Wonder Guy (6 page)

“So how do I reach you?” he muttered.

“You only need ask.” She sat on the chair opposite him, still clad in her lace-trimmed purple suit and the hat with its jaunty feather.

Greg levitated a few inches. “Jesus!”

She tsked. “I won’t tolerate profanity, young man.” The corners of her smile drew into a disapproving moue.

“Fairy godmothers are Christians?” He settled back in his seat.

“That has nothing to do with it. It’s a matter of respect for your elders.” She pulled herself even more upright, lace-gloved hands folded before her.

“Sorry, ma’am. You startled me.” Best to humor her.

“That’s better.” She twinkled at him again. “You wanted to speak with me?”

Oh yeah.
“Right. The super speed was great, but it’s not quite the right thing for me. It’s too easy to cause accidents at high speed.”

“Say no more, dear boy.” She held up a dainty hand. “It’s gone. Did you have something else in mind?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Maybe he should have thought this through before calling her. Only he hadn’t realized he was calling her. Why pursue this whole mad idea anyway? He’d been crazy to think a superpower would impress Gloria. He did have a life of his own. Why not leave this stuff to the police? But, those people the robbers held at gunpoint looked so relieved when he’d stopped the robbery, and those kids seemed so impressed. It had been kind of fun to foil the gunmen without them seeing him. It felt good to be able to help. Just remembering made him feel a bit taller, a bit stronger, a bit closer to being an actual hero.

When he’d been a kid, he’d daydreamed about what he’d do with superpowers. He’d taken the comics as his guide. Heroes stopped criminals. They stopped monsters and super villains. There wasn’t much call for defense against monsters and super villains here in the Twin Cities, and today was the first time he’d ever encountered actual criminals in the area. What kind of superpower would be most useful here and now?

He mused aloud, “Maybe I should figure out what people need from a superhero if I were able to go around invisibly and observe things, see what kinds of problems come up, and then maybe foil crimes without doing any damage in the process.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, dear.” She smiled like a teacher approving a clever child.

“Thanks.” Though, who knew what he might learn as an unseen observer that he wouldn’t learn by paying attention to the people around him? At least he’d do less damage invisibly than he’d done moving at Mach whatever it’d been.

“You’re very welcome. Now say ‘Zone Out’ to activate your power and ‘See Ya’ to return to normal.”

“Okay, then. No costume this time, I guess?” Greg chuckled, trying to visualize it.

“Oh, there is.” Her smile brightened her tone. “But no one will see it.” Her words echoed over the empty chair.

Chapter 4

Gloria unlocked the back door as quietly as possible. Dad had probably passed out by now and it would be easiest if she didn’t wake him…but the key scraped in the lock, and jangled against the others on her keychain as she pushed into the house, and the hinges creaked as usual. It didn’t matter, with the television blaring from the living room. The news by the sound of it.

“That you, Glory?” Dad’s voice, shaky, with a whining edge.

“Yeah, Dad. You still awake?” Not that she suspected him of talking in his sleep. She made her way through the kitchen and dining room to the front of the house where her father kept his usual post on the sofa in front of the television.

Ike Torkenson looked older than his actual age, with his deeply lined face, thinned hair gone gray, a big man who’d shrunken in on himself after injury stopped him from working in construction. He seldom bothered to shave and tonight made no exception, leaving his chin heavily stubbled in gray. Gloria breathed shallowly. He wore the same worn jeans and flannel shirt he’d worn yesterday and it seemed he hadn’t bothered to bathe today.

“Why’re you getting in so late?” Not looking at Gloria, he leaned forward over the coffee table, chose a beer can and waggled it, then another, until he found one in which some liquid sloshed.

“It’s not late.” She kept her tone light, but loud enough to cut across the weather report. “I went for an early dinner with Pete and his parents, then stopped by Aggie’s and worked on a project for a while.” She kept moving, hanging her jacket in the front closet, placing the portfolio of her sketches on the end table beside the wing chair also facing the television. She stood over the chair and looked at the TV screen without seeing it. She held herself braced like a dam against her own reactions.

“Pete’s parents, huh?” Ike hitched around to face her squarely.

“Yes. They’re nice people.” Here it came.

“Bet they are. Too nice for the likes of us. You’ll see.” He frowned and drained the last bit of liquid from the can he’d found. “People pretend to like you, to be nice, but they don’t think you’re any better than you are. Like Aggie next door. When’s the last time she invited me over? No. Last time she says, ‘You clean up your act, Ike, or don’t come over.’ Thinks she’s better than me. Probably mad cuz your mom, Evie, her good friend was killed while I got drunk at your birthday party.”

Any attempt at talking seriously to Dad hit her like dashing through a hard, cold rain. Time to shake off the results yet again.

“Dad, you say the same thing whenever you have too many beers, which is every dang day. Aggie doesn’t blame you. She doesn’t like your drinking. Neither do I, and Pete’s folks are not too nice for me.” Fretting for something to do, Gloria sat in the wing chair and pulled her portfolio of sketches onto her lap. “They seemed perfectly happy to welcome me to their family. They’re Episcopalian. Pete’s mother is real active in the church.”

“Episcopalian, huh? Churchgoers? Think you’re going to fit in with them?” He glanced at the coffee table, as if wondering whether he’d find another can still holding a few drops.

She plucked at the zipper of the leather case on her lap.
Do not engage.
“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Why should you? What do you know about their sort? What do they care about our sort?” His voice mimicked the scorn such people must feel for her. “A girl quits college after one semester, marrying their boy with his business degree?”

She turned to him, sick of his same old crap. She could shake off only so much before it soaked her to the bone and she had to deal. “Stop it. I quit college to take care of you. You couldn’t do for yourself after the accident.”

“Yeah.” His remaining gnarled hand clutched the worn-shiny arm of the sofa. He scowled at her. “Rub that in.”

“I’m not.” Why did he always get so defensive? “It’s just the way things went. But now, when I want to get married, you make like I’m not good enough, like you want to stop my chance at happiness.”

“I still need help,” he muttered, so quietly she had to strain to catch the words.

Hopelessness, almost despair, crossed his stubbled face, tugging at her heart. Wasn’t that exactly what had kept her at home, stalled her career for these past few years while Greg finished college and went on to grad school?

“Poor daughter you are,” he went on. “You’ll move away and leave me on my own. You don’t care what happens to your old worthless papa.”

“You’re not being fair, Dad. You know perfectly well how much I care. Didn’t I leave college to help you? I wanted my art degree, and now you throw it back in my face. Like I’m not good enough for Pete because I have less education?” She glared at him, surprising herself with the bitterness souring her tone. Sometimes she resented him, but resented herself more for the heart that trapped her here. If it were a paw, she’d chew it off.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she charged ahead. “Well, you’re not as helpless as you make out. You got your prosthetic four and a half years ago. I helped when you needed it, when you first lost your arm, but you’ve had plenty of time to adjust and you’d be able to get along fine if you hadn’t given up on yourself. Look at Aggie. Look at how much she does.” She gestured in the general direction of the house next door.

“Don’t you hold her up to me.” He slammed his empty can down with a clatter on the coffee table. “She’s had MS her whole life and never knew different. What am I worth if I can’t do the only work I ever knew?” With some fire in his eyes, at least he didn’t look so helpless. Ah.

“Dad, do you want me to believe you’re an idiot who can’t learn a new skill to save his life? Or to give his only daughter a life of her own?”

With a jerk of his shoulder, he turned back to the glowing screen.

Gloria looked to see what he found so interesting.

They’d gotten actual footage of the guy in the red costume. Jeez. He ran across the surface of a lake like an ordinary person would run over solid ground. The first clip showed only a red streak. The slo-mo version followed immediately. The camera zoomed in on the man, moving like a great cat, well-muscled limbs sliding through the air like water sluicing over a dam. The rippling play of muscle under skintight red fabric fascinated her. Whatever had been next on her mental agenda never made it to the surface of thought. Not too dorky after all, until he stopped, slid bouncing across the water and slumped beneath the surface like a skipped stone, all in slow motion.

She laughed, along with her father, the old issues forgotten for the moment.

* * * *

It must have been some kind of trick. Gloria sat on the edge of her quilt-covered bed among a pile of pillows and brushed her hair, teasing out the tangles her blond curls loved to get into. Nobody could run across the surface of a lake. It must be some publicity stunt. Someone staged the whole thing. She tried to imagine how. People on water skis traveled across the surfaces of lakes all the time.

She shook out the now shinier curls on the right side of her face. No, that wouldn’t explain the speed–he’d just been a red streak until they slowed down the footage. Maybe it was a trick of the cameras. She hadn’t been there in person. She started the fifty strokes to the tresses on the left. Yeah. It had to be some publicity stunt, film students trying to prove something, play a joke. Publicity for some movie, maybe. Maybe this guy in the red costume had an underwater accomplice. Someone pacing the runner, staying under him with a submersible something.

A comforting thought. Her momentary conviction that the truly impossible had happened, something beyond understanding, made the whole world seem flimsy as a stage set. If a person couldn’t rely on the world to behave the way it was supposed to behave, what could she rely on? What else might happen? Anything might be real, anything at all.

If she allowed superheroes, that opened the door to super villains. If the laws of physics didn’t apply, the whole world might come undone. Her familiar bedroom might melt away like a dream. Everything could go floating off into space, or dissolve in a mist. Didn’t some people believe the world to be an illusion anyhow?
Maya
, that’s what the Hindus called it. She set her boar-bristle brush on the bedside table and shook her head with abandon, shaking the wild thoughts away, shaking her shining curls into a single mass, and then ran her fingers through it to be sure she’d gotten out all the tangles.

Yes. Clearly, someone pulled some cinematic trickery. But that guy, the one in the costume... Wow. A frisson of delight shimmered through her at the remembered vision of him in motion and the supple flow of his well-defined muscles. She needed little imagination to guess what lay beneath his revealing, skin-tight costume. His legs had moved like pistons in a well-oiled machine. The sight ran on a continuous loop through her mind’s eye. Imagine running her hands over those pumping limbs, sliding along his arms, down his sides to waist and thighs, or facing him and cupping his strong jaw between her hands as he moved.

She sighed. The shimmer deepened, shivering through her limbs, stirring where they shouldn’t for a woman engaged to someone else.

Mmm. She snuggled in under the quilt and top sheet. She wasn’t married yet, or dead.

* * * *

Tuesday morning, Greg carried the front wheel of his Trek bike with him tucked under his arm as he entered the lab on the fourth floor of the University’s Computer Sciences building. He leaned the wheel against the wall behind the front desk. The rest of the bike stayed chained to the bike rack on the front plaza. He didn’t usually take the double precaution.

As a teaching assistant to Professor Morrissey, Greg got his own key to the computer lab and his own locked drawer in the front desk. Classes might be over for the semester, but end-of-term business didn’t end with delivering the batch of final exam papers he’d dropped in the professor’s in-box on his way to the lab.