Scaredy Kat (9 page)

“What happened to Jac?”

I was relieved to have the subject moving away from the van Hecht house. Probably she hadn’t seen me with Orin, then.

“Her mother came and abducted her,” I said. “She’s gone totally nuclear because Jac told her she’s quitting the cello.”

“Oh boy. Poor Jac,” my mother said. I nodded.

“Anyway, that’s it. Jac’s gone. I might try to e-mail her to find out what’s happening, since I have a feeling her mother
won’t be letting her use the phone. In fact, I think I’ll go send her one right now.”

I started toward the house, again uncertain why I was in such a hurry to get away from my mother. Her kindness, her goodness,
the way she was so different from Jac’s mom, all of that was making me mad. Go figure. I felt angry at my mom because she
was such a nice person, and that made it painful to shut her out.

“Kat?”

I stopped and looked at her over my shoulder.

“Is there some reason you’re leaving out part of the story?”

I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.

“Huh?”

“Five minutes ago you were standing in the yard next door with Orin. Were you going to mention that you’d met him?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Because I didn’t have an answer for her. I didn’t even have an answer for
myself.

She walked toward me and stood close, brushing my hair out of my eyes.

“Maybe I’m imagining things. But these last few weeks, especially these last few days, I feel like you’re putting up walls.
Shutting me out. I get the sense that there are things going on with you that you feel it’s important you keep from me. And
that worries me. You’re entitled to your privacy, Kat, like anyone else. But I’m worried about you.”

I couldn’t tell her she was wrong. Because she wasn’t wrong.

But I sure didn’t want to tell her she was right.

Typical me. Since I didn’t know what to say, I cried instead. And I don’t mean a tear or two trickling down my cheek. I bawled.
I cried for Tank, and for Jac. I cried for my mom, raising me all by herself. I cried for me, too—for the part of me that
was terrified of my spirit sight, and for the part of me that couldn’t seem to confide in my mother anymore.

During all this sobbing, my mom put her arm around my shoulders and led me inside. She sat me down at the kitchen table and
put a kettle on for some tea. When my bawling downgraded into sobs, and then sniffles, she wet a cool cloth and handed it
to me. I pressed my face into it. The cold and wet sensation helped shock me back into myself. My mother placed a steaming
cup of tea in front of me. Its familiar smell was comforting. I had a few more sniffles in me, and then I felt almost like
myself again. Myself with a swollen face and red eyes.

“Who is Orin, anyway?” I asked.

She didn’t seem to mind that having left so many of her questions unanswered, I now had one for her.

“He’s a healer,” she said. “I got to know him four or five years ago—you remember when I did that six-week intensive program
at the Omega Institute? He was there, too. After that, I ran into him at a couple other programs. We were friends. But after
your dad, after the move and everything, we lost touch. Things got complicated.”

By complicated, my mom meant that cash was too tight for any more new age workshops, and anyway a single mother couldn’t up
and leave her daughter to take classes at the Omega Institute. I felt a flash of anger at my father. He had taken away so
much from both of us.

“I saw him outside,” I said. “Jac’s mom had just kidnapped her. I was still standing there with Max on the sidewalk. And Orin
came out of the house. I’d kind of wondered who you were in your office with.”

She nodded.

“So he introduced himself and stuff. Then he went to get his bike. And I decided to go back in the van Hechts’—in the house
next door.”

“Go back?”

I sighed.

“I
am
doing my BC project on the house. I didn’t make that up. I was over there photographing yesterday, and the screen door was
easy to open. A window was propped up. So I went in.”

I hesitated. Trying to decide how much I should tell her.

“But I’ve been getting these . . . kind of spells, recently. Around spirits. I got really freaked out in the house. One of
the spirits in there is very strong, and very angry. It was doing everything it could to get my attention. The more I tried
to ignore it, the more forceful it got. I lost it—started screaming bloody murder. Orin heard me, and came in to help.”

Again, I found myself presenting only part of the truth to my mother. It was so humiliating.

“Orin told me I was having panic attacks. He said . . . he showed me how to do breathing and stuff. He said he could teach
me . . . other ways. To, like, manage my energy or something. He said I’d overloaded my system, and that was causing the panic
attacks.”

My mom sat, nodding a little, and waiting. She gave me an encouraging smile.

“I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have tried to pretend like I hadn’t met Orin. It’s just all so complicated. But I thought if I told
you about him, I’d have to tell you about the panic attacks and the . . . I just don’t want to talk about it. About me. I’m
so sick of me right now.” I made a noise of frustration.

“But you seem angry at me,” my mother said.

I didn’t say anything. Because the fact was, I did feel angry with my mother. And if I admitted that, she’d want to know what
she had done. And I knew very well she hadn’t done anything wrong. All she had done was to continue being herself.

“I can’t—I just can’t talk about this with you. I’m not even making any sense.”

“No, you make perfect sense, Kat,” she said. She reached over to pick up my mug and took a sip of tea.

“Your intuition is telling you not to come to me for guidance right now,” she continued. “You have to honor that, Kat. You’re
right to honor that. Coming into the sight is different for every single person. It’s never the same experience twice. And
in the end, all you have is your intuition. Intuition is a line to your higher spirit. The part of you that’s multi-dimensional,
that has access to unlimited knowledge and help. You’ve got to go where that takes you. Maybe the Universe brought Orin to
you today, instead of guiding you to me.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Things always happen for a reason. When you watch a movie, and the main character has a random encounter with someone, you
know that encounter has meaning. That it’s important to the story, or it wouldn’t be in the movie. Real life is the same way.”

She got up and went over to the counter near the telephone, and came back with a card in her hand.

“This is Orin’s card,” she said, handing it to me. “His phone number and his e-mail address are there. If you feel the impulse
to contact him about something, do it.”

I took the card. It said
ORIN WATKINS—HEALING AND ENERGY WORK
in plain letters. Below were a phone number, a Web site, and an e-mail address.

“You’re going to be okay, Kat,” my mom said, reaching over and pushing the hair out of my eyes. “I trust you. Trust yourself,
okay?”

If only it were that easy.

I put Orin’s card in my desk drawer. I e-mailed Jac a few times, telling her all about Orin and how he’d rescued me in the
house. I got no response, though. Jac’s mom was probably keeping her off the computer, or maybe she’d even taken her somewhere.
So I’d be getting no advice from my best friend. I sat, my mind blank. Then an idea came to me out of the blue.

“That’s stupid,” I thought.

But where had the idea come from? Maybe it was more of that intuition my mother was talking about.

I Googled Philips Memorial Hospital and got their phone number. I dialed it.

“Philips Memorial, how may I help you?”

I had intended to ask if Julius van Hecht was still a patient there. But it came to me suddenly that if I was entitled to
any information about Julius, I would know that.

“Uh, yes, can you tell me the room number for Julius van Hecht, please? I’ve misplaced it.”

There was a pause, and I thought the woman was going to tell me to buzz off. But in a moment she came back on the line.

“Room seven sixteen,” she said.

I took a quick breath of surprise.

“Uh, thanks,” I said, and hung up.

Julius was still alive, and he was still in the same hospital.

Twenty minutes later, I was on the bus. Philips Memorial wasn’t that close. I’d have to transfer twice—the trip there would
probably take forty-five minutes, give or take. With my mother giving me my space and Jac virtually locked up in her own home,
I’d had nobody to bounce the idea off of. Which left me with two choices: forget about the whole thing or just do it. Here
I was on the bus, just doing it.

I had no idea what I was going to do when I got to the hospital. I just felt like I needed to see Julius. That somehow by
seeing Julius, I’d find out more about Tank’s mystery. My mother says that sometimes we just need to take action and trust
the Universe to handle the details. There seemed like a lot of details here even for the Universe, but the sad fact was, this
was the only plan I had.

The third bus let me off right outside the hospital. Philips Memorial was a mid-sized hospital, situated on top of a ridge
that looked over the surrounding valleys. As I walked up the paved pathway toward the front entrance, I heard an ambulance
siren scream by, and I felt a chill. I didn’t like hospitals. I mean, who did? But I had a special thing about them. Whenever
we drove by a hospital, I’d fix my gaze on a particular window, knowing that there was a patient behind it. Maybe sleeping.
Or being operated on. Or dying. I did the same thing when an ambulance went by. I’d try to get my head around the reality
that there was a person in that ambulance. Someone sick, or injured. And I’d never know who they were, or what happened to
them.

I walked through the main entrance of the hospital into a sunny lobby. There was a desk by the elevators, where a dour-looking
middle-aged woman sat.

“Room number?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What room are you visiting?” the woman said. She looked at me like I was the stupidest person she’d seen so far that day.

“Oh, sorry. Um, room seven sixteen.”

The woman fished a card that said 716 on it from a file. She pushed a clipboard toward me.

“Sign here,” she said.

I signed my name, my real one, since I hadn’t thought to come up with a fake name and didn’t want to stand around wondering
what to write. It probably didn’t matter. Always better to be honest. And in fact, I hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
I was just going to visit a patient, nothing more.

The woman directed me to a bank of elevators. There was one waiting there, and I was relieved to find I was the only passenger.
I had gone to a hospital a few years back, to visit a classmate who had broken her leg. There had been a man on a gurney with
me in the elevator, along with a nurse. The man had made strange, unhappy sounds in his throat, while the nurse chatted to
a doctor about some restaurant like the guy wasn’t lying right there. I couldn’t have gotten off that elevator any faster.

The seventh floor seemed unusually quiet and empty. I followed the room numbers down the hall. Room 716 was directly opposite
the nurse’s station, but there was no one there. Relieved, I walked quickly to the room. The door was open, and I peeked inside.
I caught a quick glimpse of a figure standing by the window, then hurriedly stepped away from the doorway.

A nurse was coming down the hall toward the nurse’s station. I knew it must look strange, the way I was standing there a few
feet from the doorway. She gave me a curious look, then peered into Julius’s room.

“Leaving so soon?” she called into the room.

I took off down the hall. Whoever was visiting Julius was about to come out of the room, and I didn’t want to be seen. I darted
into the bathroom and locked the door. I checked my watch and waited. I pressed my ear against the door, but I couldn’t hear
anything other than regular hospital sounds.