Blessed Child (24 page)

“So what did it feel like?”

“Like something . . . someone went through me. Something that touched my emotions, not just my nerves.”

He grinned. “We're talking Casper here? Actually, I think the good doctor's theory is slightly more plausible.”

“I'm serious, Jason.”

“I was there too, Leiah. Trust me. What we felt was definitely physical. It wasn't a flock of ghosts conjured from the past, and it certainly wasn't the invisible hand of God come down to knock us all from our feet. Please, get real.”

She turned a shade of pink, and he knew that he'd hit on something.

“You're not serious, are you? You can't actually believe this was spiritual?” In reality he'd had similar thoughts just last evening, but now those thoughts seemed distant and absurd. “I've seen what a band of Holy Ghosters can do, and believe me, in the end it all adds up to
nada
. Absolute zero.”

She nodded and pursed her lips defiantly. “Well, we're not exactly in tune with the fundamentals of mathematics here, in case you hadn't noticed. Maybe your little run-in with the hallelujah folks at the Holy Ghost church didn't add up to much, but neither is anything else right now. Nobody—and that includes your Dr. Caldwell—knows what's going on here except Caleb. And Caleb isn't rambling on about what a joy it is being a psychic.”

“Caleb? What Caleb thinks he is and what he actually is are probably two very different things. You have to at least see that.”

“I don't see anything.”

“Exactly.”

They locked stares and then each took a drink. Leiah sighed heavily and ran a gentle hand over her temple. “He says his power comes from God,” she said. “It may be that no one really knows who God is. Maybe the Buddhists have it wrong, maybe the Muslims have it wrong, maybe the Hindus have it wrong, maybe the Christians have it wrong, and maybe even the God-is-in-the-trees people have it wrong. Who knows? But Caleb seems to think this power comes from outside of him, and I'm not so sure that I disagree anymore. It sure felt like something from the outside to me. That's all.”

“Well then, you can join the local ‘It's God' group, 'cause believe me, they'll be coming out of the woodwork. The lines are being drawn as we speak. All I can say is that if some higher power is responsible for all this, he's sure got a sick sense of humor.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning any God who could do what Caleb does and yet chooses not to is no God at all. If God empowered any one of your religious groups, including Christians, we would see that power all the time, wouldn't we? Supposedly Jesus walked the shores of Galilee healing the sick. He left promising his followers would do even greater things. But when you're the one in need of a miracle, he's conspicuously absent, isn't he? That's why I know Caleb's power is specifically
not
from God.”

“And this from who? A man who wants to fit God into a mathematical equation?”

“No. This from a man who lost his son after spending weeks begging your God to heal him,” Jason said.

Leiah stared at him directly for a moment. And then she sat back, softening. “I didn't say he was
my
God,” she said.

He had shed some light on the matter, he thought. What he said next came almost without his thinking. “You should know how that feels,” he said.

She tensed, and he hoped she didn't think he was referring to what he was. Unfortunately she did.

“Really? And why's that?”

“I don't know—”

“Because I know what it's like to suffer, is that it?”

She wielded an unreasonable tone that betrayed bitterness. He didn't know what to say.

“Because poor Leiah is covered from head to toe in nasty scars? Because anyone confined to the gutter with the lepers should know how it feels? Does that about sum it up?”

“No.”

She leaned forward, and he saw a fire in her eyes that frightened him. “No? You don't find my scars ugly, Jason? You don't look at me and wonder how I can stand to take my clothes off at night? It doesn't make your stomach turn?”

Her lips held a slight quiver. It felt like a spike had been driven through Jason's chest, and he was suddenly finding it hard to breathe. Heat washed down his spine, and he looked at his glass, immobilized.

“Oh, so now you can't even look at me, is that it!” She bit the words off, mocking. She slapped her hand on the table, palm down, and yanked on her sleeve.

“Well, look! Look at me! Like it or not,
this
is me!”

She had gone over some cliff in her mind, and Jason suddenly wanted to cry. He looked up at her arm because not to would have been like slapping her backhanded.

She'd pulled her sleeve up to her elbow, and in the very first instant he didn't recognize her arm as an arm, because it didn't look like an arm. It looked like a root from an oak tree, gnarled and discolored and rough like bark. But he knew it was her arm because he'd come to know her surgically repaired hands, and one of them was stuck on the end. He blinked and caught his breath, and he knew that she had seen that. But he couldn't help it. Nothing could have prepared him for the horror embedded in that strip of flesh she called her arm.

Almost immediately another sentiment flooded his belly. The empathy rose through his chest, and suddenly his throat was aching badly. He wanted to scream. He wanted to fall on his forehead and blubber like a baby. He wanted to beg her forgiveness and tell her that it would be all right.

But he could do nothing except stare at that arm and fight for breath.

When he tore his eyes away from it and lifted his head, Leiah's eyes were swimming in tears. Her face wrinkled in shame, and she slowly pulled her sleeve down.

“I'm sorry, Leiah. I'm so sorry,” he whispered. The words sounded silly and, in their own way, mocking. She shook her head and lowered her head. The moment was impossibly awkward, the kind woven into nightmares.

“Listen to me. Listen to me, Leiah. I don't care what your skin looks like. You hear me?”

If she did, she wasn't responding.

“Listen . . . please . . .”

And what could he possibly say that would mean anything to a woman with scars so deep? Her scars went past her skin to her heart. She'd bared herself to him, and now she hated herself for doing so. It had left her with a hemorrhaging heart. She sniffed and lowered her left hand to the table. It sat there trembling.

Jason moved almost without thinking. He reached across the table and placed his hand over the back of hers. She flinched and he closed his fingers around her fingers.

For endless seconds he just held her hand. Although her hand hardly showed any sign of the burning, certainly not the damage evident on her arm, it was the first time he'd touched her. And in that moment he wanted to touch her scars. To somehow identify with her. She touched her scars all day long; they were grafted onto her. And now he had joined her in a small way.

She relaxed her hand, and he pulled it to the center of the table and softened his grip.

“Look at me.”

She looked up slowly. She hardly resembled the fiery fighter he'd come to know. Now she was Leiah, the wounded girl who would cry if you looked at her too long.

“Now I'm going to say something that comes from my heart, and I guess it's up to you whether or not you believe it. I look at you and I see nothing but goodness. Your heart is as big as the ocean, and I know where all the love in this world has gone to. But it's more. It's not just on the inside. You are one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.”

He paused. It was a bit sensational, but the moment begged for it. And he wanted to give it.

“Do you hear me? You have eyes that most women would kill for. Your face is as smooth as cream and your hair's as shiny as the sea. That's what I see, soft and smooth. And if this all seems a bit melodramatic, you'll just have to forgive me. I see you on the street and you make me blink, because I forget how stunning this woman who I met in an obscure monastery in Ethiopia really is.”

She searched his eyes for a few long seconds, and then a small sheepish grin curved her lips.

They were like that, their hands together, when Jason saw Donna out of the corner of his eye. He smiled at Leiah, suddenly shy. “It's the truth. Tell me you believe me.”

She'd seen Donna walking their way as well, and for a second she looked panicked. But she recovered quickly.

“I'll give it some thought,” she said.

He released her hand.

Donna saw them pull their hands apart, and she approached wearing a wide grin. So then he was interested in her. She was being beaten out by a woman covered in scars. You see what happens when you get lost in this career of yours, Donna? You let the best ones go and they get snatched up right in front of your nose.

Actually there was something about Leiah that she admired. She had a fire that blazed true. And truth be told, with the scars covered she was quite attractive. Jason had always been a sap for a sad sack. It was no surprise he was attracted to a beautiful woman who was obviously hurting. By the looks of them, they may very well have just shared an emotional moment.

“Well, well. Forgive the intrusion, my dear lovebirds, but I was invited to this party, right?”

She pulled out a seat adjacent to them and sat. “Am I right?”

“Of course,” Jason said. “Thank you for coming. We were just talking about what a job you've done, Donna. My goodness, it's been what, three days, and you've managed to make our little boy the center of attention, coast to coast. Would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you. I try to do my best. That was the point, wasn't it? And I would love some coffee.”

Jason motioned at a waitress, who nodded and went off for a coffeepot.

“Actually you should be thanking Caleb for his popularity. All I did was get the camera there and check for hidden wires. He did the rest, although I will say he had me going for a while there. Have you ever seen such an innocent kid?”

“I didn't realize how much power the camera has,” Jason said.

“And still there are doubters.”

“You'd expect that.”

Donna nodded.

“I suppose we owe you our gratitude,” Leiah said. She seemed subdued and distant. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“Although I will say, you don't seem to be holding back.” That was more like her.

“Never. I've always said, if you see something that looks worthwhile, grab it before someone else does.” She glanced at Jason. “Unfortunately, I don't always get there first.”

“Well, you got there first on this one, didn't you?” he said without batting an eye.

“I guess I did, Jason.”

“And how's the view from up front?”

The waitress filled her cup with hot black coffee, and Donna thanked her.

“The view. Well, for starters there's the media. Nikolous told me this morning that they've received interview requests from over two hundred media sources.”

“Two hundred? There
are
that many?”

“Are you kidding? Trust me—many more. He's denied them all, of course. There will only be one interview, next week after this has had time to mushroom, and that will be my interview.” She smiled and took a sip of coffee.

They didn't look impressed.

“Anyway, if the next meeting is anything like the last one, the media will be slobbering all over itself. This time all the majors will be there, and with any luck, it'll just be the beginning.”

“I'm sure Caleb has his critics in all of this,” Leiah said.

“Oh, there'll be critics, honey. But so far it's a general scramble to explain exactly what happened. There's your typical wholesale rejection from the most conservative types. Mostly religious pundits.”

“Really? I'd think the religious folks would eat this up,” Jason said.

“A lot of them are. But it also threatens a ton of dogma. Think of it. How would you react if you were someone who believed that only the powers of darkness pull these sorts of tricks today? You'd have to either discount the event altogether—some kind of optical illusion or something—or you'd have to pal the kid up with the devil. Trust me, the former is much easier. Either way, most aren't so quick to draw conclusions. Rabbis, sheiks, priests, theologians . . . they're picking their way through interviews as if they were caught in the middle of a minefield. Problem is we have an undeniable bona fide occurrence of the paranormal caught on film. They can't deny it, so they're forced to at least consider it. But they're being very cautious.” She shook her head thinking of several interviews she'd seen.

“Give them time,” Jason said. “Within a week they'll have him labeled as everything from Moses to the Antichrist.”

Across the room a television mounted to the wall beside the bar showed images of street fighting in the Middle East. Give them ten minutes and the chances of Caleb's face filling the screen was pretty decent, she thought. There was a momentum building on this one that came along maybe once a decade or so. In this election year where the race was boringly one-sided, the media was jumping.

“And what about in the real world?” Jason asked.

Donna nodded. “There seems to be a consensus that follows Dr. Caldwell's explanation. She's making the rounds. Putting a UCLA professor in front of the camera holding up her old wire-frame glasses comes off quite nicely. Of course there are other theories—all the talking heads seem to have one—but they're pretty much all variations on some sort of psychokinesis.”

She smiled. “Wait until the next meeting. It's one thing for one camera to catch something extraordinary. It's something altogether different when fifty cameras catch it.”
It would be a zoo,
she thought. Which was fine; she lived for zoos. “It's gonna be one heck of a ride, and pardon me for saying so, kids, but I wouldn't miss it for the world.”