Flutter (2 page)

I looked at Dr. Chen now. “If you believed me, you would test my theory and quit shutting me down. I mean, what’s wrong with you people?” I locked eyes with Dr. Chen. “Help me convince him,” I said, gesturing to Dad.

Dr. Chen’s eyes met Dad’s, and I hated the understanding that passed between them, the silent agreement that I was wrong. But worse than that was the pity. A fresh wave of exhaustion washed over me. I gave in to it, let my head sink into the pillow, and let the urgency of being understood fold in on itself inside me. It was always there, an uncomfortable weight in my chest, a bitter seed.

Dad rose from his chair, signaling the end of our conversation. “You are our number one concern,” he said, shaking his finger at me. The same finger that had wagged at me when he had caught me painting with nail polish on my
bathroom wall or smuggling green olives under the table to Pancake.

His number one concern and a significant scientific breakthrough. I was sure Dad could already see his byline on the
Harvard Medical Review
abstract or the
Time
magazine article.

I closed my eyes then, signaling to them that I needed to rest. But I added one more thing.

“You were there again, Dad. Today.”

Silence. He didn’t believe me. I knew that. I heard him whisper something to Dr. Chen. The scratching of a pencil on paper.

I was exhausted from my loop and from having to keep up with the differing feelings that I had for my father. How could the future version of Dad be so supportive when the present-day Dad was everything but? It opened up too many questions. Was Dad destined to become that version of himself at Setina Park, or was that just one possible path? Too many big questions I had worried about for too many years. The truth was I just didn’t know.

I glanced at the pink notebook on my bedside table. Part of me wanted to record my data before I drifted off. I usually did, almost always. I thought about the stacks of filled-up notebooks in my closet at home. Where had it all gotten me? No closer to control, no closer to understanding it, proving it, owning it. No closer to the big question. Why?

I heaved a deep sigh and let my body relax, my eyes close. I could record my information in the notebook later. I would wait to write down my encounter with Dad, his warnings, the uneasiness.

“You were there,” I said again to Dad stubbornly.

I was drifting off to sleep and to whatever else, but I knew the look that had been exchanged between Dr. Chen and Dad. I had seen it many times before.

My eyes fluttered. I saw the crisp, pale blue of the hospital room wall for a moment. It looked cold. I felt cold.

I closed my eyes.

I felt the exhaustion wash over me and my body relax.

I began to seize again. In a moment, my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened. My breath came in fits and starts. Then the smell of ammonia. And I was gone, in a flash, back to the loop. Back to my other … my other me … my other places. My other times.

Ammonia. I open my eyes, and I’m there—this time with the boy
.

“Hi,” I say
.

He smiles back at me. He must be nine or ten, gangly, all teeth and ears. I think briefly that I should ask his name, but it doesn’t seem important. I’m already feeling Zen
.

I blink a few times. The colors are bright, as always. It’s sunny, very sunny. Cheery. Happy. We are on Next Hill again, by the well. Clusters of clover bloom in the grass around me, and I can smell them so clearly
.

I raise my head and breathe in a big gulp of fresh air, and I feel the calming buzz of the loop wash over me. A soothing, electric sensation radiates through my core, my limbs, my head. I’m content, serene
.

The boy takes my hand then and pulls me up. I realize for the first time that I must have been sitting. His hand feels exactly real in mine, a small, tanned-from-the-sun hand grasping my own
.

The grass is knee-deep here on the hill, and I take in the view of the farm below, the red barn, the blue-and-yellow farmhouse, the multiple outbuildings. Everything beautifully maintained. A picture postcard. I think briefly of when I first met the boy down in that red barn, where he showed me many of his treasures: the Victrola, the early windup jukebox—antiques to me, yet marvels to this young boy in this past time
.

My boy yells, “Come on!” and yanks me in the opposite direction from the barn. He takes off toward the stream at a good clip, pulling me after him, and my legs feel rubbery, heavy, less coordinated than they do at home
.

I trip. I stumble a bit and then find my rhythm. He laughs and pulls me faster. I’m slow, thick, as I always am in the loop
.

But I am here
.

We are at the stream, and he lets go of my hand and kneels down. “There!”

I crouch down, miscalculating the incline of the stream bank, and land on my butt. I laugh and then see what it is that he’s showing me
.

“Tadpoles!” I say
.

He takes a jar from his knapsack and dips it into the stream, attempting to capture a few of the tiny fish-frogs
.

I dip my hand in the water and try to swish the little tadpoles
into the jar, but my movements are awkward. I watch the boy gracefully scoop the jar out of the water, and then he’s sealing the top in a moment. He smiles at me
.

“They’ll be frogs soon,” he says
.

“But right now they’re just happy to be swimming around, aren’t they?” I say. “Look, that one is starting to grow feet!”

“Heavens to Betsy!” the boy says with a laugh
.

I find this funny and giggle, watching the smile on my boy’s face. We stare at the four little tadpoles swimming in the jar for a long moment
.

A cool breeze catches my hair, and I watch as the boy takes his jar up the bank a few feet and settles in the tall green grass, sitting cross-legged, a serious look on his face, a look of concentration
.

I turn to join him on the bank and lose my footing. I trip and land on my knees in the shallowest part of the stream. The water is cold on my skin. The bubbling and gurgling of the stream, which has been in the background, registers in my ears now. Through the clear blue water, the stones on the bottom are many shades of greens and blues and grays. A fish swims quickly by and startles me
.

It is then that I stand up, and out of the corner of my eye, I see a movement in the stream, at the farthest point of my eye line. A slinking blackness on the surface of the water. A shape, a motion that seems a bit unnatural. Shadows, but not really. Instantly—oddly—I think of an old black-and-white movie being projected onto the surface of the stream
.

I don’t like the way the water moves on my skin now. I have
goose bumps, and I don’t like how the sun has gone behind a cloud. I don’t like the stillness on Next Hill or the look on my boy’s face either
.

I feel a bit on edge. I think briefly of Dad in the other loop and the heron
.

I look again at the surface of the stream. All I see is the clear, pale blue. I think of the hospital room wall then
.

I steal one more glance at the boy’s face. He looks serious, almost grim. The colors come in my peripheral vision now—I see them like a prism, feel them there, and I know I’m going
.

“Can you help me?” he pleads
.

“What?” I say, feeling the familiar thrum begin behind my eyes
.

“Please, help me,” he says
.

“I’ll be back,” I say
.

“Esperanza,” he says. And now he smiles
.

And I am gone
.

The intercom clicked on, and then I heard the nurse’s voice. “Did you need something, hon?”

“No, I just accidentally hit the button,” I answered, rolling my eyes at myself.

The intercom clicked again. “Emery, you didn’t eat any of your breakfast.”

“Loretta, it smelled like pickled eyeballs.”

“Do you need some chocolate?” Loretta’s voice asked.

“No thanks,” I answered. But then I thought better of it, pushed the button again. “Something with peanut butter.” Loretta laughed her crazy, loud laugh, and I heard it in stereo, over the speaker and through the open door of my hospital room.

“I’ll bring you a snack in a while.” Loretta didn’t know
what was wrong with me, but she was pretty sure it could be cured with chocolate.

I flicked the power button on the side of my laptop and sat myself up more comfortably in the bed. I opened up my pink notebook and recorded the date, the time of my last two loops. I described them clinically, scientifically, avoiding emotion and sentiment. But it was difficult to be that way, now that my loops were becoming something
more
. They were usually calm—mundane, really. Just my boy and me fishing in the stream behind his barn, snacking on blackberries, not talking much. Or a very old and very bald Dad teaching me how to drive a stick shift on some nameless country road, snorting with laughter while I ground the gears and swore under my breath. And sometimes it was just me. Me sitting cross-legged in the sand, staring out at the surreal turquoise water, running my fingers through the clean white sand. Me eating ice cream in my backyard. Me alone with a feeling of completeness. A feeling of calm. These were normal loops.

Requests for help, warnings from Dad, these were new developments. And even though there was no official scientific term for
freaked out
, that didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling it.

I stared at the last sentence in my notebook.
Esperanza
. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that in Spanish it meant “hope.” I grabbed my laptop, searched for the meaning. There it was.
I was right.
Esperanza
= “hope.” I wrote that down in my notebook, circling and underlining the words. What did my boy want me to glean from this?

I sighed. I wasn’t too familiar with hope lately. The Spanish or English version.

What did my boy mean by it? Did he
hope
that I could help him? Why the Spanish version? I remembered the fleeting panic in his eyes when he asked if I could help him.

Then I wrote down one more word:
scared
.

I closed the notebook and my computer, and shoved them onto my bedside table, my vision finally beginning to clear from the loop, the headache shrinking. I looked around my room.

Long-term patients—lifers, as some called themselves— liked to bring things from home, make their rooms more comfortable, more personal. Heather down the hall had recently gotten permission from the board to paint a mural on her wall.

I stared at the blank, pale blue of my walls. There were no knickknacks. No pictures. No signs of life.

This would not be my life.
Could
not be my life.

I had planned to leave this place many times. I made the decision constantly, on again and off again in my mind, but had never actually left. I thought that … that they would eventually believe me. They didn’t. They wouldn’t even listen.

I would give Dad and the team one more chance, and if it didn’t work, if they didn’t do a one-eighty and believe me wholeheartedly, well, then I was going to leave.

I pushed away my hospital blankets and climbed out of the bed, nearing the window to get a good look at the Ann Arbor sky. It was blue and sunny—clear and bright, the trees bare and vulnerable, bracing for the upcoming winter.

It had been a long time since I had felt free and young and not so exhausted. I thought about the possibility of hiking down by Brock Point or riding my bike out by the lake. I thought of last fall, how Gia and I had gone to a Halloween party near the lake with a handful of kids from school. We had carved pumpkins and toasted the seeds over an open fire. Gia’s pumpkin had definitely looked a lot like Johnny Hatfield, her old next-door neighbor. It was the gap in the teeth.

I laughed at the memory.

That seemed like a lifetime ago. The loops were taking so much out of me now. Only months ago I had spent my days at Loganbridge Academy, at the ballet studio, being normal—or quasi-normal—with only my nights captive to the loops. But now I was too worn, too wiped out to even leave the hospital some days. Things were obviously getting worse, and getting worse quickly.

I had had such high hopes for figuring this all out when Dad had proposed the “team” to me, the study. I had been so
happy to have someone, anyone, listen to me and even half believe me that I had jumped at the chance.

Nights at the hospital? No problem. How naive I had been.

As I pondered my looming final face-off with Dad and my team of doctors, I started to wonder which I wanted more: for them to finally believe me or for me to just pack my bags.

Maybe I could start midsemester at school.

No, that was crazy. I was in no physical shape for anything, really. I knew that.

Maybe Nan and I could finally go visit Monet’s bridge, go to Giverny, paint it ourselves, like we had talked about for so long.

I decided to get some breakfast after all.
Maybe eggs
, I thought as my brush got tangled in my curls. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. I looked the same—same blue eyes and red hair, same fair skin, same long, slightly off-center nose, just like Mom’s. Nan always called it elegant.

But I looked different somehow. Beaten.

I slipped on my robe, and once I was convinced I was at least hospital-type presentable, I walked out into the hallway and pressed the elevator button.

A few of the newer nurses stared a bit. I was used to it. I knew I was the freak on the grounds. I waved over to Loretta at the nurses’ station.

I rode the elevator down to the cafeteria, aware that I
had my arms crossed over my chest the whole way. Everything was so squeaky-clean, so shiny. So very clinical. Even the elevator buttons looked free of smudges and smears and signs of life. I didn’t want to touch a thing, as if becoming familiar with my surroundings would somehow mean I was accepting my fate here.