Awash in Talent (3 page)

“We removed this from your daughter’s small intestine,” the doctor said with an intent gaze at my mother.

“Is this some kind of joke?” demanded my mother.

“Is Beth all right?” asked my father.

“She appears to be fine,” the doctor said calmly, setting the bag on the table next to my chair. I concentrated on her face as she continued, “She was awake during the extraction.”

My mother lunged toward the doctor, and her fists didn’t land on their mark only because my father held her arms. “What? You didn’t sedate her?”

“She refused, madam. She wanted to be aware of what was happening. We were able to make a very precise incision with her guidance. She told us she’d accidentally swallowed the tab while attempting to open an RC Cola can with her teeth.”

“What? Why?” shrieked my mother.

“She said something about impressing her sister.”

For some reason, everyone looked at me. “When did this happen?” demanded my mother.

“How should I know? It’s not like she was worth paying attention to until the doctor told us she stayed awake and guided the scalpels,” I said in an even tone, in an attempt to get my mother to calm down.

“It was just before I came down with all the allergies.” A thin but steady voice came from the doorway. I gazed at my sister, rapt. She was holding on to the doorway so hard, I was sure clumps of it were going to come off in her hand. Her hospital gown hung limply open on her frame, revealing a trickle of blood oozing from under the surgical bandage and over her white briefs. I was vaguely aware of my father covering his eyes from the sight.

“Since you weren’t paying attention to me even halfway across the world, Emily, I decided I didn’t need your attention any more. And I decided not to have allergies anymore. It was time for the aluminum to come out.” I noticed her bare, pink feet lose their grip on the rough floor as two nurses came up behind her and one inserted the contents of a syringe into her naked arm.

He apologized to all of us in general. “She needs to rest. We couldn’t keep her in the bed.”

We all followed the nurses back to the recovery room, where they gingerly laid my fascinating sister in the bed. I had no memory of anyone trying to open a can with their teeth, much less a member of my own family, and I wondered how the tab had managed to stay so recognizable after all those years in a corrosive environment. While Beth slept off the drugs, the doctor kindly brought chairs from the waiting room so we could all sit. She said she’d seen many more puzzling objects caught in people’s digestive tracts in the few years she’d been a doctor.

We all just stared at my sister, at her rhythmically falling and rising chest, at the little mounds of her pupils darting under her eyelids. Beth looked a lot like me, I noticed: the straight brown hair, arranged in a way that she probably meant to look like mine; the unruly eyebrows; the long, ramrod-straight eyelashes. I’d introduce her to an eyelash curler when this was all over. I felt strangely united with my parents while the three of us directed all of our energy toward Beth’s wellbeing.

Her lips twitched. I laid my hand on her wrist. Her eyes snapped open, as clear as they’d been before she came down with all the allergies.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Better than I have in years.” She sounded a little crusty, so I went to look for someone who could bring water.

When I came back to Beth’s side, my mother was in the process of doubting my sister’s statement.

Beth flipped the blankets off. “I feel fine. I don’t need pain relievers or bed rest. I only need to help Emily find fossils to impress that graduate student.”

My heart fluttered at the mention of Carlos. “That’s not why I do it,” I muttered, then nodded. “But, yes, if you really feel all that good, you can come into the pits with me and learn how not to disturb the evidence.”

She smiled widely: I guess she still wanted my attention after all. She sat up, utterly unimpeded, and made to throw her leg over the side of the bed, but my mother held her down and screamed, “Doctor, doctor!”

The doctor came back into the room and smiled at Beth. “Feeling better?” Her voice was like honey. “Let’s take a look.”

She parted the flimsy hospital gown and gingerly lifted the surgical bandage. I wanted to look away, but I was too entranced. A pool of blood sloshed in the hollow of my sister’s stomach to the rhythm of her breathing. The doctor swabbed it up with a towel to reveal Beth’s belly button, accompanied only by healthy skin and a barely visible surgical thread that snaked in and out of her flesh. There was no sign of the incision, as if it had never been there at all.

“See?” Beth said. “What did I tell you? I can get up now.”

“You certainly can,” the doctor said, so improbably that my mother felt the need to intervene physically again, clapping Beth’s arms back onto the bed’s surface.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded.

My father was trying to appear reasonable, but he was standing awfully close to the doctor, staring hard into her eyes.

“The first sign was when she was able to guide the incision while it was happening,” the doctor explained with admirable calm. “But now there’s no doubt that your daughter is one of a very special class of people. There are only maybe one hundred of them in the world at any one time.”

I helped my sister get dressed in the clothes she’d arrived in—not that she needed any help—while the doctor explained that, because this was the cradle of humanity, she’d seen more than her fair share of cases. “These special people share the gift of healing that your daughter has illustrated. In fact, we call them Other-Talented Healers, because in addition, they possess telekinesis, or pyrokinesis, or psychic powers. Your daughter’s other Talent will probably manifest over time, now that we’ve extracted the aluminum from her system. We think aluminum is her kryptonite, the elemental substance that weakens her and takes her Talents away, but she should probably be tested to be sure. The only certainty is that she is physically fine.”

Beth came up close to my mother and said, “See? You really should trust my judgment.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” the doctor said.

While we waited for the truck that would take us back to the hotel my parents had booked, the doctor placed a piece of paper with the contact information of the people she knew who were like Beth into my mother’s shaking hand. The doctor stood with us and patted my mother’s shoulder. I was free to give, for the first time ever, my undivided attention to Beth while I held on to the sack with her former aluminum burden inside.

My parents arranged for a return home as soon as possible. During the three days before the next available flight from Addis Ababa, I was busy seeing what it was like to have a sister, and trying to balance that with my unflagging interest in Carlos. Beth, now outfitted in a normal t-shirt, shorts, and sun hat, came out to the site every day with me. I was unsure whether it was appropriate to hold her hand as we walked and how much to tell her about my assured future with Carlos.

As promised, I showed her how not to destroy the evidence, and she learned quickly. We had plenty of time when we could have worked side by side in silence, but there was a new bridge building between us, and the girders were words. Most memorably, she said, “It’s really great that you’re digging up all this stuff now. You can carry the memory of these discoveries into whatever happens next.”

“What happens next?” I asked rather too shrilly. I glanced at Carlos, two pits over.

Beth wiped her arm across her beading forehead, creating a brown smear. “Well, no one really knows what happens after we die,” she said lightly, continuing to use a sharp dental instrument to define the outline of what might have been an ancient fingertip. “Or whether the end of the world will be a special case. I mean, when everybody dies all at once, will the souls have to wait in line? The traffic!”

“When everybody dies all at once?” I insisted.

“Well, maybe not all at once,” she said. “But you know, with climate change, the ocean levels will rise higher than ever in the next few years. With everybody competing for land and food, there’s bound to be a mass die-off.”

I had learned about such extinctions, of course, but they had never seemed so alarming before. I looked down at the fossils, but mostly at the dirt in which they were encased. If all this was gone in a few years, what would I have to show for myself? I looked at Carlos again, wondering if our souls would be caught waiting together on the off ramp to the next place. Would Carlos’s soul have that crazy blond hair?

“So you blithely accept the end of the world as we know it?” I asked.

“Well, sure. What can we do about it?”

I wondered whether my sister had been this interesting all along.

The last day before my family left, Beth and I sat in the dust around the pit where Carlos was gently prodding at his prized femur. The sun was digging into my skin and causing so much sweat to well up, it was as if I’d been in the shower, but much less pleasant. It didn’t matter. All I really wanted were Carlos’s arms around me and his hot breath in my ear.

For some reason, that thought made me look at my sister. Her stare was so icy, I knew I would never need to pay for air conditioning again. She nodded toward Carlos, and I saw that the bone he had been so precisely extracting from the ancient layers of silt and dust had suddenly jumped into his cupped hand. He hadn’t even had time to put down his scalpel, and the whole valley seemed to echo with the clink it made against the ancient bone.

Carlos remained frozen, his jaw sinking lower and lower toward the ground. “What happened?” I cried. The only reply I got was a pile of gauze gliding, ghostlike, toward Carlos as if it knew it was needed for the safe transport and cataloging of the precious bone.

“Beth?” I said.

She looked back at me, too serious, so we stood up and walked toward the communications tent where she had so recently collapsed.

“Are you ready to go home?” I said, parentally, because I couldn’t bear to ask the real question: whether she had had anything to do with the objects’ movement. I didn’t know what the telekinesis policy was in Ethiopia, but back in the States, people with that kind of Talent were closely monitored and often forced to live in communes that a lot of civil rights groups compared to concentration camps.

She came back at me with the most distracting question possible. “Why do you hang on him like that? He’s not that special. Plus, he’s married. He talks about his wife all the time, haven’t you noticed?”

Intellectually, I knew that he was not only married but also had a baby. But I felt in my heart that such a relationship could only be a passing fancy compared to the love Carlos and I would share into eternity and beyond.

“No, he doesn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I needed to throw Beth off the scent. “You behave the rest of the day. Don’t touch anything, don’t move anything.”

I huffily led to her back to a flagged area no one else was working on and we spent the rest of her last day in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia in silence, my neck aching with the effort of not looking in Carlos’s direction.

I don’t know enough about my family’s first few months back in California to say anything except that they must have been odd. After the field study, I stayed with my friend on the Cape, as planned, and we returned to Brown together in the fall. The big difference my second year was that I kept up an avid correspondence with Beth, largely through texting. We had a couple of tacit rules: I never asked whether she possessed telekinesis and she never tried to start a conversation when I had class with Carlos. In fact, I turned my phone completely off during the one anthropology course I had been able to schedule in which he was the TA. In contrast, in my other classes, I missed almost everything for the sake of reading my sister’s text shorthand about how bored she was in school and how lame our town was.

I hadn’t done anything to compromise Carlos all semester, aside from sitting as close to him as I could, taking routes across campus that would coincide with his, and utterly ignoring all the other males of the species on the planet. It was the last class before reading period, marking the anniversary of the first time I’d really noticed him, and everyone else had already left the classroom. I was still gathering my books and turning my phone back on, in case Beth had some interesting observation about Christmas preparations in California, where I was finally headed for winter break. Carlos came charging back into the room, but paused when he saw me.

“Oh, hi, Emily.” His voice made the hairs on my nape stand up. “I think I left my . . .”

He stopped, spotting the flash drive he sought on the desk where he’d been sitting as he gave us his last instructions for the final exam, just beyond my seat. Without thinking, I placed myself in his path as he reached for the item, so that his arm brushed up against mine through both of our sweaters and his wool coat. I’m embarrassed to think of the instant reactions it caused all over my body.

It was the most sensual moment of my life.

I exhaled deeply and the room did a funny twirl as he said, “Have a good winter break.”

“Mm hmm. You too,” I managed.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from Beth. Through a fog, I texted her back that I couldn’t carry on these conversations anymore, as reading period had started and I needed to concentrate on finals.

I made it up to her during winter break, though. I’d passed all my classes and made sure I was in Carlos’s only course for the spring—Issues in Prehistory—so I opened gifts and went caroling with Beth and took her to the mall whenever she wanted. And had endless discussions with her concerning how lame our town was and how much more interesting it was in Providence.

As before, she didn’t mention Carlos—thank God, because I’m sure my blushing would have led her to the conclusion that we’d actually done something—and I didn’t ask about her possible otherworldly powers. Beth’s room had been liberated of its antiseptic plastic boundaries and the décor had taken on a distinct style that reflected her own interests instead of mine. I was happy to learn about popular music download sites and architects who took their inspiration from M. C. Escher.