Indigo

layer, just out there, waiting for us to tap into.” He looked up then, gave a funny little laugh. “Or maybe some of us have already tapped in.”

“But I want to know what this all means to me. To the touch.” I didn’t want to sound impatient, but there it was.

He got excited then, held his finger up in a just wait gesture. He grabbed a couple of wires with metal clamps at the end, then pulled a bucket out from underneath the table. He pried the lid off, and the garage filled with an acrid smell. Formaldehyde or a preservative of some kind. And instantly Rennick was transformed, a crease in his brow, his whole body full of tension, questions, but he looked strangely comfortable. This was a new confidence, a real one, not a facade. Rennick plunged his hand into the bucket and brought out a frog. A dead one, dripping clear liquid. He placed it on the table, and before I knew what he was doing, he had picked up a scalpel and slit its underside near the legs.

“Whoa … what are you—”

“Just hold on a minute. I mean, I could hook these up to dead frog legs, right? Make the muscles jump. Reanimate them?”

“Okaaay?” I answered.

As I watched, Rennick did just that. He secured the tiny silver clamps to the leg muscles inside the body of the frog, although I tried not to see exactly how, to keep my eyes away from the grayish-white frog innards and the bulging, glassy eyes.

Rennick pressed two live wires together and there was a spark. The legs of the frog twitched. He did it again, and I watched more closely this time. “It reanimates the frog. The legs move. Jump. But it doesn’t bring the frog back to life. It doesn’t restore that.” He looked at me hard. “Just mimics it.”

I thought for a second. “Do you think the touch mimics life?”

He shook his head, never taking his eyes from me.

“You think the touch restores life.”

“Yes.”

“So, how? That’s a pretty big difference.”

He just shrugged. “I agree.” We stared at each other in silence. “There’s a lot of things like that, a thin line between what we think we know and what we don’t, really. Especially with electricity.”

“I read about dirty electricity. Atmospheric too.”

“Exactly. I mean, you put your finger in a socket, that electric current is going straight through you, quickest route it can find. But lightning doesn’t do that. It kind of picks and chooses its route. Random. It can go in, wipe out the systems, organs, and leave not so much as a burn.”

“So you think what I have is like lightning?”

“No, not at all,” Rennick said. “I’m sorry. I got carried away. I just think there’s a lot we don’t know about tons of things, especially electricity. That’s all.” He gave me a sideways look. Plopped the frog back into its bucket, threw the wires on the table. “I just don’t think we should be scared of what we don’t know.”

He held my gaze then. I saw myself in the reflection of his eyes. I was wide-eyed. Deer in headlights.

“You know what happened to my sister?” I whispered finally. “What I did?”

He nodded, wiped his hands on a rag. Our eyes never left each other’s. We just held that gaze for a few beats. “I think you’re wrong about that whole thing,” he said.

It swirled too high then, the heat in my chest. It began to feel like hot coals beneath my ribs. “I have to go,” I said, the clear, sharpened edge of truth coming alive inside me.

“But I think I—”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Corrine, I’m glad you came,” he said.

I walked briskly back to my mom’s minivan, equal parts glad I came, scared by the connection I had made, and more confused than ever.

Mom asked me to go along with her to Chartrain the next morning. She had to visit a patient and said she could use the company.

I thought of her chin quivering. I thought of her at Lucy’s funeral, knowing what memories it had brought to the surface for her, of Sophie. So I agreed. And there was also part of me that knew I agreed to go with Mom because this was me trying. This was me wanting to take a step.

Of course, once we got to Chartrain, Mom told me who she had to visit. Lila Twopenny. Of course. Her hospice patient.

Random? No.

The idea of coincidence didn’t even seem to cover this.

I watched my mom carefully to see how she behaved. Did she know about Rennick? Had she been talking to Mia-Joy? As we entered Chartrain and Mom chirped hello to the staff and signed us in, I watched her face and it was mostly a study of worry—a furrowed brow, gray circles under the eyes. I knew I had caused them, and it didn’t seem like she was in cahoots with Rennick.

Mom seemed surprised when I told her I would like to go in with her to see Mrs. Twopenny. “I just listened to her story,” I explained. Mom gave me a look, but she didn’t push it.

The room was decorated in bright yellows and reds, a loud flowered wallpaper pattern, lacy white curtains on the window. Someone cared about Mrs. Twopenny. Someone helped her room feel more like home.

“Good morning, Lila,” Mom said.

“A visitor! Hello there, Leslie!” I recognized her voice and her face from my sketch. A burst of singsong laughter emitted from this tiny woman lying in the bed. “Introduce me!”

Mom smiled. “This is my daughter, Corrine.”

I wanted to ask questions but didn’t know how to begin. Could I possibly have some kind of curse that I could turn into a blessing?

Did the blue light similarity mean anything? Would my mom be seriously pissed if I started to interrogate this old lady? Should I have told my mom first?

“Say hello,” Mom said to me, a stern look on her face. Obviously, Mrs. Twopenny was a woman not long for this world, and Mom wasn’t going to bear me not saying hello.

I stood there dumbstruck, trying to figure out the best line of questioning. I ignored my silence rule. I didn’t even consider it, actually. “Hello, ma’am,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I took one more step closer to her, and when I did it was like I hit a wall of feeling. Energy.

It surprised me, and it froze me, so I didn’t see—didn’t really register—when Mrs. Twopenny’s long thin arm reached from her side toward me. Before I knew what was happening, Mrs. Twopenny’s frail-looking, age-spotted hand clasped onto mine. I stared at it for a moment before I could believe it.

I pulled back. My hand slipped from hers, but she grabbed my other one with both of hers. Tight, strong. She had sat up now. And that’s when the lens of blue shifted in front of my eyes, coloring everything indigo, but not just coloring it, making it glow too, my mom’s face, the flowered wallpaper, the now-blue lace curtains. The energy opened like a flower in my chest, pulsating and pushing through my extremities. I closed my eyes against it, the power of it, the surge. And I tried once more to loosen my hand from Mrs. Twopenny’s. The woman was strong. But it was more than that. I was leaden in my position, a conduit. Frozen.

I let the indigo current—not unpleasant, but definitely singular in itself—flush through me, out the tips of my fingers, through the soles of my feet, my eyelids, out of my open mouth. Time stopped around me, and I sank into the blue, felt and saw nothing but this power, this surge inside me, throughout me, around me. Into Lila Twopenny. C-sharp major. It felt like C-sharp major. My favorite key. Anything was possible in that key. I could always make music in that key.

When I opened my eyes, I saw Mrs. Twopenny first. Her hand had dropped from mine, and her eyes had closed. Monitors beeped and blipped; an alarm went off. The lights flickered, once, twice, then went out. I turned to Mom. Her mouth was agape, and she pulled me to her, held me close. I didn’t think to push her away.

I took a deep breath, aware now that I had been holding it. The exhaustion in my limbs and spine weighed me down. I leaned against my mother, hollowed out.

The air settled in the room, the charge dissipating. Two nurses dressed in peach scrubs flew into the room, bringing us back to reality. They spoke in serious, professional voices.