“Yo bro.” My friend Exelrud could be so exasperating with his casual demeanor. Watched too many of those Earth movies, that was the problem. “So, what's your girl up to now?”
“She’s here, there, and everywhere. Sometimes, she transports herself after watching news clips. But, usually, I send her on little errands.”
“Can I watch?”
“No!” Bad enough I was letting Elspeth see everything—well, not the sex bits of course. No way was I going to let Exelrud see any of it. He was too nosy for his own good.
*
She slumped on one of the sofas in the staffroom, toed off her shoes and swung her feet up. Thank God everyone was gone. She really should leave too, but was too fatigued to move. The day had flown by. Never a dull moment surrounded by teens. Today had been brutal. A fight at smokers’ corner, an injury in the lab, thankfully not too serious, girls crying over a squabble that she hadn’t fully understood and probably didn’t want to, and a trip to the nearest clinic with a boy who had something in his eye. Turned out to be a piece of metal from working with his dad on Sunday.
“Did you tell your dad your eye hurt?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me to wait and see if it went away.”
The doctor didn’t think there would be permanent damage.
But that wasn’t what was bothering her now. It was the whole messy business of strange words coming out of her mouth at the oddest times. She’d taken to writing them down phonetically and trying to discover what they were. Some were easy. Spanish, French, Russian. Others were obscure. Urdu, Swahili, Javanese. And some she never did identify.
The words were the least of it. Had she really been the one to have the hostages in Columbia released unharmed? Had she met with the cartel leaders and the Mexican president to stop the drug trade, or at least try to? Had she led police, over a period of twelve hours, to illegal arsenal stashes in one hundred and forty-two locations across the US?
It seemed she had. She hadn't turned on the TV for months, had canceled her subscription to the newspaper, but she couldn't avoid hearing the conversations around her, at school, in line at the grocery story, at the gym. The media had apparently reported that doctors were confident the hostages would regain their health. It seemed the cartels were curtailing their activities and drug users were flocking to detox clinics. Hundreds of thousands of people had come forward to turn in arms voluntarily.
Had she really gone to the soccer game in Rio?
Without Ron?
And, there were the dreams, of course. One almost every night. Last night’s had been particularly vivid and horrifying.
Huge tents filled with row after row of makeshift tables hastily assembled from crudely constructed sawhorses and pieces of boards or old doors, anything that could be scrounged.
Each table piled high with remnants of clothing, broken bits of bones, some with muscle and sinew still attached, and human skulls as far as the eye could see.
She picked up a skull and put her finger through the hole in the forehead. She picked up another to see the back smashed in at a crazy angle.
She put the skull down and held up a uniform jacket, picked up a thighbone, then part of a hand with a ring hanging loosely from the baby finger, and after that a tiny pink baby sweater. She put the sweater down, picked it up again and stared in horror. She was holding a baby with empty eye sockets, not just any baby her own daughter. She dropped the body, screamed, backed away.
She woke up shaking so hard the bed shook too. She bolted for the bathroom, retched and vomited. Eventually the nausea eased and she hung over the toilet bowl clinging weakly to the sides. In due course she recovered enough to sit back on her heels without falling over. She waited agonizingly for a return to normal. When her stomach finally stopped heaving, she levered herself up clutching the edge of the counter top. Leaning against it she bent over to splash her face and neck with cold water. The clock showed 3 a.m. She picked up the phone and dialed anyway, called her daughter, just to hear her voice, to know she was alive, safe.
*
“Kaya!” A bad word. Very bad. One of ours. And Mentor had just used it. This was not going to be good. “Isn’t it enough that she has to live it? Now you have her dreaming it too.”
“I don’t give her the dreams. They’re her own.” I felt feeble protesting like that.
“You could stop them. Save her the agony.”
“I tried. She’s too strong.”
“Guardian, have mercy.” Mentor looked up to the heavens. “Why did you give me such an idiot to deal with?” A string of bad words followed. I searched frantically for an escape. “It’s your responsibility,” she thundered. “Fix it.”