After arriving at the hospital, I made way to the elevator and pushed the neon green, up arrow, button. It took its pretty little time answering my summons. Once it finally graced me with its presence it took forever for the doors to shut. I kept pressing the “close doors” button in rapid succession, but the elevator refused to obey my command until I stopped my frantic button pushing. Typical. As it slowly ascended I had to fight the urge to tap my foot impatiently.
Longest elevator ride ever.
I was so caught up in counting how many seconds it was taking for the elevator to get me to the third floor that I was totally unprepared to see my father waiting on the other side of its doors when they opened.
“Dad? What are you doing here?” I stepped out of the elevator before it got the chance to swallow me whole.
His eyebrows raised.
“I could ask you the same question. A little early for school to be out, don’t you think?”
I racked my brain for an excuse, but my thoughts became jumbled. If I’d had any idea he was going to start feeling better I would’ve had an explanation rehearsed for him. Unfortunately, I was no good at improvising, and my deer in the headlights look was all it took for him to notice something was wrong.
“Come with me.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me back into the waiting elevator. I swear I could hear the ancient machinery laughing at my predicament.
“But I’m going to see Kirby,” I protested weakly.
“He’s fine.” His voice was curt. “I just finished checking up on him.”
The minute my dad said it he looked like he regretted it. I picked up on it immediately.
“What’s wrong with, Kirby? Why would you need to check up on him?” I didn’t want to hear any bad news, but a sense of foreboding was beginning to permeate the cramped little rectangle we were in.
“Wait until we get to my office. This conversation can’t happen here.” I recognized the steel in my father’s voice and knew that pressing him at this point would be absolutely useless. The elevator ride dragged out even longer then the first one had. When we finally reached the second floor my father grabbed my arm and hurriedly walked me over to his spacious office, shutting the door behind him.
I sat down and waited impatiently for him to do the same.
“What’s going on with Kirby?” I asked.
My father looked down at the table, not willing to meet my gaze.
“There’s been a complication,” he finally offered.
I waited, almost hoping he wouldn’t get around to telling me even though I wanted and needed to know.
“His immune system is just so beaten down, Hope.”
“He has an infection?” I blinked a couple of times to clear up the moisture obscuring my vision. I was so ready to cry.
“This morning his nanny called in one of the nurses to check his temperature. It was one hundred four degrees.”
I leaned forward and rested my head on his large oak desk. Tears formed beneath my closed lids. As I thought through what he’d just told me, I realized something I hadn’t caught before. I lifted my head and met my father’s gaze.
“You found out this morning?”
“Yes.” His voice was steady enough, but he was having a hard time looking me in the eye.
It was well past one in the afternoon, and I was just now hearing about this? He hadn’t called me. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t called me. Anger and frustration nearly blindsided me. I sucked in my breath and held it. I knew he wasn’t finished.
“I examined him, ran some tests, and found fluid in his lungs. I’ve got him on antibiotics. His fever is at one hundred one now, but doesn’t seem to be getting any lower. I’m not sure his body is going to respond to treatment.”
I could feel the anger inside me building.
“Why didn’t you call me the moment you realized what was going on?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“My staff is very capable of handling this situation.”
“You should have called me. Your staff has no idea how to help him.” I knew my voice was beginning to rise, but I couldn’t seem to control it.
“Let them do their job, Hope.” His voice was much more controlled than mine. “Everyone on my staff has had the proper training. They know what they’re doing.”
“Really? Their training trumps what I’m capable of?” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.
“I’m not going to call you out of school every time a patient might benefit from your abilities.”
“A patient? Are you serious, Dad? This isn’t just any patient we’re talking about here, it’s Kirby. It’s a boy I’ve been trying to heal for months and months now. I know his background, his favorite color, how much he loves chili dogs, and Scooby Doo reruns, and how much he wants to visit Disneyland before he dies.” I was yelling, but I couldn’t stop. It was like all of the stress from the day was boiling over into this one moment of release, and I was using it to emotionally vomit all over my father. “I know every detail about his medical history, the way he responds to treatments, the way his body functions. I’m trying to keep him alive as long as possible, and you’re worried about calling me out of school early?”
“I just want your life to be normal!” He was finally beginning to lose his cool. “I’m tired of watching you worry. I’m tired of seeing you so wound up all the time. You’ve been showing signs of exhaustion for months now, and I hate that I can’t help you, but most of all I’m tired of watching you heal everyone but yourself.”
I stared at him in stunned silence. When I finally found my voice I realized that I had no idea what to say.
“You need to forgive yourself for what happened to your mother and move on. This world, with all of its problems and everyone else’s baggage, is too much for your young shoulders to carry.”
Tears slid down my cheeks, but I refused to respond to my father’s attempts at psychoanalyzing me. There was nothing wrong with the way I lived my life. There was nothing wrong with wanting to help people, to save people. If I wanted to make it my mission in life to heal everyone I possibly could then that was my choice and a darn good one. All that mattered right now was Kirby’s health.
“I want to see Kirby as soon as possible.”
It wasn’t the response my father had been hoping for, but I could tell he wasn’t surprised.
“You can see him as soon as we finish discussing why you’re here. You don’t even work today. Is school so boring that all you can think about is cleaning out hospital rooms?” He was trying to lighten the mood, but I was still upset about Kirby and the fact that he hadn’t called me. “You never cut school. What happened? Did you have another hallucination?”
“No, Dad. I didn’t have another hallucination.” I took a deep breath and tried to cover how ill at ease I felt. “Some weird stuff just happened at school today, and I wanted to talk to Kirby about it.”
“Talk to Kirby,” he repeated. “Some weird stuff happened at school today, and you wanted to run it by the ten-year-old?”
“Dad…”
“When I saw your face in the elevator it was clear you were worried and possibly scared about something. If you want to talk to Kirby about it then fine, but you will tell me first.”
My plan to hide the day’s events from my father had tanked big time. I’m not sure why I thought it would even be possible. I’d never been good at hiding things from him. Of course, up to this point I’d never really had a reason to. My father continued looking at me expectantly, and since both of us knew how difficult it was for me to lie in a convincing manner, I decided to just dive right in and tell him everything.
“There are two new guys at school. They claim to be cousins, and I have a class with each of them.”
My dad studied me, clearly puzzled.
“Please tell me this subject isn’t going to turn into you being interested in both of them and not being able to choose between the two.”
“What
? No! Geez, Dad, just let me finish here.” I almost laughed at how relieved he looked. That is, until I remembered what I had to tell him.
“I don’t know how else to say this so I’ll just rip the Band-Aid off real fast. They know about my ability to heal. They know what I’m capable of.” I spoke lightly, hoping it might lessen the severity of my news.
My father sat back in his chair, never taking his eyes off me.
“What do you mean? What…” He licked his lips. “They know you can heal people?”
“Yes.” I let the word hang in the air between us. I wasn’t sure what my father would do with this bit of information. I mean, we’d talked about possible contingency plans if anyone ever found out, but we had never really made a solid plan.
“Okay, from the beginning. I need you to tell me everything. Don’t leave a single thing out.”
I did as I was told. I started from the very first moment I walked into the school building. I described to him the panic I felt at being able to connect, instantaneously, to everyone’s life force. I told him about Tie and the unusual things he’d said to me during mythology. Then, I went right into my class with Victor and my reasons for suspecting he wasn’t who he pretended to be.
By the time I finished describing the cafeteria scene and the alone time I’d spent with Tie in the nurse’s station, my father was gripping his fountain pen so hard his knuckles were beginning to turn white. He was probably ready to snatch me up and bolt for the door in the same way that I’d been ready to escape that stupid cafeteria. I was glad I hadn’t shared with him the strange waking dreams I’d been having.
My father sat in silence for some time. I waited, knowing he needed to work it all out in his head. He finally looked up at me and gave me a grim smile.
“I was always afraid something like this might happen, but I thought it would come in the form of some government agent or a journalist following up on a lead from a patient you healed.” My father shook his head looking troubled. “I’m completely unsure about what is really going on here.”
“Maybe Tie and Victor are government agents,” I offered.
“How could government agents pass for high school kids? College kids, maybe, but not high school, and you said Tie is capable of healing himself without your help. What if he can not only heal himself, but other people as well? What if he and Victor have been sent here to find other people who are just like them?” He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.
I considered the possibility for a moment.
“That might not be so bad. If there are other people who are capable of doing what I can do, then I want to know who they are and why we share the same gift.”
“Tie and Victor have gone to great lengths to find out if you really can heal people. If their intentions are honorable why the charade? Why this cat and mouse game?”
I shook my head, knowing I didn’t have any answers that would make this situation seem less alarming.
“Look, we don’t need to freak out about this just yet, okay?”
My father started to laugh and rubbed his eyes more vigorously.
“No, I’m serious. Tie and Victor aren’t positive that I’m the person they’re looking for. If they were certain I could heal people, they never would have staged that fight. I don’t know much about Tie, but he doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would let someone nail him in the face like that. They need proof, and as long as they don’t have it there’s nothing they can do.”
My father shook his head, already disagreeing with me.
“The fact that these two guys are actually manipulating events to bring about a situation where you would feel compelled to heal them is worrisome. It’s bad enough they suspect you, and how do they know about your compulsive need to always fix things that are broken? What made them think you would heal Tie right then and there in front of everyone?”
I didn’t like where this conversation was headed. My father’s line of thinking was most likely leading him toward a moving van and an unknown destination where no one would be able to find us.
“Maybe they do know me, Dad,” I said hesitantly.
“How? Do you think they’ve been watching you for a while now?” His alarm was rising. I knew I needed to work quickly to calm him down.
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” I would need to be careful about how I worded my next sentence. “I feel like I’ve seen Tie before. Even Victor seems slightly familiar to me.”
“How is that possible?”
“I think we might have known each other when we were kids. Maybe I healed them when we were playing together, and they somehow remembered it.” I doubted it, but I couldn’t tell my dad about the out-of-body experiences I’d had. “All I’m saying is we have no idea who they really are or what their intentions are, and as long as they have doubts about who I really am then that buys us some time.”
My father’s look was grim. I could tell he saw the logic in what I was saying, but he didn’t like it.
“I’m not sure I want us to wait around wondering if this is simply going to disappear. We have to figure out who these boys are. More importantly, we need to figure out what they want with you.”
“Agreed,” I said quickly. “I will do my absolute best to get to know them at school.” I cringed inwardly at how happy the thought made me feel. I wasn’t supposed to like either one of them.
“That’s not necessary. I’ll figure out who they are, and you’ll avoid them like you would a fatal disease.” It wasn’t a request. “If you spend too much time with these two they may find another way to trick you into revealing yourself. That can’t happen, Hope. We need to know who they are first.”
I nodded, even though I knew avoiding them would make me look more suspicious in the long run. I was going to have to acknowledge them at the very least. Plus, the thought of never speaking with Tie again depressed me. Clearly, there was something wrong with me.
“Is it okay if I go see Kirby now?”
My father didn’t say anything. I could tell he was torn between allowing me to heal Kirby and actually putting his foot down in the name of normalcy.
“I will help him faster than any antibiotics you could possibly give him, and you know it.”
He nodded his assent, running his fingers through his hair in mild frustration. I stood up and quickly headed for the door before he could change his mind. A thought occurred to me, and I stopped abruptly.
“Dad, why did you end up coming back to work today? You told me you were sick.” I returned to stand in front of his desk.
His eyebrows drew together in a V.
“I never said I was sick.”
“You don’t remember? This morning you told me you weren’t feeling well. You even asked me to heal you, which I thought was strange because the only time you’ve ever asked me to do that was when you had food poisoning from that weird taco joint we ate at during one of our vacations.”
My father’s baffled look was beginning to make me feel nervous.
“Hope, didn’t you get my note? I was already at the hospital by the time you woke up.”
“I read the note, but right after that I heard a noise from the living room. I went to check it out, and when I turned around you were right behind me. You scared me to death. Then you told me you weren’t feeling good and asked me to heal you. You seemed a little different, and I….” my voice trailed off. The look of alarm on my father’s face was enough to make me break out into a cold sweat. “You weren’t at the house this morning, were you?” I whispered my question. It seemed less scary.
“No.” He stood up and walked around his desk. He lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. “Your pupils are dilated, and you feel a little warm. Do you think you had another hallucination?”
He tried questioning me like a doctor instead of a concerned father, but his attempt at being impartial and detached was failing miserably. His hands and voice trembled a bit. Knowing my father’s tendency to lean towar
ds the extreme side of overprotection, I figured he was fighting the urge to hospitalize me and run as many tests on me as he possibly could.
“Hallucinations cannot be your ‘go to’ diagnosis for every weird thing I say or do, Dad. You were there. You were standing in our house, right there in the hallway, looking at me as if you thought I might be able to heal you but you really weren’t sure. I swear it.” To my own ears, I sounded a bit desperate. I needed him to believe me. I needed something in my day to go right for me.
My father looked worried. I didn’t think he knew what to believe.
“Well, I was definitely here while you were getting ready for school, and I have the patient files to prove it. So the way I see it there are only two scenarios that are even remotely possible at this point. One, you’re having some very strange lapses in reality or two, someone broke into the house posing as me. The resemblance had to have been uncanny in order to fool you, though, and what would the purpose of that be?”
I could feel my heart drop in disappointment as I realized that the first scenario seemed the more likely of the two.
“I can’t imagine what the purpose would be. All you asked me to do was heal you.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin as my father grabbed me by my shoulders and abruptly pushed me back into my chair. He knelt down at eye level, and grabbed both my hands in his.
“You didn’t do it, did you, Hope? You didn’t heal me or act as if you actually could heal me, did you?” His eyes looked pleadingly into mine, and it dawned on me what he was getting at.
“You think the person in our house was testing me, trying to see if I was capable of healing him,” I said completely horrified.
My father nodded, his own expression registering a healthy amount of fear.
“You’ve already had two classmates at school attempt to trick you into revealing what you can do. What if this other guy was doing the same thing?”
“Why? Are Tie and Victor working with other people? How in the world could that man have looked so much like you? He even sounded like you.”
As I considered the possibility that I had actually been in my own home with a complete and total stranger, a stranger whose sole purpose was unearthing my well-guarded secret, my pulse began to quicken.
I wasn’t so sure that Tie and Victor were working with this imposter, though. The man posing as my father had left me feeling uneasy. I hadn’t taken the time to examine my feelings because I’d believed the person in my house to be someone I loved and trusted, but looking back on it now, I realized I had sensed some very dark vibes coming from him. It was completely different from how I’d felt around the two cousins.
My train of thought was broken as my father stood up and began opening and closing filing cabinets in quick succession.
“Dad, what are you doing?”
“I’m looking for a key,” he said continuing his frantic rummaging.
“A key to what?” I was totally confused. It wasn’t exactly the kind of response I’d been expecting from him.
“A key to a safety deposit box. Inside it there are fake passports, ID’s, and birth certificates so no one can track us. It’ll be like Hope and James Fairmont never existed. I’ve also got a very large sum of money that should keep us comfortable until we’re settled in our new home.” He was dead serious.
Okay, this was the kind of response I was expecting from him.
“We can’t just leave!”
My father stopped digging in his desk to gap at me in surprise.
“Are you kidding me? There’s someone waltzing around this town looking so much like me not even my own daughter can tell the difference. There are at least three people we know of who are doing their very best to prove that you are not exactly the most average of teenagers.” He slammed a drawer and opened another. “We don’t know who they are. We don’t know if they’ll hurt you, but breaking into our house is crossing a line that is hell and gone from my comfort zone. We are leaving just as soon as I book the next flight to Germany.”
“Germany? Are you insane?” I ran over and slammed the latest drawer he’d been searching through, nearly smashing his fingers in the process. “We don’t speak German. The only experience I’ve had with a foreign language was two years of Spanish, and that isn’t even remotely close to German. If you’re going to completely uproot us from everything we’ve ever known and all the people we’ve ever loved, you could have at least picked a European country where my Spanish might have come in handy. Was Italy too expensive for you?”
“Italy? They don’t speak Spanish in Italy.”
“Well, they don’t speak Spanish in Germany either. There is no way I’m moving to a country so totally devoid of nice, handsome looking Latinos.”
“What are you talking about? I’m sure there are plenty of good-looking Latinos in Germany. People are migrating everywhere these days.” My father stopped what he was doing and stared at me. Pinching the bridge of his nose he said, “I can’t believe I just let you suck me into such a ridiculous argument.”
We stood there in silence for a few moments, neither one of us willing to back down.
“We’re not leaving. We’re not running away. I want to know who these people are and why they’re looking for me.” My father started to say something, but I quickly held up my hand to stop him. “I won’t leave Kirby. So unless you plan on flying a very sick cancer patient to Germany, you can forget your relocation plan, for now, anyway.”
My father shook his head in frustration. He knew I wasn’t going to allow him to ship me off to some foreign destination.
“There is too much we don’t know yet. Let’s just wait this out and see what happens,” I said attempting to appeal to his sense of reason.
“I’m not happy about this, but I’ll agree to it on one condition. The minute I think your life is being threatened in any way, the minute this becomes dangerous, we take what’s in that safety deposit box, and we don’t stop running until we know it’s safe.”
“That sounds fair,” I replied grudgingly.
My father sank into his desk chair and placed his shaking hands on the table.
“You better go heal Kirby.”
I walked over to where he was sitting and wrapped my arms around his drooping shoulders.
“I just want you safe,” he whispered.
“I promise I will be.”
I gave him a kiss on his cheek and squeezed his shoulders. Then I walked determinedly out of his office toward Kirby‘s room, where I hoped I wouldn‘t be too late.