Seeds of Discovery (2 page)

Finally somewhat settled down, she managed to get started on making an enchilada casserole just a few moments before she heard her mother’s car in the garage. She put all of her energy into the preparations, trying to keep her mind occupied. Although she knew it was going overboard, she took a long time preparing an extensive salad with lots of vegetables that needed chopping, and she washed all of the dishes by hand.

Megan Robbins was usually exhausted on Friday evenings, which was one reason that Quinn had taken over making dinner most of the time. She hoped her mother would be too tired to notice how antsy she was as she scrubbed the counters and set the table.

Of course, it was stupid to think her mom wasn’t going to find out. An hour later, as the girls sat down to dinner with their mother and their brother, seven-year-old Owen, Annie turned to their mother.
“Mommy!
Guess what?”

“What, sweetie?”

“We saw a car crash! And there were lots of police! And a fire truck. Just like on Fireman Sam!”

Quinn hadn’t even noticed the fire truck.

“Quinn! What happened?” Megan turned to her in alarm, concern written all over her face.

She sighed. It wasn’t always easy to appreciate how verbal Annie was becoming. “Some tourist ran his car into the guardrail right at the intersection to River Road. I stopped and called 911.”

“Are you guys okay, honey? That must have been scary.” Megan scooped Annie into her arms, hugging her tight, and reached across the table to grab Quinn’s hand. “Was the driver okay?”

She shrugged. “He looked like he was going to be okay, he was pretty out of it though. He had big cuts on his arm and his forehead.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be having you pick up Annie when it’s getting dark so early...”

“It’s fine, Mom, really. We didn’t crash. We’re safe.” She didn’t want this conversation going too far in the wrong direction.  She knew it made her mother anxious to have both her and Annie in the car alone.

“Quinn always drives safe,” Owen’s quiet voice interrupted. “It’ll be okay mom.”

She looked gratefully across the table at her little brother, who had glanced up from his book long enough to join in the conversation. She loved her sweet, quiet little brother. Owen was always so straightforward and literal; it was easy to believe everything he said.

“Yeah, Mommy! Quinn drives safe. And buckles her seat belt!” Annie chimed in.

She anxiously watched her mother’s eyes as she looked carefully at each of her children in turn. Finally, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and spoke.

“All right, sweetheart. I’ll try not to worry.  Are you sure you’re okay, not too shaken?”

“I’m sure, Mom.”

Quinn retreated to her room after dinner, hoping that immersing herself in the English essay would distract her enough to stop the endless playback of the near-accident that was running through her brain. She had just crumpled up the second paper that had doodles on it instead of words when there was a soft knock on the door.

“Hi sweetheart. Can I come in?”

She sat up on the bed and shuffled her books and papers into a pile, making room for her mother to come and sit beside her.

“How are you doing, honey?”

“I’m okay.”

Megan eyes were on her intently. Sometimes she felt as if those green eyes could see right through her. Tonight, they were laced with the same concern and anxiety Quinn was feeling. “Really?”

She sighed. “I think so. I was pretty freaked out.” And she hadn’t even told her mom about the part that had scared her most. The part where she’d almost hit William in the street. Her heart sped abnormally every time that memory crossed her mind.

“And now?”

“I keep seeing it over and over in my head.” She didn’t know why, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her mom about seeing William Rose there.

Her mom nodded. “That happens sometimes when something really scares me, too,” she paused, and her eyes drifted to a framed photograph on the nightstand. “And that would really scare me.”

Quinn followed her mother’s gaze. It was a picture of her real father, Samuel. He had died in a hit-and-run car accident when she was three. Someone had hit him in the road, the same way she’d almost done to William tonight. In the picture, he was grinning widely, his gray eyes twinkling as he hoisted a tiny Quinn into the air. They both stared at the picture for several minutes.

“Still think I should have gotten my driver’s license already?” Her voice was wry.

Her mother looked directly into Quinn’s eyes. “Yes, I do. You’re almost seventeen, Quinn. You can do this. Things happen. You can’t control everything. I know it’s scary for you. Trust me, it’s terrifying for me. Someday you’ll understand when it’s your child. But you can’t hide from everything that scares you.” She pulled Quinn into her arms and hugged her tightly, kissing her on the forehead before she let her go. “It will be okay, honey, it really will.”

“I know,” she said. But she didn’t really.

Halfway to the door, her mother turned back to face her again. “I think you should come to Denver with us tomorrow.”

Quinn raised an eyebrow.

“I know you don’t love going down there all the time anymore, but Richard and Denise haven’t seen you in a while.”

“They just saw me at Christmas.” It wasn’t that she didn’t like Jeff’s parents. They’d been supportive when he had adopted Quinn, and they were always nice to her and made her feel welcome, but they weren’t her grandparents the way they were Owen’s and Annie’s. She’d never really had her own grandparents. Her mom’s mother had died when she was little, and her grandfather had remarried and moved far away. They saw him every other year or so. She didn’t know anything at all about her father’s parents. Megan had told her they’d died before she was born.

It felt weird to her now, watching her little brother and sister with grandparents who doted on them, who got antsy about seeing them if more than a couple of weeks passed between visits.

“Look, sweetie … I just don’t think I could spend a weekend away from you right now, okay? Please come.”

She sighed. It wasn’t like she had big plans here in Bristlecone for the weekend anyway. “I thought you said you were okay.”

Megan kissed her on the head again. “I’m fine, and so are you. I just … want you close, okay?”

As she watched her mother walk out of the room, Quinn wondered which of them she had been trying to convince. The last few months, since Jeff’s team had taken the contracting job in Afghanistan, she knew her mother’s anxieties had been soaring. It was hard on all of them really, to be missing him.

She stared at the picture again, thinking now about the fact that she’d almost hit William. It still scared her. What if she’d hurt him as badly as someone had once hurt her father?

Her phone buzzed, startling her out of her reverie and when she looked at the screen, she realized that she was still more freaked out than she’d thought. It was a text message from Abigail, and just the thought of reading it abruptly exhausted her. She was sure that Abbie had heard about the accident from her brother, and she was going to want all of the details.

What could she even tell her? Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t told
anyone
about William being there. Louis had probably just assumed that Quinn had been the one to pull out the first aid kit and patch that guy up.

 Right now, she didn’t even want to think about it. So she did something she’d never done before. Without reading the message, she turned off the phone and went to bed.

*          *          *

Quinn woke up feeling unsettled. It didn’t feel like it could be morning already. She glanced at the digital clock on her nightstand. The red numbers glared at her. 1:23. Strange, she never woke up in the middle of the night. She could almost remember the dream she’d been having, but not quite. Something about … flowers? It left her with an odd feeling that she just couldn’t shake.  As if it was somehow important, as if she needed to be able to remember it, but the memory kept slipping away, just as she thought she might grasp it.

For almost three hours, she tossed and turned in the bed, telling herself it was just a crazy dream brought on by the stress of the almost-accident, and that everything was okay, but sleep refused to return.

Finally, faced with the approach of morning, Quinn resorted to something she would never admit to – she crept quietly to the next room. Inside, her mother lay sleeping, Annie curled peacefully next to her on the king-sized bed – the same way Quinn had slept every night until she was six, until a few months before her mother had married Jeff.

Gingerly, so she wouldn’t wake either of them, Quinn climbed in next to Annie. The little girl’s face was so relaxed, adorable, deep in sleep, that Quinn couldn’t resist stroking her soft cheek for a moment. Though she didn’t wake at all, Annie’s hand reached for Quinn, wrapping her chubby little fingers around Quinn’s thumb. Their mother, a light sleeper always, stirred and reached across the sleeping Annie to find Quinn’s arm. For a long moment she lay there, soaking up the comforting warmth of her mother’s loving hand on her arm, and the sounds of Annie breathing peacefully. A few moments later, she drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

On Monday morning as she drove to school, Quinn had knots in her stomach. In a move that was really uncharacteristic of her, she’d left her phone at home all weekend when she went to Denver. The incident on Friday night was still scaring her, and it wasn’t just the tourist. She still wasn’t ready to talk about what had almost happened with William. She didn’t understand why he was there – where he’d come from, how he’d managed to disappear so quickly.

It was the kind of thing that she normally would have told Abigail, and she couldn’t explain to herself why, right now, she didn’t want her best friend to know.

The trip to Denver had been surprisingly nice. It had felt good to be able to go to a big mall, and see a movie that she knew would never come to a small theater like Bristlecone Cinema. Her options in Denver were endless, but she’d spent much of the weekend doing homework and reading, which she would have been doing at home, anyway. It had even been more relaxing than she’d expected to be away from the constant texting and phone calls from life here.

Or would have been relaxing, if she hadn’t been still silently freaking out about Friday night.

Now it was Monday, though, and she still wasn’t ready.

As she expected, Abigail was waiting by her locker to pounce, her short black locks bobbing in agitation. One of the strands that she had recently dyed purple swung into her face. Quinn felt an immediate stab of guilt at the worry she saw in Abigail’s expression.

“Quinn! What is going on with you? What happened? Why didn’t you text me back? Are you okay?”

Quinn eyed her warily, “One question at a time, Abbie, please.”

Abigail wasn’t having it; her blue eyes flashed irritation. “Quinn, what the heck? Where have you been? I was trying to call you and text you all day yesterday.”

Quinn knew that. There were probably fifty unread text messages on her phone right now. “I went to Denver with my mom, to see Richard and Denise.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t seen them for a while?”

“Is that a question, Quinn?  Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

Quinn didn’t have an answer for her. She had no answers at all. She hadn’t felt like herself since Friday. For three nights now, she had barely slept; waking each night from bizarre dreams that she could only remember parts of. Small flashes of the dream would assault her throughout the day, but she couldn’t get a concrete picture.
Nothing happened
she kept telling herself. She hadn’t hit him. Not when she was awake, anyway. In at least some of her dreams she had hit him. And in others she had watched him vanish, over and over in to the night.  It felt like something else was going on here, but she couldn’t begin to figure out what it was. It was driving her crazy, though.

“I don’t know, Abbie, I’m sorry.”

Her friend’s eyes softened, although the suspicion didn’t disappear entirely. “So what happened on Friday night? You saved some tourist? My brother told me you really helped that guy.”

Now, now would be the time to tell her the whole story – about William, about what happened with the accident, about him disappearing into nowhere. But she didn’t. Instead, she shrugged. “It was just first aid, Abbie.”

“Still, wasn’t it scary?”

“Yeah. I’ve been kind of messed up about it all weekend – that’s probably why I didn’t call you. I’m sorry.”

Now her friend’s expression melted completely. A flash of guilt almost had Quinn spilling everything, but then she caught sight of something across the hall, and she was distracted again. William Rose was standing there. He watched her for a moment, his eyes wary behind his glasses, and then he disappeared into a classroom.
What in the …

“Quinn! Quinn!”

“What? Sorry, Abbie.”

“Are you sure you’re okay? You weren’t hurt in that accident or something, were you?

“No, I’m fine, I promise. It’s just …” she didn’t know what it was just, so she opted for distraction, instead. “Are you ready for the World History test?”

“I think so.” Abigail nodded. “No thanks to you. We were supposed to study together this weekend, before you flaked out on me.”

She swallowed. She had completely forgotten that she and Abigail had planned to spend Sunday afternoon studying. Now she really felt guilty as she realized the meaning behind at least some of the text messages. Heat flooded her face. How could she fix this? “Want me to make it up to you by helping you write your English essay?”

She could see Abigail contemplating the offer. She was still looking at Quinn in a concerned way, so maybe it wouldn’t take much. Quinn’s writing skills were well known, and writing was a subject her friend struggled with. She was relieved when Abbie’s eyes lit up; maybe she would just let it go after this.

 Although she was putting all her effort into staying focused on her work, it was harder than it should have been.
What in the heck had just happened in the hallway?
She had always told Abigail everything – mostly, anyway. Why couldn’t she tell her about this? And what was that with William? She tried in vain to settle into answering the questions on her World History test, but her thoughts kept drifting to William Rose.

William had always been sort of an enigma in Bristlecone anyway. He’d arrived at the small K-8 school when he was in third grade, an instant object of curiosity in a community where new people were pretty rare. By lunchtime on that first day, the third graders had spread everything they knew about him to the entire school, which had turned out to be not much.

He had come here to live with his uncle, Nathaniel Rose, who was a doctor at the small community hospital in Pinespar, about twenty minutes away. He was friendly, but quiet. He’d never married, despite the fact that there were a number of women in both Bristlecone and Pinespar who would have been more than willing to fix that.

Doctor Rose was kind and personable. In addition to occasionally being on call at the hospital, he ran a small clinic in Bristlecone on random days. He was liked enough that the people in their small community usually called him first before trying one of the other close-by clinics. Occasionally, he even made house calls. He had been the Robbins’ family doctor ever since Quinn could remember. Nice as he was, though, he was a very private person.

Nobody had ever heard where William’s parents were, or why he was here living with his uncle. There had always been rumors, of course, but both William and Doctor Rose were adept at fading into the background and avoiding answering invasive questions. And since most people liked Doctor Rose too much to really pry, the details of their lives had remained quiet.

Now that she thought about it, she realized that she really knew very little about William. Much like her little brother, Owen, every time she’d seen William at school, he’d had his nose buried in a book. She remembered so long ago, when he’d first appeared on the playground, the other students had hounded him with their questions, and with teasing about his constant reading, but William would never react to any of it.

By the end of that first school year, most of the questions had stopped. He’d somehow managed to just fade into the background until nobody really noticed him anymore.
Hardly anyone, anyway,
she thought, as she found herself able to drag up a surprising number of memories of him. He hadn’t changed his behaviors since then, though, and now he was just part of the background.

How was that even possible? She’d seen him so many times – buried in books on the playground, in study halls, even most nights that she worked her after-school job at the public library, and yet …

 Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she even knew what he looked like well enough to describe him. He was quite tall, with dark, nearly black, hair. His eyes were...what color were his eyes? Had she ever seen them? She must have. He did wear glasses; maybe that’s why she’d never noticed? The most distinctive thing she could identify about him was the dark purple sweater he was nearly always wearing. It had been replaced over the years with new ones as he’d grown taller.

“I’ll be collecting the tests in twenty minutes, finished or not.” Mr. Black’s voice pulled Quinn out of her abstraction.

Crap!
That was twice this week she had had a near miss because of William Rose. She looked back down at her paper. Twenty minutes, and she still had nearly two pages of essay questions to answer. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she had started doodling on the margins of the page. Some design she had never drawn before ... pretty, but not on a test. She quickly rubbed it out with her eraser, and rushed through the rest of the questions on the test, pushing William Rose as far from her thoughts as he would go.

By the time she finished her World History test, she was able to clear her head enough to concentrate on school. She didn’t even think about William Rose again until lunchtime. As she set her tray down at a table with Abigail and the rest of their usual group of friends, she saw him.

Surely he ate lunch in here with the rest of the students every day, and yet, she’d never noticed him before. Today, though, the pile of books that surrounded him
were
like a huge flag, waving in the wind, calling for her to notice. He was only two tables away, but nobody else seemed to notice him. A small, black insulated bag sat next to him, and every few minutes he would take a bite of something from a glass bowl, using a real metal spoon.
Who did that?
she wondered, glancing down at the plastic silverware on her cafeteria lunch tray.

Mostly, though, he wasn’t eating at all. He was reading from a thick book, jotting notes down in a black binder. Whatever it was he was working on held his attention completely. Forehead propped on his hand, he wrote furiously and flipped through the pages of his book, never once seeming to even notice that he was in a room full of teenagers carrying on social lives.

She wasn’t aware that she’d been staring, until someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she nearly fell out of her chair.

“Hey, Quinn, are you all right?”

She steadied herself, trying to remember to breathe, and looked up. Right into the brown eyes of Zander Cunningham. Her whole face, her whole body probably, flushed a deep crimson. She had no idea what Zander was doing, standing here. He hadn’t left the football players’ table and come over to talk to her the entire time they’d been in high school together.

“Yeah, I’m fine, why?” Had he seen her staring at William like that? Was she making an idiot out of herself?

“My mom told me you saw that accident out on the highway the other night. I heard you gave first aid to that guy or something, and your mom told her it kind of scared you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Why, oh why was his concern making her throat tight? She blinked several times, fighting back the sudden emotion that his words had brought on. Zander’s mom and her mom had been best friends since they were in high school. Maggie Cunningham still watched Annie during the day while her mom worked. When she and Zander were younger, they’d been close friends, but ever since he had gone to high school a year before her, all of that had changed, and they very rarely talked anymore. She couldn’t remember
ever
talking to him at school.

“It wasn’t a big deal, Zander. I just saw the accident after it happened. I called 911, and put pressure on the guy’s cut until the ambulance got there. That’s all. I’m fine.”

He took a step back at her tone, but the concern didn’t leave his eyes. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she softened her voice. It
was
kind of him to ask.

“You’ll let me know if you need anything?”

“Um …”
Really?
“Okay.”

“Good.” He reached toward her, giving her a sort of awkward pat between her shoulder blades, before returning to his usual table, full of senior football players and a few cheerleaders.

“What was
that?
” Abigail’s eyes were wide when Quinn turned back toward the table.

“I don’t know.”

“Since when does
Zander Cunningham
just come over to talk to you at lunch?”

Aware
of the curious eyes at the table around her, Quinn busied herself with her lunch, capturing peas with her fork, despite the fact that she had no interest in eating them. When she finally looked up again, everyone had gone back to their conversations. Nobody at her table was paying any attention to her. But someone was.

Two tables away, William Rose was staring over at her, with an expression that managed to be both surprised and intrigued. His silent communication was brief and definitive. He’d heard her conversation with Zander. He knew she hadn’t told anyone he was there. And she didn’t know why, but he was grateful.

Suddenly, she decided that she just didn’t want to know. It was over now. William had been there, he’d helped that driver, and he didn’t want anybody to know. She didn’t know why, but did it really matter? He’d helped someone, not committed a crime. Maybe he
really
just didn’t want anyone paying attention to him.

If she kept up with this level of distraction, her friends were eventually going to notice. And she was going to have to deal with things like Zander Cunningham coming over during lunch to ask her if she was okay. She would be happier right now if she hadn’t seen that accident, either. Quinn had never exactly been an attention-seeking person herself. Yes, it was definitely best to just let this be done.