Quicksilver(26)

“Maybe you deserved it, waving that knife around.”

“I still say it could have turned out worse.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Could have.”

“Didn’t.”

“I’d have fought him if I had to.”

“I know you would have, Sparky. You’re a valiant warrior.”

They fell silent, and I waited, but finally I asked her, “So then what happened?”

“You mean with Alphonse?”

“What else would I mean?”

“Well, we walked him out of the woods, coaxed him into the back seat of the car, and drove him to the nearest animal shelter.”

I said, “Okay, come on—what’re you leaving out?”

“Leaving out? Nothing. Alphonse was domesticated.”

“Semi-domesticated,” Sparky said. “No tiger is ever totally cured of its wildness.”

Bridget made a dismissive noise. “Alphonse was about as wild as that tiger who sells breakfast cereal. What’s his name?”

“Tony,” I said.

“I was big into Frosted Flakes in those days,” she said.

“Those days? When did this Alphonse thing happen?”

“About ten years ago. I was nine.”

Sparky said, “Actually, we did leave out one detail about Alphonse. The frozen custard.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Bridget said. “On the way to the animal shelter we passed a Dairy Queen, and I just knew Alphonse would enjoy that, so we stopped.”

“He enjoyed three big cones,” Sparky said. “I was sure he was going to throw it all up.”

“Grandpa has this fear of having to clean up after someone gets car sick.”

“I’d rather just trash the car and get a new one.”

She reached out to pat his shoulder. “But it’s an unnatural fear, since it’s nothing that ever happened to you, dear.”

I managed to rewind the conversation. “You already had psychic magnetism at nine?”

To her grandfather, she said, “When did it start with me?”

“The magnetism when you were seven, almost eight. The thing with animals, I first noticed when you were about four.”

I remembered what they’d said about the deer looking in their windows, the squirrels that ate from their hands, and the fox named Cary Grant that kept them company by curling up on a rocking chair on their back porch.

Troubled by a sense of inadequacy, I said, “You’re seven when you get magnetism, and I’m nineteen. You start seeing the Screamers two years ago, and I see them for the first time tonight. You’re Doctor Dolittle at four, and I’ve not once yet talked with an animal.”

Turning her head to look back at me, Bridget said, “I’m sure you’re not developmentally disabled, Quinn. Whatever you and I might be, apparently our gifts come to us only as we need them. Living snug and protected by a lovely bunch of nuns, you just didn’t need your gifts as early as I needed mine. Anyway, sometimes animals tell me things, but they don’t talk. It’s more of a mind meld—images and feelings.”

“Oh. Just a mind meld. No big deal. What other gifts do you have?”

“That’s it, I’m afraid. Don’t have X-ray vision. Can’t fly.”

“You handle a pistol as if it’s an extension of your hand.”

“That’s not a gift. That’s training. Grandpa knows everything about weapons. Every girl should have a Sparky.”

To the back of her grandfather’s head, I said, “Did you learn everything about weapons when you were something or when you were something else, or when you were another something that you don’t talk about?”

“Exactly,” he said, as I’d known he would.





|?12?|

Built in the days when cars were steel rather than fiberglass and light alloys and glue, the heavy Buick rolled through the night with the certainty of a train on tracks, with a reassuring rumble. It seemed we would be safe within it even if the world beyond its windows metamorphosed into a kingdom of eternal night and infinite terrors.

Having been, by age and custom and law, gently exiled from the orphanage and the only family I had ever known, I had the incipient sense that a new family was forming around me. Our kinship wasn’t defined by bloodline—or by being parentless—but by affinity and the need to meet a threat common to the three of us. The sisters of Mater Misericordi? had provided a loving but firmly ordered matriarchy offering stability and encouragement, an environment in which I had thrived. This new little family was far stranger than that provided by the nuns but warm in its own way, its history a ball of twine that, in its every loop, concealed a mystery.

I was comfortable with mysteries. I’d been raised on them; and I was one myself. Life without mysteries was incomprehensible—like a sandwich made of nothing but two slices of bread—and too tedious to contemplate.

When we passed the town of Picacho, chasing our future south through the Sonoran Desert toward Red Rock and Rillito, I broached a sensitive subject. “You said that your mother, Corrine, was ‘never right,’ because her mother drank during pregnancy.”

“FAS—fetal alcohol syndrome,” Bridget said.