vials on an empty table. “Could I get a blood sample?”
Helen said, “Not just yet. Let’s talk a little first. I know you saw what happened with my tea. So, why am I here? What do you want from me?”
Dr. Liu laid down the syringe and turned to Helen. “I would think it obvious. You’ve been taking my supplement, and it works very differently in you than in most women. I want to know what it’s doing to you and why.”
Helen paced a few steps, hesitating. “Are there some other tests we can run first? Something a little less invasive and personal than giving you my DNA in a vial?”
Dr. Liu pursed her lips. She seemed to be considering something deeply. “I am very anxious to look at you under a microscope, but I suppose we could start by letting you show me what you can do. Want to start a fire for me?”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t just make fire whenever I want. It’s more like I can release the heat when it’s already there.”
“I see. Have you tried?”
“Tried what?”
“Making fire when you’re not having a hot flash?”
Helen had to admit she had not. She had experimented with dispersing the heat in different ways. The first time, she was now pretty sure, had been at her condo. She had just tossed the heat out without concern about where it landed. That hadn’t ended so well. But other times, she had been able to focus the heat in certain directions. The heat had never hurt her. She’d suffered no burns or effects from smoke. The same could not be said for her clothes. She’d thrown away several blouses and pairs of pants in the past few days because of small holes or melted fibers.
When she boiled her tea at the talk that afternoon, she had even controlled the speed, so the tea had come to a boil and slowly turned to steam and disappeared. The cup had even sort of survived. If it had been a cup meant to contain heat, Helen suspected she could have done it without damaging the cup.
Could she do it just anytime? That was an interesting question, indeed. “Let’s try it,” she said aloud.
Dr. Liu led Helen to a corner of the lab where there was a sort of glass stall, not that different from a shower. “This is reasonably fireproof. It’s where I tested the—” Dr. Liu seemed like she wasn’t sure she wanted to reveal whatever she had started to say. Helen was finding Dr. Liu more interesting all the time.
Helen set her purse on a small table and looked into the stall. “What do you want me to do?”
“Tell me how it feels, what you do when you push the heat out of you.”
Helen thought. She remembered the icicle feeling dripping down her body from the top of the head, down her arms, and out her fingertips. She remembered focusing the energy out her toes that time in her daughter’s yard. “When I’m already hot, it’s like I can just imagine the heat leaving me, and it does. The other times, it made actual fire. Today, at the co-op, that was the first time I made it come out as heat without flame.”
Dr. Liu was typing notes in a netbook she had pulled from somewhere. “What did you do differently today?”
Helen laughed. “It’s gross, but it’s like when you have to fart, but you’re in a public place, so you try to let it out only a little at a time, without any noise. I think I was controlling how fast it came out. Slower, it’s just heat. Faster, it’s fire.”
Dr. Liu typed faster. “And you say you’re taking a daily dose of my supplements? How many tablets a day is that?”
Helen nodded. “Yes. At first, I was taking Surge Protector multiple times a day—whenever I got a hot flash. And I was having a lot of them. When they started happening less often, I slowed to taking just one a day, which seemed to keep them at bay.” Helen paused, thinking. “One time, I had one at night. I was upstairs, the pills were downstairs, so I didn’t take another pill. I went into the bathroom and tried cool cloths on my neck. It wasn’t working. I wished I could just push the heat out, someplace safe, like the sink. Then I felt it.” Helen could almost feel it again, thinking about it.
“I raised my hand and felt the heat coming out my palm. Then there was this little ball of fire in the sink. It sort of rolled around in the bowl until I turned on the faucet and put it out. It singed the washcloth I had left hanging over the basin, but otherwise, didn’t hurt anything. I went back to bed. The next day, I wasn’t even sure it had really happened.”
“So, you’ve sent out your heat a variety of ways: projected away from your body, a fireball, general fire all around, and slowly, as heat?”
Helen nodded again.
“I think it’s time to see if you can call it at will.” Dr. Liu pointed toward the booth.
Helen hesitated only a moment. She had to admit she wanted to know. Could she do this? She stepped in, and Dr. Liu closed the door behind her.
Helen looked around. The walls appeared to be ordinary glass. “Won’t I just melt the glass?” she asked.
“It’s grade four fire-resistant glass. It should be able to withstand your fire for up to thirty minutes.”
“And if it fails?”
“There is a sprinkler system in the ceiling and a gaseous fire suppression system as a backup.”
“Good. I’d hate to burn the house down. The insurance people might doubt the condo fire was an accident.” Silence. If they were going to spend time together, Helen was going to have to teach that woman to respond to a joke. In the meantime, she was excited about trying this.
She sat down cross-legged in the middle of the stall and rested her head in her hands. Could she raise the heat if it wasn’t already there? Helen closed her eyes and breathed in and out slowly, finding her center like she’d been taught in yoga class. She imagined a ball of fire in her cupped hands, spinning gently. The yellow and orange flames rolled around themselves like an Ouroboros, a dragon consuming and feeding itself endlessly. It was beautiful. She opened her eyes. There, in her hands, was the ball she had imagined.
Dr. Liu was practically pressing her nose against the glass. Helen raised her hands high, the ball spinning slowly. She stood, wobbling a little since she couldn’t use her hands to push herself up. She willed the ball to spin faster, and the ball began to whip around in her palm. Helen noticed her palm felt no heat, just a light tickling sensation as if someone were running a feather duster across her hand. Then she threw the fireball down at the ground in front of her feet. A small wall of fire spread in a line in front of her toes. Helen raised her arms, and the wall grew to knee high, and then waist high, and then filled the space in front of her. It felt wonderful. Helen realized she was laughing.
“Can you bring the flames back down?” Dr. Liu’s voice came through a speaker somewhere in the stall.
“Down? Why would I want to do that?”
“The flames are hotter than the grade of the glass! Can you bring them down yourself or should I engage the system?”
Helen imagined the fire becoming smaller but nothing happened. She imagined the wall rolling itself back into a ball. Nothing. She pulled at the flames with her mind, trying to pull them back into her body. Nothing. Her head hurt from the effort. She started stomping out the flames with her feet, but the fire was burning faster than she could move.
For the first time, she felt afraid. Was she going to burn up in there? She s
tarted to feel dizzy. The box was fully sealed. Was she even getting any oxygen? The flames began to look strangely like liquid. As she fell to the ground, she was dimly aware of a sound, like there was a leak in her inner tube. It is very warm here at the beach today, she thought, just before she fell into darkness.
essica’s weekend started out okay. Nathan was feeling more normal, eating and complaining, which was a good sign. So, Jessica’s guilt over injuring him when she fell from the chandelier was somewhat assuaged. Of course, they hadn’t really talked about how he ended up in the hospital yet, or what was happening to her. There was this look on Nathan’s face every time his accident was mentioned, as if he felt a little queasy.
Jessica thought it best to leave that topic for another day. It wasn’t as if talking about it would help. Jessica didn’t know any more than he did about why she’d had these incidents. They had just happened. It’s not like he could help her find an expert to consult, either. Jessica was sure there wasn’t a Google entry for floating women, at least not one that would be helpful.
As for Nathan, he seemed to have convinced himself it had not really happened, that it was just his concussion talking. The fact that the boys had seen it, too, and had taken to incorporating flight around the house into their imaginative play, didn’t make him accept the truth. He just smiled tensely when Frankie and Max ran by the bedroom with capes and shouted about flying just like Mommy. She didn’t blame Nathan for feeling freaked out—she was pretty freaked out herself―but she was annoyed he so blatantly ignored her role in the whole thing.
He hadn’t once asked if she was okay. It was becoming increasingly clear Jessica had used up Nathan’s supply of understanding and support with the cancer year. He wasn’t ready for any more drama.
Jessica wasn’t interested in babying him along. She had enough on her plate, worrying about what might trigger another incident. While she might wish for a partner to work this out with, Nathan wasn’t going to be that for her. She would deal with this herself.
When she’d made it to Saturday with her feet still firmly on the earth, Jessica began to relax a little. She had stayed grounded. She began to hope she could pick up the boys and her life and pretend this had never happened. Maybe her flight was a one-time incident, a freak event. The lightness she had experienced at the hospital had not reoccurred, and it had now been several days.
But a simple trip to the grocery store dashed those hopes like jellyfish in the surf. Jessica had been examining packages of ground beef in the meat section when she’d felt the lightening sensation in her belly, the same tickle she’d felt before taking flight in her living room. She closed her eyes and prayed silently, “Please, God, no.”
But God wasn’t listening. When she took a step toward the grocery cart, her foot bounced against the floor, and she felt herself rising. Grabbing at the nearly empty cart didn’t help. It simply started to rise with her. Luckily, she was still near enough the meat counter to grab it. With all her strength, she pulled herself down and wedged her body inside, pushing her hands up against the top of the case to hold her bottom down in the shelf with the meat. She looked like a stone monkey stuck in the middle of the pillar to hold up the structure. But this wasn’t funny.
Stuck, she buffeted against the cold metal. She huddled there for long minutes, willing weight back into her body, straining the muscles of her arms against the force trying to suck her into the rafters with the lost balloons and confused songbirds. She was trying not to panic and failing miserably. Anytime she peeked out, she could see other customers quickly changing their minds about needing any meat just now and backing their carts away.
Eventually, a manager had approached her. “Ma’am? Are you okay, ma’am? Should I call an ambulance?” He eyeballed the way she was wiggling around on the packages of ground beef. “You need to get out of the meat counter, ma’am. It’s just not sanitary.”
Somehow, she convinced him not to call an ambulance or the police. She told him she’d gotten lightheaded from going too long without eating and lost her balance, and now, she felt weak. He was still wary but seemed sympathetic. He said he’d go get something to help. He came back with a package of cheese crackers and a soda, which she drank gratefully with one hand, hoping he’d mistake her death grip on the meat case as nerves. He’d been so nice, crouching down and talking with her while she took care of her “blood sugar problem.” Oddly, the soda did seem to help. She suppressed a gentle burp and suddenly felt much more normal. Still, she was loath to let go of the nice, sturdy meat case and try standing in open air.
Eventually, she could stall no longer. The light, bubbly feeling had abated. She’d have to take her chances, or he’d call that ambulance after all or maybe the police. She knew she’d never be able to shop there again.
She accepted the manager’s arm and allowed him to help her stand. This time, she stayed on the ground. She moved carefully, keeping a tight grip on the grocery cart. The manager shadowed her for an aisle or two until he was called away to another problem. Jessica smiled at him with all the reassurance she could muster and shuffled her way to the checkout, afraid to lift her feet from the ground. But she’d made it.
The walk back to her van felt endless. She’d stood for long seconds at the exit doors, just staring at the long open expanse between the relative safety of the store and her minivan. She was terrified of what would happen if she lost her grip on gravity outside. What would stop her from just floating upward until she disappeared into the upper atmosphere and suffocated? It was only the impatient harrumphing of another shopper that made her take the first step into the open air. She sweated enough in the ten yards or so walk to soak her thin T-shirt through.
When she made it back to her house, she parked in the garage and asked Nathan to carry in the groceries. She was less worried about his concussion than about herself now. While he’d brought the groceries in, she’d gone into the attic and found the chest with her father’s old scuba gear in it. She had pulled out his weight belt and ankle weights and strapped them on.
She’d hardly taken them off since. Nathan hadn’t asked. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he assumed it was some kind of fitness thing she was trying. She was glad not to have to explain. She’d work this out somehow on her own.
elen woke on a sofa some time later. She was under an itchy blanket crocheted from some kind of yarn with sparkles throughout. She sat up with a start and looked around. Where the hell was she? The room was completely unfamiliar. She looked everywhere at once, searching for anything she recognized. That was when she spotted the mouse, strapped to a bird stand, which was hovering four inches above it at the end of its tether. The sight of it soothed her. She knew where she was. She was still at Dr. Liu’s house, somehow back in the living room.
She tried to stand but almost immediately fell back against the cushions. Her head hurt. What had happened? She stood again, this time more slowly, using the couch arms and the coffee table for support. She swayed a little but kept her feet. The blanket fell from her shoulders. Helen looked down and saw that her pants were full of holes and one leg of them had been cut away. Her shirt wasn’t in much better shape. It hung in tatters around her.
She remembered the wall of fire she had been unable to bring down. Dr. Liu’s backup systems must have worked, because she was here and alive. Other than the headache, she felt fine. How had that tiny little woman managed to move her up the stairs and onto this sofa?
Examining herself for signs of damage or injury, Helen noticed one of her arms was bandaged at the inside of the elbow. Dr. Liu must have taken a blood sample while she was unconscious. They’d have to talk about boundaries, and also about what she had learned. In spite of the lingering headache, which probably came from oxygen deprivation or dehydration, Helen was excited. She had done it! She had produced fire just because she wanted to. That probably meant she could do it any time she wanted to!
Concentrating on her hand, Helen tried to raise a fireball. It came, tho
ugh it sort of sputtered like wood does when it is a little too wet to light well. Helen frowned. She hoped it was temporary. It had been exhilarating, the power of controlling the flames like that. She wanted to do it again. For now, though, she had to admit she was dizzy. Helen sat back down to gather the blanket. It might have itched, but at least it was all in one piece.
She had just settled the blanket around her shoulders when Dr. Liu entered the room, a large bronze edged tray in her hands. “Oh, good! You’re up.”
Helen nodded. “What time is it? Was I out long?”
Dr. Liu gestured at the clock above her left shoulder with her ear. Helen saw it was nearly seven o’clock. So, she couldn’t have been out too long. That was good. She also saw the tray was laden with a tea set: a small pot that looked like it was made of stone and two of those tiny cups with no handles. Helen hated those kinds of cups, but the tea smelled wonderful, and she was grateful for the gesture. She reached for a cup as soon as Dr. Liu set the tray down. She also picked up one of the Surge Protector pills her host had included in a small bowl on the tray. Against the blue lacquered bowl, the orange and yellow pills looked like strange Easter eggs. She swallowed one of the tablets, hoping that was why her power seemed diminished―maybe she had used up the effects of the pill she had taken that morning.
Dr. Liu sat in the chair across from her and took a cup of tea for herself. They both sipped, thinking their own thoughts for a few moments before Helen spoke. “Well, that was interesting.”
Going Through the Change Page 8
