Solstice - Of The Heart (18 page)

“I still don’t see Aaron as
dangerous.”

“You don’t. I do. So did
grandpa.”

“Why? What else did he
say?”

“He said Bernard was teaching the
young ones how to exploit their ability by harnessing the power to
get the most use out of it. Grandpa was concerned as to where it
would end. He said Bernard was on a power trip, that he was
becoming a madman whose thirst couldn’t be quenched.

I walked home dazed and confused. It’s
a short walk, a few steps across the street, but I didn’t make
it.

The blow came from behind. I spun
around. My head whacked the white-ice pavement. I slid down the
hill as though I were a human toboggan.

I heard voices. One was shrill,
calling my name. I recognized it as Dierdra’s voice. Then all went
silent.

And black.

13 DEAL

I woke up to the sound of snoring. It
was dark in the room. Rain pattered against the window.

My head hurt.

I reached up to silence the pain and
felt the bandage and the bump on my temple. A tube ran from my arm,
a bag of liquid hanging above. I was being fed something
intravenously. It made me sleepy, disoriented.

I drifted off.

I found myself high on a mountain.
Clouds drifted by. They were close. Very close. I reached out and
pulled one in. I squeezed it into a ball, the same way a child does
with cotton candy. I pushed, prodded, and punched until the cloud
became the size of a tennis ball. I did the same thing to another,
and another. I piled the balls up at my feet. When I had finished
the sky became blue, absent of clouds.

Out of the sky’s depth a flock of
Canadian geese, flying in V formation, came directly toward me. I
felt threatened, as though I knew they were on a mission to knock
me off the pinnacle I stood on. I threw cloud balls at them, but
there wasn’t any weight to the orbs. They simply floated out and
away from the string of geese. They didn’t strike the birds at
all.

One more cloud ball remained. I waited
and waited until the lead goose was but a few feet from me. Then I
threw the cloud ball. I aimed for its eye.

Again the orb flew listlessly through
the air. The geese broke from formation and surrounded the cloud
ball. They pecked at it, pulling the ball apart. It returned to its
original self—a big billowy cloud.

I felt a presence beside me. Far off I
saw lightning. Not the kind you see as a bolt during a
thunderstorm, but one of rainbow color. It stretched from horizon
to horizon. I smelled the scorched air and turned.

Aaron stood before me, more noble and
handsome than I had ever seen him. I didn’t think that was
possible, but the thin azure colored air with the burst of rainbow
lightning flickering behind him, all contributed to his radiance.
Down below, his golden locks rarely seemed to move. Here they did,
waving gently from a breeze. His blue eyes told of a sense of
content and happiness. They spoke love, truth, and trust, all of
which I accepted at face value.

He reached out a hand and, when I
returned my hand in kind, he laced his fingers through my fingers.
We were locked as one, never to be separated, so I
thought.

We walked across the mountain top to a
high point.

The geese, their beaks entwined in the
edging of the cloud, drove it up close to the mountain as one would
a car to the curb.

We stepped across and onto the
cloud.

The geese flapped their wings
faster.

We moved forward. As we jetted onward,
the billowy cloud transformed into a wave-cloud. It resembled the
design on my beanie.

I didn’t know where we were going and
I didn’t care. As long as Aaron held my hand, I felt
safe.

I looked down.

We were high, maybe a couple of miles
above the ground. Everything below us looked small, a miniature
form of the earth with ants crawling over the surface.

In the distance I saw Mount Shasta.
Snow covered her from summit to flank. Shastina, Shasta’s sister,
was covered in white as well.

The geese pulled our cloud to the side
of the mountain. They stopped.

We stepped off.

The snow pack was made of deep powder,
in the tens of feet, but we didn’t sink. We walked on top of it. I
heard the cold crunch of snow beneath our feet.

At once I knew we should be freezing
to death. I wore a nightgown, yet I didn’t feel chilled. I didn’t
feel anything except an inner burning of love. This, I felt, kept
my bare feet from being frostbitten. As long as I loved, and was
loved, I would not succumb to the elements.

This was my belief.

In the distance I heard a bell. I saw
Aaron smile. He pointed with his free hand and I saw him say,
“come”, for I could not hear his words over the bang of the
bell.

We traveled around the mountain toward
the sound of the signal. It grew clearer, more pronounced, more
musical than the thong-thong-thong we’d been hearing. Suddenly we
were there, at the golden arch, the bell hanging at its apex. We
slipped in through a crack of the rock, unseen even as I slid
through.

I heard a murmur, like the singing of
bugs on a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota. Down the passageway
I saw light.

Aaron tightened his grip on my hand.
He led me down the corridor.

The cavity opened large into an
expanding chamber. I became miniature. Tiny in comparison to the
structure that held me, diminutive next to the contents it
held.

The murmur came from humans, ten feet
tall, dressed in robes and sandals, blonde curly hair down to their
shoulders, eyes of blue. They wore ornaments of gold and silver
around their long slender necks. They spoke, but not with their
mouths. The mutter came from the undulating bumps on their
foreheads.

I saw little people too, midgets if
you will. They hid in the shadows, disappearing from here to there,
as though they had the power to become invisible at will. I heard
no sound coming from them.

Walls of gold rose high and ever
higher above me until all I could see of their tops was darkness. I
was too tiny, too far away to see the ceiling. There were roads
paved with jewels, houses built out of silver and copper. Trees,
flowers, and crop plants grew in abundance, fed by light and mist
that seemed to have no source, but just was. Animals roamed at
will, at peace with each other and their care takers.

From nearby I smelled a sweet aroma.
The smell battered my senses. It was a potent drug, numbing my
ability to resist. I struggled against Aaron’s grip.

Aaron held strong. He pulled me along,
away from the smell.

I dug my heels in, cast hateful eyes
on him, and wrenched my hand away.

As soon as our hands parted, I could
no longer walk. My feet and ankles sank into the floor of rock.
They became embedded. I couldn’t move, one way or the other. The
murmur of the ten-footers grew louder, the spotting of the midgets,
quicker. I looked into Aaron’s eyes. They showed sorrow, dismay,
and the effects of having been betrayed.

I slipped into the rock floor as
though it were a bed of quicksand. I called out, crying Aaron’s
name. I asked for forgiveness for my unfaithfulness.

Aaron’s eyes softened. His face
relaxed. He reached out his hand.

I could not raise my hand. I sank
beneath the surface. My memory of Aaron closed like a book that has
been read and shelved. He disappeared from my
consciousness.

And then I awoke.

I was dripping in sweat.

Dierdra placed her hand on my
forehead. She turned away. I heard her yelling for a nurse to come.
One arrived.

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s soaked.”

The nurse checked the monitor.
“Nothing abnormal,” she said. She fiddled with the IV, checking to
make sure it hadn’t become detached. “Probably sweating out the
hypertonic saline.”

“Does she still need it?”

The nurse gave Dierdra a variation of
the text book description for use and purpose of the
liquid.

“We use saline for short-term
cardiovascular stabilization following trauma to prevent elevated
intracranial pressure. I think she is out of danger, so I’ll check
with the doctor.”

They were all big words, beyond my
comprehension at the moment. I spotted Cherrie in the background,
deep asleep in a chair, working her way through a rhythmic snore
pattern.

The nurse turned her attention to me.
“How are you doing, Sweetie?”

I tried to pull myself up, to sit
up.

The nurse—her name tag said,
KM—reached under my arms and helped me slide into
position.

“That your name?” I said.
“KM?”

“Stands for Katherine-Margaret,” KM
said. “I just don’t want to put folks out, so KM works. Do you need
to visit the bathroom?”

I hadn’t thought about it until this
moment, but yes! I did.

KM helped me slide out of bed. Dierdra
grabbed my other arm.

“Hi Mom.”

“Hi baby. How’re you
feeling?”

“Bloated. Light headed.”

They helped me to the bathroom. KM
brought the IV pole along.

“I’m going to talk to the doctor about
getting you unplugged,” she said.

I sat on the toilet and peed for what
seemed a very long time. KM and Dierdra stood idly by chatting
between themselves about my condition.

I looked a lot better. I probably
could go home today.

“What day is it?” I asked.

Dierdra leaned in. “It’s Thursday,
baby.”

I remembered. I was crossing the
street after talking with Cherrie. Something hit me from behind.
Wednesday afternoon. I hadn’t been out long.

I finished my task and they helped me
back to bed.

“What happened? What hit
me?”

“A freaking snowboard.” Cherrie had
awakened. She rubbed her eyes, stretched, and yawned. “You’re lucky
to be alive. If you didn’t recover I was going to give Jason one of
these.” She held up a fist.

“Jason did this?” I pointed to my head
as if the gesture was needed.

“No,” Dierdra said. “It was another
boy.”

“But Jason was with him,” Cherrie
offered. “He should have known better than to snowboard down the
street.”

“They do it all the time,” Km said.
“They do it on our street too. I’ve talked to the police, but they
say they can only do something if someone gets hurt and presses
charges. Something for you to think about, young lady.”

I didn’t think I wanted to press
charges. I didn’t know how Mom was going to pay the hospital bill.
Maybe the boy’s parents could help with the bills, but press
charges? No, I didn’t want to go there.

“I don’t want to press charges,” I
said. “They were just having fun.”

“At your expense,” Cherrie
said.

KM tucked the covers around my neck.
“Don’t get chilled, Sweetie. I’ve got to go and tend to my other
patients. I’ll be back in a bit to check on you.”

Dierdra sat down in a chair beside my
bed.

She looked exhausted, emotionally
drained. If I had died I wondered if she would have survived the
loss of another loved one. I didn’t think so.

“Mom,” I said. “Go home. Get some
rest. I’m okay.”

She reluctantly got up. She leaned
down and kissed me on the forehead. Tears welled up her eyes. “I
don’t know what I would have done...”

She didn’t dare finish the sentence. I
knew it was too painful a thought for her.

“I love you, Mom.”

She kissed my forehead again. She let
out a huge breath. I saw the tension fade from her face.

“I love you so much,
Julissa.”

“I know, Mom.”

Cherrie guided Dierdra to the door.
Dierdra turned for one last look before disappearing down the
corridor.

Cherrie pulled up a chair.

“You don’t have to stay,” I
said.

“And what? Ruin a perfectly good
excuse for not going to school? Now I know you were hit in the head
something fierce.”

I touched my bandage and felt the
bump. “Pretty traumatic, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re the talk of the
town.”

“Why?”

“Mayor is calling for a city ordinance
to ban snow boards from the streets.”

“That was fast.”

“It’s been on the agenda for a while.
You’re little bump on the head just brought it to the front
burner.”

“Is the kid going to get in trouble,
the boy who hit me?”

“Maybe from his parents, but since
there isn’t a law that says you can’t ride snowboards on city
streets there’s not much the cops can do.”

“Do you know the boy?”