Troubled by a sense of inadequacy, I said, “You’re seven when you get magnetism, and I’m nineteen. You start seeing the Screamers two years ago, and I see them for the first time tonight. You’re Doctor Dolittle at four, and I’ve not once yet talked with an animal.”
Turning her head to look back at me, Bridget said, “I’m sure you’re not developmentally disabled, Quinn. Whatever you and I might be, apparently our gifts come to us only as we need them. Living snug and protected by a lovely bunch of nuns, you just didn’t need your gifts as early as I needed mine. Anyway, sometimes animals tell me things, but they don’t talk. It’s more of a mind meld—images and feelings.”
“Oh. Just a mind meld. No big deal. What other gifts do you have?”
“That’s it, I’m afraid. Don’t have X-ray vision. Can’t fly.”
“You handle a pistol as if it’s an extension of your hand.”
“That’s not a gift. That’s training. Grandpa knows everything about weapons. Every girl should have a Sparky.”
To the back of her grandfather’s head, I said, “Did you learn everything about weapons when you were something or when you were something else, or when you were another something that you don’t talk about?”
“Exactly,” he said, as I’d known he would.
|?12?|
Built in the days when cars were steel rather than fiberglass and light alloys and glue, the heavy Buick rolled through the night with the certainty of a train on tracks, with a reassuring rumble. It seemed we would be safe within it even if the world beyond its windows metamorphosed into a kingdom of eternal night and infinite terrors.
Having been, by age and custom and law, gently exiled from the orphanage and the only family I had ever known, I had the incipient sense that a new family was forming around me. Our kinship wasn’t defined by bloodline—or by being parentless—but by affinity and the need to meet a threat common to the three of us. The sisters of Mater Misericordi? had provided a loving but firmly ordered matriarchy offering stability and encouragement, an environment in which I had thrived. This new little family was far stranger than that provided by the nuns but warm in its own way, its history a ball of twine that, in its every loop, concealed a mystery.
I was comfortable with mysteries. I’d been raised on them; and I was one myself. Life without mysteries was incomprehensible—like a sandwich made of nothing but two slices of bread—and too tedious to contemplate.
When we passed the town of Picacho, chasing our future south through the Sonoran Desert toward Red Rock and Rillito, I broached a sensitive subject. “You said that your mother, Corrine, was ‘never right,’ because her mother drank during pregnancy.”
“FAS—fetal alcohol syndrome,” Bridget said.
At first Sparky spoke dispassionately, as though reciting a doctor’s diagnosis that he had memorized. “Not a severe case. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. No physical deformities. No organ damage. Just attention deficit disorder, spells of hyperactivity, mood swings. She was often argumentative for no good reason.” He hesitated. When he continued, his voice was softer, and a thread of sorrow raveled through it. “But there was a goodness in her, too, a sweetness that I think was the true Corrine, that would have been the only Corrine if she hadn’t been warped by FAS.”
I said, “Bridget hoped that Getting to Know Me might take her cup of spit and find her father. But, Sparky, didn’t Corrine give even a hint of who the father might have been when she left her baby with you and split?”
“Two important things,” he said. “First, she didn’t look pregnant until the last two months of her third trimester, and then only slightly. She was one of those rarities who gain maybe ten or twelve pounds max. When she told me she was pregnant, she said she hadn’t realized it for the first seven months. I don’t see how that could be, but she was quite adamant. Although Corrine didn’t drink alcohol, there was concern that the baby would be underweight and have birth defects. No need to worry. Bridget popped out at seven pounds, fourteen ounces, as lovely a baby as you’ve ever seen.”
She had grown lovelier over the years. I didn’t say as much, because I thought that might sound as dopey as “sweetums.”
Instead, I reminded Sparky that he’d said he had two important things to reveal.
“Well, you have to consider how Corrine was. When she was in a hyperactive state, which could last hours or weeks, she could become obsessed with odd ideas. Like that there’s a city on the dark side of the moon. Or that the Titanic never sank and the whole story was invented to cover up a conspiracy of some kind, though she couldn’t figure out what that conspiracy might be. So when she brought the baby to me a week after the birth, said she was going away for a while, and then insisted that she’d not had relations with any man for fourteen months, that she’d become pregnant without coitus, I figured this was another fantasy. She wasn’t a virgin. She didn’t claim that an angel appeared before her to announce the birth of a savior. She was more inclined to believe that this had something to do with those who lived on the dark side of the moon or with a new protein drink that she had tried. She was always half-lost, the poor girl. But one thing I’ll swear to at the cost of my soul—Corrine didn’t lie. She had fantasies, or call them delusions if you will, but she did not lie. The day she left her baby with me, she wasn’t hyperactive, only bewildered and fearful. She believed what she said, though I knew it couldn’t be right. Then as the years went by and Bridget proved to be so gifted . . . Well, like I said, Corrine didn’t lie. And maybe in this case, somehow, she wasn’t delusional, either.”