The Weird Travels of Aimee Schmidt: The Curse of the Gifted (5 page)

“Are you okay? Do you need help?” he asked again.

She spit out, “I’mmm...mm…I’m okay.”

The man continued to stare. Aimee stood up and started moving away from the vehicle. He crept his car along the street, ignoring the cars honking at him from behind. She turned the opposite direction. Finally the man, looking at her in his rearview mirror, shook his head and gave up. He swerved his car back into traffic and sped away.

Aimee had to get back home. Now! But she didn’t dare call Dad. She knew how he fussed over her, always afraid her darkness would return. Aimee couldn’t bear to see him go through that again. The agony he suffered when she was ill was a hundred times worse than going through this alone.

She muttered, “This time I have to be strong no matter what happens. I have to deal with this by myself. No help from pills. No cures by doctors. No bothering Dad with my delusions. This time will be different.”

The jog back to the house blurred by. Her mind waddled in the past. She frantically whizzed through the files of her visions, desperately trying to dust them off, and then restore the memories that she had purposefully reburied. Her first one, the beginning of it all, the one farthest from this moment, but clearest in Aimee's mind, began to replay as she struggled to keep her pace. …

…August 1992 The Schmidt house

“Daddy…” Aimee barely whispered while her eyes slowly filled with life.

“Shhh, sweetie. Please try to stay still. Don’t talk, okay?” Dad’s voice was noticeably shaken.

“Daddy, I was a birdie…”

Dad interrupted, gingerly blotting her head wound with a white hand towel soaked with fresh blood. “Aimee, honey, here, put the ice pack on your head. Dr. Miller wants you to keep ice on it until he sees you.”

Dad laid another towel filled with ice chips on her head, gently compressing it with one hand while he continued to rub the dried blood off her neck with the other soiled towel.

“Daddy…” Tears welled up in his eyes, spilling over onto his cheeks. He tenderly stroked her face. “…no Daddy…no…don’t Daddy.” She weakly tried to pull the ice from the gash. “Daddy, I flew like Mommy…” Dad touched his forefinger to her lips to hush her.
“No…no…NOOO…Daddy, I
did
fly!” she choked out with sobs mingled between the words.

“Shhh, Aimee. You need to be quiet. Dr. Miller wants you to stay awake, but you have to keep still so I can get the bleeding to stop. The ambulance is coming. Dr. Miller is waiting for us.”

Dad grabbed Aimee's wrists with his long, rough fingers, stained black from grease, pulled her hands away from her face, and effortlessly restrained them in her lap. She fought against his hold, but the shock of the accident drained the strength from her limbs, and she melted. The pounding reverberated relentlessly across the inner surface of her skull, and the images of the mishap flashed across the back of Aimee's eyelids like angry bolts of lightning. It was impossible to keep her eyes open.

“Stay awake, Aimee! Sweetheart, open your eyes!”

She struggled to obey. She felt like a bird, floating through the clouds, her surroundings fading in and out. The sound of Dad’s harsh voice scolding James, drew her back from the darkness. Aimee's big brother’s sobs were hardly distinguishable, but she could hear the sincere concern in his voice. After all, he was the gallant white knight who swooped in to save her. His determination to absolve himself was evident, but she knew the truth. He would never hurt Aimee. This wasn’t his fault. This was meant to happen.

Even though she wanted to go home, Dr. Miller made her stay overnight for observation. She cried, “Daddy, I wanna sleep.” Her brain struggled to stay engaged, but Dad was determined to keep her awake. He kept vigil all night, never leaving her bedside. Dr. Miller made rounds early the next morning as promised. Dad’s smile told her she was okay. No needles necessary. After Dr. Miller left, Dad crawled into her little bed and with his arm gently around Aimee's waist, his warm, protective body next to hers, they both drifted quickly to sleep. His soft snoring awoke her a couple hours later that morning as the sunlight streamed through the window.

Her head ached sharply, but she
was
okay. She needed to go pee, only she didn’t move. Instead she listened to Dad’s musical snoring. But the details from her accident returned. Aimee remembered the second after she crossed into the path of the baseball bat. James swung it with the force of a six year old gunning for a home run. Luckily, it only grazed the side of her skull. Her eyes flickered, and then they rolled back into her head. Her body suspended in space for a fraction of a second, then dropped to the ground.

Aimee didn’t know how to describe it to Dad other than she flew. How could she explain the impossible? Who would believe her? It was too strange for the fantasy world of a four year old; no witches on brooms, fluttering apparitions, or even angels.

Her travel, out-of-body experience, or whatever you called it, was scary, but at the same time exciting. The sensation of her body lifting from its limp shell, floating over home plate like a Black Hawk helicopter suspended in the air, was real. Every sense was magnified tenfold. The pain of the impact felt like a hammer pounding a stake into her brain. Aimee smelled the musty red liquid exploding from the tiny hole in her scalp, and she heard the whooshing of the birds’ wings as the crack of the bat hitting the ball startled them into flight. As her body crumbled across home plate, Aimee watched James gather her up and hold her in his lap. He screamed at Ryan, who was frozen on the pitcher’s mound, to find Dad. Her blood spurted on James, soaking his white t-shirt. Tears streamed down his cheeks. And Aimee saw Dad when he dashed into the backyard from the garage with Ryan a step behind. The wrench slipped out of his fingers when he saw Aimee's lifeless body. She watched him charge towards them, screaming hysterically at James. Every detail stayed etched perfectly into her mind’s subconscious.

Then suddenly, as quickly as the body had lifted, it got sucked out of the light back through the darkness and returned to her limp body. Any sane person would call it an hallucination, or her subconscious filling in the missing seconds, as Aimee's psychiatrist described it, but she knew the truth.

The horrendous headache that followed her accident finally subsided after several days. Dad had the doctor run Aimee through every possible test, poking and prodding only to find out she was a healthy four year old. Then when she was eight, Aimee started having severe headaches. Dr. Miller subjected her to more tests. Again more negative results. Dad fretted so over her that almost every time Aimee complained about feeling bad he toted her off to see Dr. Miller. Aimee was under constant scrutiny, as if any moment she might explode into ashes and blow away.

Fourteen years have passed since Aimee's first travel, and she still vividly remembered the terror in her dad's eyes when he saw her body draped over James’s lap. Only four years after Marie’s death, losing Aimee would have killed him, if not physically at least mentally. It would have been more than he could handle, and he would have given up, no matter how much James needed him. So, if Dad had a need to hover, then so be it. It was the least Aimee could do for him.

The pain of traveling was worse than any pain Aimee had ever experienced, but other than the miserable headaches, she was okay once she got out of the tunnel and made it back. Aimee tried to tell her father, but he wouldn’t listen to her wild tale. She didn’t know what was happening to her, but Aimee knew it wasn’t a dream. It was real. Her dad didn’t want to believe her then, and she knew this time wouldn’t be different. She couldn’t share her secret. She would have to go this alone.

Aimee arrived at the house not sure how she made it back. Standing on the front lawn, she
stared at the house, her mind a million years from the present.
I have to know more. What’s next? How
long do I have before it’s time; today, tomorrow, next week? Damn hypnosis! It’s tampered with my
valuable memories and I can’t recall the little details I so need right now.
She was damp and chilled to
the bone, and the cool air danced around her head licking at her brain. The fog that had concealed the buried memories had lifted completely. Suddenly, as quickly as it had triggered the dream this morning, with a vengeance the reality hit. The nightmare this morning was more than just a memory resurfacing.

It was a forewarning!

Chapter 4 The Gift

Dad was just leaving through the backdoor when Aimee bolted breathlessly into the kitchen. His eyes narrowed when he noticed her soggy sweats dripping a pool of rain water onto the tile.

“Rough workout?” he asked and tossed her a dry dish towel.

“Yeah, a little I guess,” she answered hastily, trying not to look at his face. Dad always had a way of knowing when something was wrong with Aimee. Parental perception? Or was it because her psycho drama history had left him constantly looking for clues she was returning to the dark side. “I have to get ready, Dad. Can’t be late for first period. I have that test this morning.”

“Well then, I’m heading out. Do good on your test, sweetheart. See you tonight.” He started to leave, but then shouted from the backdoor as Aimee hurried towards her room, “Hey, Amos, can you pick up a few things from the store after school?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“List and money on the kitchen table. Thanks a bunch! Love ya.”

“Ditto,” she yelled back and continued down the hallway.

Aimee twisted open the blinds and watched her dad pull out of the driveway heading off down the rain-slick street in his little pickup. For a long moment she stared out into the street, her brain stuck in a fog. Finally her thoughts reverted back to where she was a few minutes earlier. She desperately needed to wrap her head around the missing piece to her epiphany. She was certain of one thing. The dream was real, but it was only the preface and the epilogue for something much more, something bigger than what was blatantly apparent. Like a flight, it was the takeoff and the landing, but not the
journey. Aimee sensed
someone
had an assignment for her to accomplish with each travel.

Like a
mission
!

Something told her she was too young to comprehend the motive behind each travel she had experienced when she was a child. To an eight year old it seemed more like a scary amusement park
ride. Even now Aimee was unsure why she had this
gift
, and where exactly it had come from, or how it
was even possible, but she knew it was real.

Fresh images suddenly started to trickle into her thoughts and she slumped into her chair. Slices of each travel imprisoned in her mind started filtering through it, like the kaleidoscope she got when she was a kid, the beads falling together into a pattern then becoming distorted again with a turn of the tube. A vision from a past journey stopped and played in slow motion. It seemed like something horrific that had recently occurred. It played exactly like a story she had read in the paper a few months ago. A sick feeling instantly balled up in the pit of her stomach when she recalled the article. A young female hiker went missing in the Siskiyou National Forest last August. Her badly decomposed body was found in October when two backpackers came across it. She had fallen into a crevice, her leg broken and body trapped between two massive boulders. At the time of the news release Aimee felt a strange anxiety over the tragedy, but it didn’t trigger a recall so she didn’t know why it bothered her so much. She honestly didn’t remember having any mystical presence at the woman's disappearance, but now she knew she had been there with her when she vanished into the crevice. She had been with her as the woman veered from the trail to save time. She watched as the woman leaped between two boulders jutted on either side of the cavernous chasm and lost her balance. Aimee saw her fall backwards into
her death pit. The woman didn’t know she was present, but Aimee
was
there. She knew where she lay
injured until her painful death. And she didn’t help her. Aimee moaned, “I was with her and I didn’t help her!”

It had been the last journey before Aimee's breakdown, five years before the woman died. At the time it was too much to fathom, too surreal and way more than Aimee could comprehend. Her body shut down unable to process anything else after her collapse, then the visions from her journeys got snuffed away.

“How can this be happening?!” Aimee screamed. Zonker jumped up from his peaceful slumber
and looked at Aimee with a worried expression. Then swiftly it all began to make sense.
No wonder everyone thought I was crazy! Who would
believe my stories? Dad? James? Dr. Sanders? No one in this world and certainly no one in his right mind would have believed me. I musta confessed stories about being transported forward in time to observe events yet to unfold, and revealed journeys back into history to witness something that had already transpired, desperately hoping someone would believe me. These were things too outlandish to
anyone who didn’t believe in the supernatural
.
Well, I don’t understand why I was chosen, but I know
t
hese journeys aren’t delusional, the word Dr. Sanders used. He was wrong. His years of training to diagnose the imaginary world some people live in, and then methodically and intentionally alter that world so he could bring his patient back to reality was all he understood. They didn’t teach these kinds of things in medical school. The mystical world doesn’t exist for him, and even when he listened to my stories, there was never anything sensible to make him believe. So I earned a nice, tidy crazy diagnosis followed by a colorful assortment of pills, mixed with a touch of hypnosis. Abracadabra…cured! It was
unethical - even malicious - to tell me it was all in my mind. I may not be normal, but
…
but...omigod...I have NEVER been crazy!