Absolutely Captivated (4 page)

“So you’ll tell me?”
Travers asked, feeling a bit like a supplicant. He had felt out of
control with his son since Kyle started school. The outside
influences severed a bond between them, one that had seemed so
tight that it almost felt as if they knew what each other was
thinking. At times, Travers wanted that bond back. At others, he
simply wanted to know how come he no longer understood his own
son.

“Weird,” Kyle said, sitting up and
crossing his legs, “is one of those cool words that people don’t
use right.”

Travers bit his lower lip. He didn’t
want to say anything, but at the same time, he didn’t want a
lecture. And Kyle was good at lectures.

“It means ‘mysterious’ or,
you know like ‘ghostly’ or something. It comes from the Old English
word ‘wyrd’ with a ‘y’ which means, literally, fate.”

Kyle put his elbows on his knees and
leaned forward, his hands expressing his thoughts as if he couldn’t
speak without them.

“In Norse mythology, there’s these
three women. They’re called the Wyrd Sisters—with a ‘y’—and they
control fate, literally. Their real name is the Norn, and one of
the sisters—I think the one who controls the past—is called Wyrd,
which is kinda confusing, I know, but kinda cool, too—“

“Kyle,” Travers said. He already had
too much information.

Kyle nodded, as if
he realized he was telling his father too much. “Okay, so when I
asked you if you thought they were weird, I meant strange, but not
in the way that people mean when they call
me
weird. When they call
me
weird, they don’t
mean weird, they mean dork. When I called
them
weird, I meant it in the
coolest possible way. Like they were bound by tree limbs, you
know?”

“Bound by tree limbs?” Travers
couldn’t help but ask.

“Like the Wyrd sisters.
They guard the root of this tree, Yggdrasill, which is in the
middle of the world. The Wyrd sisters guard the root that extends
into earth, which the Norse called Midgard. There are two other
roots. One goes to the underworld, and the third goes to the home
of the frost giants. Which isn’t important, but is
cool.”

“Yeah,” Travers said.
“Cool.”

“But all day, as
we’ve been riding with these women, I kept thinking of the Wyrd
Sisters. I wrote a comic book for Vivian called
Defender of the Fates
, and it dealt
with the Fates, remember, Dad?”

Travers nodded, although he didn’t.
All of Kyle’s comic book plots and drawings seemed the same to
Travers which, his sister Vivian said, had a lot more to do with
Travers than with Kyle.

“Well, if you look
at the pictures, you see all three women. They look just like those
ladies next door. And they talk like them, too, all jumbled up, and
interrupty, and everything.” Kyle’s cheeks were flushed. He was
excited to be talking about this. “And if you look at the Defender,
she looks kinda like Aunt Viv, and she falls in love with this guy
who looks like Uncle Dex, only I wrote it before I met him. And
when we were coming up to the wedding, I started a new comic book
called
Fates’ Clues
, and in it, there’s these same three women—only I was going
to look up the Wyrd sisters, and kinda use them as the basis, and
then there’s this other woman who’s a detective and she looks like
that movie actress, that chocolate one?”

It took Travers a minute to follow
that. “You mean Juliette Binoche.”

“Yeah, her. Only tall, with a dancer’s
legs, and a longer face, but just as pretty—maybe
prettier—”

“I get it,” Travers said.

“And I keep thinking that
maybe I’m not making this stuff up. Maybe I’m, like, channeling it
from the future, you know? Like Aunt Viv.”

“Your Aunt Vivian can’t see the
future.” Travers knew that for certain. Sometimes she knew—in a
very uncanny way—what someone else was thinking. And she could
figure out all sorts of odd things, like who was going to call the
moment before the phone rang, but she almost never saw the
future.

Although every once in a
while, she would pass out—which used to scare the whole family when
Vivian started the practice in high school—and she would come to
with the most amazing stories of things she’d seen. She called them
visions. Their mother called them dreams, and Aunt Eugenia, who,
before her death, used to pamper Viv, called them
normal.

There was nothing normal
about those visions, and watching Viv go through them was the only
time in Travers life that he was glad he and his siblings weren’t
related by blood. They were all adopted, which anyone could tell by
looking at them—Viv with her dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair;
him, all tall and blond and Nordic; and round, chubby little
red-haired Megan, who wasn’t quite so little anymore.

“Sometimes she can see the future,”
Kyle said, and he sounded defensive.

Travers had mentally moved so far away
from the original remark that it took him a moment to realize that
Kyle was referring to Vivian, not Megan.

“But mostly, she kinda sees the
present—especially if it’s happening somewhere else.” Kyle had an
expression on his face that Travers hadn’t seen before. The
expression was a combination of defiance and hope. Kyle truly
believed this. “She saw Aunt Eugenia’s murder when it
happened.”

“Kyle!”

“It’s true.”

“Vivian told you that?” Travers asked,
thinking honeymoon or no honeymoon, he’d have a talk with his
sister about the stories she told his son.

“Nope.” Kyle’s voice was
soft. “I saw it, too.”

Travers folded his hands together,
looking at them and counting to ten, just like Megan told him to do
when his son said something he didn’t believe.

“You’re psychic,” Travers said as
calmly as he could.

“I think so.” Kyle’s voice was barely
above a whisper.

“You hear people’s thoughts,” Travers
said.

“Sometimes,” Kyle said.

“And you see the future,” Travers
said.

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I draw it. If you
look at my comic books, you’ll see a lot of stuff that I knew
before it happened. Like I knew all about Uncle Dex and Aunt Viv
when they met and stuff. I didn’t know I knew it, but I made a
comic book out of it and gave it to Aunt Viv before we left
Portland that first time.”

Travers raised his
head. Behind Kyle, some rock group was playing in the middle of
the
Tonight Show
soundstage. “You believe that?”

Kyle’s look of
anticipation faded. His entire face closed down. “No, of course
not,” he said in a perfectly normal tone of voice. “Why would
I?”

“But you told me about the comic
book,” Travers said.

“And it’s a good story, isn’t it?”
Kyle uncrossed his legs. His socks looked even greener in the light
from the TV.

“I thought you said this has something
to do with those women.” Travers was confused. He wasn’t quite sure
what Kyle had been trying to tell him.

“It does,” Kyle said. “They make me
think of the Wyrd Sisters, which is what made me think of the comic
book, and Aunt Viv, and stuff. I’m sorry, Dad. You know me. I just
get carried away.”

He did, too. He got caught
in his own imagination. Travers nodded. His stomach twisted, and he
felt, once again, as if he had lost control of the
conversation.

“I shouldn’t have agreed to bring
those women along with us,” Travers said. “I should have told them
to take the train or something.”

Kyle snorted. “Like they would’ve done
good on the train. They’d’ve been arguing in the station and missed
it.”

Travers nodded, in spite of himself.
The only reason the five of them were in this seedy hotel was
because the Wyrd Sisters, as his son called them, had argued about
the best place to stay for so long all the other hotels from
Medford to Ashland were full.

Travers had been tempted to drive all
night, but everyone, including Kyle, managed to talk him out of
that.

Kyle lay back down and
tucked his hands under his head. He watched Leno for a moment, then
as a Lexus commercial came on, he said, “You know, Dad, there’s
just one thing.”

Travers stood. He headed back to his
own bed. He was tired, more tired than he cared to admit. And this
conversation, like the day, had taken something out of
him.

“What’s that?”

“I have this feeling that
the Wyrd Sisters—they’re not supposed to go to L.A.”

“Yes, they are,” Travers said. “They
told me. Vivian told me. And they even offered me a free kitten if
I took them there.”

Kyle giggled. He’d seen
the kitten exchange, as had everyone else at the wedding. The Wyrd
Sisters had given a group of kittens—well-trained kittens, or so
they claimed—to anyone whom they trusted.

They claimed they trusted
Travers.

“Seriously, Dad, I don’t
think they’re supposed to go to L.A.,” Kyle said as his giggles
faded.

“Where are they supposed to go?”
Travers asked, knowing he would regret the question
later.

“Las Vegas.” Kyle
sounded very serious. “I keep seeing them escorting me through
the
Star Trek
Experience
.”

Travers grabbed his
paper-thin pillow and pummeled Kyle with it. Kyle laughed again,
grabbed his pillow, and whapped Travers with it. They had a good,
old-fashioned pillow-fight as the
Tonight
Show
theme song faded into the jazzy
opener for
Conan
O’Brien
.

Then he and Kyle collapsed on their
respective beds, sweaty and laughing, and very tired.

They agreed to go to sleep, and Kyle
went through his routine first, using the bathroom, brushing his
teeth, and putting on his pajamas. Travers shut off the television
and lay on his bed, thinking about the conversation.

It left him unsettled,
although he couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was the belief in Kyle’s
voice as he discussed his own psychic ability. Perhaps it was the
long day with the three chattering, oblivious women. Or perhaps it
was the mention of Las Vegas.

Travers had been avoiding
Las Vegas his entire life. He had no logical reason for doing so.
It was a numbers-man’s Mecca, a place where a CPA could meet a game
theorist could meet a statistician, and all of them would have
enough math to keep them happy for the rest of their lives. He
could watch the average person in a controlled gambling environment
and see his pet theories proven again and again.

Normally, most accountants
and mathematics fiends loved places like Vegas, where odds were a
way of life.

But Travers didn’t trust odds. They
never worked quite right for him. And he hadn’t discussed that with
anyone—especially not his superstitious family.

Fortunately, they
had never asked him how he paid for college after Kyle was born. He
didn’t want to tell them that he had done so with his lottery
winnings. Not that he had won the big Powerball Jackpots or
anything that spectacular. No. It was quite simple. He would stand
in front of the scratch-off counter in a convenience store and
know, somehow
know
, that the third ticket from the bottom was worth fifty
dollars. That was the only time he would then do the math. If he
made a profit after buying all the tickets to that one, he’d buy
them. If not, he’d tell the clerk that the third ticket from the
bottom was worth the fifty dollars. Later, the clerk would always
tell him he was right.

The weirder ones were
Powerball. He never hit the automatic number-choosing button. He
always closed his eyes and imagined the little Ping-Pong balls in
their little blower. He would see them come up—not the way they did
on TV—but with big red numbers above the rotating Ping-Pong balls,
as if someone, somewhere were trying to tell him which numbers
would win.

He never put in all of the numbers. He
just couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. So he’d see how low the pay-out was,
and put in three or four, and take home his $20,000 or his
$150,000. He never told anyone, and his name was never printed in
the paper. Only the people who ordered the names of the weekly
winners ever saw his. And they apparently never made the
connection.

Not even Kyle knew. Travers kept that
strange ability to himself, and lived as comfortably as he dared
without calling attention to his wealth. CPAs made good money. They
just didn’t make great money. So he made sure he looked like he was
worth good money and nothing more.

But Travers knew that as tempting as
Powerball was for him—and he had trouble walking past one of the
kiosks without seeing the damn red numbers—Vegas would be worse. He
always imagined himself watching the numbers come up correctly on
the roulette table or in craps or even at the blackjack table,
where math and luck lived together in an uneasy
alliance.