Indigo (28 page)

Lifeless.

“Tell me in the car.”

Mom flew, going well above the speed limit, out to the wharf, to Crescent Charters. As soon as we pulled into the gravel parking lot, I jumped out of the car before it had even stopped. I could see the knot of people standing on the small dock, their heads bent in reverence, their shoulders slumped, their voices silent.

I ran. I had to get there. I had that feeling again that I could see these things, and they registered, yet they were so very far away. I heard the slapping of my running feet against the wet boards of the dock, and that brought me back into myself a little, but when I saw his face, ashen white, with blue eyelids, his chest not rising or falling, that shocked me back into myself in a moment, in a flash. In that second, my world focused into a pinpoint on those beautiful eyelashes, holding drops of seawater.

My mother had explained it on the way to the wharf. He had been fishing. Dodge had been short of breath, but they had become stuck in the weeds, the cattails, out near the swampy edge of Egret Inlet. Rennick got nervous, surely thinking of another heart attack for Dodge. He dove in to dig out the propeller from the seaweed or whatever, instead
of just rowing. Dodge didn’t know how it happened. But Bouncer began acting weird, whining as they waited in the boat, his tail between his legs.

And Rennick never came back up.

He had drowned. My Rennick. He was gone. How long had he been without a breath? He would not be that fucking cricket. Never.

I watched the paramedics do their rescue breathing, the pressure on his chest. How long had they been at it? Were they still hopeful? I gave them five seconds. Six.

The sharp jut of his Adam’s apple. The black-oil color of his hair. The unseeing eyes. I couldn’t wait any longer.

I pushed through them. Risks. Guilt. Perfection. Control. None of it mattered. Only he mattered. Some things had to be charged at, saved, worked for, again and again, if need be.

All this talk, all these issues, none of it really mattered. Because Rennick was gone, and I had this power. A=B.

I knelt down next to his body, spied Dodge’s face above me filled with panic. Bouncer was at my heels, nudging me closer to Rennick with his snout. Mom had joined us, but these things didn’t matter. I only had to think his name, all he had come to mean to me, all that he was, and there it was. The indigo lens in front of my vision. The crackling spark of life inside my ribs. Like an explosion of heat from the heart of me.

I held on to his hands, both of them in mine. They were
cold, so cold. I placed them over my heart, held them against me with my palms. And I couldn’t help it, I was bawling.

He had believed in me when I hadn’t even believed in myself. He had saved me.

“Please, please. Rennick, please,” I said between gasps.

And then it was there at its height, plateaued and waiting for direction. And I let it go, I let it move freely, surging and charging into my beloved Rennick.

And in that moment, time stopped. It’s like I was there, but I wasn’t.

I hold Sophie’s body in my lap, cupping her face in my hands, the blue surges through me, in her. It brings her back
. I saved her,
I think. Here it is. I remember it now. The part I could never quite account for. The lost time. “I got you, Sophie. I got you.”

She smiles at me, shivers. “You saved me,” she says, lisping her
s
through that gap in her teeth
.

“Did I?” I say, flummoxed, holding on to her face. I am exhausted, and we lie back on the rocks. Her eyes close as she lays her head on my chest
.

I awake to her teeth chattering along with mine. It’s darker, colder. And I see that Sophie is pale again. Why had we not left? Walked back? I remember the surge of electricity through me, the exhaustion
.

Sophie’s eyes roll back in her head then, her body jerks. Not again! But then things change, the power pricks back up inside me, and I reach for her, to cup her face again, to fix her
.

But the wrong thing happens. The white light explodes around me, in me
.

The lightning
.

One lone bolt of lightning emerges from the atmosphere around us, blinding us, a terrifying and powerful glow around us, bathing us in current, jolting us, electrifying us. I absorb it and I don’t. Not enough. Sophie doesn’t recover
.

I smell the ozone in the air. The crisp Lake Michigan air. It is just a storm
.

I saved her. Lightning killed her.

I woke back up to where I was now. Here in my life without Sophie. Holding Rennick’s hands to my heart. The physio-electric life churned through me, out of me, into Rennick. I shuddered with exhaustion.

For all my power: I could heal, I could fix Lila Twopenny, I could maybe save Rennick, but I still wasn’t
all-powerful
. I still was not in charge. I couldn’t fix Mia-Joy. I couldn’t control lightning. I couldn’t do a lot of things.

It was good and it was bad. I was just a human Leyden jar.

“Please,” I said out loud, and I could feel the surges rack my shoulders, press against my ribs, exit my hands.

And then I snapped my eyes open because I could feel the current change, plunge from deeper inside of me. This was when I would normally stop, what I had come to recognize as the time to let go. But Rennick was not back yet. I couldn’t give up.

It pulled from inside me, deeper in my core, and I pushed it, willed it out of me.

Rennick coughed once. And then he was still. I wanted to pull back, but I couldn’t. Rennick needed me. Needed the blue.

I had it. He needed it. I gave it all.

And then it went black.

I watched Rennick gasp, cough, and wretch. Beautiful, gorgeous, life-affirming coughs. He vomited water and green stuff. He doubled over and coughed some more, and my heart swelled. Rennick. Alive. He turned on his side and curled his knees to his chest, coughed again.

By now I realized that I was watching this from an odd angle. I was above him, far above him. I could see him, but I couldn’t hear the noise that his coughs made. I reached out to him, but I could not see my own arm. I was air. I was wind. I was space. I was nothing and everything. I somehow hovered above it all, outside of myself.

This alarmed me, but not much, because Rennick was okay. He sat up now, the scary pallor of his face only a memory.

He turned his attention to the small knot of people to his left. They were surrounding someone. Rennick got
to his feet quickly, swayed, then pushed his way into the center.

It was me.
I
was down there, lying on the dock, and it was my turn to be ashen. Empty. I had used myself up. Just as I had promised not to do. And if I had been careless before with my power—arrogant, even—well, I was so sorry now. I struggled against nothing and everything trying to get myself back into my body, back down there, back with Rennick.

When I had so much and so many had so little, I should be hanging on to my life, tooth and nail. I realized this now.

One of the paramedics performed rescue breathing on my body, but Rennick pushed him aside, and the medic let him. Did the medic think it was useless? I watched Rennick in a panicked state. He cleared my airway. He pressed on my lifeless body. It was so white. And it looked so small from up here. Again I tried to push myself nearer, but … nothing. If anything, I floated farther away, up higher.

I struggled more from my vantage point to move, to get there. But it was all in vain, because I was nothing. I was gone from myself.

Rennick pinched my nose, breathed into my mouth. A sad and desperate last kiss. I struggled, but it was useless. Then he began to press on my chest, three even compressions just like they teach you in CPR class. But something changed. I could feel them, the pressure on my sternum, on
my rib cage, right there, right at the source of all of this. And with the pressure came the spark.

My vision tunneled and it all turned indigo, a blinding indigo flash, and then all was silent. For what seemed like a very long time. All I knew was the indigo. I was surrounded by it, bathing in it, tasting it, hearing only it.

Then it was his face, just his face so close to mine. And I wondered, was this heaven? But then, no, I saw salt water dripping from his hair, like it was happening in slow motion. A bead dropped from his forelock onto his eyelashes, then onto my face.

The first breath burned hot in my throat. He moved his mouth, but I couldn’t hear him yet. He smiled that smile. I reached up a shaking hand, and with one finger I touched that spot, those teeth, that overlap, and he was saying something over and over. And gradually a din, a little rustle of sound, then his voice. And it was in my ear. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”

I threw my arms around his neck, pulled myself up to him, and he held me against him, cradled me in his arms, in his lap.

After a long time, I opened my eyes, and he pulled back to look at me, the sun glinting off of his hair. A crash of thunder jarred me back into myself.

“I used myself up,” I said.

“I know.” He didn’t seem mad, didn’t seem anything but
relieved. He kissed the tip of my chin, each of my eyelids, my nose.

“Guess I’ll have to keep you around.” My voice was a scratchy whisper. “You’re getting good at this lifesaving thing,” I said.

He laughed then, a glorious, booming sound. And when he kissed me, the sky broke into another boom of thunder, and rain began to sheet down on us, the sun still high in the sky.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“I have a present for you,” Rennick said, holding out his hand as we stood by Sophie’s headstone. In his palm was a delicate silver chain, but instead of a charm there was the most magnificent rock, a tiny polished yet uncarved blue stone, sparkling in the September Chicago sun.

“Rennick—” I said, my heart fluttering in my chest.

“I found it on the shore of Pontchartrain. That Fourth of July. It’s quartz.” He smiled. I picked it up and admired the way the sunlight hit the surface of the rock.

“It’s the most perfect color.” It was just this side of purple, just that side of blue. Indigo. I rolled it around in my fingers. “Thank you.” And I thought about something. “What does indigo in an aura mean?”

“We don’t want to inflate your ego or anything,” Rennick joked. “Wisdom,” he said, eyeing me. “Bravery.”

I flushed. I couldn’t hear this about myself. “Could you
put it on me?” His fingers graced that spot on the back of my neck and I shivered. “When we first met, you said you knew I was stubborn and generous … kind. Which color of the aura goes with those?”

“I didn’t know any of that from your aura,” Rennick said, finishing with the necklace.

“No?”

“That’s just from watching you, seeing how you operate.” He smiled, squinted at me playfully. I thought of that first day I met him, that first time I looked in those eyes. The day at the Crawdaddy Shack, the sun shining along with the rain. And then again that day on the dock, when we saved each other.

I saw now that this was what life was. I looked down at Sophie’s granite headstone. And I looked up again at Rennick. The sun along with the rain.

And it made me think of what Mom had said when I told her and Dad about the lightning.

“It’s the price we pay for love, honey. It hurts this much because we love so much,” she had told me, holding on to my hand. “We are not in control of things. Ever. We only have that illusion. The death of a loved one shatters that.”

The lightning had killed Sophie, stopped her heart, and shattered me. There had been no other signs, no burns, nothing on Sophie’s body, but that was how lightning worked. It was haphazard. Random. Messy. Like so many things in life.
In a way, it seemed worse, not better, to know that I had had nothing to do with it. Worse because it was just so arbitrary. Unpredictable.

But I had nodded at Mom. “The thing we learn, though, is that we still have to keep going. Even though it could happen again. To me. To someone else.”

Mom added, “We love anyway. Even with death around every corner. That’s hope. That’s faith.”