37. Olly
THIRTY-SEVEN
OLLY
I lie in bed in the fetal position, on another crinkly hospital mattress cover with a rough sheet covering it.
There were no more tears to cry, so I stared around the room in a strange lethargic panic, like I was freaking out but in super slow motion.
Shouldn’t there be a baby in the room with me, in one of those plastic bassinet things?
I asked myself for the hundredth time. But no, I awoke in here, in pain, alone, and the flood of tears began until I gathered the courage to grab the nurses’ station call button, but now I couldn’t bring myself to push it, so I lay there in silence waiting for someone to pop in and acknowledge what had happened while I had been passed out.
I knew I could find out in a minute if I wanted to by reading the area, but I didn’t want to access my gifts—it felt too much like tempting fate.
I wanted my damn baby, and if she really was dead, then heaven help us all, because there would be no putting a lid on my rage.
And that was just it—I didn’t know how to face it if Bea was gone, or I was.
How did you know if you were dead, if you had a hoard of psychic potential?
Did you linger, or could you just decide to let go?
I knew from the disturbing lack of visions that Bea and I were not going to be together.
I knew it like I knew my own name. But I had thought I would at least be able to see her, at the start of things.
Unless she was gone, and it was the end of all.
With Maya, they swaddled her for me, and then let me hold her until I fell asleep.
And if I really was dead, would they bring in a swaddled Bea and place her on my chest?
Hours had passed with me either asleep or stuck in that place between sleep and awake.
What woke me was a calm voice, a woman’s, asking me the most basic but brilliant of questions.
“Would you like to hold your baby?” I squeezed my eyes closed as tightly as possible and pulled the sheet up as far as it would go, almost all the way over my head.
Why hadn’t Shepard woken me up if it was getting time to go to work?
Wait. Sheet? Crinkly rough sheets, and an even crinklier mattress underneath me.
I wasn’t home. I was in a hospital, and holy flying flippity fuck, I wasn’t pregnant anymore.
Had I ever been pregnant? Was all of that some kind of psychic trick I’d played on myself?
Oh goddess, what if I was still back in the Mental Health Inpatient Unit?
“What...who...?”
“Who?” the voice repeated, sounding confused.
“Yeah, um, who am I? I mean, who are you?” I asked, as I turned around on the bed and saw a nurse with an iPad. I groaned in pain as I moved, my lower body protesting the sudden change in position.
“Careful! Move slowly. You’ve only just woken up from collapsing yesterday, and had a major surgery.
A caesarean section isn’t to be taken lightly.
You have a lot of gear holding you together.
Now, to answer your questions, your name is Olive McLeod, and you are very lucky to be alive, Ms....
no, Mr...I’m sorry. They updated your pronouns here in your chart but not your salutation. What shall we call you?”
My mind was growing less cloudy, and it slowly came back to me what she was talking about. “Could you just call me Olly? No need for ma’am or sir or Miss or Mister. Too formal, and to be honest I haven’t gotten that part figured out yet, anyway.”
The nurse nodded, made a note in my chart, and said, “That should be simple enough for us to do, Olly. My name is Fatima, and I’m a licenced practical nurse here.
You’ll be seeing me a lot, so you may call me Fatima, and we will be on even ground, yes?
” She moved a bit closer and asked, “May I take your hand to check on your IV?” I nodded.
And something in me said that this wasn’t our first meeting, though she was acting like it was.
She had a musical lilt in her voice that made me guess she was from Kenya, mostly because that was the only part of Africa I’d been to, and her accent took me straight back there.
I was six, and my parents had taken us on a safari, where we got to sleep in a tree house.
Huh, I’d forgotten all about that. I reached out for her and felt the slightly wrinkled flesh of a warm hand that had known a lot of hard work.
Her voice retained that soothing richness that washed over me, and I felt just a twinge of the warm, unnameable feeling that was rapidly spreading from my head to my toes.
I noted she was wearing the same pink scrubs and matching hijab I always saw her in, and it was a comfort to me, that familiarity.
Wait a minute. Always saw her in?
“Fatima, when they brought me into Bridgewater by LifeFlight, when they treated me for hypothermia, and I almost died, you were there, weren’t you?
I was out of it, but I told you how you helped me with my baby when she was born.
You laughed and said I was still very pregnant, and you got me settled into the Mental Health Inpatient Unit.
So how are you my nurse here, too, in a completely different hospital, in a different line of work, in another part of the province? ”
The nurse looked down on me with kind eyes and a smile revealing brilliant white teeth, and said, “You have gained much in power these past few days. So much it will take you a lifetime of figuring out how to best use it. Giving some of it to me so that I can visit people I knew and even be seen by regular people is a generous gift. It should wear off in maybe two days or so. Don’t worry, pet. You’ve not raised the dead.”
I narrowed my eyes, now suspicious of the woman I had instantly trusted.
Then, like a streak of lightning, I remembered.
Twenty-three years ago, Fatima Abdallah, with a beautiful hijab and kind, welcoming smile, had been working at the clinic in Kenya we visited when Thomas broke a few toes and his left arm trying to climb a tree.
Sleeping in one wasn’t enough of an adventure, I guess.
We had been heartbroken to hear just a few months after our stay there that she had been killed by some assholes looking for narcotics at the clinic.
I had sent her a packet of pictures of our home and family on different holidays, because I had thought she was fabulous.
I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. She had dark, dark brown skin, a ready and wide smile, arms that were always ready to dispense a hug, and colourful headscarves.
She moved with the grace of a dancer, and I wanted to be her.
I received the packet of photos and my letter back, with a note from the clinic director informing us of the tragedy.
She was the first person I’d ever known who had died, and it prompted a thousand questions to my parents, and death becoming one of my favorite topics, since I was convinced that ghosts and an afterlife of some kind was real, based on what I’d seen that others could not.
I had wondered if Fatima would ever visit me as a spirit, and then I forgot her in the car accident that took so much from my mind.
Well, she was certainly visiting me now, and she was not only visiting me, but she was also pulling full duty as a nurse on this ward.
Everyone just accepted her presence, and no one questioned it.
The questions I had about her burned more than my battered lower body.
Another nurse came around to check my vitals.
“We recommend skin-to-skin contact as soon as possible,” Fatima was saying.
“So one more time, do you want to hold her? She’s doing very well, and we can get you into one of these wheelchairs if you don’t feel ready to walk.
The NICU isn’t far. You can also try breastfeeding her, giving some of that good colostrum you’re filled up with. ”
“Yes, I think I’d like that very much, Fatima.” I smiled back at her with everything I had.
She patted my shoulder and said, “That’s a good girl. Still have your feet planted on the ground, and out of the trees, anyway.” We both laughed a bit as tears ran down my face as the other women helped me sit up, and then stand, and thankfully sit into one of those extra-wide wheelchairs.
As we rolled out toward the NICU, I swear I could feel Beatrice, and could guide myself to her.
Halfway there, all hell broke loose. Something, something huge was waking up inside me, like after a long nap.
So huge that I wasn’t sure my body could contain it.
I squeezed my eyes tightly closed and bit my teeth together as I felt like a wave of electricity had hit me, and the only thing grounding me to the earth was Fatima’s grip, because she could see or feel whatever it was, too.
I reached blindly for her other hand, and she clasped it tight as we waited for the sensations to pass, and I felt no longer like I was going to fly out of this chair by the force of the storm in my mind.
We sat there in silence, me heavy breathing, and Fatima taking a few steps to the nurses’ station to get me a disposable cup of water.
I gratefully drank it down and wished I could toss one over my head to cool off.
That was when I realized the pain I had felt was a shining ball of white light, like a miniature sun inside my chest, where my own small centre of power usually lay.
And then, I remembered. What does one do with around nine hundred and twenty psychics, many of whom had ambiguous motivations?
Why, take their power, of course. And share it with a trustworthy friend—Clark.