Crosstalk (17 page)

Nothing. Three o'clock and then four came and went with no sign of Trent in her head and no texts from him. Surely he wasn't still in his meet—

Her phone rang.

It was Mary Clare again, saying, “Well? Did you talk to Maeve? What did you find out?”

“That she's fine. I can't talk to you right—”

“Did she at least tell you why she's locked herself in her room?”

“Yes, she said she had a ton of homework to do, and she locked the door so she wouldn't have any distractions,” Briddey said, willing Mary Clare to get the hint.

She didn't. “Oh, dear, I knew it! She can't keep up with her assignments. I read the other day that schools assign far too much homework, and it's causing anxiety attacks and depression—”

“Goodbye, Mary Cla—”

“No, wait. When are you taking her to lunch?”

“We didn't set a date.”

“You can take her on Saturday.”

“No, that won't work—” Briddey began, but Mary Clare wasn't listening.

“Her Irish dancing lessons are over at eleven,” she was saying. “You can pick her up at eleven thirty. Kathleen's here. She wants to talk to you,” and put her on before Briddey could hang up.

“I've been trying to reach you all afternoon,” Kathleen said. “I think there's something wrong with your phone. You said you needed me to do you a favor?”

Briddey'd forgotten all about that. “No. I thought I did, but I didn't.”

“Oh,” Kathleen said. “You sounded sort of desperate, and I thought maybe you'd come to your senses and decided not to have the EED, and Trent got mad and dumped you like Chad dumped me, and you needed a ride.”

“No,” Briddey said.

“Oh. What was the favor?”

“Nothing. It doesn't matter. Have you decided how you're going to keep from going out with Sean O'Reilly?”

“No. That's why I was hoping you'd broken up with Trent, so you could go out with him instead.”

“I'm not breaking up with Trent.”
Though if we don't connect—or if he finds out about C.B.—he may break up with me.

“Aunt Oona won't take no for an answer,” Kathleen was saying. “You know how she is. I'm going to have to come up with a boyfriend fast. I've been looking at dating sites—you know, Match.com and OKCupid. There's one called Flame. What do you think about that?”

“I think it sounds perfect if you're Joan of Arc.”

“Or there's one called RolltheDice. Their philosophy is that all those profiles and compatibility algorithms don't work, that your chances of falling in love aren't any better than if you'd pulled a name out of a hat. Which is true. I mean, remember Ken, the guy I met on eHarmony? We had
tons
in common, and we still broke up.”

“So if they don't do profiles, how do they match people?”

“They don't. They just randomly assign you to some guy. What do you think?”

I think it's the worst idea I've ever heard,
Briddey thought, and told her so.

“Really? Why? I thought it sounded like fun.”

It's not. Trust me,
Briddey thought, and said, “What if you get stuck with someone who's a pain in the neck?”
Who keeps telling you you could have connected with somebody worse.
“Or what if Sean O'Reilly signs up?”

“Oh, gosh, I hadn't thought of that. Maybe I'd better go with Tinder instead. Or Hit'n'Ms.”

There was no way Briddey was going to ask what that was, but it didn't matter. Kathleen launched into a description anyway. “Listen, I need to go,” Briddey said. “Trent—”

“No, wait, Aunt Oona just got here. She wants to talk to you.”

Of course she does,
Briddey thought. “Hello, Aunt Oona.”

“Are you all right, childeen? It's worryin' I've been all day. I had a premonition something dreadful had happened to you.”

It has,
Briddey thought.
But not the sort of thing you're thinking of.
“Nothing's happened, Aunt Oona. I'm fine.”

“You're not still thinking of having that VED thing done, are you? Peggy Boylan—you remember her from the Daughters of Ireland, don't you?—well, she says her neighbor's daughter was after having one and lost all her hearing. Deaf as a post, she is now.”

Lucky her,
Briddey thought. “Aunt Oona, I have to go,” she said. “Trent's here.” And hung up. She checked the time—oh, Lord, it was already four forty-five—turned her phone off, and sat down at the kitchen table. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands before her on the table, and began calling:
Trent? Can you hear me? It's Briddey. Come in, Trent.

She kept it up for the next hour, sending, listening, sending again, but nothing happened, even though it was now well past twenty-four hours since they'd come out of the anesthetic. She was surprised Trent hadn't called to say that.

Your phone's been off,
she reminded herself, and when she checked for messages, the only one was from Maeve, wailing, “What did you say to Mom? She's talking about getting me a TUTOR!”—which meant Trent hadn't received any of her transmissions. Or that he was still in his meeting with no way to get a message to her, though surely if he'd felt anything, he'd have found some way to let her know, secure meeting or not.

His secretary phoned at six thirty to say he was still in his meeting and that was why he hadn't returned her call.

“Do you have any idea when it'll be over?” Briddey asked.

“No, but they just had dinner sent in, so I'm assuming it will go to at least eight.”

Good,
Briddey thought.
That gives me more time,
and went back to sending, but she didn't hear
or
sense Trent, even though she sat there for the next two hours, clasping her hands so hard her knuckles were white.

She didn't hear C.B. either. And now that she thought about it, she hadn't heard him since he'd made that comment about there being less traffic at his apartment, and that had been—what, six hours ago? She couldn't imagine he'd been “researching” all that time. So either she
had
erased the pathway, or the swelling causing the crosstalk had finally gone down—or both.

Encouraged, she began sending to Trent again, but nothing happened.
Maybe I'm going about it wrong
, she thought after an hour, and wished there was someone she could ask. Not Dr. Verrick, obviously, and the only person she knew who'd had an EED was Rahul Deshnev's assistant. If she asked her, it would be all over Commspan by tomorrow. She'd have to see what she could find on the internet.

She typed in, “EED failure to connect,” but all that brought up was the
Match Made in Heaven
breakup and two more failed-connection murders.

Very helpful,
Briddey thought, and tried “EED connection,” and when that didn't work, “EED connection blogs.”

That produced a number of entries, but none of the bloggers had had any trouble connecting, or any idea of how they'd done it. “It just happened,” one of them said, and another: “I was kind of nervous about it, but it was easy. All of a sudden I felt Jack's love enveloping me, like he'd put his arms around me, and I felt so safe.”

All of them reported it happening “quicker than I'd expected,” and in none of the blogs was there any mention of talking. Briddey typed in “EED telepathy.”

“Did you mean ‘OED telepathy'?” the computer asked, and brought up the
Oxford English Dictionary
definition of telepathy: “The communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.”

Independent of sense is right,
Briddey thought. “No, I didn't mean OED,” she said, and retyped “EED telepathy” and then “telepathy.”

C.B. was right: There was a lot of junk on the internet. Briddey found the “Lyzandra of Sedona” ad that Kathleen had sent her, which described Lyzandra's “psychic spirit gift” and promised she could open your chakras, change your understanding of the nature of communication, and connect you to the universe.

She also found a number of similar ads and the “hearing voices” study C.B. had talked about. He'd said all the participants had been diagnosed as having schizophrenia. That wasn't true. The two that hadn't been labeled schizophrenic had been diagnosed with acute manic-depressive psychosis.

And C.B. hadn't been exaggerating as far as the “emotional bonding” component went. She couldn't find a single instance of telepathic communication where someone had connected with a stranger, let alone a person they couldn't abide. Every single account involved families, friends, sweethearts, fiancés.

So why can't I connect to Trent?
she wondered, and went back to the blogs to look for clues. And after reading several more delirious accounts of improved romantic relationships and improved sex lives, she finally found something helpful: “My friend Adanna and her boyfriend connected right away, but we didn't, and I was scared it meant Paul didn't love me, but the doctor said the problem was that I wasn't concentrating enough. He said I needed to focus on Paul and not think about
anything
else, and once I did that, we connected right away.”

“Not think about anything else,” Briddey murmured, remembering all the distractions she'd had today: C.B. and the CT scan and Kathleen's online dating and money laundering and psychics and U-boats and zombies. No wonder she hadn't connected with Trent.

She tried again, concentrating on him and only him, determinedly shutting every other thought out, but she still didn't feel anything—except for a growing sense of dread as the evening wore on. Trent's meeting had to be long over by now. What if the reason he hadn't called was that he'd concluded their failure to connect meant she didn't love him?

When he finally phoned at eleven she was so relieved she could hardly speak. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “My meeting
just
got out, and I had no way to communicate with you because Management wouldn't allow—”

“I know,” Briddey said. “Your secretary phoned when she realized you were going to have to work late.”

“She did? Good. Then you didn't have to spend the whole evening wondering why I hadn't gotten in touch with you,” he said. “I've been absolutely frantic, worrying about leaving you at the hospital.”

Oh, no. Now he's going to ask me how I got home.

But he didn't. He said, “What did the tests show?”

“Nothing. All the results were normal. And just because we haven't connected yet, it doesn't mean—”

“So you haven't felt anything either?”

“No.”

“Damn. I was hoping…Dr. Verrick said the reception might be one-way at first, and I thought that might be what was happening, that you were receiving but I wasn't. But if you haven't been receiving either…We should have connected eight hours ago. We need to call Dr. Verrick.”

No!
“Twenty-four hours wasn't the deadline for connecting,” she said. “It was the soonest we could connect, but it can take a lot longer. When did you come out of the anesthesia?”

“I don't know. Mid-afternoon?”

“Then it's no wonder we haven't felt anything yet. The average for connecting is forty-eight hours, and my nurse said it sometimes takes even longer.”

“How
much
longer?”

She debated how long she could get away with. “Seventy-two hours.”

“Seventy-two
hours
? That's three days! I can't wait—” He must have realized how impatient that sounded, because he said, “I'm sorry, I just want to be connected to you so much. And Dr. Verrick said our scores on the tests were really high. We should've connected sooner than the average.”

“Not necessarily. My nurse said there were all kinds of variables—how long it takes the wound to heal and the brain to develop the neural pathway, how focused both people are—”

“Focused,” he said, seizing on the word. “That's the problem. With the meeting and worrying about you, I haven't been able to focus. I'll come over—”

No,
Briddey thought. Keeping him from suspecting anything was hard enough over the phone. There was no way she'd be able to manage with him actually here. They wouldn't
need
to be connected for Trent to sense her fear and anxiety. “I don't think that's a good idea,” she said. “The nurse told me Dr. Verrick said we'd both need to get lots of rest the first couple of days after the surgery, that it would help us heal faster.”

“What'll make me heal faster is seeing you. I want to hold you, to be with—”

No!
If by some chance C.B.
wasn't
gone, that would be disastrous. “No, Dr. Verrick said no sex till after we're connected.”

“You're kidding! If we connect physically, it's bound to make us connect faster mentally.”

“It doesn't work like that. Dr. Verrick told me couples connect faster when they're separated, that being together is a distraction. He said when couples are in the same room, they revert to talking and physical contact as their means of communication, and their neural pathways don't develop. Whereas when they're separated, if they want to communicate, they're forced to connect, and it happens more quickly.”
Please, please buy that,
she added silently.

“I suppose that makes sense,” Trent said. “And connecting's the top priority. If keeping apart helps speed things up…all right, I won't come over tonight.”

Thank heavens.

“I'll come over in the morning, and we can have breakfast together before work. And speaking of work, did you tell Charla we were having the EED done yesterday?”