’cause it sounds even screwier if I dress it up at all. My wife, Lena,
had a power.
Presentiment, you’d call it, I guess. Not that she could see the
future, tell you who would win a horserace or where you’d be a year from
now or anything like that. But sometimes. . .
well, you might invite her to a picnic Sunday a week, and without
thinking, she’d say it was going to rain like-for-Noah come Sunday a
week. And by God it would. Or some neighbor would be pregnant, and
Lena would start referring to the baby as either a he’ or a she,’ when
there was no way for her to know which it would be-and she was always
right.”
Holly sensed some of the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place.
When Henry gave her a maybe-you-think-I’m-an-old-fool look, she took his
bad hand and held it reassuringly.
After studying her a moment, he said, “You’ve seen something special Jim
did, haven’t you, something like magic?”
“Yes.”
“So you maybe know where this is going.”
“Maybe.”
The unseen birds began to screech again. The residents at the
television set turned the sound off and looked around, trying to
identify the source of the squealing.
Holly looked toward the courtyard window. No birds there. But she knew
why their cries made the hair stand up on the back of her neck: they
were somehow connected with Jim. She remembered the way he had looked
up at them in the graveyard and how he had studied them in the sky
during the drive to Solvang.
” , Jamie, our son, was like his mother, Hen said as if he did not even
hear the birds. “He just sometimes knew things. Fact is, he was a
little more gifted than Lena. And after Jamie had been married to Cara
for a while, when she got pregnant, Lena just one day up and said, The
baby’s going to be special, he’s going to be a real mage.'”
“Mage?”
“Country talk for someone with a power, with something special about him
the way Lena had something special and Jamie, too. Only she meant real
special. So Jim was born, and by the time he was four. . .
well, he was doing things. Like once he touched my pocket comb, which
I’d bought at the local barbershop here, and he started talking about
things that were in the shop, though he’d never been in there in his
life ’cause he lived with Jamie and Cara down in Los Angeles.”
He paused and took a few deep breaths. The slur in his voice had begun
to thicken. His right eyelid drooped. Talking seemed to tire him as if
it were a physical labor.
A male nurse with a flashlight was at the fireplace. He was squinting
up into the flue, past the cracks around the damper, trying to see if
any birds were trapped up in there.
The shrieking was now overlaid by the frenzied flapping of wings.
“Jimmy would touch an item and know where it’d been, bits and pieces
about who owned it. Not everything about them, mind you. He just knew
whatever he knew, that was it. Maybe he’d touch a personal item of
yours and know the names of your parents, what you did for a living.
Then he’d touch a personal item from someone else and only know where
they’d gone to school, names of their children. Always different
things, he couldn’t control it. But he always came up with something
when he tried.”
The nurse, trailed by three patients offering advice, had moved away
from the fireplace and was frowning up at the air-conditioning vents.
The quarrelsome sound of birds still echoed through the room.
“Let’s go out to the courtyard,” Holly said, getting up.
“Wait,” Henry said with some distress, “let me finish this, let me tell
you.”
Jim, for God’s sake, Holly thought, hold on another minute, just another
minute or two.
Reluctantly she sat down.
Henry said, “Jim’s specialness was a family secret, like Lena’s and
Jamie’s. We didn’t want the world to know, come snooping around, call
us freaks and God knows what. But Cara, she always wanted so bad to be