Rolling out of the house that afternoon, I felt like the
villain in a spy movie, El Brujo draped across my lap looking as
innocent as only a fluffy black cat can--not very, in other
words--and Serena quivering against my chest, her claws little
pinpricks through the thin material of my shirt.
A line from some TV show popped into my head--"Where I come
from, they hang a man for sheet stealing! Or was that sheep?"--
and I flashed back to the absolute last place I wanted to be:
the Newport Coast house as a seven-year-old, Mom and Dad and
Lizzie and--
The reaction froze me solid as usual, my hands locking onto
the wheelchair rims, my fingers crooking into things more like
claws. I couldn't breathe, of course, or rather, I could
breathe, but my lungs scraped the inside of my chest like rough-
cut balls of splintery wood, tiny jabs of pain slicing up and
down me as fine as razor blades.
Because I'd seen this movie before, had lived it so
many times the last fifteen--God, was it fifteen years?? The
beginning of my paralysis just when I was starting second grade;
Mom and Dad smiling, saying how we'd all get through this
together till the crash, the car spinning off a rain-slicked
Coast Highway and down the rocky cliff into the Pacific; Mom and
Lizzie's screams cutting off with a shrieking of metal and a
crunching of bone; hanging, wrapped in that car seat, my own
screams growing hoarse as the rescue crews braced the wreckage
and began cutting me free; sitting in my chair next to Dad at
the funeral, the air ice between us; the ice thickening,
solidifying, widening the gap between us--
Ten years, I knew, a thought I'd been desperately trying to
keep out of the front part of my brain: ten years since I'd last
seen him, Dad's face a carved mask, his mouth moving, words
coming out that said this would be the best for both of us. A
twelve-year-old kid in a wheelchair staring at his father
driving away before the "Welcome to Chrysalis House" party had
even started, and then?
Then nothing. Dad paid whatever it took to keep me here,
and here I stayed, one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys
slowly winding down, getting more and more sluggish till one day
it would creak rustily to a halt with no one to care one way or
the other about--
"Miss Brujo! Why has he stopped?? What has--??"
"Oh, dear." A pat of velvet paw at my face. "August? You
need to come back to the 'now.' The past is gone and cannot
change. But the 'now' is here and flexible."
"Mr. Augie! Please! Soon we will attract the attention of
your keepers! We must--"
"Silence, please, Serena. I've experience in this area."
The soft patting against my cheek went suddenly hard and sharp,
a bundle of tiny knives slapping me hard enough to shock me
back, make me blink, El Brujo's dark chocolate eyes inches from
my own. "We've no time for such nonsense now, August," she
said. "Kindly pull yourself together."
Serena's pointed ears and rounded snout popped up behind
her. "Mr. Augie! Are you broken? I can make a glue from
acorns and spit if that will help!"
El Brujo's eyes rolled. "How could that not help?"
I touched my cheek, expected my fingers to come away
bloody, but while my face still buzzed where she'd struck, El
Brujo hadn't broken the skin. I couldn't help smiling; she was
a professional, after all, as she never stopped telling me.
A shaky breath, and I managed to get out, "I'm fine," glad
I didn't have to use my dry and scratchy throat to say it. "And
by fine, I mean 'a physical, emotional, and mental wreck.' But,
hey: po-tay-to, po-tah-to."
The squirrel just blinked at me, El Brujo turning to settle
herself on my lap again. "I've warned you, August: If you're
going to sing, you need to warn me at least fifteen minutes
beforehand." She gestured toward the front gate with her nose.
"Shall we be getting along now? We've appointments to keep."
Which leads us on to 23.
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