“Wait up!”
Reuben told Phoebe, who was on the verge of trailing away from the arched tree.
While their parents were having it out not very far from them, the unwatched twins were in the middle of some agitation of their own.
Phoebe had spotted something scintillating over there, down the stepping-stone path. Whatever it was, it seemed to be wedged in-between two sizeable moss-covered pebbles, and also seemed to radiate the brilliance of the sun.
I knew what it was… It was the golden ball.
“You have to stay here!” Reuben told his twin sister. “Mommy said to stay close.”
“But look…” Phoebe stretched her little roly-poly finger. “It’s a dragon ball. We can use it to make a wish. Make the squirrel come down.”
Reuben shaded his eyes with his hand to better see off in the distance. Then he touched the tip of his nose. Doing so always helped him think clearly.
After thorough consideration, he said, “But you need seven of them to make a wish, don’t you?”
“Maybe the others are close,” Phoebe said, lifting her face as if she was sniffing something good. The smell of adventure, perhaps. “Let’s go find them.”
“But Mom said…”
“Wait here, I will go get it.”
And Phoebe sprung off, despite Reuben’s protest. She went past a couple people promenading up and down the pathway. There was this young baby-sitter rolling a pushchair, who was coming in a rush from the opposite direction. Funny how she looked like his elder sister, Solene, but only a few years older.
At last, Reuben glanced back at his parents and saw his father and his mother apparently talking at length about grown-up stuff and not paying any attention to them. And so he decided to go after Phoebe, telling himself that if they were punished for their disobedience, he’d lay all the blame on her because after all, it was her idea to go see about that round shiny thing that indeed looked like a dragon ball.
Phoebe got to the golden ball first. It was gleaming even more vividly when you looked at it up-close. She stood there for a second contemplating the odd find, as a chill wind, without gust, was carrying a cohort of dead leaves to their next resting place. For those withered leaves, trading one tomb for another every ten minutes or so was commonplace. By this repeating cycle, they were bound to wander around, never able to rest peacefully on one spot, or ascend to the heaven of flowers.
I don’t know why, but from their throes I drew a terrible analogy to the throes of my own situation. And for that reason, I feared the same thing might happen to little Phoebe when she touched that cursed, god-awful ball.
In her gawking eyes, the thing was like something out of a fairy tale, or more precisely, something from the Japanese manga series Dragon Ball, which topped the list of her favorite cartoons. So Phoebe bent her bandy legs to pick it up, somehow prolonging – maybe voluntarily – the seconds before the moment of contact with the deadly object. Behind her, Reuben had just caught up with her. He chanced another glance at their parents to see if their running off had been noticed.
“Hurry up!” Reuben said, keeping his eyes on his folks.
He heard a brisk yelp of pain in response. He quickly turned and saw, lying on the pathway, the steaming body of the baby-sitter. Phoebe standing stiff near her; unable to look away from the dead human being whose last moments – judging by the skin burns –appeared to have been in some kind of heated oven…
What had happened was, the baby-sitter had noticed the ball as well, and was – maybe – trying to beat little Phoebe to it. So before Phoebe could pick it up, the baby-sitter had quickly reached down and grabbed it.
She died an instantaneous death. The kind of death a bullet through the head was guaranteed to bring. And the sight of this horrific death would likely traumatize Phoebe, which in turn would take a lifetime to undo.
A crowd began to form around the sitter’s body. A murmur of incomprehension floated from person to person. People were staring at the dead girl with a tentative curiosity. Still, shock and horror were the prominent reactions.
Reuben approached his twin sister and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. She was crying. The baby in the pushchair was crying too. Someone attempted to soothe him. Another called 911. A minute later, Jeff emerged from the crowd, shouldering his way through to get to his children. He took them both in his arms, and lavished them with kisses.
By the look on his face, you could tell he had been looking for them, and after seeing the huddle, had feared the worst. He briefly eyeballed the dead body and grimaced. Whatever had happened to this poor girl? He wondered, like everyone else. Anyway, this was nothing for children to witness. Jeff pulled himself away, along with the twins.
“Are you guys okay?” he asked both, still holding on to them tightly.
“I want Mommy...” Phoebe said with a sobbing voice. She was quite shaken up.
“It’s okay,” Jeff said, trying to fix her the best he could. “We’re going to see Mommy later. You guys want to leave? You want to go to Legoland?”
Head down, Phoebe was wiping the tears from her face. Whereas Reuben was less affected, and thus excited about a trip to Legoland.
“Alright, let’s go!” Jeff said with zest.
“It was the dragon ball, Daddy…” Phoebe whispered in a sort of eerie way.
“The what?”
“The dragon ball,” she said again. “We’re not supposed to touch it… or the dragon gets angry.”
Jeff stared into the tear-brimmed eyes of his little daughter. It’d be difficult to determine the extent and reach of the damage resulting from this awful experience. Now he was pondering whether he should take them to see a doctor, just to make sure a screw hadn’t gotten loose somewhere. These were his children; he couldn’t take a chance. He also thought about Zoe and how she’d digest this new incident. She’d likely trip out for sure if she heard Phoebe talk about dragons in the wake of this tragedy. A tragedy she observed from front row center.
Suddenly, it occurred to Jeff, that as a matter of fact, Dragon Ball was an anime featuring a number of magical, star-studded balls.
“Where is it now?” Jeff asked carefully, aware that doing so would further Phoebe’s delusion. “Where’s the ball?”
When, instead of answering, Phoebe looked back to where the dead body was, Jeff regretted having asked the question. He then ushered the twins further away from the death scene, looking to create, not only a physical distance from it for his children’s sake, but an emotional one as well.
But where was the golden ball?
That was actually a good question. Indeed it had long winked out of the death scene, and possibly out of the park, the second the baby-sitter had dropped dead on the stepping-stone pathway. By now, and in its usual fashion, the ball was laying somewhere in town, somewhere on the outskirts of the next destination the baby-sitter was headed to. It was just a matter of time, before its whereabouts were known again; before another unsuspecting person found themselves confronted by its eye-catching gleam, only to live or die afterwards, depending on whether luck was on their side.
Chapter X
EXCITEMENT OF A FIRST DATE:
JUSTIN AND SOLENE ON THE SAME PAGE