When finally I felt Zach’s tug the following night, I jumped out of bed, grabbed my bag and headed out the door.
“Seraphina?” Mom called through the darkness.
I froze. I’d forgotten all about the squeaky hinge. It had never woken her before.
“Honey, is that you?” The toilet flushed.
Damn. Bad timing.
She came into the living room and turned on the light. I dropped my bag and kicked it under the little writing desk where she paid bills.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I was hungry,” I lied. My pores itched. I felt exposed. She had to know I was lying. I
sucked
at lying.
“Why is the door open?” she asked.
“Oh.” I looked at the door, trying to think up an explanation. My mind went completely blank.
“You’re not…
It’s not the pull from down below, is it? You’re not going down there at night and…”
“No, Mom, I promise. I haven’t touched any animals.” That at least was true.
“Then why are you going down there?”
We stared at each other across the room.
“It calms me… when I can’t sleep.”
She let out the breath she’d been holding. “I’d rather you waited until daylight to go.”
Zach wouldn’t be there at daylight. “It’s not dangerous,” I said. “No one goes down there.”
“I know. But still.”
“It helps me with the insomnia thing.”
“Why can’t you sleep, sweets?”
Damn
.
“Has the pull gotten so strong that it’s keeping you up at night?” Worry wrinkled her face, made her look old.
“Forget it, really. It’s fine. I’ll try and get to sleep.” I headed toward my room.
“Want to sit up and talk?” she asked. “I could make us some hot cocoa.”
“That’s okay. I guess I’m feeling sort of sleepy after all.” Goosebumps raced up my arms. My body was not a fan of lying.
“All right,” she said. But she walked toward the kitchen, away from her bedroom.
“Aren’t you going to go back to bed?” I asked.
“I think maybe I’ll stay up a while,” she said.
And I knew she knew that I was just waiting for her to go back to sleep so I could slip out.
I went to my room, closed the door, sat on the bed, and listened for her to stop moving around. Zach’s tug nagged at me. I worried what he’d think about me not coming down there to see him. What if he thought I was afraid? What if he thought I didn’t want to be his friend anymore after his confession? What if he went back to Myra’s before Mom fell asleep?
I tried reading the book I’d picked up from Astrid’s doorstep,
Healing Hands
. It seemed to suggest that anyone could heal. But what it described didn’t sound anything like how it felt to me. Reading it was slow and boring. The book had it all wrong. I shoved it back under my mattress. I listened to music on the softest setting on my speakers. I didn’t want to use headphones, because then I wouldn’t be able to hear what Mom was up to. The music didn’t calm me at all. Switching from my alternative rock to my pump-up to my hip-hop playlists only fueled my music ADD. Nothing hit the sweet spot.
Just before dawn I heard Mom leave for the bakery. Surprisingly, Zach’s tug was still pulling from The Hollow. He hadn’t gone home yet. He must have been waiting for me. I turned off the music, got dressed, ran outside, and tore down the hill.
“Zach!” I called. “Are you here?”
He looked tired and upset. “I didn’t think you were going to come,” he said.
“I thought…”
“It was my mom. She caught me trying to slip out during the night and she basically waited up to make sure I didn’t.”
“Oh,” he said.
“What are you holding?” I asked, my heart
beat accelerating.
He held out a little furry body, the chipmunk from the other night, at least I thought it was the same one. It didn’t look right. Its chest shook with each breath. Its little tug felt pathetic.
“Don’t touch it,” I whispered.
“It’s dying,” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s nature’s way.”
“You could help it,” he said.
“It’ll make me sick, or crazy,” I replied.
“Maybe it won’t.”
“My health…” I stopped. I was going to say it was no less important than the chipmunk’s. But its little tug felt so sad, so weak.
The whirl of The Hollow rose up in me, longing to pour itself into the dying chipmunk. Why couldn’t it just do the healing without me?
“It needs you,” Zach whispered.
And it was as though everything inside me turned to liquid. I sat by my favorite sequoia and closed my eyes, trying to clear my head and figure out what to do. And then I felt the chipmunk’s soft fur, its tiny body in my lap.
Zach put it in my lap.
My body tensed.
I shouldn’t be touching it. I shouldn’t be considering what I’m considering.
“Please,” Zach said. “He’s all alone. I can’t watch him die.”
It was barely bigger than my hand. Such a little thing couldn’t hurt me, couldn’t make me crazy, couldn’t destroy my friendship with Zach. Could it? I didn’t know for sure. But I couldn’t just sit there and let Zach watch me allow the poor thing to die, not when there was a chance I could do something.
I let down the floodgate, opened to the energy of The Hollow, which immediately raced through me. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was like silvery moonlight filled my body, like I might float up into the sky, like nothing could touch me, like everything was perfect. I soared. I remembered the dying chipmunk,
knew
that healing it was the right thing to do. I pushed the energy of The Hollow into its body, felt its heartbeat strengthen, its breathing ease. I kept going, pouring more and more of the healing into its body. It jumped out of my hands and raced around in circles, faster and faster.
Zach yelled, “You did it! You saved him!”
We both laughed at the little guy tearing around the clearing. My thoughts felt clearer than ever. I felt like I could fly. I’d never felt so filled with light, so happy, so over the top ecstatic.
The chipmunk ran and ran and ran. And then it froze, turned to me, its little eyes bulging. It keeled over and didn’t move.
“What happened?” Zach asked. “What’s wrong with it?”
I rushed to its side, put my hand against its chest. “It’s dead,” I whispered, pulling my hand away. There was no heartbeat. All its energy dissipated, leaving nothing behind but an empty, useless body. All the blood in my own body dropped to my feet. All the good feelings disappeared. The surge of The Hollow retreated.
Zach looked at me. “Can’t you fix it?”
I shook my head. “I can’t bring it back from the
dead
! I’m not a magician!”
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You’re just out of practice. It wasn’t your fault.”
I slumped to the ground. “I killed it.”
“No, you didn’t. It was dying anyway, remember? You just… you just couldn’t save it. Maybe it was too far gone.”
The church bell rang in the distance.
“Oh God, I have to go. She’ll be up soon. She can’t find me gone. Sera, I’m sorry. Look, just … come back down tonight. We’ll talk about it. Okay?”
I didn’t move.
“I’m sorry I have to go.” And then he went.
And I was sitting at the edge of The Hollow staring at the tiny body of an animal I had murdered. Images of diseases attacked my mind, wouldn’t leave me alone. A jay chased a wren through The Hollow. “Leave it alone!” I cried, throwing a twig at it.
I used a rock to dig a little hole in the ground. I wanted to pick up the chipmunk and put him in it so birds wouldn’t swoop down and feed on its body. But I was afraid to touch it, afraid it would open its eyes and attack me, afraid its dead body would infect me with something horrible. I took off my sweatshirt and used it to pick up the body and place it in the hole. The sweatshirt was too big to fit in with him. So I covered the body with dirt. Then covered the mound with my sweatshirt.
And then I cried.
I woke up next to the sequoia. My stomach growled. Fog had crept into the forest.
What had I done wrong? Why had the chipmunk died? When I was little, healing had been second nature. I hadn’t understood yet that I wasn’t supposed to do it, s
o I just did. But after Sierra — that was the last time I’d ever healed anyone. I’d been so good, so obedient, ignoring every call to heal. And now — what? I’d
lost
the ability?
But
something
had happened. The chipmunk had revived first. It had seemed happy even, running around. So why had it died?
I’d disobeyed. I’d risked my health and my sanity. And for what? A dead chipmunk? My skin crawled with shivers. My body ached. Fatigue weighed me down. As my stomach started to hurt, I realized it could be Hantavirus. Chipmunks were carriers. My head felt warm. Mom was going to freak.
I dragged myself up to the house and stood in the hot shower, scrubbing my body from head to toe, checking for ticks as I went. My head pounded.
No cure,
Mom’s voice said in my head.
Your lungs fill with fluid, fevers, vomiting…
“Shut up!” I yelled, then sank down to the floor of the shower. “I killed it,” I whispered, remembering how tiny and cute the little thing was.
After drying off, I went to bed. All these years Mom had been right. My sensitivity was useless and a danger to all involved.
When Mom got home, I was still in bed, achy and cold.
“Seraphina? Honey, are you home?” she called.
“In here,” I said.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?” She put her hand to my forehead. I was expecting her to freak and insist on calling a doctor. But she said, “You don’t feel warm.”
“I don’t?”
“No. What’s bothering you?”
“My chest feels tight.”
Probably fluid in my lungs.
“I’m nauseous.”
I’ll probably be puking soon.
“I’m freezing.”
I was sure it was fever.
“Have you eaten anything today? Have you just been lying in bed with the window open and the fog drifting in? No wonder you’re cold and nauseous. Come on. I’ll make you some soup. Anything going on you want to talk about?” She pulled back the covers and gave me a hand.
I wrapped my quilt around myself. I loved how all the little individual pieces of fabric from our family’s history came together to make the giant-sized heart. The quilt always made me feel safe and protected. Dragging it along with me, I moved to the high-backed couch.
“I was thinking about visiting Gran and MK tonight,” she called from the kitchen, where she was chopping vegetables. “But if you’re not up to it, we could go tomorrow. I’m pretty tired myself.”
I wondered if Hantavirus was contagious between humans. I went to the desk and opened the laptop, searched
Hantavirus contagious.
The first site that popped up read
Hantavirus is carried by rodent fecal matter and is not contagious through human contact. It has an incubation period ranging from one to five weeks, which means symptoms take some time to appear after initial contact with rodent feces.
Wait. Weeks for symptoms to appear? Contact with rodent feces? Mom never said anything about it coming from poo. She made it seem like it came from touching the animals themselves. And it hadn’t even been a day since I’d held the chipmunk. There was no way my symptoms were Hantavirus.
“I’m okay,” I said. “We should go see them tonight.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, poking her head out from the kitchen.
I shielded the computer with my body so she wouldn’t see what I was looking at. “Yeah, I want to go.”
She shrugged. “Okay, we’ll head over after dinner.”
I searched every disease I could think of that she’d warned me about. They were spread through ticks and through saliva by bites and by pee and poo — none of them were from holding or touching the animal.
“What is this?” I said, stepping toward the kitchen.
“What?” Mom asked.
“Why did you lie to me?” My face got hot.
She came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a daisy-covered towel. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been lying to me all this time.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” She tried to touch my forehead.
I jumped away from her. “Why would you do that?”
She wrinkled her brow as if to say,
What?
“All those diseases you warned me about, the ones that run through my head all night long, all those horrifying pictures you showed me, they don’t come from touching animals. They come from feces and urine and saliva.”
“Yes,” she said calmly, “which you could be exposed to if an animal were to bite you or pee on you or lose control of their bowels. Sick animals should not be messed with.”