CHAPTER 7 — SYNCHRONOUS
Jane woke up with that last sentence echoing in her mind. The place in the memory that was now so clear had been beautiful indeed. She sat up on the sofa and recalled staring into Max’s eyes. They had been a distant, icy blue and she could see glints of sunlight in them. She had felt tremendous peace looking into them. There was only a distant, lingering trace of these feelings from the dream now as she readjusted to the surroundings of her present existence.
Her mother arrived from work shortly after with a surprise: Jack was with her. Jane stepped onto their front porch. The snow crunched beneath her feet as her mother yelled from the footpath, “Look who I found!”
He was walking towards them from up the street, having parked his car elsewhere. Jane smiled when she saw him, and he smiled back. Nora went to the back of her car to gather groceries. Jack approached and began to help.
“Do you want help?” Jane yelled out to him.
“No kid, I’ll get it. Just wait there for a second. I’ve got something for you,” he said, holding up his hand, proudly displaying a wrapped parcel.
Jane looked up and around into the night. Her teeth chattered as she inhaled the bitingly cold air, and she wrapped her cardigan around her more tightly. As Jack approached from behind the vehicle, she had the sudden, pre-emptive feeling that she should warn them both. Warn them about what? she wondered, gasping at the thought, taking in another gulp of the ice-cold air.
As her mother and Jack continued fixing groceries into bags in the back of the car, the feeling intensified. The two of them were talking and laughing about something. They suddenly seemed dangerously vulnerable to her. Then Jane heard the screech of tires. It was a sound locked firmly into her memory from an event that had happened so long ago it seemed as though it were from a different life. Even though it was a memory she had never been able to fully uncover, she associated this sound with the tremendous discomfort of her father’s estrangement.
She winced as she heard the sound, unaware that she was doing so. Then a sense of unreality washed over her, and she began to hear stirrings—the confused, drunken thoughts of a man in her head, as though someone were turning the dial on a radio receiver.
—Damn her—do whatever I—can’t tell me what to—
Jane covered the side of her face with her palm as she tried to focus. What’s happening? she wondered. There was a car she could see now, careening down the road from their left. It was only fifty feet from them and approaching rapidly.
She became aware of several things. Her mother and Jack were not aware of the danger, and the car was too close. Then she realised that something very obvious had changed in her field of vision. Her eyes drifted to the left, past her mother and Jack and across the street. She saw that Max was standing there. He appeared almost exactly as he had in the dream, wearing the same long black coat, only this time it was closed around his frame. He was staring at her from those same glacial, penetrating eyes. She gasped as she realised he was really there, standing on the footpath across the street only twenty feet away.
Jane, you have to push the car, she heard him say in her mind, in that same echoing voice she recalled from the dreams of her youth. The urgency in his voice caused her to tremble.
“But they’ll…”
They won’t react in time, Jane. PUSH IT.
She knew he was right. The ripples of his thoughts had thankfully shut out the sound of the driver’s confused rambling. She didn’t have time to think; there was no time to wonder whether she could still do it—she just had to. She closed her eyes and reached into the recesses of her mind to where the power came, the place where she had kept it locked away. As she did, she heard the thunderous crack of some locked vault opening violently in her mind. Then suddenly the energy was there, ready for her command. She sent it forward and away from her in a confused, jarring fashion.
Every cell in her body rained with fire, lighting up like the stars as the gushing torrent of force raced down the steps. She opened her eyes as the invisible, ethereal energy slammed into the front of the car, just ten feet before it hit Jack and Nora. A shockwave from the impact flew outward, sending flutters of snow unfurling from the ground below.
She had her grip on the car now, and anger surged through her as the power immediately took its toll on her body. Jack and Nora were out of harm’s way, but she kept pushing. The car flew around three hundred and sixty degrees, and the front bumper slammed into a lamppost, knocking the casing of the light free. It fell to the ground with a crash, creating a strange, mocking crescendo. Shards of glass tumbled away and stopped. Then there was silence.
She was breathing deeply, and a vaguely familiar dizziness came over her in waves. Max, she called dimly in her mind. She thought he had begun to respond just as she collapsed to the ground.
Nora heard the bolt of force slam into the car behind her and turned to see it swerve violently as it skidded across the road and away from them. The car sent cascading swaths of snow flying into the air as it moved. It seemed to Nora as though the car were moving in slow motion as every cell in her body came alive with a familiar, rapid awareness. For a brief moment, she could see everything and all was clear. She saw the color of the car and the fact that it was old and rusted. She could see each individual packet of snow that flew up from underneath the tires as the car spun around.
Above them, she had a new awareness of the street light and how strangely beautiful it made everything seem. There was something else that she became aware of then in that microcosm of time that seemed to stretch on into infinity. There seemed to be a figure standing on the footpath where before there had been no one. She didn’t look in his direction, as there was no time for that, but it seemed to her in some strange sense that he wasn’t really there; he just appeared to be there—a tall man in a black coat, out of time and out of place. A distant memory tried to surface from somewhere, one somehow connected to this event, but the three seconds of time that spanned the occasion were over before she could make the connection.
Jack pushed her to the side rapidly, but Jane had already ensured they were out of harm’s way. Nora turned then and saw her daughter fall back against the doorway and collapse.
Why like this? she wondered hysterically as she ran up the steps to help Jane. The answer came in a confused jumble of thoughts, but after asking the question, everything seemed right to Nora: the chilly evening; the car; the inescapable, approaching accident; her daughter’s immense psychokinetic ability and the appearance of…oh my God, she thought as she knelt to check on Jane.
Nora jerked her head up and looked across the street as she lifted Jane into her arms. She was checking for the man she had seen amidst the confusion, but he was gone. His appearance had seemed terribly surreal to Nora, as he was wearing clothes that made him look as though he had walked straight out of another century.
Was it him? she wondered. Her mind stretched to grasp the exact memory to which she was referring, but there was no time to think about that now. She looked back at her daughter’s face and leaned in to listen for breath. Jane was breathing fine. Nora checked her pulse. Slightly elevated, but okay. Nora was reaching for her phone to call emergency services when she heard a weak voice coming from her daughter’s lips.
“Mom,” Jane said faintly.
“Oh, thank God you’re okay,” Nora gasped.
Jane coughed and sat up as Jack crouched over Nora and looked down at her. Jane swayed a bit and looked as though she wasn’t paying attention to either of them. Jack reached out a hand and gently rubbed Jane’s cheek with the back of his palm. She glanced at him then, but only for a moment.
“Mom,” she said again weakly, staring past them across the street.
“Yes?”
“They’ll be coming now.”
Nora gasped, realising that her daughter was correct.