Crosstalk

  “Because she told me she was. We were eating breakfast—she was fine when she got up this morning—and we were talking about the mother-daughter book group, and all of a sudden she set her spoon down and said, ‘I don’t feel good. I think I’d better lie down,’ and then went in her room and shut the door. I asked her if her stomach hurt, or if she was in pain, but she said no. I think it’s appendicitis.”

  And I think it’s the thought of facing the mother-daughter book group. “It’s not appendicitis,” Briddey said. “She’d have a fever. And a pain in her right side.”

  “Not if it had burst. I looked it up online. If she’s not better in a couple of hours, I’m calling an ambulance.”

  Poor Maeve, Briddey thought, pulling into the garage.

  C.B.’s car was already there, and so was Trent’s. And Suki’s. And Briddey was too tired to face any of them right now. Or Art Sampson, whose voice she heard the moment she entered the building. “If I’m laid off,” he was saying, “there’s no way my savings will last till I’m sixty-five.”

  Briddey didn’t wait to see where he was. She sprinted for the stairs and up to her office. “I need you to call Art Sampson’s office and cancel our eleven o’clock meeting,” she told Charla. “Reschedule it for next week.”

  “His assistant already called and rescheduled it for Monday morning,” Charla said.

  “Oh. Good. Any messages?”

  “Yes. A bunch from your sister Kathleen, and Trent’s secretary called to say you have reservations at Luminesce tonight at eight, and Trent will pick you up at seven.”

  “Thank you,” Briddey said, and started into her office, hoping there were no members of her family in there. Behind her, she heard, “A decaf latte.”

  She turned automatically, thinking, If Charla’s going for coffee, I could use some, too, but Charla was at her computer typing.

  It must have been someone out in the corridor, Briddey thought, going back to the door, but there was no one out there.

  That sound was in my head, she thought excitedly. It’s finally happened. I’ve connected with Trent! And not just emotionally—with words! C.B. had been wrong about them only having a second-class connection. They were going to be able to talk to each other, just like she and C.B. did.

  Trent, can you hear me? I can hear you, she called, but he didn’t answer.

  Maybe it’s only working on my end, she thought, and started to text him, pausing at the last second. If it was Trent, why had he said, “Decaf latte”? He hated lattes, and he never drank decaf. And the voice hadn’t sounded like him at all.

  C.B., are you the one who said that? she called, even though the voice hadn’t sounded like him either.

  “Is something wrong?” Charla said, and Briddey nearly asked her, “Did you hear somebody talking just then?” and then noticed the glint of curiosity in Charla’s eyes. And the fact that she was reaching for her phone, no doubt to text Suki: “Boss acting strange.” Or worse: “Boss hearing things.”

  “No, nothing’s wrong. I just thought of something I forgot to do. Hold my calls,” Briddey said, walked into her office, and shut the door.

  A grande, the voice, still very faint, said. No, no foam— It cut off abruptly, and this time there was no question that it was in her head, which meant, in spite of the wrong-sounding voice and unlikely words, it had to be Trent. He was probably sending Ethel Godwin for coffee for the people in the meeting, and his mental voice sounded different from his audible voice.

  But C.B.’s doesn’t sound different, she thought. And his hadn’t been faint, even in the beginning. It had been perfectly clear, and it hadn’t cut off in the middle of sentences like they’d been disconnected—

  Disconnected. It was Trent’s voice, and the reason it cut off like that was because C.B. was interfering with it.

  C.B.! she called. Answer me! I know you’re there.

  You don’t have to shout, C.B. said. I can hear you. What’s up?

  What’s up? she thought angrily. You’ve been blocking Trent! And don’t deny it. I heard him!

  You heard Trent? C.B. said, sounding completely astonished. What do you mean, you heard him? You sensed his feelings?

  No, I heard his voice, she said. In spite of what you were doing to keep me from—

  When was this? Never mind. There’s something I have to tell you. Now. I need you to come down to my lab.

  So you can explain why you’ve been keeping us from—?

  Where are you? In your office? And she must have thought yes, because he said, Stay there. I’ll be right up.

  She had no intention of letting him tell her any more lies, here in her office or anywhere else. She grabbed her phone, told Charla she was going down to the cafeteria, and took off for Trent’s office, taking the stairs to avoid C.B. I should have told Trent about the telepathy when this first happened, she thought, running up the stairs and hurrying down the corridor to his office. I should never have let C.B. talk me out of—

  A hand shot out from the doorway of the conference room as she passed it and grabbed hold of her wrist. “What do you think you’re do—?” she yelped, and saw that it was C.B.

  “Shh,” he whispered. “First the hospital and now this. Exactly what part of ‘Stay there’ do you not understand?”

  “Let go of me,” she spat at him, trying to wrench free.

  “Not until I’ve talked to you.” He started to pull her into the conference room.

  “You can’t just kidnap me!” she said, looking wildly around for someone, anyone, to help her.

  “Again with the kidnapping,” C.B. said. “What is it with you?”

  “With me?” she said furiously, trying to pry his fingers from her wrist. She kicked him in the shins. “You’re the one who’s acting like the Phantom of the Opera!”

  “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he corrected her, and stopped pulling. “Fine,” he said loudly. “We’ll do it right here, in front of everybody. Is that what you want? I just saw Suki coming this—”

  “Shh,” Briddey said, and let him usher her into the conference room. As soon as they were inside, C.B. let go of her wrist, took the MEETING IN PROGRESS—DO NOT DISTURB sign off the doorknob, and opened the door just far enough to hang it outside. Then he walked over to the conference table to grab a piece of paper and Scotch tape. Briddey looked at the door, gauging whether she could make it out and to Trent’s office before C.B.—

  Nope, he said, moving swiftly between her and the door. I can read your mind, remember? He taped the piece of paper over the door’s window and then pulled out one of the conference chairs. “Sit.”

  “I’ll stand, thank you.” She crossed her arms.

  “Fine. When exactly did you hear Trent?”

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “That was the first time you’d heard him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re sure it was Trent? What did he say?”

  “That’s none of your—”

  “What did he say?” C.B. shouted. “I need to know, Briddey.”

  “So you can block him.”

  “I’m not blocking him!”

  “Then why did his voice cut off like that? You were jamming him, that’s why. He managed to get through despite it, but that’s why his voice was so faint, and why it didn’t sound like him—”

  C.B. pounced on that. “What do you mean, it didn’t sound like him? You didn’t think it was Trent’s voice when you first heard it?”

  “No, thanks to your distorting it or whatever you were doing.”

  He ignored that. “Tell me what he said.”

  “Why?” she said belligerently. “I thought you could read my mind.”

  He ignored that, too. “Tell me. The exact words.” And something in his manner made her answer him.

  “The first time he said, ‘A decaf latte,’ and I thought it was someone out in the hallway,” she said.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t?”

  “Yes, because a few minute
s later I was in my office with the door shut, and I heard him say, ‘A grande,’ and ‘No, no foam.’ ”

  “Like he was ordering at Starbucks,” C.B. said, and when she nodded: “Did it sound like he was talking to you?”

  “No,” she admitted. And don’t you dare try to tell me Trent’s emotionally bonded to a Starbucks barista.

  “And that’s it? You haven’t heard anything else?”

  “No, except for you,” she said, and he visibly relaxed. Because he was jamming Trent.

  “No, I’m not! When you said the voice was ‘distorted,’ what did you mean? How was it different from Trent’s voice? Did it sound deeper? More nasal? Did it have an accent?”

  “No,” she said, frowning, trying to remember, but there’d been nothing identifiable about it at all, nothing to distinguish it from any other—

  Shit, C.B. said. That’s what I was afraid of. “I should have—” He broke off and gestured toward the chair he’d pulled out. “Sit down. Please. I have things I’ve got to tell you,” and he sounded so serious she obeyed.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He pulled out another chair, sat down opposite her, and leaned forward, his knees spread apart, his hands clenched together between them. “I should have told you all this before, but I thought…the thing is, you could only hear me, and I thought maybe it was going to stay that way, especially when so much time went by and nothing had happened. I—”

  Why is this taking so long? a voice cut in, sounding annoyed, and Briddey automatically glanced at the covered window in the door, thinking it was someone outside wanting to get in, and then realized C.B. hadn’t looked toward the door. Or given any indication that he’d heard anything.

  It’s Trent, she thought, even though it still didn’t sound like him. But at least this time he’d said something Trent would say.

  I’m here, she called. I can hear you.

  “You can hear who?” C.B. said, reaching forward to grab her hand. “Briddey, did you hear somebody talking just now?”

  “Yes. Trent. He asked why our connection was taking so long.”

  “He did? He used the word ‘connection’?”

  “No,” she admitted, “but that was what he—”

  “Tell me exactly what he said. It’s important.”

  “He said, ‘Why is this taking so long?’ ”

  “Did his voice sound like the time before?”

  It hadn’t, though she couldn’t say how the two voices were different. She simply had a feeling that they were. “No, because you interfered with—”

  She stopped. C.B. was looking at her, but his expression wasn’t defensive. It was pitying, as if he had bad news to give her. “What is it?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t Trent.”

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t Trent? Are you saying I only imagined it?”

  “No. Unfortunately.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? It had to be him. Who else could it have been?”

  He looked even more pitying. “Anyone,” he said.

  “Anyone? What do you mean, ‘anyone’?”

  “I mean it could have been somebody else here at Commspan waiting for his computer to boot up, or an expectant father wondering why his wife’s labor is taking so long. Or a guy waiting for the light to change.”

  “Yet you’re certain it wasn’t Trent wondering why we hadn’t connected yet,” she said angrily. “Why not?”

  “Because you didn’t recognize the voice. That means it’s a stranger, and so was the person you heard ordering the latte.”

  “You’re saying I heard two strangers?”

  “Yes, and they’re just the first. Over the next two or three days you’re going to hear a lot more—”

  “And how exactly do you know all this?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. “You’ve heard them, too, haven’t you? These other voices.”

  “Yes. And they’re not pleasant. I need to teach you—”

  “You heard other voices,” she said, working this all out in her mind. “You heard complete strangers’ voices, and as soon as you heard them, you knew our hearing each other didn’t have anything to do with emotional bonding. You knew something else had to be causing it, and yet you didn’t say a word.”

  “Okay, look, I realize I should have told you sooner—”

  “Sooner? You should have told me immediately. When it first happened. Which was when?”

  “Briddey—”

  “You’ve obviously been hearing these other voices long enough to have figured out all sorts of things about them, which means you must have been hearing them for a while. How long?”

  Since that day he brought me home from the hospital, she thought, answering her own question. That’s how he knew Kathleen didn’t see us at my apartment. And how he knew it was safe to go back, because he heard her think about leaving.

  “Or did you hear them before that, when I was still in the hospital?” she asked. “Of course you did. That’s how you knew the nurse had gone off duty, and that they were trying to decide whether to tell Dr. Verrick about my running away.” He’d said he overheard them talking at the nurses’ station, but he hadn’t. He’d read their minds. And that was why he’d brought up Joan of Arc’s having heard more than one voice—to find out if it was happening to her, too. “You started hearing other voices that first night, right after you heard mine, didn’t you?”

  He had that pitying look again. “No.”

  Oh, my God, he’d heard them—and hers—before she’d had the EED. That was how he’d caught her as she was leaving for the hospital. And how he’d found out she was having the EED in the first place. “How long have you been hearing voices?” she demanded.

  “Briddey—”

  “Answer the question. How long?”

  He took a deep breath. “Since I was thirteen.”

  “I was in my thirteenth year when I heard a voice from God…and the first time I was very much afraid.”

  —JOAN OF ARC

  “Thirteen?” Briddey repeated, trying to take it in.

  C.B. nodded. “Three weeks after my birthday. And a couple months after I’d hit puberty, so you can probably figure out what I assumed was causing it—though we were also reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in school, which is about a schizophrenic teenager, so I figured it might also be that. I didn’t know about Joan of Arc then, or all the other saints who’d started hearing voices at the same age.”

  “You’ve been hearing voices since you were a teenager,” she said. And of course he had. It explained everything: his being such a loner, and Charla’s saying she’d heard him talking to himself, and his earbuds not being attached to anything. And it explained why he hadn’t been surprised that first night in the hospital, why he’d instantly accepted the idea that they were communicating telepathically. Because he’d been doing it since he was thirteen.

  “Wrong. I’ve been hearing voices since I was thirteen,” he corrected her. “Not talking to them. That’s a more recent development.”

  “How recent?”

  “Really recent.”

  “You mean I was the first person you were able to talk to? And what do you mean ‘voices’? How many voices? Can you hear everybody at Commspan?” Of course he could. He’d probably been eavesdropping on the Hermes Project’s meetings and laughing at the security precautions they’d taken to keep Apple from finding out about the new—

  “It doesn’t work like that,” C.B. interrupted. “You don’t have any control over who or what you hear. It just happens, like a minute ago when you heard the guy say, ‘Why is it taking so long?’ The voices just come. And they’ll keep coming, which is why I’ve got to teach you how to block—”

  “I knew it,” she said. “You were blocking Trent!”

  “Oh, for cripes’ sake,” C.B. said, dragging his hand through his hair. “For the last time, I am not blocking your stupid boyfriend! I’m trying to help you block the vo
ices. You’ve got to erect a bulwark against them, and you’ve got to do it now, before you start to hear any more of them. You just heard the first one today, so we should have a day or two before it gets bad, but it takes time to get defenses up, and I’m going to need to teach you to—”

  “Even if I believed you weren’t keeping Trent and me from connecting, which I don’t,” she said coolly, “you could obviously hear him, which means you knew how much he loves me and how hard he was trying to connect, but you didn’t say a word. And you didn’t say a word about why I could hear you, even though you knew that, too. You told me it was because we were emotionally bonded—”

  “I did not. I said that was what Trent would think. And it wasn’t like that. I didn’t tell you that first night because I was afraid you’d freak out completely. You’d already yanked out your IV and gone running off just from the shock of hearing me. I was afraid if I told you everything, you might throw yourself down an elevator shaft or something.”

  “And what about since then?”

  “I tried to tell you when I took you home from the hospital—”

  “That was two days ago.”

  “I know. I probably should have told you sooner—”

  “Probably?”

  “Okay, then, I definitely should have, but I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. You weren’t hearing anyone but me, and I thought maybe the EED had only made you partially telepathic and you wouldn’t hear anybody else—”

  “And you might be able to convince me we were emotionally bonded, and I’d fall into your arms.”

  “No, of course not—”

  “Or at the very least you could use the emotional-bonding thing to keep me from telling Trent. Of course. That’s why you told me all those stories about dying loved ones and torpedoed sailors and McCook, Nebraska. And you told me about Bridey Murphy and the ‘hearing voices’ study to convince me Dr. Verrick would think I was crazy. You did everything you could to keep me from telling them.”

  “You’re right, I did. Because—”

  “Because you didn’t want them to find out you were telepathic,” she said. “That’s what all this—the warm blanket and the ride home and taking me to get my car—was about, making sure I kept my mouth shut. You didn’t care what it would do to me or my relationship with Trent, whether he thought my not connecting to him meant I didn’t love him, and he broke up with me. That didn’t matter. All you cared about was keeping your precious secret.”