Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1) (5 page)

I’m worried he’ll want to come closer, to hug me, but he maintains some distance. He fidgets as though he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, or whether to sit or stand, or even what to say, and his shocked, wet gaze doesn’t wander from my face.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, you look like her. I thought… I wasn’t prepared for that.”

“Like who?” I asked, even though I know. Even though the tremble in my voice makes me sound like an emotional ten-year-old instead of the almost-grown woman I am.

His hands grip the back of one of the visitor’s chairs, knuckles stark white. “Abigail. Your mother.”

Abigail. My mother. Robert, my father.

“What’s my name? Did I have one? How did you guys know each other? How did I get… lost?”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down. Let me just…” He collapses into the chair, hands shaking as they grip the armrests. He takes a huge breath, then another. “That’s better.”

He smiles, and I smile, and the tension in the room pops like a balloon. My ears hurt. My chest hurts. This is so awkward, but wonderful, too. I feel ready to rush ahead but also hesitant. The world spins too fast, until I want to feel everything, ask everything, yet I crave silence at the same time.

“We have as long as you want to talk about the details, Norah.”

“Norah?”

“That’s your name. Norah Jane Crespo. Your seventeenth birthday is tomorrow.”

“I’m already seventeen,” I reply automatically, unsettled by the influx of information.

Everything would be different now. My name. My age. What else?

“You’re not. But it doesn’t matter. If you want to keep the birthday they gave you, that’s fine.” His voice rumbles, quiet and honest. Not forceful. His eyes won’t hold mine. They touch my gaze and then flutter away, as though looking at me makes him uncomfortable, or sad.

For some reason, I expect him to be angry. That years were taken away from us, that other people have raised me, lied to me, but aside from nerves, he seems steady. At peace with not only this bizarre situation, but with the world.

It’s a curious countenance. One I’ve never experienced before, and it’s almost too good to be true. Mole is the Cavy closest to being content with life, accepting that things will work out the way they’re meant to, but even if the others don’t know he wishes his gift were different—nonlethal—I know that he would like to change at least that one thing about his life.

“I believe you,” I answer, trying to mimic my father’s peace as I settle on the edge of the bed and dangle my legs over the side. The shifting bedrock under my feet is something I’ll have to get used to since nothing—
nothing
—can stay the way it was, or be the way I imagined or the way I dreamed.

My mind gropes for answers, ones that can maybe form the beginning of a new foundation. “Can you tell me about the day I was born?”

He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Not upset, I don’t think, but stealing a moment to gather his thoughts. There’s sorrow in his heavy glance. “I wasn’t there when you were born. Your mother and I were in high school, and I didn’t even know she was pregnant until her parents sent her away to an alternative school for the duration.”

“What’s an alternative school?”

“It’s a place run by a religious sect where some parents send their daughters to hide the fact that they got pregnant out of wedlock. After the girls give birth the sect finds a home for the baby and the mothers are forced to return home as though nothing happened.” He sucks in a breath. “That’s what they tried to do to Abby, but she never wanted to give you away, not for a single second. I know she never forgot you.”

The words gather in the air, surround my feet, and settle next to me on the bed, a steaming stew of letters and sentences. I’m afraid if I slurp them all down they’ll never rearrange into the proper order, never make sense, so I sit among my own story, afraid to touch. Afraid to move.

“The… Were they nuns?” I’ve seen those in movies but don’t feel sure of the term. It must be close because he shrugs, then nods. “So, they gave the babies away. To whom?” My lips feel numb. If my father’s words steam, mine slide across my mouth like cubes of ice.

“I don’t know. Your mother raised hell but couldn’t learn where they sent you, and I’m not sure if your grandparents knew, either. Maybe they didn’t want to.”

Grandparents.
More people poised on the threshold of my new life. People who had forced my mother to leave her life, who had been ashamed of a baby they never knew, but still. Family.

The word turns over in my mind, and the sudden pressure of all these new people and expectations and
changes
makes it hard to breathe.

The man, my father, doesn’t seem to notice, kind of lost in his own memories. “Abigail and I exchanged letters while she was at the school. We talked about you, mostly. She was sure you’d be a girl, and we agreed on your name. Wondered if there was a way to smuggle you out, for us to run away. But we knew there wasn’t. In the end, she and I hoped you would have a good life, with people who loved you like we did.”

He meets my gaze again, with a reassuring smile this time. “I would like for you to consider coming to live with me, Norah, but I understand if this is all too much to take in. You’re not a baby. You’re hardly a child, and this is your decision.”

“What decision?”

“Whether you want to come home with me when the hospital and the police discharge you. There are options.”

The words make sense now, yet they don’t. Decisions, choices… those aren’t things that have ever belonged to me. “What options?”

“They can place you in foster care with a different family. Or a group home, if you’re more comfortable with that. Some of the other children that you grew up with will probably end up in one of those situations. From what I understand, not everyone’s parents can be found.”

A fissure cracks me down the middle. An ache erupts, a need to know this man who helped create me, even if he has had no other impact on the girl I’ve become. Am becoming. Hot on its heels is a slimy fear, one that suggests in a snakelike whisper that perhaps he doesn’t
actually
want me. That he’s here out of duty, obligation, guilt, and nothing more.

“What do
you
want?” I manage, my voice small.

Tears gather in his eyes with more force, trembling on his bottom lashes before one drops down his cheek. “I want a second chance.”

The firm, quick response surprises me. It sounds as though he wants me to go home with him, for us to have the chance at the relationship that was taken from us years ago, but I’m not sure that’s all he wants, or that the tears are only for the lost chances with me. Grief hangs on him almost as strongly as his peace, making him hard to read.

My concentration on trying to decipher his feelings makes me slow, too slow, when he reaches for my hand. His fingers grip mine too tight for me to pull away, and a set of numbers flash in front of my eyes. Black, like always. No details. There never are.

83

The news is not bad—my father can’t be older than thirty-five, which means that if I decide to go with him, to get to know him and maybe build blood into something more, we have time.

A wet sob dampens my throat, and I clamp my fingers around his. It’s been years since my skin has touched anyone else’s. Since the doctors and researchers gave up making me practice, satisfied that there was nothing more to my gift. Nothing they can use to kill, or alter, or predict. It’s just information. Useless on its own.

Like me.

He’s going to die. I’m staring at a dead man, but the fact that it’s far away, and that he’ll be an old man, calms my typical nausea after seeing a number.

Everyone dies, Gypsy.

A deep breath helps steady my nerves, and the quiet in the room helps me hear the answer that’s struggling to escape from beneath my crushing uncertainty. “I think it would be nice. To try.”

His body comes alive from the top down—eyes brighten, shoulders and back straighten, and then his legs propel him from the chair. He tugs me up and grasps my other hand, and the number
83
recedes to a transparent blink on the edge of my vision the longer we’re connected.

It’s the same age most people expect to lose a parent. Breathe
.

“Thank you, Norah.”

A law-enforcement agent of some sort pushes the door open without knocking, then stands by the door, avoiding looking at us. “I’m sorry, Mr. Crespo. I’m here to ask a few more questions and get contact information, and then she can go home as soon as the doctors discharge her.”

“Don’t be sorry. Do your job so my daughter can start putting this behind her.”

Putting what behind me? My life? The Cavies?

It’s not possible for me to make a cut, to sever past from present, and confusion tugs on my heart. I don’t know what to feel or what I’m
supposed
to feel, and fatigue swamps me.

Robert lets go of my hands, and I lose more than the winking number. The break in contact steals warmth and promise, and even though it’s silly—neither of us is going anywhere—the thought of being alone nudges confusion toward panic. I don’t know this man at all, but the Cavies, the family I want, aren’t here. They’re not
going
to be here, and without thinking, I adjust.

My hand darts out, snatching Robert’s fingers again as the young cop starts down the same list of questions they’ve had for two days, and I answer. Betray the Cavies, the Philosopher, the people who raised me, one more time.

We go over everything. What I remember from the beginning, our daily life at Darley. I leave out the things I skipped during previous interrogations—about our powers, what the laboratories were used for on a regular basis, and let them believe what they want about the nature of the Philosopher’s research—but am honest about the other kids, our friendships, and that none of us were unhappy or mistreated.

Whether or not that means an easier sentence for my caretakers is impossible to know. But I feel compelled to protect them, as they’ve done me. All of us. If everyone’s story turns out to be the same as mine, if we were all given away by our parents or nuns or whatever, the Philanthropist and the Philosopher and the Professor… they didn’t do anything wrong. Not really.

The officer takes my father’s address and phone number—
my
address and phone number, now—and turns off his tape recorder. A doctor enters, the officer leaves. I’m free to go.

Free.
To go.

Chapter Four

“It’s not too homey or anything. It’s just me.”

My father gestures me over the threshold of a Charleston single house, white with black shutters, two piazzas running down one side. The scents of pine cleaner and bleach gush out the door, mingling with the tendrils of jasmine and magnolia wafting up from the garden. When he flicks a switch, the fluorescent light makes me squint. We’re in a laundry room, two bright-white appliances situated underneath cabinets, a tiled floor leading through an open doorway into a good-sized modern kitchen built around a giant marble-topped island.

He leads the way through the house, flipping on more lights as we cross into a living room covered with dark hardwood floors. My eyes struggle to adjust to the brightness and clutter, as they have since leaving Darley. Every last inch of space is utilized, ordered, overfilled. The real world is a study in excess. Light, sound, people—there’s so much of everything.

The living room kind of reminds me of the Clubhouse in that the furniture doesn’t match and there’s too much of it. There’s a giant sectional, but the fat end piece, like something Cleopatra would have reclined on while being fed grapes, is off-white instead of the khaki color of the rest of it. The bookshelves that surround a nook under the windows are mismatched, too—one white, one black, both overflowing—and flank a chocolate suede recliner. Lamps are scattered here and there, all aglow, and there’s an armoire and television that wouldn’t fit on any of the four walls in my cabin.

The movies we watched at Darley made us feel as though our lives aren’t that different, that we understand what it’s like for kids our age in this world, the one outside, but the pressure on my chest promises that’s not true. Nothing feels familiar or good or welcoming.

Nothing feels like home.

“What do you think?” He looks sheepish, and the house could be tidier. “It’s not much, but I think there’ll be plenty of room for both of us once you settle in, and it’s close to where you’ll be attending school.”

“Traditional school,” I try, copying Sandra’s words. My voice shakes.

“Well, regular school. You’ll have to be tested so they know where to place you, but we should be able to get that taken care of so you can get started before winter break.”

“Okay.” Tests I understand. They don’t scare me. Jumping into a building full of strangers is another story.

There’s still a shift toward excitement, of anticipation, at meeting kids who are normal. Who don’t have the ability to stop a heart beating in a chest, or fly around the world in less than ten minutes, or burn a house down with a concentrated glance. It’s small, struggling to stay alight among my nerves, but there.