“No, I guess not, thanks,” Nancy said. Slowly she put the phone down.
Now she was really beginning to get worried. She thought, Brendon! She tried to find him with her mind, but he slid past her, as he had a way of doing lately, flickering like light and shadow, a will-o’-the-wisp. Like his father, he couldn’t be grasped and held.
I’m being silly, she told herself. Nothing is ever wrong with Brendon.
She went back to the coffee table and picked up their father’s letter, but now she couldn’t focus her mind on it. What a moment ago had seemed so important was now only words on a sheet of paper. After a minute, she laid it down again and left it there and went out onto the porch.
Standing looking out toward the sea, she shivered a little in the cool salt breeze. The sun was low in the sky, resting on the top of a dune, screened by the sea grass so that the golden afternoon light was diffused and soft.
Nancy shivered again, and this time it wasn’t because of the wind. Something is wrong, she thought. Something is very, very wrong—
And then it hit her. It came like a bolt, a shock, a stab of ice, a churning, sickening terror, a voice screaming through her, so piercing that there was no other sound, no other reality in the world. “Nancy! Nancy!”
“Bren!” She cried his name. She could see him now, clear and sharp before her eyes, as real to her mind as her mother and Kirby had ever been. He was silhouetted against the sun so that she couldn’t see his face. His light hair was plastered against his head, and there was water—water—all around him.
Brendon is going to drown!
She moved so quickly then that later, thinking back on it, she couldn’t remember having moved at all. In an instant she was back in the house with the phone in her hand calling a second number.
The voice answered immediately, as if he had been waiting for her.
“Mr. Duncan,” she gasped, “this is Nancy. You’ve got to come fast! Brendon’s drowning!”
“He’s what?” There was a startled sound from the man at the other end of the line. “Where is he? Where are you? What’s happened?”
“I’m at home. Mom and Kirby aren’t here. Bren’s out in the water. I don’t know where—I think he’s… in a boat—”
“You get out of that house and start running,” Mr. Duncan said. “It’ll be faster than me coming to get you. I’ll meet you at the dock in front of my house.”
“All right,” Nancy said, and she was running even before she reached the porch.
She flew down the steps and across the dunes with the soft sand squeaking beneath her feet and the setting sun orange in her eyes and that voice screaming in her brain, over and over again.
“Nancy! Nancy!”
When she reached the hard sand, she could see up the beach to the dock in front of Mr. Duncan’s house. He was already out there, untying his motorboat. By the time she was on the dock itself, the engine was running. Tom Duncan reached up from the boat and helped her in.
“Okay,” he said in a low, tight voice. “Where do we go?”
“Out there,” Nancy said, and she pointed straight to sea.
Mr. Duncan turned the rudder and the boat swung wide and headed out into open water. The sky ahead of them had burst into sunset. Orange flames sprang from the water to echo in the clouds.
“Where?” Mr. Duncan asked again, and Nancy said, “To the sandbar.”
“There isn’t any bar,” Mr. Duncan said quietly, “when the tide is in.”
“That can’t be,” Nancy said—and as she said it, she could see that he was right. The sun’s last rays reflected in the water, unbroken streaks of gold and flame. There was no rim of white sand rising above them.
“But it can’t be,” Nancy whispered. “It just can’t be!”
“You’d know,” Tom Duncan said. “If it were too late to save him, you’d know it. You knew he was out here. You’d know if he suddenly—wasn’t.”
“I don’t know what I know,” Nancy sobbed.
Clutching the side of the boat with both hands, she tried to see through the glare of light on water, of sea and sky. In her head the voice was screaming, screaming—and then—it wasn’t in her head, it was in her ears. Weak in her ears—“Nancy!”
“There he is,” Tom said. “There!”
A tiny black spot. A bit of driftwood. A fish. They drew closer, and an arm rose, waving to them. They were closer, closer—Nancy could see the shape of his head.
“Brendon!” she cried, and then they were beside him.
Nancy gazed down over the side of the boat into the green eyes of her brother. They were red now with salt, and the soft hair was plastered darkly to his head, and the face was white beneath its tan, and the dimple—unbelievable as it was, the dimple was flashing in the smooth, wet cheek, and Brendon’s voice, weary, gasping, half-strangled, was trying to make words.
Tom bent over and caught him by the shoulders and dragged him up into the boat.
“It sure took you a long time to get here,” Brendon said.
“How the hell did you get out here?”
Tom Duncan’s voice grated with a mixture of anger and relief.
To Nancy it was an echo of her own feelings exactly. Looking at Brendon, small and sopping, sprawled on the floor of the boat, she could hardly keep from throwing her arms around him. At the same time she had an almost irresistible desire to hit him. Never had she loved him more or been more furious at him.
“Don’t tell us you swam,” she said. “You couldn’t have made it that far. Besides, you’ve got all your clothes on.”
“I’m not wearing my shoes,” Brendon said self-righteously. He coughed and shook his head sideways to get the saltwater out of his ears. “We came out in a boat, Greg and me, but the boat took off on us. It got caught in the current and Greg wasn’t fast enough to pole it back.”
“Greg?” Tom Duncan asked. “You mean Greg Russo was with you? Where is he now?”
“Out there someplace.” Brendon motioned toward the passage to the open sea. He pulled himself to a sitting position and turned his gaze out across the crimson water. “We’d better go get him. I bet he’s scared.”
“Not in this boat, we can’t,” Tom said. “It’s almost dark.” He, too, was staring toward the passage, and his face was set and worried. “That’s open sea out there. This boat is too small to handle it. What sort of boat does Greg have?”
“A good one,” Brendon told him. “It’s made for rough weather. It floats just fine, and we’ve got it caulked up good with chewing gum and a layer of glue on top of that.”
“You’ve got it caulked—” Tom began to repeat the sentence and broke off in the middle as the full meaning of the words swept over him. He swung around to face Brendon in horror.
“You built the boat? Greg is out there in the Gulf—with night coming—in a boat you built yourselves?”
“It’s a good boat,” Brendon insisted. “The deck’s real solid. We’ve got crates across the back of it so he won’t wash off. If a big wave hits he can stick his feet in the crates and—”
The roar of the motor cut off his words as Tom Duncan gave a frantic yank to the rope that brought the engine into life. Nancy, in the bow, clung tightly to her seat as the boat lurched into a sharp arc, almost throwing her from one side to the other. In the stern, Tom’s face was a grim silhouette against the fading pink of the sky.
“You kids!” he growled. “You crazy, daredevil idiots! Glue and chewing gum!”
His voice came out in a hoarse kind of croak.
But Brendon is safe, Nancy told herself. This time at least. The boy out there is Greg. It isn’t Brendon.
The selfishness of the thought horrified her, but she couldn’t fight it. The memory of Brendon’s voice screaming from the water still filled her heart with echoes. She didn’t want Greg to drown. She hoped and prayed that he could be rescued. But at least it wasn’t Brendon—it wasn’t Brendon.
This is how Mom felt, she realized suddenly,
during all those years with Dad. This is what she meant when she talked about being a dove married to an eagle.
For the first time she found herself understanding something of what it might be like to be the one who was left behind to love and worry.
It would take a strong person, she thought. A very strong person. I hope when Brendon grows up and marries it will be to somebody tough enough to take it.
The sun was down before they reached the dock. The sky had dulled to a faint rose, and stars dotted it with tiny pinpricks of light. By the time Nancy and Brendon secured the boat and crossed the dunes to Tom’s cottage, night had fallen down around them, flat and dark. When they looked out toward the horizon, there was no telling the water from the sky.
Tom had leapt from the boat almost before the engine had stopped running.
When they caught up to him in the living room, he had already finished the phone call.
“Greg was lucky,” he said quietly. “He got home safely. I’d say, Brendon, that the two of you have had enough luck to last a lifetime.”
“I told you the boat was a good one,” Brendon said. There was a note of pride in his voice. “It could make it in the ocean.”
“Thank god it wasn’t put to that test,” Tom Duncan told him. “It grounded at the point right at the edge of the passage. Greg hiked back to the highway and called his father. When I talked to the Coast Guard Station just now they were getting ready to send a patrol boat out to search for you.”
“For me!” Brendon exclaimed. “Wow!”
For an instant he seemed abashed. Then his face brightened.
“Do you think it’ll be in the news?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Tom Duncan said shortly. “Now get into the bathroom and get yourself dried off before you come down with pneumonia. There’s a robe hanging on the back of the door; you can put that on. And stop being so cocky. You weren’t brave, you were stupid. If your sister didn’t have the gift she does, you would be fish food by now.”
“I could have kept swimming,” Brendon said peevishly, but he did as directed. Halfway across the room he paused and turned accusingly to Nancy. “I thought you weren’t going to tell anybody about your ESP thing. You made Kirby and me promise to keep it a secret.”
“I didn’t have to tell Mr. Duncan,” Nancy said. “He just knew. He’s always known, even after I flunked the card test.”
“That’s actually when I became absolutely certain.” Tom shoved some fishing gear off the overstuffed chair by the window.
“Sit down,” he said. “You must be exhausted.”
“I—I guess—I am,” Nancy said shakily, and suddenly she was. Her legs seemed to fold beneath her as she sank gratefully into the chair and leaned back in it. She watched Mr. Duncan as he crossed to the sofa. This was the first time she had ever seen him in his own home, and he seemed different here, somehow; bigger, more in command of things.
Curiously, she glanced around her at the cluttered front room of the cottage. It didn’t look like a place she would have expected a school counselor to live in. A guitar was propped against the bookcase, and on the table at the end of the sofa there was a pile of magazines on an assortment of subjects—politics, sports, photography, even engineering. A hunting rifle hung on the wall by the door, and a stuffed tarpon resided over the mantel. A fishing pole leaned against a chair as if its owner had been called away in the process of repairing it.
“What do you mean,” she asked, “that that was when you were certain? I guessed all the cards wrong. I called all the red ones black and all the black ones red.”
“That’s just it,” Tom said. “That was a dead giveaway, that they were all wrong. It’s called psi-missing. The odds against doing that are just as great as the odds against naming all the cards correctly. It was pretty good proof that you were clairvoyant and trying to keep it a secret.”
“If you guessed that, then Dr. Russo must have, too.” Nancy looked at him in growing bewilderment. “Why didn’t one of you say something? When Mom told Dr. Russo I didn’t want to take more tests, he didn’t call again. He just let the whole thing go, as if he didn’t think it was important.”
“What else could he do?” Tom Duncan asked her. “This gift is your own. It’s your property and nobody else’s. There isn’t anyone in the world who can force you to share it with science if you don’t want to.”
“You mean all those people who took part in experiments did it because they wanted to?” Nancy was incredulous. “They thought it was fun, being guinea pigs?”
“Maybe some of them did,” said Mr. Duncan. “They could have enjoyed feeling important. Many others liked the idea of contributing to the world’s store of knowledge. Still others wanted a chance to develop their gift to the fullest potential. Through working with parapsychologists in their studies, they could compare their abilities with those of others.”
“I’d like to know how other people use theirs,” Nancy admitted despondently. “It seems like all I do is make a lot of unhappiness. Ms. Green—well, I don’t feel so bad about that one. She deserved to worry about having dropsy. But Kirby—I did a terrible thing to Kirby. And to you and Mom. You probably guessed that, didn’t you? I’ve been pushing against the two of you every minute.”
“Your problem,” Tom Duncan said wryly, “is that you’re a born manager of the people around you. Even if you didn’t have ESP, you’d still probably be one. You ought to take a few lessons from your grandmother. She didn’t try to arrange other people’s lives for them.”
“She didn’t?” Nancy asked him. “Even if she loved them? Even if she knew, just knew, they were making major mistakes?”
“She could have stopped your parents’ marriage,” Mr. Duncan reminded her quietly. “She knew, though, that your mother’s life was her own possession. So she sat back and waited—and loved her and understood her. If she hadn’t, you and Kirby and Brendon wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m hungry. Do you have some food? Cookies or something?” Brendon appeared in the doorway wrapped in a terry cloth bathrobe. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes shone as green as emeralds. His hair had dried and fluffed up around his head like yellow feathers.
“I think I’d better get the two of you home,” Tom Duncan told him. He started to say something more, but his words were interrupted by the shrill blast of his phone ringing. The sound shot through the room like the scream of a terrified voice.
“That’s Mom,” Nancy said. “She just got home with Kirby. Nobody’s there, and they’re worried. I don’t know why she’s calling you—”
“Don’t you?” Mr. Duncan gave her a long look. “I think you do know. I think, Miss Manager, that you just don’t want to accept it.”
He answered the phone, and his voice changed in that special way that it always did when he spoke to Elizabeth.
“Hello, dear,” he said. “The kids are here with me. You don’t have to worry.” He paused while the voice on the other end of the line asked something.
“How did I know it was you?” He grinned and flashed a glance at Nancy. “Well, I guess it must have been ESP that told me.”
“My ESP,” Nancy said possessively, and Brendon stifled a giggle.
“Just a moment,” Tom Duncan said into the phone. “She’s right here. I’ll get her.” He held the receiver out to Nancy. “Your mother says Kirby wants to talk with you. She says it’s important. It’s something that she wants to tell you herself.”
Nancy got up quickly and crossed the room to the phone.
“Hi, Kirby,” she said, and was allowed to get no further. Her sister’s voice came leaping over the wire in a rush of excitement.
“Nancy, guess what? Guess what happened! I got my cast off!”
“Well, obviously,” Nancy said. “That’s why you went to the doctor.” It seemed like a million years ago that her mother and Kirby had left the house. So many things had happened in the meantime.
“I’ve got so much to tell you,” Nan
cy said. “Brendon almost drowned, and we took Mr. Duncan’s boat to get him, and there’s a letter from Dad—”
“Nancy, listen to me!” Kirby interrupted. “Please listen! This is important! They took more tests and, Nance, the light line wiggled! They stuck a needle in my foot and the light on the screen started jumping! The nerve isn’t dead at all! It’s growing!”
She was crying—Kirby, who never cried, ever. Emotion came rushing through the wire, joy, wonder, relief, so strong and overpowering that it was all Nancy could do to hang on to the phone as the force of it struck her.
“Then you’ll dance?” she asked.
“Dance? Of course I’ll dance! Well, first there’ll be therapy. And catching up. And practice. It’ll take months to get back the way I was. Maybe even years. By the time I get to Atlanta I may be the oldest ballerina in the company, but I’ll make it, Nance! I’ll get there!”
“All that work,” Nancy said doubtfully. “Is it really worth it? I thought you were learning to like the idea of being—well—like other people. You’ve got so many friends now, and Paul—”
“Paul!” Kirby gave a disdainful snort. “Please! Paul doesn’t know royale ouverte from entrechat! I’ve got to call Madame Vilar now, Nance. I’ll talk to you later.”
Nancy hung up and turned to Tom Duncan.
“She’ll have the life she wants,” she said. “I didn’t wreck it. But all the makeup work—it’ll take her so long now—and I’m responsible—”
“You?” Tom said. “Why should you feel responsible?”
“Because I’m the one who made her fall.” For the first time, Nancy spoke the terrible words aloud. “I have this power—I can make things happen to people—like a witch—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom said. “No one is that powerful. You’re not a witch, Nancy, nor God, nor a magician. You’re a young woman with a sensitivity that’s tuned a little higher than that of other people. You didn’t make Kirby fall any more than you got her nerve endings to start mending.”
“Then why—” Nancy began in bewilderment.
“Your sister fainted. It would’ve been surprising if she hadn’t. Any growing girl who skips breakfast and lunch in order to lose weight—”