you."
"You've lived three years longer, but I guarantee my soul is older than yours."
It was a distinction too fine for me just at the moment.
"I need to take a nap," I said and shut my eyes.
I hadn't anticipated that sleep would drag me down before I'd even had a chance to thank Manfred for coming to see me.
Bodies have to have rest to heal, and my body seemed to need more than most. I don't know if that had to do with the lightning that passed through my system or not. A lot of lightning strike victims have trouble sleeping, but that has seldom been my problem. Other survivors I've talked to on the Web have a grab bag of symptoms: convulsions, loss of hearing, speech problems, blurry vision, uncontrollable rages, weakness of the limbs, ADD. Obviously, any or all of these can lead to further consequences, none of them good. Jobs can be lost, marriages wrecked, money squandered in an attempt to find a cure or at least a palliative.
Maybe I would be in a sheltered workshop somewhere if I hadn't had two huge pieces of luck. The first was that the lightning not only took things away from me, but left me with something I hadn't had before: my strange ability to find bodies. And the second piece of luck was that I had Tolliver, who started my heart beating on the spot; Tolliver, who believed in me and helped me develop a way to make a living from this newfound and unpleasant ability.
I could only have been asleep for thirty minutes or less, but when I woke up, Manfred was gone, Tolliver was back, and the sun had vanished behind clouds. It was nearly eleven thirty, by the big clock on the wall, and I could hear the sound of the lunch cart in the hall.
"Tolliver," I said, "do you remember that time we went out to get a Christmas tree?"
"Yeah, that was the year we all moved in together. Your mom was pregnant."
The trailer had been a tight fit: my older sister, Cameron, and me in one room, Tolliver and his brother, Mark, in another, Tolliver's dad and my pregnant mom in the third. Plus, there was a never-ending flow of the low-life friends of our parents coming in and out. But we kids had decided we had to have a tree, and since our parents simply didn't care, we set out to get one. In the fringe of woods around the trailer park, we'd found a little pine and cut it down. We'd gotten a discarded tree stand from the Dumpster, and Mark had mended it so it would work.
"That was fun," I said. Mark and Tolliver and Cameron and I had come together during that little expedition, and instead of being kids who lived under the same roof, we became united together against our parents. We became our own support group. We covered for each other, and we lied to keep our family intact, especially after Mariella and Gracie were born.
"They wouldn't have lived if it wasn't for us," I said.
Tolliver looked blank for a minute, until he caught up with my train of thought. "No, our parents couldn't take care of them," he said. "But that was the best Christmas I'd had. They remembered to go out and get us some presents, remember? Mark and I would rather have died than say it out loud but we were so glad to have you two, and your mom. She wasn't so bad then. She was trying to be healthy for the baby, when she remembered. And that church group brought by the turkey."
"We followed the directions. It turned out okay."
There'd been a cookbook in the house, and Cameron had figured we could read directions as well as anyone. After all, our parents had been lawyers before they fell in love with the lifestyle and vices of the people they defended. We had smart genes in our makeup. Luckily, the cookbook was a thorough one that assumed you were totally ignorant, and the turkey had really been good. The dressing was strictly Stove Top Stuffing, and the cranberry sauce came out of a can. We'd bought a frozen pumpkin pie and opened a can of green beans.
"It turned out better than okay," he said.
And he was right. It had been wonderful.
Cameron had been so determined that day. My older sister was pretty and smart. We didn't look anything alike. From time to time, I wondered if we really were full sisters, given the way our mom's character had crumbled. You don't suddenly lose all your morals, right? It happens over time. I caught myself wondering if my mother's had started to erode a few years before she and my dad parted. But maybe I'm wrong about that. I sure hope so. When Cameron went missing, it felt like my own life had been cut in half. There was before Cameron, when things were very bad but tolerable, and after Cameron, when everything disintegrated: I went to foster care, my stepfather and my mother went to jail, and Tolliver went to live with Mark. Mariella and Gracie went to Aunt Iona and her husband.
Cameron's backpack, left by the side of the road the day she'd vanished on her way home from school, was still in our trunk. The police had returned it to us after a few years. We took it with us everywhere.
I took a sip of water from my green hospital cup. There wasn't any point in thinking about my sister. I'd resigned myself long since to the fact that she was dead and gone. Someday I'd find her.
Every now and then, I'd glimpse some short girl with long blond hair, some girl with a graceful walk and a straight little nose, and I'd almost call out to her. Of course, if Cameron were alive, she wouldn't be a girl any longer. She'd been gone now—let's see, she'd been taken in the spring of her senior year in high school, when she was eighteen—God, she'd be almost twenty-six. Eight years gone. It seemed impossible to believe.
"I called Mark," Tolliver said.
"Good. How was he?" Tolliver didn't call Mark as often as he ought to; I didn't know if it was a guy thing, or if there'd been some disagreement.
"He said to tell you to get well soon," Tolliver said. That didn't really answer my question.
"How's his job going?"
Mark had gotten promoted at work several times. He'd been a busboy, a waiter, a cook, and a manager at a family-style chain restaurant in Dallas. Now he'd been there at least five years. For someone who'd only managed three or four college semesters, he was doing well. He worked long hours.
"He's nearly thirty," Tolliver said. "He ought to be settling down."
I pressed my lips together so I wouldn't say anything. Tolliver was only a couple of years younger, plus a few months.
"Is he dating someone special?" I asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
"If he is, he hasn't said anything." After a pause, Tolliver said, "Speaking of dating, I ran into Manfred at the motel."
I almost asked why that reminded him of dating, but I thought the better of it. "Yeah, he came by," I said. "He told me Xylda had had a vision or something and decided she better come here, too. He told me that Xylda is dying, and I guess he's indulging her as much as he can. He's sure a good grandson."
Tolliver looked at me skeptically. His eyebrows had risen so far that they looked like part of his hairline. "Right. And Xylda just happens to have a vision telling her that a woman he wants—he thinks you're hot, don't pretend you don't know that—needs her help. You don't think he had something to do with that?"
Actually, I felt a little shocked. "No," I said. "I think he came because Xylda said to."
Tolliver practically sneered. I felt a strong dislike for him, just for that moment. He shot to his feet and walked around the little hospital room.
"Probably he can't wait until his grandmother dies. Then he can stop carting her around, and be your agent instead."
"Tolliver!"
He stopped speaking. Finally.
"That's an awful thing to say," I said. We'd seen the flawed side of human nature over and over, no doubt about it. But I liked to think we weren't wholly cynical.
"You can't see it," he said, his voice quiet.
"You're seeing something that isn't there," I said. "I'm not an idiot. I know Manfred likes me. I also know he loves his grandmother, and he wouldn't have hauled her out into this cold weather with her failing, unless she told him he had to."
Tolliver kept his head down, his eyes to himself. I felt I was trembling on the edge of saying something that would push our little barrel over the waterfall, something I'd never be able to take back. And Tolliver was suffering under some burden of his own. I could read the secrets of the dead, but I couldn't tell what my brother was thinking at that moment. I wasn't completely sure I wanted to.
"This past Christmas, just us alone, that was a pretty good Christmas," he said.
And then the nurse came in to take my temperature and my blood pressure, and the second was gone forever. Tolliver straightened out my blanket, and I lay back on my pillows.
"Raining again," the nurse remarked, casting a glance out at the gray sky. "I don't think it'll ever stop."
Neither of us had anything to say about that.
The sheriff came by that afternoon. She was wearing heavy outdoor clothes and her boots were coated with mud. Not for the first time I reflected that there were worse places to be than this hospital. One of those places was digging through nearly freezing dirt for clues, breathing in the reek of bodies that were in different stages of decay, telling the bad news to families who'd been waiting to hear about their missing boys for weeks, months, years. Yes, indeed. A concussion and a broken arm in the Doraville hospital were far preferable to that.
The sheriff may have been thinking the same thing. She started off angry. "I'll thank you to keep your media-seeking friends away from here," she said, biting the words out as if they were sour lemons.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your psychic friend, whatever her name is."
"Xylda Bernardo," Tolliver said.
"Yes, she's been down at the station making a scene."
"What kind of scene?" I asked.
"Telling anyone who'd listen how she'd predicted you'd find these bodies, how she'd sent you up here, how she knew you were going to be hurt."
"None of that is true," Tolliver said.
"I didn't think it was. But she's clouding the issue. You know—you show up, of course we're all
