For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (19 page)

8

The phone rang.

The phone rang several times a day. It was, as you would expect, a non-event.

So of course I ran and picked it up. “Hello, Black residence,” I said. Yes, I really said that. My parents taught me manners, okay?

There was a brief silence, enough so that I felt something. I can’t say it was fear. Annoyance? Anticipation? My eyes wrinkled at the corners, as if squinting and listening were connected.

Finally, a voice spoke. “It is good to hear your voice again, John, my friend.”

Branco.

I looked around the living room. I was along, thank God. “How do you know my phone number?” I whispered fiercely.

“Please, John. You have no doubt seen me on your television, just a few months ago. I know many things. I can
do
many things. You did see me, didn’t you? John?”

I realized I wasn’t breathing, and sucked in a breath. “Yeah, of course, I saw you,
Branco
. I saw what you did.”

Laughter. That light, self-amused chuckle he often made. “Ah, my name. I am so pleased you remember it. Though perhaps it is appropriate for you to forget that name now. You see, Branco is no more. Now there is only Sol.”

“Yeah, well, based on what I’ve seen, I’m not sure I like this
Sol
person too much.” My grip on the phone was tight.

“I understand, John. You may not be ready. Yet. But I wanted you to know something.
I think you are important
. I know that not many people think that.”

“And why would I care what
you
think about me?”

“If you do or you do not care, either way is fine with me, John. But you
are
. And so, of course, I am
paying attention
to you.” Sol stopped, taking one long, easy breath. “I know where you are.”

My eyes grew wide, and my heart rate kicked up several notches. If he knew where I was, he knew where my mom was. He knew where Holly was.

“What the hell do want with me? I’m just a kid!” I shouted, then remembered where I was, at home. I looked around, but still no one was there.

On a set of shelves near the phone sat some of my father’s things, stuff my mom couldn’t bear to move. Some knick-knacks from past travels, a carved whale, a miniature wooden sailboat. On the top sat a marble chessboard, with rows of ebony figures on one side mirrored by ivory ones on the other. Dust filled the carved crevices and left a thin coat across the surface of the board. As I spun to glance around the room, I bumped the shelf and some of the chess pieces toppled. An ebony pawn fell over and threatened to roll off the board, so I snatched it up with one hand.

“True, true, you are quite young. But then again, so is Bobby.”

Bobby?
Although I knew in my heart that Bobby must have been with Sol, hearing his name spoken gave it new weight. “Bobby is a friend of mine,” I said. It was clear that I meant that partially as a threat.

Sol chuckled again. “So he is. So he is.” Then the laughter stopped. “But John. That’s what I am trying to tell you: I am your friend, too. Just come to me and see.”

So there it was, out in the open.
Join me.
Not an invitation so much as an ultimatum. With the terms implied…
I know where you are
.

“What do you want with Bobby?”

“Ah, John. I think the better question might be, what does Bobby want with me?”

I tilted my head down, chin to chest. Was it already too late? I had waited so long, the guilt of my inaction suddenly heavy.

There was a rustling sound on the other end of the line as the phone changed hands. “Johnny?” It was Bobby’s voice, all right.

“Bobby? Ah man, what the hell are you doing, Bobby?”

“Listen, I know you don’t understand. You never really wanted to…
push it
. But I do. And Sol, well, he knows how to help.” More rustling as Bobby apparently cupped his hand over the phone in an effort to be discreet. “Johnny, I know what he’s done, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to, I don’t know, get stronger. He
is
stronger. He’s shown me how to do things.
Amazing
things.”

“But Bobby —”

There was a dull thump as Sol came back on the line without a struggle. “Your friend is right, John. I am strong. You could learn a lot from me. Bobby certainly has. So I repeat: Come to me and see.”

This arrogant jerk. This murderous bastard.
I was angry at Sol for everything he’d done, from tricking me into a short-term friendship, to pulling Bobby away, to the killing he had done. But mostly, I was mad because here I was again, being bullied.

“I know where you are, too, you son of a bitch,” I said.

On the other end of the line, there was silence. Until finally, that deep chuckle came again, barely audible. “No, John, you know
approximately
where I am. That is because I am smart enough and powerful enough to conceal myself until I deem the time right. Bobby came to me because he felt the same call that you no doubt feel right now. But it was not until I revealed myself to him that he actually found me. Of course, I would like for you to join me, so I will make it easy for you. I am still in the capital city. Not so far from the governor’s mansion, in fact, although no one who sees me remembers much about that whole episode. I
encourage
them to forget. Do you know the capital, John?”

“No. I’ve never been there. And never will.”

“We’ll see about that, John. I think you will come. And when you do, find a park called General Tulloch Park in the center of town. In the middle of that park is a statue of the late General Tulloch himself, on horseback. Once you are there, I may reveal myself to you. Do you have a pen? I shall give you a phone number where we can talk once you’re near.” He rattled off a number, which I didn’t write down. “Or…”

Sol trailed off, and I was speechless. The game we were playing was cat and mouse, and I most definitely wasn’t the cat.

“Should you choose not to come, John, I could always come to you. I never did get to meet your mother and sister. Holly is your sister’s name, correct?”

Cat and mouse. I looked down at my hand, realizing that I was squeezing something hard in my fist. The pawn from my dad’s chess set, a set he and I had played on countless times. I realized that the game I was playing with Sol wasn’t cat and mouse, it was chess. I thought about Bobby, the school bully who used to terrorize me, and yet I had knocked him out. I smiled, but my expression held no joy.

If my dad taught me one thing about chess, it was this: Even a lowly pawn can take out the king in the right circumstances.

“You should be careful what you wish for, Sol. If I come to you, I may be more than you expect.” Sol was silent, so I pressed on. “And if you come for me and my family, I promise that I’ll destroy you, even if it kills me.” I hung up the phone without another word.

* * *

Putting down the phone was like taking the plug out of a giant balloon. I wilted and crumbled to the floor, shaking uncontrollably.

I wasn’t even 15. Sol was an adult. I had beaten up a friend once, another kid. Sol had killed who knows how many police and soldiers.

He was going to kill me. I had no doubt.

What the hell was I going to do? Go to him, like he wanted? Come on, that had to be a trap, right? But if I waited for him to come to me, what would that mean? Barricading the house, living like an outlaw holed up in some old Western? Both choices completely sucked.

Since the day of the car accident, I had lived in secrecy. Not even my mom knew about what I could do. It seemed that was all about to change.

Go and die?

Stay and die?

What were my options? Tell my mom? Maybe she could help. But how? Guns and tanks couldn’t hurt Sol. Mom could be a royal terror when she was mad, but she wasn’t a tank.

I sank against the wall, one fist slamming the floor. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be in this special club of extraordinary people whose president was apparently a psychopath.

I could run away. Go somewhere that no one else could find me. Then Holly and Mom would probably be safe. What would be the point in Sol hurting them?

But I could
feel
Sol. Somewhere in the distance. Maybe he could feel my presence, too.

Running away wouldn’t work.

I either had to tell my mom, or…

Oh, God. After what I’d done, what had happened to my dad, the thought turned my stomach. But I could.

I could push my Mom’s mind. I could make her drive me to Sol. Or just have her accept that there were perfectly valid reasons why I wasn’t around for a little while.

Who was I kidding? If I left to confront Sol, whether I told my mom outright or tricked her mind, I wasn’t coming back. Eventually she would know.

I had to tell Mom what I could do.

And what I had to do.

9

After making the momentous decision to reveal my supernatural abilities to my mother, I did what any 14-going-on-15-year-old boy would do on a school night. I ate dinner (spaghetti), watched TV (replaying shows I’d already seen), and went to bed.

When my alarm went off the next morning, I could hear there was trouble brewing already. Not life-threatening trouble, but the kind of everyday “oh crap, someone’s in a foul mood” trouble that every family probably deals with.

Mom was rushing around trying to get things done, get us all ready to go for the day, and for whatever reason, it wasn’t going smoothly.

By that time, Dad’s life-insurance money was coming in, but it wasn’t enough to make us rich. In fact, it wasn’t even enough to live off, so Mom found a job as the front-desk clerk in a dentist’s office downtown. From what I could tell, while the hours weren’t too long, the pay was just so-so. Without Dad around, mostly it meant that instead of just getting Holly and me ready for school, Mom had to maneuver all three of us out the door. Holly was picked up by a specially outfitted bus that took her to the elementary school each weekday. Being older and in middle school, I never saw the place, just heard about it from my parents. It didn’t sound like much more than free babysitting, but Holly didn’t fight going, so maybe she got something out of it. Because it was a special program, Holly got picked up first. That left Mom and me alone for a few minutes every morning.

It was time to talk, to spill the beans. “Mom, I—”

Mom, still huffing around, having a bad morning, walked toward me, past the shelves holding Dad’s old knick-knacks. She must have turned quickly or bumped it or something, just like I had when I was on the phone with Sol, because for a moment the whole thing teetered. Honestly, those shelves should have been moved to some less-trafficked place in the house long before, but now it was too late. The chessboard, which jutted out because it was a bit too wide to fit neatly on the top shelf, lost all its pieces as they tumbled to the floor below in a series of thud-clacks. One or two of them might’ve chipped in the process, but seconds later that was immaterial. The board itself slipped, fell heavily, and cracked into three jagged pieces on the floor. Mom froze.

The board was
Dad’s
. There was no way to replace it. I realized instantly from the look on Mom’s face that the chessboard was more than just a thing, a tchotchke. It
was
my father. It was part of him. And suddenly, Mom had to face that it was gone. She didn’t fall or even sit heavily; she drooped to the ground, hands covering her face, shoulders shaking.

I went to her and put my arms around her. “Mom, it’s okay. I can clean it up.”

She looked up, eyes red and wet, forcing a wry smile onto her face. “Thanks, John. It’s not that. It’s…”

“Because it was Dad’s,” I said, and she nodded. I didn’t have anything else to say, so we sat that way for a while.

Finally, Mom looked at her watch. “Oh, God. I’m going to be late. I’ll have to clean this up later.” She sighed, wiping the last tears from her eyes. “What were you going to tell me?”

“Huh?”

“You started to say something, just before I—” She nodded toward the mess.

What was I supposed to do? Drop it on her then?
Hey, yeah, Mom. I know that Dad is dead and things are very hard on you now, but I just wanted to let you know that I have superpowers and I’m going to need to go confront the psychopath you saw on TV causing death and destruction at the governor’s mansion. Cool?

I couldn’t.

But I had to help Bobby. I had to go.

So…

I
pushed
instead. Yes, I felt guilty. I still do.

Nudging her mind, I said, “Mom, I need to go to the capital. I’ll take a bus or something, and I’ll be back in a couple of days. This is all perfectly normal. Just tell people that I’m visiting Aunt Cindy. She’s a little sick, nothing serious, and I’m just helping her out around the house. You’d have gone, but you need to stay here for Holly. That’s what you’ll tell people. And don’t worry about me.
Okay?
”

With glassy eyes, Mom made a perfectly normal smile. “Sure, honey. Have fun. See you when you get back.” Five minutes later, she was driving off to work and I was left at home, alone.

* * *

It didn’t take long to see how Sol could get around the capital without being noticed. I’d ridden my bike to the small bus stop in town, not too far from our house, and locked it to a rack. The place wasn’t a bus
station
, just a stop; a covered bench. There was nowhere to buy tickets or snacks or anything like that. But I needed to get to the city and, at fourteen — superpowers or not — I had no idea how to drive. So I hopped on the first bus I saw idling at the stop. “Excuse me, sir, are you headed to the capital?” I asked the driver. He started to give me a strange look, like
What the hell is a kid doing trying to take a bus to the city by himself?
So I pushed his mind a little bit. While I was at it, I did the same to the other half-dozen or so people scattered throughout the bus.

“Nope. Bus for the capital is over there,” he said without another concern, pointing across the small parking lot to a green and white bus emblazoned with the words “ROAD STAR.” Through the large front windshield, I could see the driver, feet kicked up. Dark sunglasses covered his eyes, but I was pretty sure from his position that his eyes were closed.

“Thanks,” I said, stepping back down to the street. The door of the second bus was closed, so I knocked lightly on the glass. The driver stirred, looking at me over his glasses. Then he simply pointed. On the dash, a white placard read, “CAPITAL, 11:00 a.m.” I didn’t have a watch, but estimated it to be no later than nine o’clock. For a moment, I considered pushing my way in, getting the bus moving. Then, considering the many challenges already awaiting me, I realized that hijacking a bus might bring me all sorts of attention I didn’t want. So I gently nudged the driver’s mind to forget having seen me, and I waited.

* * *

Fifteen minutes before departure time, I remained on the covered bench, watching who — and how many — passengers boarded the capital bus. Thankfully, it was light. I didn’t know how hard it would be to push a busload of minds at once. Instead, I only had to deal with 11: the driver and 10 random travelers.

Pushing here and there, I made them all ignore my presence, especially the driver, who was collecting scraps of paper from each rider that I assumed were tickets. Another push and he overlooked the fact that I didn’t have one. I sat near the back, against a window in an empty row.

A few rows ahead was a fashionable young woman wearing a short black jacket over a long-sleeved striped shirt. She may have dressed well, but she was loud and obnoxious, flailing her hands while talking on her cellphone in a voice that I could only describe as grating. From what I could hear, she was headed to the city to meet up with friends and have a wild weekend. I pinched two fingers over the bridge of my nose, a gesture I’d seen my father make many times, only now really understanding it as I felt the beginnings of a headache coming on. I wanted her to shut up.

So, of course, I made it happen. In fact, worse (or better, depending on your point of view), I made her stand up, walk to me, and give me her phone. I realized that I needed it.

I nodded at her and gave a friendly smile, although of course it wasn’t necessary. Still, I thought it best for appearances. When she sat back down, I checked out her phone.

Not surprisingly, it was one of the latest model smartphones. I began to dial.

Somehow, from a memory I didn’t think I had, I remembered the number Sol had given me. After punching in the last digit, my finger hovered over the green CALL button for just a moment.

And the bus engine rumbled to life, a deep throbbing sound, all bass. The driver closed the door, and without another thought, he dropped the bus into gear and began to drive.

I pressed the button.

Within moments, there was a click, then the strange, open sound of a connected phone call, like listening to the wind on another planet. “Hello?” Sol said.

Good
, I thought
. At least he isn’t so powerful that he can tell it’s me
.

“Sol,” I said, and nothing more.

“Ah John. So good to hear from you. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Typical smug bastard.

I steeled myself for one final moment before speaking. “You got your wish. I’m coming for you.”

Sol drew in a long breath. At first I thought maybe he wouldn’t say a thing, but of course he did.

“Good, John. Very, very good.”