Woman King

CHAPTER 8

For the first time in many days, I woke up alone in the house. I confess I missed my roommate, or at least I missed the feeling of having someone nearby. I don’t have a great track record with men. There have been no great romances in my life. Instead, I have amassed a collection of single-night memories. To be sure, there have been a few multi-week excursions, but they never transformed themselves into repeat engagements.

It would be nice to feel great passion for someone, to feel my body long for another with every fiber of my being. But that has not been a sensation I’ve experienced. Perhaps watching my mother come unraveled has made me timid. From where I sit, spilling over with emotion looks messy, and if unreciprocated, humiliating. As a result, the only male voice heard emanating from my living room on a regular basis is the baseball radio announcer Jon Miller.

Even without Elsa, I followed my normal schedule, rising early to eat a banana and then heading straight for the park to work out. I entered at Ninth Avenue and ran west toward the coast. I managed to reach the graffiti scarred retaining walls of Ocean Beach in less than an hour.

To cool down, I decided to walk onto the broad beach and stretch on the sand. The fog from the night before had retreated, perching along the edge of the horizon as if it couldn’t decide what to do next. The sun was coming up into the sky and the air around me was cool and mild. It felt delicious to be outside. I decided to prolong the feeling by walking over to Judah Street for a cup of coffee at a nearby beach café.

The Java Shack was fairly busy, with other people apparently also working at extending their morning. I managed to find a table outside and picked up a rumpled copy of the San Francisco Chronicle someone had left behind. For several minutes I sipped my cappuccino, gazing at the sea, enjoying the first moments of quiet I’d had in days.

As I regarded the foamy waves rolling in and out with the tide, I worried about what was coming next. I was rapidly moving toward a moment when I would have to open myself up again to feel my emotions and those of others, something I had avoided for a long time. I felt like Pink at the moment when the bricks of the Wall are set to come tumbling down. What would I discover, I wondered, when the dust settled?

I pushed aside my worries and settled in to scan the day’s news. Within a few minutes I came upon a headline that surprised me, “Internet CEO Seeks Return to Congress.” I read with interest a story about my former boss, Levi Barnes, and his decision to run for office again, this time as a congressman representing Silicon Valley. My first job in Washington had been with Levi when he was a congressman from Salt Lake City. After losing a particularly tough re-election bid, he’d left politics and moved to the Bay Area to become an entrepreneur. It seemed unthinkable that, after losing so badly before, he would give up his privacy and success to reenter national politics. What had changed for him? It had been more than a year since the two of us had spoken, and I made a mental note to call him to catch up. I was also curious to see who he had hired to run his campaign.

The high-pitched squeak of the N-Judah streetcar jarred me out of my thoughts. It was time to head home. Seeing that a train had reached the end of the line, and was turning east again toward downtown, I decided to hop on and ride back to my house.

By mid-afternoon, a few hours later, Elsa had returned. She walked straight into the kitchen and began brewing some kind of concoction that gave off a quite unpleasant aroma. I came into the kitchen just as she was placing small button-shaped fruits into boiling water with what looked like cinnamon sticks and a vanilla bean.

“What are you making?” I asked, trying to breath through my mouth.

“It’s going to be a tea,” she said. “You’re going to drink some tonight before we go out.”

“Is it going to taste as bad as it smells?”

“Actually, it’s going to taste worse,” she said, keeping her back to me as she hunched over the stove brewing her potion. “The trick is to drink quickly and not think about it.”

“What does it do?” I asked, thinking that I should know what I was getting myself into.

“It should help you regain your senses,” Elsa said. “It’s an old recipe that has been used by many women over the years.”

“Where did you go last night?”

Elsa kept her back to me. “New Mexico, mostly. I had a few other stops to make.”

“You don’t seem to have flown on a commercial jet to get there,” I said, hoping to provoke a discussion about portals and time-walkers.

For the record, it’s not that I find it difficult to imagine that there is more to things than what we see at first glance. And I don’t doubt that the world has more complexity to it than we imagine. I’ve just never wanted to accept it.

What I want from life is something more rational. If I’m going to pay attention and care, then I want to know how the mysteries work. If I can understand the mechanics, then I can manage my fear. After years of living in a very logical fashion, now I’m expected to be Alice in the looking glass, throw caution to the wind and drink my potion so all can be revealed.

“You know I didn’t fly on an airplane,” Elsa said. “I used a portal. It’s a door between places. They are scattered across the city.”

“Where do you go when you use them?”

“With a little practice and focus, you can go anywhere,” Elsa said.

“Am I going to use one tonight?”

“No. Tonight you’re going to work on finding those instincts of yours so we can see what kind of empath you really are. I sense you have great abilities, Olivia, but you have stuffed them so far beneath your skin that only the most drastic efforts will draw them out.” She removed the pot from the stove and strained the contents into a ceramic pitcher, which she placed in the refrigerator.

“It will be better chilled.”

“I’m scared,” I said, admitting the obvious. “What’s going to happen to me tonight?”

“Lily and I will be with you,” Elsa said. “Whatever happens, and maybe nothing will, you will be with us and we will take care of you.”

“This is not a reassuring speech,” I said.

“I’m not here to reassure you.” Her voice was stern. “I’m here to protect you and to get you to stop living a half-life.”

“A half-life,” I repeated. “How is running a business and owning a home a half-life?”

“Olivia, you were born with a sixth sense—a set of instincts that allows you to read people before they even know something themselves,” she continued. “Instead of using those skills, you have buried them and left yourself vulnerable to all kinds of danger and mischief. At minimum, you might have been able to stop Stoner Halbert’s demon from stealing your clients. Do you think a man with eyesight would knowingly blind himself? That’s what you’ve done.”

“I haven’t blinded myself,” I responded, my pride wounded once again. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I see more clearly than you do?”

Elsa snorted. “After tonight we will see if that’s really true. You should go upstairs and rest. You won’t get much sleep tonight.”