Chapter Five

 

The steady rhythm of the car soothed her anger down to disappointment as she drove to the hospital, diverting her eyes to the street sides in search of her son. She realized why he’d taken off like that: because he knew she wouldn’t drive him. She had wanted him to stay away from those investigators, and none of them understood why.

What was so important that he had to tell Sidney Pratt? Did it concern his father, and if so, why wouldn’t he come to her? But, she knew the obvious answers to these questions. She had discouraged this ability from the onset, even making a deal with him that she feared he couldn’t possibly keep.

The guilt she sometimes felt was an unwelcome and recurring visitor whose face she’d slammed the door on many times. Now, that decision began to haunt her, and she found herself being forced from the denial she’d become so comfortable in. The secret of Ryan’s father stirred inside of her, and silently she knew she couldn’t keep it hidden much longer; Ryan’s ability was becoming stronger.

She had lied to the investigators when she claimed not to know where his ability came from. Well, she spoke a half-truth; it didn’t come from her. Ian, Ryan’s father, was a different story...

Those sage-green eyes had attracted her long before she knew the truth about what kind of person lived behind them. In their younger days, he seemed like such an easy-going guy, a hard worker, and honest. He was a strong, strapping, Irish-American lad with reddish brown hair and enigmatic eyes she couldn’t ignore, and as they became closer, she felt like she could follow him anywhere.

They shacked up, as her mother called it, but those seemed like the good times. Then she got pregnant, and things slowly changed. She knew that Ian felt cornered, as Ryan was unexpected, but he loved him to death...literally. Under the mounting pressure of the enormous life change, not to mention the rising finances, Ian began drinking heavily.

He’d always drunk socially, but it became ongoing, bringing with it a domineering and possessive personality that overtook him. He was not the same man that once caused her heart to skip. He began coming home later, drunker, and meaner. Soon, it was he who threw the first punch when one night, well past midnight, a backhand struck the side of her face, stunning her into silent shock.

He’d flung a little-too-late dinner plate into the air, sending bites of beef, rice, and potatoes flying across the room to cling to the curtains, windows, and walls.

“How am I supposed to eat this? It’s cold!” His voice was a drunken roar she’d prayed her son wouldn’t hear. His temper had been building, but she had never seen him like this, his face turning the same shade as his bloodshot eyes. She eased the sharp sting of the right side of her face with the cold palm of her hand, and then in her mind, she answered him...

Ever hear of a microwave, asshole?

“Asshole?” He shouted back at her, yet she knew full and well that she hadn’t said a word out loud. “How about if I put your goddamn head in that microwave!”

He lunged at her, and Ian was burly, built like a wall, but she was not the type of woman to be intimidated. Her own temper fueled from the full-force slap; she kicked him in the groin then smashed the side of his face with the glass sugar-bowl she’d snatched from the counter, gashing a slice in the side of his head.

This was the beginning, when the hidden demon inside of Ian had reared its ugly head. The shouting, the cursing, the expletives had continued that night, and through it all, one thing continued to flash in her mind like a beacon shining a warning...

She hadn’t said anything aloud about the microwave. He had read her thoughts without realizing he had. A sick feeling swept through her that she’d fought with the devil.

And the next morning, regrets, sorrow, and hollow apologies followed. That night had created a distance between them forever. He was changing. Something was happening to him, and yet simultaneously, something was happening to her love for him; it was fading, and somehow he was shamefully aware of this.

But his drinking must have been some early, hidden part of his life because surely it had resurrected. The next night would wipe the day’s slate clean, but the irritated sore was left to fester for another time. And many more times there would be.

Ryan would hear them fighting and go back to sleep, but in the morning, he still loved his father. Children could be so resilient, she thought, oblivious to the wrongs parents sometimes commit because they are blind to them in the first place. She was thankful for this, as it maintained some cause for neutrality between them.

She had decided it was time to leave him. How many times could she cover the bruises on her face with makeup? How long would it be before Ryan developed a better understanding of what had really been going on? She had to shield him, deciding that she and her son would move to her Mother’s house in a neighboring town.

She sat in the living room, contemplating it all, when the phone rang.

The first sound she heard on the other end was his breathing, rising in the hard, fast panting of a mad, rabid dog. She could identify the slightest sound of him.

“So, you think you’re going to just take my kid and leave me? I don’t think so, bitch! Do you think I won’t find you? Don’t make me have to find you!”

The phone was slammed in her ear, silencing the random chatty voices and empty clinking glasses in the background. He was reading her mind, even from where he sat at the bar three blocks away. She broke into tears thinking of all the continuous excuses she had made for him, and now all of the angst and anger within her had turned to sheer terror.

They began to lead separate, non-existent lives. They rarely spoke and barely looked at each other, but the violence dissipated as the fighting soon became random. She took to sleeping in Ryan’s room, and the fact that he had suddenly been having nightmares served as a perfect justification.

And then she found the drugs.

The rolled up twenty-dollar bill alongside the line of white powder on the bathroom counter caught her eye. It had been a shock seeing it for the first time in her life. She had never been exposed to it, not even in high school, but she could see exactly what it was. She stood for seconds in stunned silence, feeling the simultaneous dread, contempt, and most of all, disappointment.

She snatched the rolled-up cash from the countertop, and then paced into the living room where he lazed around on the couch watching reruns. The twenty flew in his face by the fast, angry flash of her hand.

“So this is what you’re into now? I guess this is where all of our money’s been going, right?” She steamed as she continued to pace, waiting for a fight, but he’d said nothing. He didn’t move from his position; he just stared at her with the mean arch of his sage-green eyes that now seemed lifeless, vacated of what once lay behind them. The twenty-dollar bill lay untouched on his chest, which moved up and down to the rhythm of his strange but steady breathing. He refocused his odd stare back toward the television.

Strangely, she became alarmed at the fact that he’d made no move toward her. The confusion made her eyes widen in a watchful, glowering glare back at him. She kept her eyes on him as she slowly stepped away from the couch.

“By the way, you left your cocaine on the bathroom counter.”

Again, he’d said nothing. She left to pick Ryan up at school.

The next day when she’d taken Ryan back to school and Ian had been at work, she made a secret trip to the local library. She knew there was a name for people who could read minds, but she was unsure what it was, never having paid any attention to such matters in what used to be her normal life. She didn’t even believe in that sort of thing, until she’d actually experienced it. Whatever it was, was evil, a capability of that kind could never bring about any good. She had been kept a virtual prisoner because of it.

In fact, she couldn’t be sure that Ian wasn’t capable of knowing where she was, right this second...could he? Did this thing that he possessed reach that far? If it did, she was silently prepared for it. When she picked Ryan up, she would bring him to a friend’s house.

One of the librarians showed her how to research topics using their extensively updated library search engines. She typed in the words “mind reading” and found the word that described the warden of her prison: telepathy.

Most of what she’d read described everything that Ian had demonstrated. He was a telepath, and from what she’d researched, an extremely powerful one. She wondered if Ian even understood what he possessed, but he must have on some level. If he did know, how long had this been part of him; was this what had changed him? She’d read that telepathic abilities begin in early childhood for some, while others develop it in adulthood as either a result of trauma to the brain, or manifesting itself after lying dormant for years.

This would become the secret she would hide from her son about his father.

Their finances had dwindled even further, and Ian began getting strange phone calls at all hours. A friend who frequented the same bar told her the rumors about Ian’s increasing cocaine use, and that he’d been getting drugs spotted to him, paying later, and rousing up anger and attention toward himself.

Little did she know that Ian had owed up to fifteen-hundred dollars as a result of his drug habit. It would explain why he was becoming antsy, irritated; she had assumed it was the cocaine. Drug dealers were lurking over him, calling and hounding him for their money. She silently plotted a way to get Ryan out of this house; they would both just have to disappear—damn the consequences for her. She had to protect her son.

After picking Ryan up from his friend’s house, she’d brought him home and locked the doors. They had a quiet evening together, as Ian was out again and likely to stay out. She secretly decided that, tomorrow, she would drive her son away from here. There became no question of it when that night she answered the phone.

“Is Ian there?” An angry male voice on the other end shouted at her.

“No, he isn’t,” she said, composing herself, trying to avoid the caller’s anger.

“That’s okay, I’ll find him.”

Then, the caller hung up.

It was later that night when she was awakened by Ryan’s tortured screams as he reeled in bed from the nightmare of his father, and a few hours after getting him back to sleep, she was roused again by a hard, persistent knocking at the front door. She was sure it was someone for Ian, some irate dealer about to shout a drunken rant at her or even threaten her and Ryan. She would peep through the lace curtains of the front-door window; if she didn’t recognize the person, she was calling the police.

Yet it was the police; Ian was dead and an incident over drugs was suspected.

She hadn’t told them about the angry caller earlier, because the strange irony of it had swept over her like a cool breeze. Whoever the caller had been, if he was responsible for Ian’s death, had removed her burden forever, setting her free. She felt an almost unspeakable debt of gratitude and a bizarre sense of allegiance to this dark and anonymous pardoner.

She told them she didn’t know whom Ian was dealing with, nor did she discover his cocaine use until recently, all of which was the truth. She sat stunned by the fact that her son had just dreamed the reality she was now listening to, and of course, she’d made no mention of this to the police either.

But now she would have a deeply bereaved and possibly traumatized child on her hands. How was she supposed to tell him that his nightmare had come true? Ryan adored his Dad, and though Ian was a son-of-a-bitch, he was ultimately a good father. He wasn’t always drunken and abusive, the way he’d been toward the end, not for the first couple of years she’d known him. She would never know what had completely changed him, but she would mourn for the person Ian once was. Ryan continued to hear the voice of his father. She didn’t believe any of it at first, figuring that Ryan was grieving and trying to hold on to Ian any way he knew how, but then he told her things that only Ian would know. Then, the other voices came, and many of Ryan’s predictions had come true, all because “the voices had told him.”

The fear of what was happening to her son was a constant, blaring alarm she could not shut down. The freedom from the life with Ian she’d felt after his death was fleeting in the face of the fact that he’d passed his strange psychic bloodline down to their son. Soon after, Sidney Pratt had pronounced Ryan as a clairaudient; Ryan was able to hear the voices of the dead, as well as remotely perceive the conversations of living people. Fear and devastation had swept over her.

She had never mentioned Ian’s telepathy to Ryan, or to the investigators, fearing they would make a freak of her son, study him under a microscope to learn the extent of his capabilities, and make him their latest “discovery.” Sidney had never said anything about Ryan being able to read minds—maybe he would never develop his father’s ability. She would just stay silent and pray, pray that it would leave him.

Her feat of keeping Ryan away from the investigators had finally failed. Ryan was now headed to the hospital; he was hell-bent on seeing Sidney. She felt a slight twinge inside of her, a sickly omen telling her that the secret she’d tried to keep was slowly slipping away. She knew she couldn’t hold out much longer; everything was coming unraveled.

The hospital’s heliport loomed closely into her view. She was only three blocks away from the coming confrontation, and her raw nerves jittered in a flurry.