The Ables (2 page)

“On your left is a
huge
cornfield, and on your right … another one just as big. We’re walking down a grass path between the two, and the corn is taller than I am.” My father—my whole family, for that matter, even Patrick—was very good about setting the scene for me when we went someplace new to help me visualize the surroundings. I always thought it was just the kindest gesture, and I say that without an ounce of sarcasm. “There are over seventeen acres of farmland here.” We came to a stop. “There’s a picnic table here under giant twin oak trees. Let’s have a seat,” he said.

We sat on the table surface itself with our feet on the bench, facing out over the cornfield. My father began to sigh here and there, fidgeting considerably. For the first time, I wondered how he must be feeling, realizing that this couldn’t have been any more appealing a conversation to him than it was to me.

A healthy breeze was blowing, rustling the oak leaves and the tops of the corn stalks. The dog in the distance continued to bark but sounded much further away now. And aside from that, it was silent. Eerie, even. When you pay as much attention to sound as I do, true silence, or anything close, is a rarity. You can almost always hear
something
if you really want to.

“Son …” he said for the second time in an hour, which was followed by the single longest post-“son” pause in the twelve-year history of my father’s big talks. It seemed like nearly a whole minute or two of pause. “Son,” he said again, as though trying to jog himself into speaking.

“I wanted to bring you out here today so that we could have a conversation.”

Aw, crap! I knew it. Please get this over with quickly.

“But it’s not an easy conversation to have.”

Imagine how I feel.

“But it’s an important conversation to have. And one that every kid in this town will have to have with his or her father or mother at some point. And, to be honest, it’s a little overdue. I probably waited several months too long to have this talk. I guess I didn’t want to admit that you’re growing into a young man now.”

Kill me. Just kill me.

“Life goes by so quickly, as you’ll learn, and I just wasn’t ready for this moment like I hoped I’d be.”

Oh for the love of—

“But you’re old enough now that you need to be aware of how some things work. I can’t stop you from growing up, but I can protect you and help guide you into making smart decisions. But to make those smart decisions, you need information.”

I’m pretty sure most of this was regurgitated from a parenting advice book he must have read. Or an after school special. My father never talked like this, and it made the whole scene all the more unsettling to me.

I decided to put us both out of our misery, or at least attempt to. “Dad, I know what you’re going to say. I know what you want to talk about. You don’t have to say anything because I already know everything about it.”

“You do?” he asked, incredulously, the same way he did whenever I told him I knew who the killer was ten minutes into one of those cop shows. I didn’t have to see him to know he was definitely grinning ear to ear.

“I do,” I said boldly and authoritatively. It was the truth, for the most part. I had the general idea. The rest I could fill in with trial and error.

“Phillip, I know kids in the neighborhood talk, and that there are whispers—”

Whispers?! How long ago was it that you were a twelve-year-old kid?

“—but I seriously doubt that you know what we’re here to talk about.” His tone was different now, suddenly much more at ease. It was almost as though my overconfidence had melted his nerves away and broken the ice for him a bit.

He paused briefly. “Besides, I have a duty as your father to explain things to you, even if it’s not going to be easy. To dispel the misinformation you might have overheard. So … to that end … let’s get this over with.”

Yes, let’s do.

“You’re twelve now. You’re starting seventh grade tomorrow. New school. You’ll be a man soon. And your mother and I think that it’s time for you to know more—a lot more—about—”

He let a moment of silence pass for effect … the P. T. Barnum of father-son sex talks. He sighed an over-exaggerated sigh, the kind of sigh you let out right before saying something you can never take back, and finished his sentence.

“—your super powers.”

***

My father’s sense of humor is notoriously hilarious to him alone. Most of it consisted of awful puns and un-clever wordplay. If you asked him to make you a piece of toast, for example, he would point his finger at you, make a bug-zapper noise, and say “Poof! You’re a piece of toast.”

He would typically deliver one of these stunning one-liners, most of which we heard at least once a week, and then follow it up with some good-natured chuckling. It was the most annoying thing ever.

I waited more than a few beats after his sentence ended but did not hear the usual chuckling. I thought perhaps he was stifling his laughter a bit longer than normal at this latest gag.

“My what?” I asked, somewhat annoyed. I was so geared up for some big punch line that I didn’t even consider the possibility that he was being serious. Never even crossed my mind. This was supposed to be “the talk,” and he was just prolonging it for his own entertainment. I was so sure of it I couldn’t even process what he was actually saying to me.

“Phillip,” he said quietly, a smile in his voice, “you have the best hearing of anyone I’ve ever met. Do you seriously expect me to believe you didn’t hear me?”

I thought about it for a moment. I did have fantastic hearing, mostly by virtue of being blind. They say the other senses pick up the slack when you lose one, and I found that to be 100 percent true.

And I had heard him say “your super powers” just now, of that there could be no doubt.
But that couldn’t actually mean that he’s trying to tell me I have super powers, right? Because that would be ridiculous.

He broke my train of thought. “I’m here to tell you that your world will never be the same again. After today, your new journey will begin. Your journey to become … a custodian.”

My brain was in limbo. I cocked my head to the side like a Labrador. My mind felt like pudding. Thoughts simply weren’t coming to me. So I said something designed to buy me more time. “I’m going to be a janitor? What are you talking about, Dad?”

Now he chuckled. “This is not a joke, son, I promise you that. This is the most serious conversation you and I have ever had. And if you can just be open … and listen … then I’ll tell you what I’m talking about and why we had to keep it secret from you until now.”

I simply nodded, not realizing the gravity of what I was agreeing to learn.
He said “super powers,” right?

He spoke rapidly and nervously. “Superheroes, like the ones in your comic books—sort of—are real. They’re real.” He paused but started right back up. “They stop criminals all over the world on a daily basis. Some fly and some have super strength. There are thousands of various known super powers, which you’ll learn about in school this year, but I’m getting ahead of myself.” He breathed deeply to reset his thoughts. “You’ll have to forgive me. This is my first father-son superhero talk.”

I nodded again, still not quite caught up. I was just nodding out of reflex. Much of what he was saying was slipping right past me while I mostly just heard the word “superhero” echoing around in my brain.

“You come from a long line of superheroes—called custodians—from your grandparents on back to your grandparents’ great-great-great-grandparents. Your mother and I have powers. As far back as our family tree extends, it consists of bona fide heroes. People who had secret identities and super powers and sacrificed their time and effort to help protect their fellow man. In Roman and Greek mythology, they called them gods. In comic books, they call them superheroes. But the two groups are of the same lineage.

“We are extremely careful, which is why you never hear about custodians on the news.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “There are also some memory-related super powers, and those have also helped to keep us under the radar for the most part.

“This town, Freepoint, is a custodian town. There are two more like it in the world. They are safe havens for heroes and those who support them. Everyone that lives here is either a custodian or what’s known as human support—non-empowered individuals who assist and support the custodian community in a variety of very important ways.” Another deep breath.

“We moved here for you, son. For you and your brother. We moved here so that you could go to high school with other boys your age, all of whom are just now getting their powers … like you are. So you can learn to use them safely and effectively and then go on to be a productive member of the custodian community.” He paused for a moment. “Do you have any questions so far?”

I sat there silently for what felt like a very long time, slowly beginning to comprehend what he was telling me, even as I still struggled to believe it could possibly be the truth. My father was telling me that I had inherited super powers and was about to go to a special high school for superheroes … in a special town for superheroes.

I sighed loudly in a manner that could only have sounded like relief, because that’s what it was. “I thought you were going to talk to me about sex.”

Dad’s genuine laughter is a lot more pleasant to listen to than the goofy chuckle he fakes after all his puns, and it tore through the quiet farm air. “You thought I wanted to talk to you about sex?” he asked, spurting and choking each word through his guffaws. “That’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever heard,” he gasped. “Oh dear, no!” His laughter was still going stronger. “The last thing I want to talk to you about is sex!”

Another tidal wave of calm washed over me. I laughed too, nervously at first. Eventually we were both giggling together until he suddenly stopped for a moment. “I mean—” he stammered, “unless you think you need to have a talk about …” The wave of calm rushed abruptly back out to sea.

“No,” I blurted out, a bit more emphatically than necessary.

“Because,” he continued, “I just assumed you would pick up most of what you’d need through the general course of your life, but if you
ever
have anything you want to ask me about—“

This time I cut him off. “Dad, it’s fine! I’m cool. I’m good. Can we please just stop talking about this?!”

“No wonder you’ve been acting so strangely. You thought this was the birds and the bees talk,” he realized aloud, still chortling here and there.

“We did the birds and the bees in sixth-grade health class anyway,” I informed him, still feeling a need to build a case against a lesson about sex.

“I thought so,” he said knowingly.

We sat silently for a minute or two, my dad still enjoying the comedy of the situation and me basking in the knowledge that this was not, in fact, “the talk.” It was a nice moment.

“Well, then,” he proclaimed, taking the conversational wheel again, “a conversation about how you have super powers ought to be a nice surprise for you then, shouldn’t it?”

“Dad, I don’t understand. But if you’re talking about my enhanced hearing or whatever, I don’t think that qualifies as a super power.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, Phillip.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I know this is a mountain of new information being thrown at you all at once, and I’m sorry it has to be that way. It’s going to take some time to sink in, I know that. It was the same way when your grandpa had this talk with me—in this very spot, actually.”

“Grandpa had super powers?” I had never known the man, but my parents had always told me he was a kindly old gentleman who liked telling bad jokes—go figure. And that he had died in a car accident before I was born.

The lesson continued. “He did. My father had an ability called absorption, which allowed him to make use of the powers of other heroes nearby. He could lift an aircraft carrier over his head without breaking a sweat or run from here to Paris and back in ten seconds … as long as the right heroes were near him. He was, for a time, the most powerful hero in the world.”

“So … he wasn’t a traveling salesman?”

“No,” he said with a chuckle. “No, your grandpa was one of the greatest custodians that ever lived. They called him the “Everyman”—this was back when we still used silly monikers like “Super Guy” and “Awesome Man” and so forth. Today they just, you know … fight crime. We don’t have costumes anymore. But your grandfather did. He wore the deepest blue cape with silver trim.” I instantly pictured a small blue and silver figurine my father had always kept in the glass cabinet in his office. It was a man holding a giant rock over his head. “He was one of the last superheroes that kept up with all the theatrical elements of fighting crime. He put more villains behind bars than all of his peers combined. And he was absolutely fearless about fighting crime.”

It was clear these memories were as fresh as yesterday to my father. And he sounded incredibly proud.

A somber thought came over me. “He didn’t die in a car crash, did he?”

I felt Dad’s demeanor sag a bit. “No. He was killed in action. He was killed by one of the world’s most notorious super-villains, named Artimus, one of the worst to ever live.”

I could tell there was more to the story. A lot more. But he didn’t seem to want to go into more detail.

I decided to steer the subject back to something less depressing. “And you got your powers from him?”

Dad’s posture snapped back to normal as he climbed out of his moment of mourning. “That I did, correct. He and my mother.”

“So you have the sharing power too?” I didn’t know how it worked; I simply assumed you got the power from one of your parents.

“Sadly, no. Heroes only have a one in ten chance of inheriting the power of one of their parents. And my father’s power was exceedingly rare. There have only been a handful of absorbers in recorded history. My powers are mental. Wait … let me back up a bit first,” he said, getting animated. Some of this had been bottled up inside him for years, and now he was finally able share it with his son. “There are two kinds of super powers: mental and physical. Some powers cross a bit into both categories, and we call those hybrids, but those are pretty rare. Mental powers are, naturally, powers of the mind. Things like mind-reading, cognitive enhancement, super memory. Whereas physical powers are usually things like super strength, flight, various members of the eye-beam family, and so on.