Are You Seeing Me? (19 page)

IN WHISTLER, WE SIT FOR a time on a patio nestled at the foot of the ski hill. All across the slope, mountain bikers leap and fly and spin on a steep, dusty course of jumps and ledges, both man-made and natural. Perry watches the action like a kid on Christmas Day—wideeyed, unblinking, mouth open, barely comprehending the sensory-overloaded scene. After ten minutes or so, he studies the drop closest to us, his face a mask of solemnity.

“Problem?” I ask.

He stands, ignoring the query, and approaches the patio rail to gain a closer look at the drop. He returns half a minute later, frowning and shaking his head. “There is instability here too,” he says. He turns to Leonie. “Remember this morning? I said there was a lot of change happening?”

“Yes.”

“You remember my readings?”

“Yes. You said the ground is shifting.”

Perry nods. “I thought we might get away from it today, but it’s here too.”

He bends down, rubs his hands together, places them on the ground. He takes the seismometer and seismograph out of his backpack. The dome is placed on the deck under one of the adjoining tables; the reader finds a home under Extrasensory Perry’s nose. After a brief scan of the results, he mutters a word I can’t recognize, packs the equipment away and inhales.

“What was that you said, bud?” I ask.

“
Pranayama
,” Leonie says, stubbing out her cigarette. “It’s a yoga term for controlled breathing.”

I must have missed that one. I begin to speak but am interrupted by a proclamation.

“There will be a crash soon,” Perry says, balling his hands. “The earth is loosening up.”

I lean forward, elbows planted on the table.“Have you noticed a problem with that jump over there, Pez? Is it unsafe?”

The question is ignored; the frowns and fists continue. “
Pranayama
,” he repeats.

Leonie and I study the jump in question. The first half dozen mountain bikers negotiate the launch and landing without a bobble. The seventh—a bug-eyed dervish with curly red hair spilling out of his helmet and tattoos snaking down his arms—doesn’t fare as well. His takeoff is different from the previous riders: he attacks the far left lip of the ledge. In midair, he twists the front wheel left, then right, then back to center, positioning it ideally for a balanced landing and quick getaway toward the finish. The ground, though, fails to reward his skill. As the tires strike, the solid terrain disintegrates. A chunk of the track spits out sideways from the front wheel. He holds the jackknife for an instant, then he’s a projectile, careening over the handlebars, vainly clutching at thin air. When body and hard pan collide, Perry’s mantra pierces the air.

“
PRANAYAMA!
”

And then we are on our feet. Astonishingly, so too is the fallen rider. Amid the swirling dust, hunched and hurting, he scuttles over to his bike and inspects the damage. The front fork is bent. The handlebars are pushed back. The chain has come away.

“Are you okay?” says Perry. “I can help you.”

Tattoo Guy throws a glance Perry’s way but doesn’t respond. With his one good arm—the other is pressed to his chest, clearly injured—he stands the bike up.

“I have a first-aid certificate.”

He loops the chain back over the cog. Within sixty seconds, the spectacle ends. Tattoo Guy wheels his bike through a flagged marshalling area and disappears into the crowd.

“His face showed embarrassment and anger and fear,” says Perry, resuming his seat. “And I’m pretty sure he’s dislocated his shoulder. That would require a cuff-and-collar sling rather than a regular sling for a broken arm.”

“You knew,” Leonie says, breathless.

“What?”

“You knew he was going to crash.”

Perry frowns and shakes his head. “I didn’t know
he
would have an accident. I don’t know him at all.”

“You knew something was going to happen, though, didn’t you?”

“Yes. It was obvious.”

Leonie turns to me. Her gaze is hopeful, pleading for some shared sense of awe.

“The patch of ground was like two tectonic plates,” Perry continues. “When the bike landed, it came down on the fissure, which is the gap between the two plates. The lower one pressed into the higher one and caused it to fly out of the ground. It was like a tiny version of a 9.0 tremor.”

Leonie wants another cigarette, but the pack in her purse is empty. She keeps searching, pulling out several empty pill bottles. Perry’s declaration from this morning surfaces in my thoughts:
I never needed medication
.

“So, this is what you meant?” she asks.

“Pardon me?”

“Before, when you talked about the shifting ground?”

“There is instability here, like I said.”

She bites her pinkie fingernail, nods. “You said it’s at home, too.”

“Yes.”

“Is something going to happen at home, Perry?”

He sniffs and flicks his hand. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Something like we just saw? Something unexpected?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

He flicks his hand a second time. “It’s not obvious like today was.”

“Do you suspect someone might get hurt?”

“No.”

“No one will get hurt?”

“No, I mean
I don’t know
.” Perry takes hold of his right earlobe in a pincer grip. “I would prefer not to talk about this.”

“It’s okay. I’m just trying to understand.”

“Yes, but I would
really
prefer not to talk about this!”

“Leave it there, Leonie,” I say. I take hold of Perry’s wrist and give three quick squeezes. “That’s enough ‘trying to understand’ for now.”

She can’t let it go though. Approaching Horseshoe Bay on the return journey, with my brother fast asleep for the third time today, she draws me back into the paranoid analysis. “What do you think is going on in his head?”

“When he’s napping, you mean?”

“No, with the whole shifting-ground-instability-at-home thing.”

I prop my elbow on the open driver-side window and rest my chin on my hand. “You want to know what I think? I think he’s got an inkling of what we’re about to ask him, of the say he has in our future. In
your
future.”

Leonie glances over her shoulder. Perry is snoring. “You think he knows I want to come back?”

“I reckon he might.”

“And the fact that he will decide if it happens…You think he sees that?”

“No, I don’t think he”—I use air quotes—“
sees
it. He’s just making some logical conclusions, putting two and two together. He’s quite capable.”

“I think he’s more than that. I think he’s gifted.”

“No, he’s
capable
. He’s more aware than most of the world around him. He notices things in people that might not be clear to others. He takes in a lot—more than he’s equipped to handle, in fact. He senses energy and he feels change. Does that make him worthy of respect? Absolutely. Does that make him…I don’t know, the Oracle of Delphi? Hardly.”

“He has a gift, Justine—I’m sure of it. The third-eye chakra. The
Ajna
.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“He really is Extrasensory Perry.”

“Not the way you see it.” I take my right hand off the steering wheel and pat my forehead with the heel of my palm. A short, abrasive laugh leaps from my throat. “Boy, after all these years, you still want to think of him as a freak of nature. A handicapped freak as a child, a gifted freak as a man. He’s not a circus act, Leonie. He’s just different. Okay? Unique. He’s loving and caring… The best brother I could’ve ever had. And he shouldn’t be tagged with a label, certainly not one from a bloody chakra chart. Okay? He’s just like the rest of us—amazing in his own right, and no better or worse than anyone else.”

The argument slides into silence. On the winding Sea to Sky Highway, we pass cars and cars pass us. Near the turnoff for a place called Cypress Bowl, Leonie opens her purse again and rummages around. A spare cigarette in the clutter? A pill that escaped from the bottle and is lying among the shopping receipts and spare tampons? No. She takes out a cloth to wipe the smudges from her sunglasses.

Are you seeing me?
That’s the question she should be answering.

And Perry should be the one asking.

“PEZ, CAN WE HAVE A CHAT?”

Perry closes
Lost in Katrina
, stands the book on the adjacent shelf and joins us at the dining table. He looks to Leonie, then to me, his face impish despite the stubble on his chin and cheeks.

“This is like the interrogation scene in
Police Story 2
,” he says, smirking and feigning cuffs on his hands. “That is an okay joke.”

I nod. “Yep, could’ve been better. Listen, we want to talk to you about something.”

“Is it to do with Leonie coming back?”

My heart vaults to the top of my rib cage. I throw a stern look Mum’s way—a warning to keep any
Ajna
chakra gibberish to herself. She clears her throat and drains the dregs of her third rye and ginger. “It is, actually,” I say, maintaining a watchful eye. “You had a suspicion of it, didn’t you?”

He unlocks his invisible cuffs with an invisible key. “We are going back to Brisbane in two days—I thought Leonie might be coming too.”

“Leonie would like to come and live in Australia again, yes.”

“Is she coming back to be a proper mother for us?”

I glance at Leonie. She’s like a human house of cards, afraid of collapsing with the next breath of air, staring at her clasped hands on the table. One thumbnail is wedged under the other, digging, probing. I’m on the verge of suggesting the question can be answered another day when she decides the time for a response is now.

“I imagine I would be…someone you could get to know, Perry. Over time. I think that would be the way to start out.”

Perry considers this for a good ten seconds, then nods. “Is she…” He stops, clicks his fingers, shakes his head. “It is bad manners to speak like this when the person is in the room and can speak for themselves.” He eyeballs the vase of carnations by Leonie’s left elbow. “Are you catching the same flight as us?”

“No, she’s going to—” I press my fingertips to my lips, extend a hand toward our mother.

“I wouldn’t come back straightaway,”she says.“I would settle things here, make some calls to people over there. Could take a little while. A few months at best.”

“I will be at Fair Go by then. It would be you and Just Jeans living together.”

“Um, it wouldn’t be…That could be—”

“Pez, Leonie wouldn’t move into our house,” I say. “And right now, Leonie returning to Australia—it’s actually not a done deal yet. It needs to be something both of us agree is okay.”

“Both of us?”

“You and me.”

Through squinted eyes, he looks at Leonie for the first time in the conversation. “Just Jeans and I will decide if you move back to Brisbane?”

“Yes.”

“Just us. Not you?”

“I went away. It’s up to you if I can return.”

“You are an Australian citizen—you could return whether we wanted you to or not.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“You could though.”

“I wouldn’t do it. I want to come back and be with you guys more than anything I’ve ever known, anything I ever will know. But I won’t come back unless the two of you allow it.”

Perry wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and starts making little grunting noises in his throat. “Have you decided?” he asks me.

“I’m not going to say at this point.”

“I think your face says you’ve decided yes. Is that correct?”

“Pez—”

“I would support your decision if you’ve decided yes.”

“Perry, you can read my face, my hands, my eyes, my toes…I’m not going to tell you what I’m thinking about Leonie’s return. Okay? This is something you must decide without knowing my opinion.”

Perry rubs his eyes with his balled fists. I move in beside him and put an arm over his shoulders. Our mother rises from the table and makes to step away.

“Stay there.”

She resumes her seat.

“You’ve got a full day together tomorrow, Pez. Just the two of you at the PNE. See how it goes. See how you feel at the end of it. Then we can talk about what happens next.”

He nods, gives me a hug, then collects
Lost in Katrina
from the shelf. He flicks through from start to finish four times in quick succession, the pages blurring like hummingbird wings.