The Adventures of Flash Jackson (31 page)

“I rather suspected you might come today,” she said, lowering herself onto the sofa. Was it my imagination, or was she moving a little more gingerly? “I'd heard you were home, but I thought you might need a few days to recuperate before you ventured out into society.”

“You were right. It's been quite a summer,” I said. “Quite a year, all in all.”

“Yes, it has,” she said casually. Though the weather was warm, she was wearing a shawl that she drew close over her shoulders, warding off some imaginary chill.

“Do you have another one of those?” I asked, shivering—for in my case the chill was real.

She fetched me a plaid wrap from a closet and put it around my shoulders. “Scottish tartan,” she said, “of the clan Rory. I don't quite remember how I came to own it. I don't recall knowing any Rorys. Are you unwell?”

“I have worms,” I said. “Some kind of parasite.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, delicately. “Are you uncomfortable?”

“I felt fine until I came home,” I said. “Now I feel like dog chow.”

“Indeed,” said Miz Powell. “I have never felt like ‘dog chow' myself, but I can imagine it isn't pleasant.”

She sat down next to me and the two of us huddled up under our shawls like a couple of old crones. All we needed was a cauldron to make the image complete.

“Things have happened,” I told her. “Strange things. The Mother of the Woods is gone.”

She waved a hand in the air as if brushing away a fly. “This was what was going to happen all along,” she said. “We knew she wouldn't be around forever. Didn't we?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“She had her reasons for everything,” Miz Powell said.

“I guess I thought…she would stay until she found a…I don't know, a replacement or something.”

Miz Powell attempted a laugh. “Replacement? Now, there's an interesting notion,” she said. “Do you know of anyone who might fit that description?”

I knew what she was getting at, of course. I poured the tea out for both of us and we sipped it quietly.

“Sorry about Letty,” I said. “I know she was your good friend.”

“Yes,” said Miz Powell. “She certainly was.” But there was no sadness in her voice. The older one gets, for some people, the less frightening death becomes. It's as if the hood of the Grim Reaper gradually slips down with every passing year, and underneath one sees not a grinning skull but the face of an old and trusted friend.

“I suppose,” said Miz Powell, “that you're wondering what to do with yourself next.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That's pretty much it.”

“You haven't finished your schooling, if I remember correctly,” she said. “Your more conventional schooling, I mean. What do you call it here in the States? High school.”

“No,” I admitted, looking down at the floor. “I skipped this last year, so I still have two years to go. But…”

“I know,” she said. “You can't see yourself in that situation anymore. Not after all you've learned.”

“There are other ways to get an education,” I said. “More important ways.”

“You are correct, my dear,” she said. “The question to ask yourself now is, how might you be of service to the world? You
do
have a lot to offer, you know. The difference between the Haley I first met and the Haley of today is that today you possess unique abilities. Very few people know the things you know.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Don't guess unless you're being asked to guess,” she said, flaring briefly into her old self. “We're not discussing theories here. We're discussing fact.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“What worries you most, Haley?”

“I guess I don't want to be a wife,” I said. “Or a mother.”

Miz Powell spluttered with laughter.

“Well, who says you have to?” she said. “Look at me!”

“It's not that I don't want to be married,” I said. “I don't care, one way or the other. I mean, if it happens, it happens. But I don't want to
be a
wife
. I want to be a person who's married to another person.
My own
person.”

“For heaven's sake, at this age why are you even worrying about this now? Has someone asked you to marry them? Are you in love? Why?”

“Because,” I said, blushing. “Something happened.”

“Oho,” she said. “I see.” She reached over and patted me on the hand. “There may be a few generations between us, my dear, but I'm no stranger to what you're talking about,” she said. “Perfectly natural, and no harm done, provided the proper precautions were taken. Which I hope they were.”

I didn't say anything.

“Oh, dear,” said Miz Powell. “Well, there's a different story altogether, then.”

“You can say that again,” I said.

“Haley, you may very well end up having some decisions made for you, then. Carelessness rarely goes unpunished.”

“I know it,” I said. “That's why I wanted to have this conversation in the first place.”
It wasn't carelessness
, I thought.
It happened because…it happened
.

“Now I see what you were getting at,” said Miz Powell. “You feel you might be preg—”

“I am,” I said.

“Oh, dear.”

“Exactly.”

“You're certain?”

I nodded.

“And who was the lucky young man, may I ask?”

“Adam,” I said. “Adam Schumacher.”

“Tall lad, blond hair? Muscular? Lives down the road?”

“That's the one.”

“Well, then, I shouldn't wonder you succumbed to his charms.”

“Now, hold on there,” I said. “I didn't succumb to anything. He was the one doing all the succumbing. I know a little about pheromones.
I hadn't had a bath in months. And he loved it. He was no match for me.”

“I see,” said Miz Powell. She appeared to be trying to hide the huge amount of enjoyment she was getting out of this conversation. “So he was your victim, and the whole thing was your idea.”

“Well, no,” I said. “I mean, of course not.”

“So you succumbed to each other?”

“I guess you could say that.”

Miz Powell chuckled. “This was your first experience with a man, I take it?”

I nodded.

“And did you take a…shall I say, an
active role
in the proceedings?”

“Well,” I said, “mostly I just laid there.”

“I see. And yet he succumbed to you.”

I was starting to get uncomfortable. “I don't see what you're getting at,” I said.

“The point is, while your presence certainly aroused him, and therefore you could be said to have initiated the…ah, event—”

“That's what I call it,” I interrupted. “The Event.”

“—nevertheless, that all took place on a deeper level, an underlying level. His action, on the other hand—which I take it was swift and precipitous—”

“Indeed,” I said, dusting off my mental dictionary and paging through to the
P
's.

“—was the real
action
. Correct? You did say you ‘mostly just laid there.'”

“Yeah,” I said. “But so what? Was that wrong?”

“Honestly, Haley,” said Miz Powell. “There is no right and wrong in this situation. I am merely trying to teach you something about the dynamics between men and women. We succumb to each other, dear. We fall towards each other. It's like planets in space. When one is bigger than the other, the smaller is left to circle around it, stuck forever in orbit. And when one is falling faster or slower, or is bigger or smaller,
than the other—that's when unhappiness occurs. We must always move in tandem if we are to coexist. We must be the same size. This I know.”

“Miz Powell,” I said, “if you know so much about men, why didn't you ever get married?”

“There's your answer right there,” she said, winking. “I know
too
much about them.”

“Right,” I said.

“Now, enough of this romantic nonsense. Let's get down to brass tacks. Will you keep the baby?”

“I won't have an abortion,” I told her. “But I maybe would give it up to someone else. I don't know. I'm still pretty young to be a mother.”

She nodded. “By some standards, yes,” she said.

“By my standards,” I corrected her. “I don't want to be stuck at home, like most women around here are, and I don't want to have to devote all my energy to other people. Like kids. Or men. And I don't want to stop feeling like I feel right now.”

“How do you feel right now?”

“Awake,” I said. “Besides these damn worms, I feel great. Awake and curious, and full of energy. And power. And…”

She waited.

“Zam,” I finished, rather lamely.

Miz Powell clapped her birdy little hands together. “Well said,” she said. “Exactly what I was hoping to hear you say.”

“You were?”

“Yes.”

“Why's that?”

“Haley,” said Miz Powell, “what I have wanted to tell you since the day we met in the stable, when you swore at me like a pirate, is…don't be afraid to become a woman.”

I balanced my teacup on my leg and cocked my head at her, not sure if I'd heard her right.

“I didn't know I had a choice in the matter,” I said.

“You don't,” said Miz Powell. “Which is exactly my point.”

“All right,” I said. “I'm definitely not following you.”

“Don't be afraid to be all the things that a woman can be,” she said. “Because none of it means you can't be all the things you
want
to be. Now do you follow?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“You can be a mother and still be Haley,” she said. “You can cook dinner for your family and still be free. I'm not saying your life is going to be independent of the people involved in it. You have to make the right decisions. But you can have a baby and still be yourself. You can fulfill traditional roles if you want to, without letting them define you. Who you are will change when you have children, of course, but you could let it be an improvement, not a detraction.”

“I don't mean to be rude, but how do you know all this?” I said. “You never did any of those things.”

“No,” she said. “What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn't exactly move over and make room for me—I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That's something some women don't seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away.
Everyone
has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you—you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there is nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That's what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”

“I sort of know that,” I said.

“Deep down, you do,” she said. “I know you do. But you've been fighting it. Yet there is a part of you that's been fascinated by it, also. Yes?”

I had to admit she had a point. Here at last was the guidebook I'd been looking for, the traveler's companion to the journey I was on.
“I've never known anyone like you,” I said. “I wish I'd known you a lot sooner.”

“You wouldn't have appreciated me if you had,” she said. “The time wasn't right.”

“Yeah, but how did you know it
was
right?”

“I came home for other reasons besides that of making your acquaintance, Haley,” said Miz Powell, “though I must add that when I realized I could make some difference in your life, I grew rather excited. That's about the only legacy I can leave.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I have to show you something,” she said. “Something rather difficult.”

She got up from the couch with a slight effort and headed off to another part of the house. “Wait here,” she commanded over her shoulder. Slowly she made her way up the stairs—I didn't dare even to consider giving her a hand—where I heard her rummaging around. A few minutes later she came back down, clutching something to her chest.

“Close your eyes,” she said. I obeyed. She sat down, the weight of her scarcely depressing the springs in the couch, and put something in my lap.

“Open them,” she said.

I did so and nearly screamed. There, sitting on my lap and staring up at me, was one of the most horrifying images I'd ever seen. A man and a woman, naked, stood near a tree. The woman was reaching toward the tree, as if to receive something from the creature that was wrapped around it—a woman with the body of a snake. You could see quite clearly where the woman's body stopped and the snake's started. I had never conceived of such an abomination. Worse than two-headed Siamese twins, more terrible than the most twisted Chernobylesque mutations. My stomach did somersaults as I stared at it. I had a hard time keeping my chicken soup down.

“Please take it away,” I whimpered through clamped jaws.

“No,” said Miz Powell. “It's going to stay right there on your lap.”

I was being tested. I wasn't allowed to remove the picture—the old woman was doing this for a reason. All right. I closed my eyes and breathed deep.

“Open your eyes,” said Miz Powell, “and look at it. Look.”

“No.”

“Do it.”

Her hands were on my face, and gone was the trembling weakness that had been there just moments earlier. Now they were strong and hard, and one of them forced my face down while the other actually pulled my eyes open, tugging at the skin on my forehead until I had no choice but to look.