Indigo

was very wrong.

“It’s Rennick!” I screamed, taking one last look at my sketch. His eyes were not right; they were flat, unseeing, but it wasn’t just that. I had colored his face, shadowed it, with white and with blue. He looked … gone.

Lifeless.

“Tell me in the car.”

Mom flew, going well above the speed limit, out to the wharf, to Crescent Charters. As soon as we pulled into the gravel parking lot, I jumped out of the car before it had even stopped. I could see the knot of people standing on the small dock, their heads bent in reverence, their shoulders slumped, their voices silent.

I ran. I had to get there. I had that feeling again that I could see these things, and they registered, yet they were so very far away. I heard the slapping of my running feet against the wet boards of the dock, and that brought me back into myself a little, but when I saw his face, ashen white, with blue eyelids, his chest not rising or falling, that shocked me back into myself in a moment, in a flash. In that second, my world focused into a pinpoint on those beautiful eyelashes, holding drops of seawater.

My mother had explained it on the way to the wharf. He had been fishing. Dodge had been short of breath, but they had become stuck in the weeds, the cattails, out near the swampy edge of Egret Inlet. Rennick got nervous, surely thinking of another heart attack for Dodge. He dove in to dig out the propeller from the seaweed or whatever, instead of just rowing. Dodge didn’t know how it happened. But Bouncer began acting weird, whining as they waited in the boat, his tail between his legs.

And Rennick never came back up.

He had drowned. My Rennick. He was gone. How long had he been without a breath? He would not be that fucking cricket. Never.

I watched the paramedics do their rescue breathing, the pressure on his chest. How long had they been at it? Were they still hopeful? I gave them five seconds. Six.

The sharp jut of his Adam’s apple. The black-oil color of his hair. The unseeing eyes. I couldn’t wait any longer.

I pushed through them. Risks. Guilt. Perfection. Control. None of it mattered. Only he mattered. Some things had to be charged at, saved, worked for, again and again, if need be.

All this talk, all these issues, none of it really mattered. Because Rennick was gone, and I had this power. A=B.

I knelt down next to his body, spied Dodge’s face above me filled with panic. Bouncer was at my heels, nudging me closer to Rennick with his snout. Mom had joined us, but these things didn’t matter. I only had to think his name, all he had come to mean to me, all that he was, and there it was. The indigo lens in front of my vision. The crackling spark of life inside my ribs. Like an explosion of heat from the heart of me.

I held on to his hands, both of them in mine. They were cold, so cold. I placed them over my heart, held them against me with my palms. And I couldn’t help it, I was bawling.

He had believed in me when I hadn’t even believed in myself. He had saved me.

“Please, please. Rennick, please,” I said between gasps.

And then it was there at its height, plateaued and waiting for direction. And I let it go, I let it move freely, surging and charging into my beloved Rennick.

And in that moment, time stopped. It’s like I was there, but I wasn’t.

I hold Sophie’s body in my lap, cupping her face in my hands, the blue surges through me, in her. It brings her back. I saved her, I think. Here it is. I remember it now. The part I could never quite account for. The lost time. “I got you, Sophie. I got you.”

She smiles at me, shivers. “You saved me,” she says, lisping her s through that gap in her teeth.

“Did I?” I say, flummoxed, holding on to her face. I am exhausted, and we lie back on the rocks. Her eyes close as she lays her head on my chest.

I awake to her teeth chattering along with mine. It’s darker, colder. And I see that Sophie is pale again. Why had we not left? Walked back? I remember the surge of electricity through me, the exhaustion.

Sophie’s eyes roll back in her head then, her body jerks. Not again! But then things change, the power pricks back up inside me, and I reach for her, to cup her face again, to fix her.

But the wrong thing happens. The white light explodes around me, in me.

The lightning.

One lone bolt of lightning emerges from the atmosphere around us, blinding us, a terrifying and powerful glow around us, bathing us in current, jolting us, electrifying us. I absorb it and I don’t. Not enough. Sophie doesn’t recover.

I smell the ozone in the air. The crisp Lake Michigan air. It is just a storm.

I saved her. Lightning killed her.

I woke back up to where I was now. Here in my life without Sophie. Holding Rennick’s hands to my heart. The physio-electric life churned through me, out of me, into Rennick. I shuddered with exhaustion.

For all my power: I could heal, I could fix Lila Twopenny, I could maybe save Rennick, but I still wasn’t all-powerful. I still was not in charge. I couldn’t fix Mia-Joy. I couldn’t control lightning. I couldn’t do a lot of things.

It was good and it was bad. I was just a human Leyden jar.

“Please,” I said out loud, and I could feel the surges rack my shoulders, press against my ribs, exit my hands.

And then I snapped my eyes open because I could feel the current change, plunge from deeper inside of me. This was when I would normally stop, what I had come to recognize as the time to let go. But Rennick was not back yet. I couldn’t give up.

It pulled from inside me, deeper in my core, and I pushed it, willed it out of me.

Rennick coughed once. And then he was still. I wanted to pull back, but I couldn’t. Rennick needed me. Needed the blue.

I had it. He needed it. I gave it all.

And then it went black.

18

I watched Rennick gasp, cough, and wretch. Beautiful, gorgeous, life-affirming coughs. He vomited water and green stuff. He doubled over and coughed some more, and my heart swelled. Rennick. Alive. He turned on his side and curled his knees to his chest, coughed again.

By now I realized that I was watching this from an odd angle. I was above him, far above him. I could see him, but I couldn’t hear the noise that his coughs made. I reached out to him, but I could not see my own arm. I was air. I was wind. I was space. I was nothing and everything. I somehow hovered above it all, outside of myself.

This alarmed me, but not much, because Rennick was okay. He sat up now, the scary pallor of his face only a memory.

He turned his attention to the small knot of people to his left. They were surrounding someone. Rennick got to his feet quickly, swayed, then pushed his way into the center.

It was me. I was down there, lying on the dock, and it was my turn to be ashen. Empty. I had used myself up. Just as I had promised not to do. And if I had been careless before with my power —arrogant, even—well, I was so sorry now. I struggled against nothing and everything trying to get myself back into my body, back down there, back with Rennick.

When I had so much and so many had so little, I should be hanging on to my life, tooth and nail. I realized this now.

One of the paramedics performed rescue breathing on my body, but Rennick pushed him aside, and the