So of course, the next time El Brujo and I headed past the
Petersons' old place, the van sat in the driveway and Heather
was tumbling around the front yard singing: "Air and grass and
all the smells of both and one! It shouts! It yells!"
El Brujo's ears folded. "It appears we must first teach
the child the principles of prosody."
I was tempted to keep us rolling past, not even slow down,
not give Deena the chance to notice me so she wouldn't have to
consciously decide to hide from me, but--
"Pretty cat lady!" Heather shouted, scurrying on her puppy
legs through the lumpy clumps of grass, her dark red fur
shimmering out from her more like smoke than anything else.
"And Mr. Augie! Hooray! You really do exist!"
And, well, I couldn't roll past after that, could I?
Especially not with El Brujo leaning most of herself off my lap,
under the chair's armrest, and out over the wheel on the right
so she could stretch her nose down closer to the little
squirming mass of Heather. "It's lovely to see you again as
well, child," she said.
"We've been ev'rywhere!" Heather spun in place so quickly,
I couldn't make out eyes, nose, mouth, anything but fur. "Back
to the apartment, then here, then the apartment, then here!
It's such a giant world that I was afraid I'd just made you both
up to have someone I could talk to about it all!"
El Brujo's tail twitched: a cat's chuckle. "Not at all,
child. We're as real as you are."
"Really??" Heather froze, gave me a glimpse of wide dark
eyes, then started bouncing up and down along the other side of
the fence. "'Cause I'm the reallest thing I know! So you must
really be real!"
I was getting more nervous as the seconds ticked by. Was
she inside watching, waiting for me to leave before she came out
to see if I'd hurt her dog? Maybe she was calling the police
right now to have me--
"Oh! Hello!" A human voice, a female human voice, her
female human voice, and I looked up to see her on the porch, a
smile on her narrow face, those tiny little glasses perched on
her nose, her pull-over sweater and long skirt both a sort of
apricot color. "Gus, right?"
Don't say anything stupid, don't say anything stupid, don't
say anything stupid. "Yes," I said, then realized I hadn't said
it with human words--which meant that as far as she could tell,
I was just sitting there staring at her like an idiot.
And that little thought was all it took for every memory of
how to talk like a human to scatter from my brain like pigeons
from oncoming traffic. They don't work at all the same, human
language and animal language, and I'd discovered early on that
trying to use one on the other either gets you barked at or sent
to the juvie psych ward: hard to say which was the worse of
those two options, actually...
None of which solved my current problem, the sweat trickling
down my sides making me painfully aware of how many seconds of
silence were ticking away. "Brujo!" I finally said. "Slash
me! Now!"
She swung her head around, her ears flat. "I beg your
pardon?"
"Your claws!" I needed a shock, a good painful one, or
else I was just gonna sit there staring at-- "The back of my
hand! Right now! Hurry!"
A slow blink of her eyes, and she struck out so fast, I
never saw her paw move, just felt the pain blossom above my
wrist, tiny red dots appearing in my skin. "Ahhh!" I shouted,
my tongue and brain finally connecting, my frozen synapses
firing like a fusillade of cannons. "Yes! Gus! Hello!"
Deena's eyes had gone wide. "Are...are you OK?"
"Not usually," I said, and, yeah, the words were back, but
I had nowhere to go with them. Except maybe-- "Sorry if I
scared you. Things--" I didn't want to keep going, but if I
stopped now, I knew I'd never have the nerve to come back down
this street again. "Things get...tangled up in me sometimes."
She smiled, then, just a little, a sadness coming into her
face. "Yeah," she said. "I've been there."
"Deena?" a man's voice called from inside, and he stepped
out onto the porch, thin like she was but taller, older, grayer.
"Who are you talking to?"
I knew who he was even before she looked at him and said,
"Dad, this is Gus. I think he's one of the residents at
Chrysalis House."
"Really?" The suspicion in his eyes became something else:
not pity, which I know the sight and smell of intimately, but--
Interest? That couldn't be right!
Her father was nodding now. "Do you like it there?"
"I--" This was all so far beyond anything I'd been
expecting, even the usual little don't say anything stupid chant
had gone silent in my head. "They've kept me alive so far,"
were the words that came out of my mouth, so I can only assume I
was the one who said them.
And when they both smiled, I knew I'd fallen through some
sort of dream hole. "Best recommendation I've heard yet," her
father said.
Deena was nodding. "I--" She stopped, swallowed, looked
like a pigeon who maybe hadn't noticed the oncoming traffic till
after the other pigeons had flown off. "I'll be starting
sessions there tomorrow."
"Starting...sessions?" I asked. Not meaning to, I looked
her up and down, her legs obviously holding her upright, the
cling of her clothes to the rest of her slight but lovely curves
not showing anything like I was used to from--
"For rehab," she said. One hand went to her sleeve, pulled
it up, the skin of her forearm pale and pocked like the surface
of the moon.
You bet it continues! Number 14's just a click away!
No comments:
Post a Comment