Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(52)
Still, it was for a good cause. Too bad we couldn’t explain what it was.
Every once in a while we could hear Brad’s and Debbie’s voices through the thin walls and vinyl siding of their bi/split level. Their home was lovely, but it hadn’t been made of the soundest construction material. I wondered if Slater Properties had had something to do with it.
“Why did you have to pick tonight, of all nights, to invite them over?” I could hear Debbie demanding with perfect clarity from inside their kitchen (all stainless-steel appliances, but the dishwasher and trash compactor were often broken, usually at the same time).
“I told you. They invited themselves over, Debbie.” Brad sounded tired. “Something about a class Suze is taking. She needs to observe kids in their home environment overnight.”
“Great. So she chooses tonight to do it? With no advance warning?”
“She’s my sister. What was I supposed to do?”
“She’s your stepsister. And you could have said no. God, you are such a pushover, Brad. You let everyone walk all over you. Did you lose your balls as well as your brains when you got that concussion playing football in high school?”
“Hey,” Brad said. “Could you keep it down? They can probably hear you. And it was wrestling, not football.”
“Ask me how much I care, Brad.”
“You know, I really don’t understand it,” I said to Jesse, taking a sip of the wine we’d brought, along with a couple of pizzas. “How do you think it happened?”
“Father Dominic was probably taken off guard,” Jesse said. He reached out to squeeze my hand reassuringly. “But like I said, he’s strong. His vitals were looking much better before we left.”
I remembered the father’s pale and battered face as I’d last seen it underneath the fluorescent lights of his hospital room, how sunken his eyes had looked beneath those paper-thin lids, the frailness of his hands resting on the blue blanket, the tangle of IV tubes flowing from them.
If that was “much better,” I’d hate to know what “worse” looked like.
“And we made good use of those items I ‘borrowed’ from the church,” Jesse went on. “That Medal of Mary we hung over his bed should keep him safe tonight, along with all the holy water.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “I meant the girls. How could that have happened? How could they be mediators?”
“Oh, that,” Jesse said. “Well, as you so astutely explained to me only last night, Susannah, when a man and a woman like each other very much, they make love, and when they do, if they don’t use protection—like your stepbrother and sister-in-law—sometimes the man’s sperm can fertilize the woman’s egg, and if either of them is carrying the genetic chromosome for communicating with the dead, then there’s a chance their baby could turn out to be—”
I punched him in the shoulder, causing him to slosh some of the wine in his glass. But it was okay, since Max—whom we’d stopped off at the Crossing to bring along, as he’s such an excellent ghost detector—jumped up immediately, eager for the possibility that some food might have been spilled. Disappointed that it was only wine, however, he lay back down at our feet with a sigh.
“Ow,” Jesse said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d punched him.
“I didn’t hit you that hard. And that’s exactly what I mean. I don’t think either the Ackerman family or the Mancusos are carrying the mediator gene. I didn’t meet a single person at Brad and Debbie’s wedding who seemed remotely intuitive. Did you?”
“No.” Jesse poured more wine into his glass. “And sometimes I think you don’t know your own strength. But I’ve always felt that your stepbrother David is very perceptive. Occasionally I was able to communicate with him back when I was . . .”
“—dead,” I finished for him when he hesitated to say the word.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
I took a sip from my glass and looked up at the stars—what I could see of them through the many electric wires intersecting the sky across the yard from Brad and Debbie’s neighbors’ houses—and wondered how I was ever going to get over to Carmel Hills to salt the old house now. It seemed that fate, in the form of Lucia Martinez, was conspiring against me.
“I agree, David’s a really insightful kid,” I said. I was speaking quietly so neither the girls, who had upon occasion opened their bedroom window to spy on us after being put to bed, nor Debbie or Brad would overhear me. “But David’s not those girls’ dad. Brad is. And Debbie’s their mom. Brad is much less intuitive than good old Max here, and Debbie thinks vaccines cause diseases. So how can their kids see ghosts? And how are we ever going to explain that to their parents?”
“We’re not going to,” Jesse said. “Any more than I explained to them that in a previous lifetime I watched entire families die from smallpox. If Debbie doesn’t believe the substantial scientific proof that vaccines will protect her children from disease, how likely do you think she is to believe that they—and you and I—can see and speak to ghosts?”
“Uh, very? Especially now, since that toy the girls had belongs to the ghost of a child who died before they were born—a child who tried to murder their school principal this afternoon. The girls shouldn’t have been able to see it, let alone have possession of it, unless they’re mediators, which they can’t be, because no one on either side of their parents’ families has ever been a mediator—”