Chapter 10: Others Know
Neil drove rapidly into the school parking lot two minutes after Samantha ran out under the clear sky. From the front curb of the school she could hear students laughing in the cafeteria, waiting impatiently for the time recess began. Her unease seemed like a solid thing, both unreal and weighty at the same time.
Her Grandpa drove around the cement traffic island with a squeal of tires and pulled to a hasty stop by the curb directly in front of her. He was out of the car before it stopped, it seemed, and he jogged around the front bumper, his old face red and anxious.
“Are you alright Sam?”
“I think so.”
“Where’s Roger?”
“Who?”
“Never mind. In the car!”
There was no commiseration, not even an attempt to reassure her that everything was fine. Neil motioned towards the passenger side without another word. He led her to the door, looking around them constantly, and helped her inside. The interior was warm from being in the bright mid winter sunshine and it smelled musty. Samantha could feel the rough fabric of the seat through her jeans.
After the initial shock of her talent had passed, knowing that she was special had seemed like a good thing, even if it carried deep responsibilities. Now, watching her Grandpa behave as if a terrorist squad was nearby, she wondered if there was more to having the talent than her grandfather had told her.
He got in the front seat and drove fast, ignoring the stop sign at the edge of school. He turned towards the city limits. He ignored the stop sign at the end of the next street as well, glancing continuously between the road in front of them and the mirror view of the cars behind them. Neil stopped at the next stop sign and then turned off again, away from all the houses. He floored the accelerator and they were quickly going faster than Samantha had ever gone in a car before. She felt her whole body tense and she gripped the edges of the seat with her hands.
“Could you slow down Grandpa?”
“In a couple of minutes. I can’t see anyone following us but we need to get away to make sure.”
“What’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you all about it in a few minutes Sam. I wish to God I didn’t have too, but I’m going to tell you everything I know.”
Neil didn’t say anything more, however, and he concentrated for a long time on the rearview mirror. Samantha noticed he was drifting off the right hand side of the road, causing her to say nervously, “Grandpa?”
He corrected the car, looked into the rearview mirror, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“No one was following us after all,” Neil said. “Did she not tell them?”
He wasn’t driving as fast, so Samantha relaxed and as she did so the needle wound on her right arm began to hurt. She rubbed it to make the pain go away, looking out the window at the flat countryside around them. The houses were spaced every quarter mile or so, with nothing but farmland in between. Although she couldn’t remember this road specifically, Samantha knew they were heading toward the neighboring town.
A moment later, Neil turned onto a dirt road wedged between two overgrown hedges. The fields on the other side of the hedges were full of tall weeds, discarded cars, and scattered farm equipment. At the end of the dirt road was an ugly house, covered in white peeling paint, leaning noticeably to the right side. Neil pulled to a stop, wiping his forehead with a towel he pulled from under his seat. He looked at Samantha and tried to smile, but he couldn’t make it work and he gave it up.
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
He stared at the needle wound on Samantha’s arm, still oozing slow blood.
“I think so. What’s going on? Where are we?”
“This was the house I grew up in, although it looked much different back then.”
“You said you grew up in town.”
“We moved to town when I was eleven. But we always kept the farm and rented it out until it became unlivable. I got it from my parents but I’ve never bothered to fix it up.”
There was a pause, during which Neil looked at the old house and Samantha tried to keep herself composed.
“What’s happening to me,” Samantha asked, tears in her eyes.
“What do you mean Sam?”
“What’s going to happen to me now? What else haven’t you told me about what I am?”
Neil sighed and leaned back in his seat, with the back of his neck resting smoothly against the headrest. Samantha’s hand was resting lightly on the door handle. Her hand wanted to clench tight. She wanted to turn the knob, open the door, and run as fast as she could back towards the school. Maybe, during that run, these frightening, undesirable events would strip themselves away like an old gear and her days would be as they were. Her willpower fought against the desire and she noticed, perhaps too late, that Neil’s eyes were on her right hand. His face was sad.
“You don’t trust me, do you Sam?”
Samantha didn’t know what to say. Her first instinct was to say that she trusted him, of course she did, but there was a pause in her thinking and she wondered if she did anymore. Doubt, exactly like the doubts she had felt about Mr. Stillson, surfaced in her mind. The strangeness of this new life and the truths her Grandpa hid from his own son, told her there might be other things, more information, he was hiding from her. And now he was sitting in his car, on the rutted driveway of a dilapidated old house in the middle of nowhere, asking if she trusted him.
“No,” she said suddenly, surprising herself.
Neil nodded his head, his face stained with an expression approaching grief. “I guess I don’t blame you Sam. In your situation, would I trust me? The honest answer is no. Your life has been twisted upside down in the last few days and I still haven’t told you everything. I apologize for not doing that Sam.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’ll tell you what I know. It may be hard to hear.”
Samantha nodded, her arm throbbing where the nurse drew her blood.
“But I don’t really know where to start. It’s so hard to remember that you know little of what I take for granted. So I tend to gloss over the little things, assuming you already know. But how could you, when I haven’t told you about them? Maybe you could ask me a couple of questions Sam, you know, to get me on track.”
Samantha found his whole comment strange. She decided to ask the question that had been eating away at her since they had left the school.
“Why… why did that nurse hate me so much?”
“Yes, good question. She did hate you, I think, and not just because you broke her arm. She was what I call an operator.”
“Operator? What is that?”
“She is like a government agent. You know, someone who works for a part of the government that is secret. Like the CIA or NSA. You’ve probably heard about them in the movies. I think that she worked for one of those agencies as a low level lookout. Doctors and nurses are especially good people to notice when a person has the talent because they are involved with close physical examinations. She knew, after you broke her arm, that you were most likely a talent.”
“But why would they look for me?”
“They want to find us because they want to study why we are the way we are. Our strengths would be extremely valuable to the government because the military would find uses for people who could do what we can do.”
Samantha looked frightened and lifted her arms, staring as she moved them from side to side. She scratched her left arm with her right, as though she could scrape away the strength that lived inside her.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” she asked, her voice almost hysterical. “It’s bad enough knowing what I can do, that I can screw up my whole life by doing anything, and not being able to tell anyone about it. That I’m always going to be different than everyone else and I can’t do anything about it. Now you tell me there are people out there trying to find people like me and we have to hide from them too!”
Neil looked at h
er, eyes watering. He dabbed at them with the back of his hand. He also sniffed and shook his head slightly.
“Sam, I’m so sorry about all of this. So deeply sorry. You’ve found out many things the hard way because your father never had the talent. And now you find out about operators when you’re still so young. This is my fault Sam and I wish that I could change it for you. I tried, believe me, I tried.”
“What did you try,” Samantha asked, still sounding on the verge of panic.
“When I was younger I tried to find a way to keep this from spreading.”
“What!”
“I had heard that, if you did certain things, you could prevent it from spreading beyond yourself. And I tried, and I thought I succeeded because Thomas was clear. I thought maybe all the drainings I felt were nothing but my imagination. Things were fine with your mom and dad. But then you… Sam, I’m getting off track here. Always know that you’ll be protected. And I’m sorry you’ve had to find out about the operators this way but now you’ll know why we have to be so careful about revealing our strengths. You never know when the wrong person will see you, and you never know who that person will tell.”
“But what do we do now Grandpa? That nurse knows about me. I can’t go back to school!”
Neil sighed and sat up straight again, a few wispy iron hairs brushing across the top of the ceiling.
“It’s been taken care of Samantha. You have no reason to fear going back to school.”
“What do you mean? She knows all about me. I saw her take some of my blood and put it on a piece of paper. It turned blue. When that happened she said ‘I knew it’.”
“It’s been taken care of and there’s nothing to worry about. Nurse Wishon won’t be informing any of her supervisors that she has found a talent.”
“But how…”
Samantha suddenly realized a truth that was obvious in hindsight. She thought of Mr. Stillson rushing into the office so quickly that she couldn’t follow his movements. She thought of him closing the door once she left the office.
“Mr. Stillson is a talent too.”
Neil smiled a small natural smile for the first time since they left the school.
“Yes. He’s been watching you carefully, although I only told him you had the gift a couple days ago. He called and asked me.”
“How do you know him?”
“Like I said Sam, sometimes you hear things and sometimes you see things. I knew his father.”
Samantha’s fear had retreated but she felt again as if her head was overstuffed with information. She also had the beginnings of a headache starting under her right eye. She put a hand there. The pain remained, growing more intense. Neil noticed.
“Do you have any pain?”
“Yeah. Behind my eye.”
“Oh dear. I suppose we should get you home before it starts up good. That way we can pretend you’re sick and you won’t get your parents concerned. A draining on top of everything else,” he muttered disgustedly.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re about to get hit with the draining. After your first time it usually signifies itself with a little headache. You probably have about two minutes.”
Neil started the car and began to back slowly, carefully, along the driveway. Samantha allowed herself to drift with the pain, not sure where it was taking her. Once again she felt as if her life was not really her own anymore. The constant pull to use the talent, the constant worry that she would do something terrible if she did, and the strange things that had been happening to her all made life’s day to day reality seem paper thin and meaningless. She found herself retreating into her own mind for support and using this as her basis in reality. However, she was learning this protection came at a cost, because her mind was not as stable as the outside world. It was also an attractive place to go, but each time she went in it became harder and harder to come back out.
The weakness hit her fully as they pulled onto the road. All her muscles relaxed and her thoughts became muddy. Neil looked at her and patted her hand, which she felt a moment after she saw it happen. She couldn’t speak and her head rolled on her shoulders.
Yet it did not seem as bad this time and Samantha felt that, deep at her core, there remained a strand of control. She concentrated on this strand as if it were a bright metallic wire she could seize. She tried to pull it in her mind, thinking it could help her come back to herself, and she was amazed to find that it worked. The gray fog around her vision disappeared. She could control her muscles, although they were still weak, and she could talk again.
“You look like you’ve fought it off pretty well Sam,” Neil said, looking out the window at the passing farmland. Samantha nodded and tried her voice.
“It got bad,” she said slowly, as if she was learning to talk again, “but it went away when I concentrated on it.”
“Good. You’re getting the hang of this much quicker than I ever did, I’ll tell you that.”
Samantha leaned against the seat and rested her head and eyes. She was asleep before she realized she was tired and woke up when they pulled into her driveway. Neil shook her shoulder gently and Samantha looked up at him, feeling much better.
“Hey Sam. Sorry to wake you but we’re home. I need to let you know that I called your Dad and told him I was picking you up from school today because it was on my way. This is only a little later than you would normally be home, so I don’t think there will be any questions about where you were. Do you understand?”
Samantha nodded her head to indicate her understanding and opened the car door. She was surprised at how much better she felt this time and she could walk on her own easily. As long as no one asked her too many questions she thought she could easily escape to her room for a while and her parents wouldn’t notice a thing. She and her Grandpa walked up the sidewalk to the front door and she sensed him watching her every step to make sure she did not stumble. They were almost to the door when a high-pitched, irritating voice floated over to them.
“Feeling a little under the weather, eh girl?”
Neil turned to his right quickly, unconsciously stepping in front of Samantha. The voice belonged to Mr. Henson, who was standing on the other side of the low white fence separating the two front yards. Neil grinned.
“I have no idea why you think this one would be ill,” Neil said. “You, on the other hand, look like you need a doctor. But what else is new?”
Neil gently pushed Samantha towards the door with his left hand. She got the hint, walked the rest of the way to the house, and went inside. Her Grandpa followed a moment later, muttering to himself. Not seeing her parents, Samantha took no chances and went straight to her room to rest.
“I’ll stay for dinner Samantha,” Neil called.
“OK,” she said, already down the hall and to her room. She closed the door and lay down on the bed, glad her Grandpa was staying near, even if she no longer felt she could trust him completely. He admitted he had not told the whole truth about her talent and that revealed him to be a fallible person, just like herself. Although it felt somewhat satisfying to identify faults in an adult she knew and respected, it was also a blow to her previously uncompromised belief that Neil and her parents could solve any problem.
Before she fell asleep again, she thought of the strange scene in the nurse’s office and the terror that immobilized her. She thought of the prick of the needle and the nurse’s look of triumph when the blood sample turned blue. Of Mr. Stillson leaping into the room to rescue her. Of Mr. Stillson closing the door behind her as she left. What had he done with the door closed? Samantha wasn’t sure she really wanted to know the answer but she couldn’t stop replaying the scene.