I bunched the pillow tighter underneath my head. “It’s too late for that,” I said, and, unbidden, dredged up the image of my father once more, only this time his boots lay flat on the ground with the rest of him. The lightning generators that he’d invented loomed up into the angry sky above him. He’d been trying to harness atmospheric energy to disintegrate the atom and therefore, in turn, discover a superenergy source. Only he never managed it. A bolt of electricity had struck him in the heart, leaving red tree-branch scars across his chest and neck. He was dead and his experiment died along with him. After that night, I walked away from that forest and never returned.
There was a rustle of bedding, then so lightly I could barely be sure it was happening, Adam reached up and pet my hair in a stiff, unnatural motion. I let his hand rest there. “Thank you, Adam,” I said. “That’s very kind.”
“Victoria,” he said in that awestruck way that he had.
“Adam.”
And with the last word falling partially formed from my lips, I allowed the part of me still clinging to reality to let go while the body of the boy I’d killed lay beside me.
THIRTEEN
Observation of subject’s injuries show that all lesions and lacerations have formed scabs. Hematoma coloring has shifted to green, blue, and yellow hues at the outer edges. All signs point to healthy natural healing processes.
*
I woke up all at once, fingers splayed into stars on top of the mattress, head raised off the pillow, and breath coming in whistling heaves. My first thought was to feel around my left wrist and to panic for just a second when I found that the twine bracelet with the lightning charm my father had given me was missing. It took me several more seconds to realize that it had been missing for years and that it had been almost that long since I’d had the clawing empty feeling each time I noticed its absence.
I dropped my head back into the fluffy down. Thin light trickled through the shades. The space next to me was empty, and any trace of Adam had disappeared along with him. I sat up, rested my elbows on my knees, and cradled my forehead. Sweat prickled my skin like beads of condensation on a glass of water.
I pushed my fingers into my hair. My scalp was damp. Einstein lifted her chin and stared up at me through a face full of wrinkles. After a quick shower that left my skin pink, I wriggled into a pair of jeans and paired it with a T-shirt from my laundry pile. I found Mom in the kitchen cooking eggs. Mom’s eggs only came one way—flat and dry. She smashed the spatula into one of the cooked yolks, and air whistled out of it. The shriveling whites crackled on the frying pan. When it was the consistency of rubber, she slid it onto a plate and handed it to me. I wasn’t hungry.
“There’s something you’re not telling me, Tor,” she said in a singsong voice, baiting me, probing, like I should have known that these eggs came with an agenda. Mom wiped her forehead with the backside of her wrist, then cracked another egg into the pan.
My first thought was of Adam. The thing I wasn’t telling her was so big that it broke the scales of things that one would not tell their mother. I swallowed hard, clutching the ceramic plate to my chest. “What do you mean?” My voice sounded like it’d barely managed to escape the back of my throat.
She jostled the frying pan by the handle and looked up at me. Her eyes were cool and blue, clear as a mountain lake, clearer than they’d been in weeks. I’d come to depend on the layer of fog that kept her from asking too many questions about my life. “You know I don’t like you keeping secrets from me,” she said. “I know you think you’re smarter than me, too, smarter than everybody maybe, but I’m still your mom.”
Are you? I wanted to snap back.
But sticky saliva coated the roof of my mouth. My palms grew wet and I slid them into my lap. Einstein sat looking up at me, expecting a bite of my eggs. I ignored her, knitting my eyebrows together. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom.” Deny, deny, deny. Always deny.
Abandoning the eggs, she turned and placed her fist on the waistband of her light-wash jeans. “Then how do you explain this?” She reached for something on the counter. My breath hitched as she retrieved a dustpan and shoved the contents forward for me to examine. “You’re so careless with your belongings. First your car and now this? I could wring your neck. You know that? Who do you think’s going to pay for a new phone? And this is after the car?”
I squinted at the pieces of shattered black glass in the dustpan. At first it was relief coursing through me as I realized that Mom didn’t know about Adam, didn’t even know I’d killed somebody. But no sooner had the glorious swell of relief washed over me than it was replaced with a sickening pit that opened up in the center of my stomach. The shattered glass in Mom’s dustpan was the remnants of my broken cell phone, and the last time I’d seen that cell phone had been in pieces on the road. Blood thumped against my eardrums.
“How … how did you get that?” I stammered, touching my finger to one of the jagged edges to feel that it was real.
“How did I get it? Tor, you ain’t that bright. It was right on the porch, apparently where you dropped it or ran over it or whatever you did to ruin a perfectly good piece of equipment. Doubt we’ll even be able to sell this thing back to one of the infomercials now.” She dropped the dustpan on the kitchen table and returned to the stove, where she removed the browning egg from the heat.