They were sitting at a small table eating when the door swung open and a cluster of laughing kids pushed into the store. “Great movie,” one guy said.
“Stupid movie,” a girl countered. “How many cars were destroyed making that flick?”
Suddenly one of the boys looked over at Dylan and Maura. “Hey! Dylan! Is that you?”
Maura detected a change in Dylan instantly. He’d grown anxious. His green aura darkened.
The boy came over. “Hey, bro. How’re you doing, man? Haven’t seen you since school let out.”
“Hanging,” Dylan said.
“How’s—uh, you know.”
Dylan’s mind hunkered down and went protective. Maura saw a section of his brain sealed off by unscalable inner walls, with sentry cells guarding the perimeter. She realized that the walls had been there all along, but for some reason this boy’s appearance had allowed her to see them clearly.
“The same,” he said. “Nothing’s changed.”
The other boy’s gaze cut to Maura. “Who’s this?”
“A visitor,” she interjected. “Dylan’s just showing me around.”
Another boy at the ice cream cases called, “Brad, what flavor do you want?”
Brad’s eyes searched Dylan’s face. “It’s good to see you, man. Glad you’re getting out.”
Maura heard a note of pity in Brad’s words.
“If you ever want to do something—”
“Yeah. Sure,” Dylan said, cutting him off. When Brad rejoined his friends, Dylan tossed what was left of his cone into the trash. “Let’s blow,” he said to Maura.
She tossed her cone away too and hurried outside after him. In spite of the night, she saw that his aura was a chalky charcoal gray, almost black.
When the car was rolling, she asked, “Don’t you like Brad?”
“He’s all right.”
She sensed a sea of pain swelling inside of him, went silent, knowing instinctively that it was what he needed. Brad had triggered despair in Dylan, and he’d retreated deep into himself, leaving her out in the dark.
Dylan took a side road off the main drag and then another road that was more like a bumpy trail leading out to the countryside. He stopped at a place with an empty field on one side and a row of trees on the other. The stretch of trees ran along a river. Dylan turned off the engine and opened his car door. “Come on. I’ll show you one of my favorite places.”
Maura fell into step beside him. The trail stretched ahead like a white ribbon under a full moon so brilliant that a halo glowed around it. A million stars studded the night sky. Gurgling water splashing over stones reminded her of mellow, resonant bells.
He cut through the tree line, and in the moonlight, she saw that the ground dipped and flattened into rocks smoothed by an eternity of flowing waters. Beyond the scattering of stones, the water ran slower, and midstream, the water lay still. On the far bank stood another line of trees guarding the shoreline. “This spot by the river is one of my favorite places in the whole world,” Dylan said.
The sounds of water, tree frogs and night insects were all around them. In the future, all rivers were off-limits to people, and could only be accessed with a special license and an escort. Some families were on a waiting list for years for the privilege of vacationing and fishing on a riverfront. She envied Dylan’s freedom.
Dylan bent, picked up a smooth stone, held it sideways and sent it sailing across the water. The stone skimmed the surface, hitting, then jumping four times before sinking.
The trick fascinated her. “How did you do that?”
“Haven’t you ever skipped a rock?”
“No. Why do you do it?”
He grinned, picked up another rock and repeated the feat. “For fun. To see how many times I can make it bounce before it sinks.”
Defying gravity. She liked the idea. “What’s your record?”
“Seven. Here, you try it.” He picked up several stones from the clear water. “You need flat ones. You hold it sideways and fling.” He demonstrated and the rock bounced three times.
Maura took one of the stones he offered, tried to imitate his sideways toss. Her stone plunked into the water. He showed her again how to hold and throw one and she tried several more times without success. She growled at her lack of skill. He made it look so easy, and she wasn’t used to failing at anything.
“Wait,” he said with a laugh. “Let me help.” He loaded up on flat stones, stepped behind her. He put his left arm around her waist, pulled her against him. He ran his hand down her right arm, placed the back of her hand in his palm and said, “Pull back like this.”
All reason, all logical thought fled her brain. Her nerves quivered. Her breath went tight in her chest as his warm breath hit the nape of her neck. “There’s a rhythm to the throw.” His soft words fell like flower petals against her ear. “Don’t concentrate too hard. Feel the stone; let your fingers curve around its edges.” He limbered her arm, bringing it back and forth, still helping her grip the rock. “Success is all in the wrist. Easy.”
Maura felt one with him, not the stone. She wanted to melt into his skin, soak into his body, swim inside his veins.
“Now,” he said.
The stone flew sideways from her hand and skipped three times over the water before sinking. She might have been satisfied if the moon hadn’t been shining so brightly, if Dylan hadn’t had his arms wrapped around her. She had no defenses for what she was feeling. She wanted to press herself into his body, to place her mouth on his, to taste him, to savor him as she had the ice cream.
He turned her to face him, touched her face. He touched his forehead to hers. She joined their minds, summoned all she was feeling and poured it into him, let his feelings come into her. His mind held raw hot desire. Desire, an uncommon longing that can consume body, mind and will. The definition hit her hard, remembered from a textbook, an early primer for Sensitives. Sensitives were to be masters of their emotions, not victims.
She was supposed to be his doctor, and he, her patient. She had almost crossed a forbidden line. “I … can’t …” Trembling, she slipped from his arms. Cold seeped through her although the night was humid and muggy. He had wanted her and she had wanted him in ways that frightened her. A physical coming together, a sexual union between them would not be right.
He took several minutes to regain control of his breathing. A clear, bright red aura engulfed him, signaling sexual arousal. “My bad,” he whispered, stepping away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it in a thousand ways he would never understand.
“I just haven’t felt that way about anyone for so long,” he confessed in a halting voice.
How could she tell him she’d never felt that way? Nor was she sure she’d ever feel that way again. She took his hands in hers and said, “Please, tell me about Catherine.”
6
Dylan was startled. “Lucy?”
“Lucy,” Maura confirmed. “That Sunday dinner together. She talked about Catherine being your girlfriend.”
Dylan stared across the river, searching for a way to begin, while Maura waited. He needed time, and she needed to shelve what had almost happened between them.
“Catherine Buckley was in my sixth-grade class. We hit it off. She was a tomboy, a good athlete, liked insects and frogs and all kinds of animals. We’d catch tadpoles together, put them in a fishbowl, watch them turn into frogs and let them go. We were best friends, and by ninth grade, I started to notice she was a girl.” Dylan smiled. “Some of the guys started ragging on me about her. It didn’t matter. I really liked her. We just slipped into boyfriend-girlfriend mode and hung together all the time.”
Dylan’s memories were unguarded, free flowing, and Maura watched images fan out like a photo display, like a movie, even the pictures that wounded her. Pictures of Dylan and Catherine as children, then of them kissing and exploring one another’s bodies, of them lying tangled in each other’s arms naked, and of them sometimes stealin
g an hour of sleep only to wake, dress and part.
In her time, males and females were separated at age ten into same-sex groups. Male-female pairings were arranged according to DNA compatibility, dictated by scientific standards rather than random chance. In the dorms, late at night, schoolgirls whispered in the dark about which boy they would be assigned. Maura had not yet been paired, but had wondered what her partner would be like, and whether she’d care for him. Two of her friends had been assigned a mate—one was happy about the selection; the other, not so much. Love for your selected mate was a wonderful happenstance, a luxury, not a requirement.
She asked, “Did you love each other?”
“We thought we did.” He halted. His thoughts became a jumble, and Maura sensed a feeling of disloyalty haunting him. “Yes,” he said emphatically, to banish the feeling. “I loved her.”
“But something happened to her,” Maura said, urging him to continue his story.
“We were in a car wreck.”
“What happened?”
He rubbed his forehead. “I’m not sure. We were coming home from a party. I woke up on the ground outside the car. Catherine was slumped inside. She was unconscious. I was hurt.”
Maura watched the scene from his memory’s perspective—the hard-packed earth, the view of the car window, Catherine half-slung out the window, smoke coming from the front of the crushed hood. Maura winced as the physical pain from Dylan’s accident hit her. Sensitives were allowed to absorb patients’ hurts as their own for the sake of identifying with them, and to relieve some of their anguish.
“My leg was broken in three places. Two broken ribs. Blood in my eyes.” His pain crossed from the physical into mental. “I saw smoke and knew the car might blow up. I crawled to the car, somehow got her out and far enough away so that when the car exploded, she wasn’t burned.”
The scene was horrific to Maura—she’d never seen a car accident. In her time, special chips were embedded under road surfaces and into vehicles. The chips, not drivers, controlled traffic. “Were you burned?” she asked, already knowing he had been because she felt hot pain along her left arm.
“On my arm.”
“Seems to me you were a hero. Pulling her out of the car and all.”
His eyes narrowed and his memory clouded, cutting off the flow of images. “I’m no hero.”
Maura saw the walled-off section of his memory loom like opaque glass. She couldn’t see through it, wasn’t sure he could see through it, either. Often the psyche built barriers to seal off very bad memories. Dylan’s mind had built such a wall. As a doctor, it was her job to help him tear it down and deal with what lay behind it. If she was given enough time, she was certain she could heal him.
Cut off and unable to see his memories, she asked, “Did you save her?”
Dylan worked a stone from the riverbed with the toe of his sneaker, bent, picked it up, took his time to answer. “Would you like to come with me Sunday afternoon and see for yourself?”
“You’d let me come with you?”
“If you like.”
He might be taking her to a cemetery. “I would like to go with you.”
He slung the stone, watched it skip five times over the water’s surface. “I’ll pick you up at two.”
Someone was watching her house. Maura felt traces of a presence the second she went in the door. The cats, which always mewed and greeted her when she arrived, had hidden under the bed. She discovered them quickly with her mind probe. Her senses tingled and she tasted real fear. The time police were the only entities who could have come. They hadn’t yet breeched the security system or the mental safety block she’d set up around the house’s perimeter. But eventually they would.
The next day, she went to Jerry. “May I take one of the abandoned dogs home with me?”
Jerry kept a few animals, fed and cared for them, worked to find them good homes. “What’s up?” Dylan’s father asked.
She put on a worried-scared expression that wasn’t entirely fake. “I thought I heard prowlers around my house last night.”
“Where are your grandparents?”
She remembered she was supposed to be staying with them. “They’re sort of deaf.”
Jerry nodded. “Sure. Take Chowder.”
The big German shepherd could be difficult, but Maura was one of a few who could handle him. “Thanks. I’ll bring him back once I feel safe.”
“Maybe your grandparents will want to keep him,” Jerry said hopefully.
“Maybe,” she said, hating to lie again but knowing it was necessary. Chowder was accustomed to cats, and Maura personally found that cats were good company, requiring little care. But the dog would bark if he sensed anything unusual near the house. He would warn her if she was in danger from the searching probes of the time cops, and she would have time to run.
On Sunday Maura dressed in clothes she’d bought with her paychecks, adding big sunglasses to hide her eyes and avoid broadcasting any telltale messages about her feelings for Dylan and the possibility of seeing Catherine’s grave. Now knowing he was suffering from survivor’s guilt—the guilt people felt because they lived though another had died—she would be able to treat him more easily. Yet whatever was lurking behind his memory’s walls remained a mystery.
He picked her up promptly at two o’clock. They talked little, or rather, Dylan talked little. Maura told stories about Chowder, how he had jumped up on the kitchen counter and gobbled down the frozen bagel Maura was getting ready to toast for her breakfast. “The bread was frozen solid, but he got it down in about three chews and a swallow.”
Her story drew a half smile from Dylan, yet the farther he drove into the country, the less she was able to engage him. His aura was charcoal rimmed in black, the color speaking of death and unforgivingness. At one point she braced for him to turn the car into a cemetery they were approaching, but he didn’t turn. He kept driving down the long straight back road to his destination. Maura waited, repressing her ability to read his thoughts. She vowed to be patient, to let him take her to whatever it was he so dreaded. When he did turn, it was to enter a long driveway with a low brick building at its end. A sign read GOOD SAMARITAN REHABILITATION CENTER.
Puzzled, Maura followed him through sliding glass doors to a lobby, where a woman was sitting behind a reception desk. She looked up, smiled. “Hello, Dylan. Good to see you.”
“Here to visit,” he said. “A friend,” he added, motioning to Maura.
The woman eyed Maura. “Both of you need to sign in.”
They complied; then the woman buzzed them through another set of glass doors. Dylan walked down a hall with sure steps, obviously knowing his way well. Maura kept pace. He stopped in front of a closed door and rapped softly. “I come on Sunday afternoons because no one else is usually here,” he explained. “I don’t like other people around when I visit.”
Maura’s heart was pounding; she was positive that what lay beyond the door was at the root of Dylan’s unstoppable pain.
Though she heard no summons to enter, Dylan eased open the door and she followed. There was a single bed in the room, plus a dresser and a bedside table. In the bed lay the frail, thin body of a girl with a ventilator hose snaking out of her throat.
“This is Catherine,” Dylan said, a catch in his voice. “She’s in a persistent vegetative state. So tell me, Maura … is she dead or alive?”
7
Maura slowly raised her sunglasses to see Catherine more clearly. The girl’s body was a husk, yet her nails were groomed, lovingly manicured and painted, her dark hair brushed and held away from her face by a sparkly barrette. Her eyes were open but expressionless.
Catherine’s life force was missing. Her mind, her essence, no longer remained. The hallways of her thoughts and experiences were empty, the landscape gray and dead, like earth scorched by a nuclear blast. Maura saw nothing but a wasteland of tangled nerves and blood vessels and vacated memory cells. All that was functioning were the girl’
s automatic reflexes. Her heart beat; her lungs filled only with an assist from the ventilator. Her eyes did not see; her ears could not hear.
Dylan walked to the bed, bent and kissed Catherine’s forehead. “Hi, baby,” he said.
His words stabbed Maura’s heart.
“She blinks,” Dylan said. “She wakes and sleeps. She can move her arms and legs. She even smiles. But it doesn’t count. It’s reflexive. That’s what her doctor tells us—me and her parents, her sister. She’s here but gone. Crazy, huh?”
Maura had read about PVS in textbooks, but she’d never seen such a patient. It was so sad she wanted to cry. “I—I’m sorry.…”
“Everyone’s sorry. Except Catherine. She doesn’t know a thing.” Dylan stuck his hands in his pockets. “So now you see why I’m no hero? Why did I save her? For what? For this? The accident happened two years ago, July fifth. We were at a party at Brad’s folks’ house on Mirror Lake.”
Maura had familiarized herself with the Clarksville area in the library and brought up a map inside her head. The lake was a smudge of blue on the north end of the city. And she remembered Brad from the ice cream store. Maura saw the image of the house and lake that Dylan projected.
Dylan rocked on his heels. “She was in a coma at first. That’s when we all had hope that she’d wake up. But she didn’t wake up.”
“If they pulled the vent—”
“They did. She kept breathing without it. So they put it back to make it easier for her.”
Maura examined the shunt inserted directly into Catherine’s abdomen to supply water and liquid food. She stood transfixed, overcome with pity. “Without the feeding tube—”
“She’ll starve to death.” Dylan’s words conveyed sheer hopelessness. “Her parents won’t allow it.”
Maura knew Dylan couldn’t face that consequence either. Dylan, Catherine’s family, her doctors and caretakers, couldn’t “see” inside the girl’s brain as Maura could. They used tests and machines to confirm what Maura’s Sensitive abilities viewed plainly: no amount of care was ever going to bring Catherine back. She was a living corpse.