“Ohhh-kay,” May said, standing up and pointing at Mom. “I’ve heard enough. I can’t believe I thought I could trust you. You’re just as crazy as ever. We’re leaving. Come on, Em.”
While May took Em’s hand, Mom stood and strode to the adjoining room’s door and knocked.
I understood why May was upset. Mom’s manic episodes had pocked our childhood. I remembered Mom keeping me up on school nights with her diatribes. At the time, it had made me feel important, special, like an adult. I’d tried following her logic, but it was like a twig floating in a river, vanishing in rapids and waterfalls, only to pop up again two hundred yards downstream.
To me, and I considered myself an expert, Mom wasn’t having an episode, and even if she was, I didn’t want to leave without seeing Lonnie. He’d shown me what a rekulak could do. This could be our only chance to cure Em, and I didn’t want to waste it.
“May,” I said. “Just wait.”
I wonder sometimes now if I hadn’t tried to stop her, would she have been able to get away?
She turned and looked at me, dumbfounded, like she couldn’t believe I still wanted to go through with this. Then the door to the adjoining room opened. Shirley, the cocker spaniel, came through first, wagging her tail, then Lonnie, in his leather vest, holding some fancy green drink with a straw and a miniature umbrella in it.
When Warren walked through the door, wearing his perpetual smirk, a little sack of panic ruptured inside my stomach, sending tingling shockwaves to my ears and fingertips.
Chapter 17
ISHOUTED TO MAY, “Run!” Then I dove at Warren’s knees. He hopped to one side, avoiding the brunt of my attack. From the floor, I latched onto one of his legs and pulled until he fell, cursing. He twisted his leg free and wriggled around to my back. While May and Em escaped into the hallway, he wrapped an arm around my neck and his legs around my legs. His clothes were still wet from fighting Lou in the rain. He whispered in my ear, “Silly duck. I told you a storm was coming. Tranquil pond begone. The seagulls are here with their oceanly ways.”
Again with the duck pond crap. Had Naomi told me the truth about poisoning him? Would he help me if I asked him? As incredible as that sounded, the guy did appear to be under the influence of one of Naomi’s metaphor spells.
I wanted to tell him that he was a swan and the king of the duck pond, that I was one of his subjects, and he had to protect me from the invading seagulls, but I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t even breathe. He’d sunk his forearm under my chin, against my throat. I watched from the floor, helpless, like a turtle on its back, as square-shouldered Caroline pushed my sister back into the room. One side of May’s face was red. The Zaditorians entered next, the bearded one carrying Em, followed by Sheryl/Blanche, who still had bleach-blond hair.
The bald Zaditorian crouched beside me and pried one of my hands loose from Warren’s forearm and cupped it in his. My hand felt cold, then what looked like black air seeped through his fingers, and he let go, leaving an inky black bubble around my hand. I tried to bring my hand back to the arm that was still choking me, but my hand was stuck in midair, stuck within the bubble, no matter how hard I pulled. Warren released me from his chokehold, but my hand remained imprisoned. As I coughed and wheezed, sucking air as fast as I could, Blanche/Sheryl said, “Leave now. Everyone,” and Warren, Caroline, Lonnie, with Shirley in tow, left the room before I had enough air to talk, to try out my theory on the duck pond metaphor. Mom stayed.
I sat up but could do little more than that with my hand trapped where it was. The bald Zaditorian finished installing a black bubble around my sister’s hand as Blanche/Sheryl crouched in front of me, smiling. “Hello, Charlie,” she said.
The bearded Zaditorian held Em a few feet away from May, but he did not imprison one of Em’s hands. Em looked angry, not scared, which surprised me. Mom stood behind Blanche, looking down on me with pride in her eyes like I’d just graduated preschool. “Why?” I said to her.
“Everything I’ve done is to make you the hero you are about to become,” she said.
“Everything?” I said, not trying to hide the disdain I felt for her right then. “So the heroin addiction, the child abuse, that was all part of the plan, huh?”
“You had to be damaged psychologically for reasons you won’t understand now.”
I was speechless as I tried to wrap my head around her absurd claim. The trauma I’d experienced as a child had been
