Be in the Real (28 page)

“Ready?”
 

Kaila shuttled back. Where normally she would have been aggravated by an interruption when Trillian was working in earnest, this was not the time for anything but compliance. She had to stop a future event from happening; Pauline couldn’t die.
 

Derrick stood in front of Kaila, staring down at her expectantly.
 

She snapped the laptop shut. Trillian was more than a little put out that she had been shoved back into her box mid-sentence and thought. Kaila ignored her.
 

 
When she stood, Kaila noticed that Derrick hadn’t changed his clothes, but his hair was damp and tousled. He no longer smelled of bad breath and sleep, and instead was scented by mint toothpaste and something light and flowery.

“You smell like a girl,” Kaila said, leaning in closer, inhaling him.

“It was all there was in the bathroom, I mean nobody is stupid enough to leave good shit in a public space…I don’t smell that bad do I?”
 

He chuckled then cocked an eyebrow her way. The act surprised Kaila. This playful Derrick was one more side of him that she had not seen before.

“You smell like a girl,” she repeated.
 

Kaila glanced down at her watch. It was now 8:12 o’clock. It was odd for her to have checked the time so frequently, but since it was a monumental day she felt that she needed to keep time in a precise fashion, like the others did.

“Don’t say it, I know, we need to see Pauline. Let’s go.”

A bird took flight in Kaila’s chest and they were on their way.

CHAPTER 37

From what Derrick had said, Pauline’s house was about three hours away from where they had been staying. Since she lived on the outskirts of the city, no taxis went that way, so Derrick had arranged to borrow his girlfriend’s car. Kaila hated the idea of getting inside something that belonged to someone who she now termed her enemy. Even though there was no basis for her instant hatred of the unseen girlfriend, it was still there, simmering beneath her skin ready to boil over at the slightest provocation.

The car was electric blue and sporty. Kaila had never cared much for cars and had only been inside a handful of them, so she wasn’t impressed. She expected that Darla from Wildwind, would have been quite thrilled with it though. Unlike the beat up cab that Derrick and Kaila had rode, this car smelled new, like leather and warm plastic with an undercurrent of something sweet like the cherry lollipops that Janelle had smuggled inside Wildwind on occasion.
 

It wasn’t like candy and sweets weren’t permitted in Wildwind, only that the staff preferred that patients steer clear of things that might contain too much food colorings or sugar. That food color detail never seemed to carry over to all the colored pills that they fed Kaila and all the others every day.

 
Being out and away from her medications made her wonder why she took them at all, because most times she felt fuzzy brained and out of focus, not able to enjoy all that life had to offer.

Kaila pushed back into the plush passenger side seat. She had never sat in the front seat of a car before. She was stunned by all that she saw as they zipped down the road and away from the house. The wall to wall buildings, people, and filled spaces of the city, soon gave way to open expanses of fields that were leaf green and others golden yellow. Houses spread out and Kaila even noticed a few farms with milk white cows dotted with chestnut, and goats in varying shades of brown, black and plain white, grazing in the fields.
 

Unlike the day before, the sky was pure blue with no hints of the clouds that had tangled together before and blotted out the sun. Kaila had always been impressed by the shifting seasons, but even more so the days when the weather was unpredictable, where rain spilled at the same time as the sun shone.
 

“Why does Franco look like Einstein?” Kaila asked.
 

They had mostly driven in silence since Kaila had been mesmerized by all the new sights. Now that the question had sprung into her mind, she needed an answer.

Derrick ran a hand through his hair. The strands stood on end then promptly fell back into place.

“It’s complicated,” he said as if that was answer enough; it wasn’t.

“Nothing is complicated unless you make it so,” Kaila said, quoting one of Trillian’s sayings.

“Well this is.” He paused. “The abbreviated version is that he’s got a bit of this little man complex going, and by adopting Einstein’s look he feels bigger. I think it works for him…I kind of bought into the whole persona until…”
 

Derrick abruptly stopped speaking. His hands worked the smooth leather of the steering wheel. Before Kaila could ask another question she had a flash of Franco, but it was in a different place, a different time and she’d had things attached to her. It had scared her because she knew the spiders were coming soon and…

Before Kaila could get a reading on what she was seeing, Trillian shut the curtain, effectively obscuring what Kaila assumed was a memory.

“What did he do to me?” Kaila asked.

“Who?” Derrick asked.
 

His gaze remained trained on the road ahead. Kaila noticed however that his knuckles went white from gripping the steering wheel too tightly.

“Franco.”

“He didn’t do anything to you.”
 

Derrick jerked his head toward Kaila. There was aggression in his gaze but also something else, regret.
 

“If you want to see Pauline you’ll give the questions a rest, otherwise I’m turning this fucking car around and we’re going straight to Wildwind. ”

Kaila didn’t usually react to threats, but for some reason Derrick’s words felt like a slap across the face. They also struck cold fear in her because she was certain by the set of his jaw that he would go good on his promise. Her first instinct was to rear on him, hit him, make him feel the terror and anxiety that she felt. For once she didn’t act on her initial desires. It was just long enough for her to catch sight of a storm in the distance, just over the horizon. The sun still beat down on their car but far ahead the clouds were like black sheets of cotton batten, rolling toward them. Lightning, white and jagged skewered the land below. Kaila had witnessed storms before through the glass at Wildwind, but never until right then had she had the opportunity to drive into the melee. Her excitement grew by degrees as they approached the raging storm.

 
Kaila pressed the automatic button that wound down the window. The wind tossed her hair around until her curls snapped against her cheeks and eyes, and she was immersed in the feel of it, the wild, untamed and powerful all in one. Not long after, they were beneath a canopy of thick clouds. They had passed over a line drawn by nature, where the boundaries of the thunderstorm had been painted with an invisible hand.
 

Huge drops of rain hit her face, hard enough to sting and the wind picked up. Even more cracks and booms resonated, exploding around her, blotting out all other sound. She had always wondered what a tornado would look like up close, and how powerful it would feel. Often times she had imagined being sucked into the vortex of it. In her thoughts this act wouldn’t have hurt her, and would merely have allowed her to feel the force of it. Later, after she had thoroughly discovered all the secrets it contained, she would have been deposited back on the ground unscathed. Kaila knew that it was only a fantasy but chose to hold it anyway. There were so many things that she didn’t want to be true, but were true all anyway, so why not wish for something else.
 

Kaila fell into her imagination, where she was spinning around in a tornado, the world shifting around her, where everything twirled and she was floating on a bed of air; gravity was bypassed and all the rules of nature were broken…

“Close the window you’re getting the inside of the car soaked.”
 

Derrick’s voice brought her back to the fact that he was telling the truth, her shirt was drenched, her hair stuck to her face in wet strands. His demand was rapidly forgotten when Kaila locked on the windshield wipers, fighting to keep up the pace with the pelting rain. To Kaila it felt as if they were driving underneath a waterfall, where water poured down the glass in torrents.
 

The more intense the storm became the more Kaila envisioned and dreamed. Now she was a storm chaser. She had once seen a television show about storm chasers where the people documented their encounters with all sorts of crazy weather. They had always managed to speak while being pummeled by forces that were beyond human comprehension, forces that had to be felt to be known.

“I’m in the real,” she shrieked with absolute glee.
 

She felt the press of the window sliding up against her forearms. Kaila pushed back, attempting to stop its progress, but it was to no avail. When there was only a fingers width of space left before it closed entirely, she was forced to retreat. Her subsequent attempts at bringing the window down again were met with nothing at all. The mechanism that powered the windows had obviously been broken.

“It’s broken,” Kaila hollered. Her voice was barely audible over the sound of the squeaking wipers and the booms that seemed to have no pauses between them.

“I locked it, you can’t have the window wide open in the middle of a storm.”

Derrick was tense, like an elastic that had been stretched to the limit. Kaila could feel his fear as if it were a tangible item. Wanting to take his anxiety away, she reached for his forearm, resting her fingers against his flesh.
 

Derrick was so focused on driving that he hadn’t seemed to notice that she was touching him, but Kaila noticed. His skin was warmer than her hand and was covered in a thin film of sweat. The fine hairs on his flesh felt like silk to the touch. Kaila wondered if what she was experiencing was what it felt like to comfort someone.
 

Her hand stayed in place, unmoving; no spiders came. She felt his muscles move beneath his skin as he steered and jerked the wheel, maneuvering against a wind that seemed to shift the car around as though it were a toy.
 

Even when the rain diminished and the sun returned, leaving little but the wet to say that it had ever existed, Kaila’s hand remained firmly in place. Only when Derrick tugged away to grab his sunglasses from the console did the contact break.
 

“Gotta love those flash summer storms,” he said, breaking the quiet that had enveloped them since they had passed through the eye of the storm. Kaila gazed at him. His sunglasses were silver-framed and dark enough that she couldn’t see his eyes beneath. With the glasses in place there was a sense of mystery about him that transformed him back into a man. Kaila couldn’t pull her eyes away from him. She wanted to kiss him again, have his lips press against hers, lay her head against his bare chest, run her fingers across the infinity symbol that ran the length of his back.
 

Kaila wanted so much to connect with Derrick, to take the place of his girlfriend, to do things that lovers did together. She had seen movies about love, read stories about it too, and had heard Pauline talk about what it felt like, but she had never truly understood it. Right then she understood something she hadn’t before; what love meant to her.

 
Kaila knew that love wasn’t a universal concept, but more of an individual understanding. It wasn’t a whirlwind of flowers and roses, and everything big and bold either. Love for Kaila was knowing that someone was there to tell you everything was okay when no one else was, love was about accepting you for who you were, and not expecting any more than you could give. It was about trust, and knowing that someone was imperfect, yet not caring about their flaws. It was in a touch, an unspoken understanding. It was contained in a fight and the apology that came after. In truth, love was about being human and alive. In that moment Kaila knew that she had loved Pauline for a long time and would keep on loving her despite them being apart, and also that Pauline loved her too.

“It is in the silence between the notes that the music is found,” Kaila murmured.
 

Tears trickled down her cheeks as it all became real. And right then she realized that once you knew you were loved, nothing else mattered and that love was something Kaila had, but Trillian didn’t.

CHAPTER 38

Kaila was lost for the rest of the drive; her heart filled to overflowing with all she had discovered. When more houses sprouted upon the sprawling stretches of land, she instinctively knew that they were getting close. She grabbed a donut from the box that Derrick had picked up just before they had left town. Kaila bit into the powdered sugar exterior, reaching the gooey cherry jelly that was found inside within seconds. She released a sound of delight. It was loud enough for Derrick to glance briefly her way before he brought his focus back to the road ahead. He grinned but said nothing.
 

Kaila chewed on the donut. She savored every flavor and subtlety, just as she had when she had eaten her first donut from the pink box. That one had been a Boston cream, heavy with pale yellow custard and topped in a thick glaze of milk chocolate. She had actually thought that the first donut was the best she had ever had, but after a few bites of the powdered donut she realized that she had been mistaken. They weren’t the first donuts she had ever had, but what went for the sweet confection at Wildwind was far removed from the treasures that she had discovered within the box. Wildwind donuts had been simple, fried dough that was sugared or left plain. The only variation being that sometimes the sugar had cinnamon added to it.

Kaila was still licking the last remnants of powdered sugar from her fingertips when Derrick took an off ramp that led to what looked to be a small town. He tapped the portable GPS stuck to the windshield, pressing in another address, presumably Pauline’s.