38. Clark
THIRTY-EIGHT
CLARK
I discovered that the real estate market on Big Tancook wasn’t a booming one, but it didn’t matter because the only listing at the time was perfection.
It was as if some force greater than us had seen Olly’s drawing of the blue cottage with the red door, the rocky beach and the dock, and cover from trees, and put it up for sale.
For a song, I might add, not that we had to exactly worry over money these days.
Or perhaps Olly had just foreseen what would be available when it was needed?
I neither knew nor cared, because I called the real estate office and imparted to them that I wanted that property, and waiting for summer when more options might be available was impossible.
They probably thought strangely of me when I offered fifty thousand over asking if the current residents would agree to close on the property rapidly, and as they were living in Florida and the cottage was empty, they were delighted.
Everyone signed on the dotted line that day, and I didn’t care that the house was technically sight unseen in the sale, because I knew Olly wouldn’t have drawn a picture of anywhere dangerous or dilapidated.
They had drawn their dream house, and I would do whatever it took to have it ready for them and Bea.
“Okay, Dad number one, you’ve been cleared and you’re off to see Olly. They’re still unconscious, but if you hurry up you can snap some pics of Bea before she’s taken to the NICU. Time to run!” I realized that she really did mean run, so I followed her out of the waiting room on a tear.
“And now, Dads number two and three, come with me. We don’t have to run but...
” The other nurse’s voice faded the further away we got.
I couldn’t believe that Bea was actually here.
I thought about everything that Olly had been subjected to by the cult—I refused to call it by any other name in the wake of recent events—and I sent up a silent prayer that Bea would be okay.
Despite my fears that she would be born addicted to some drug Olly had been loaded up on, Bea was mostly okay.
They were a little concerned because of her lungs.
They hadn’t had the full time to develop, but she was “remarkably well, for a premature birth,” according to Fatima.
Small, but stable. I didn’t take miracles for granted, so that was where we were: Beatrice Rose McLeod was a miracle.
Of course, that wasn’t her official name.
Olly still hadn’t woken up from wherever or whenever they were to fill out the birth certificate, and Shepard, true to his word, had stayed back from India for now and was able to get reimbursed for his flight to Mumbai.
However, he confirmed that he didn’t want to sign the birth certificate.
Olly and I didn’t have a conversation about what that meant for the possibility of me signing the certificate, but if they would let me, I’d sign it right this minute.
I wanted the legal obligations that having a child meant, and I wanted all of the downright paranormal extras that came with Beatrice.
I wasn’t scared of being a dad. I felt ready.
As for Olly’s whereabouts, they had so much power now that I had a hunch they could have gone anywhere, or even anytime, and to us it would just look like this: a coma.
Unconscious and unresponsive, they were given an MRI, and it showed that nothing in their brain was wrong, and the assumption was made that they would wake up when their body was ready.
They were put in an isolation room, as they had gone into this state during the mass poisoning back at headquarters, and the doctors were concerned that they hadn’t just bounced back like everyone else after no more than about twenty minutes.
At least they were laid out flat on their back with their voluminous hair out of their face, so I could see them through the glass and so could Maya and Thomas, if they wanted to visit in a less visible way.
It was hard to know what to call Maya. I mean, technically, she was a ghost. I wanted to have a talk with Olly about that and see if there really was “more” out there that Maya could “move on” to, because Olly had been dealing with visitors all their life.
Surely someone had let it slip at some point that they lingered for a reason of some kind, and that there was an ultimate goal of untethering from this Earth.
That sounded suspiciously like religion, though, and I knew Olly didn’t hold with organized faith groups.
I wondered if that was because they had grown up in a cult, and just hadn’t connected the dots on that one.
I did believe in an afterlife. I just didn’t know what it would look like for me when I got there.
Hopefully, that would be far and away from now, and I should stop being such a worrywart. Olly would wake up. They had to, because the thought of raising this child without them scared me shitless.
Just as I was signing for the sale of the property on Big Tancook, I got a beep from the hospital.
Olly had awakened, and the hospital finally had their permission that I was allowed to go to the NICU to see Bea, and Olly themself had been cleared for visitors, too.
No one could solve the mystery of what happened to all of us at the meeting, and while the investigation remained open, no suspicious activity was being pursued, except to locate where the bombs were made and when they were planted.
After all, they had killed five people, and as the police had made a list accounting of Rose employees and these were extra people, it was a safe assumption they were the ones responsible for the explosives.
I couldn’t have made it out of the real estate office in the village of Chester, where the Tancook Island Ferry currently ran to, and into my car any faster than if I had flown.
It was an endless forty-five minutes back to the hospital, but eventually I was there, and I had my arms wrapped around Olly as they cried and cried into my old Pearl Jam T-shirt with a flannel over it.
I have no idea why I’d dressed so grunge today.
I didn’t have to ask Olly why they were crying.
To have made it through everything they had, to finally deliver a baby girl only to have her wind up in the NICU...
well, I could empathize with it all, but I could never really understand unless they wanted to show me with their new powers.
When they had finished crying, and my flannel overshirt was a mess for which they apologized and I didn’t care, Olly insisted I go down and visit Bea.
She was the sweetest, tiniest baby I had ever seen, and they allowed me to take off my shirt so I could go skin to skin with her, as well.
I swear, that simple act changed everything.
Bea was trying to communicate with me, trying to talk into my head!
She was a genius, I swear. I reached out with a little light tap to her mind, and I heard back, “Mama?” When I showed her Olly, smiling but in her own hospital bed, Bea just sleepily said, “Mama,” her ‘voice’ full of contentment.
Before she went to sleep suckling her thumb, I swear I heard her say “Papa.”
My god.
My time in the NICU over, I bounced back upstairs to see Olly, and give them a surprise.
I had loaded up on my iPad a bunch of photos from the real estate company of the Big Tancook property, and they were like staring at a three hundred and sixty degree view of Olly’s sketch.
I pulled the chair in the room over to their bedside so I could see their face when they saw the cottage, right down to the red door, and gave them the iPad.
“Check it out,” I said. “This is where I went this morning. To buy this, for you. For her. So you’ll never have to live in fear. ”
They swiped through every picture, eyes open wide and I could see on the machine their heart rate accelerating a bit, but I think it was from excitement.
“You found it,” they said, marveling as they dug around in their bag and found the original sketch.
I mean, there was no denying it, this was the house, and the land, that Olly had intended to raise Bea on.
I wondered where they’d place all their gardens, and if they’d get any animals.
The only ones I could think of were cats, as having more than one dog could arouse suspicion and make people want to track them down when they ultimately got into some sort of trouble.
No, if Olly wanted her and Bea to remain practically anonymous, they’d best stick to a cat or two and enjoy their property.
There was plenty of room inside and out to float around if that’s what Bea wanted to do, especially at night.
Who would cross the island and traverse that bit of forest just to get a glimpse of what a person and their baby did at night?
“Clark,” Olly began, handing me back the iPad. “This property is wonderful, really. A dream come true. But it will be awfully lonesome out there for in-person adult conversation,” they said, with just a bit of playfulness in their voice. “You said it was a two and a half bedroom?”
“Yes.”
They sang a line about us living together, this time from Rent, making me wonder just how many musicals they knew.
The bed was extra-wide, and I asked with a nod of my head if Olly could scootch over to one side.
They did so, and I climbed on, letting Olly cuddle against me and kissing their forehead, then cheeks, nose, and finally crashing our lips together.
The pressure between our lips, the way they kept sucking my bottom lip into their mouth, and the little nibbles they dispensed were enough to excite me, but this was a hospital, and...
“Excuse me, this is a hospital!” The male nurse who walked in said, admonishing us both. Olly laughed, the first real, throaty laugh I’d heard from them in a while, and I grinned and whispered,
“Behave. We have company.”
“But not behaving is so much more fun,” they countered.
“Are you two finished? Believe it or not, I have quite a few other patients to see. I’m here to do a general check on Ms. McLeod’s vitals, remove her catheter as she should be walking the ten feet to her own bathroom, and to discuss wound care, depending on the state of her incision.”
I wanted so badly to be the one to tell Nurse Ratchet here that Olly wasn’t ‘Ms.’ anything, and to use their proper pronoun, when Olly stood for themselves.
“Sir, if you check my chart it will clearly show that my pronouns are they or them, and I’ve not yet chosen a salutation, though ‘Ms.’ or ‘Miss’ make me very uncomfortable. Could you please call me Olly?”
And thus began a war which lasted an hour.
While tests were run and wound dressings changed, the nurse was sniping at Olly the whole time.
I could feel the room practically vibrate as Olly attempted to rein their abilities in.
At one point, when the nurse was removing the catheter, everything on Olly’s tray table floated six inches in the air.
I squeezed their hand, and gradually things returned to their place before they could be discovered.
I wanted to grab Olly, pick them up bridal-style, and escort them from this place, but I knew we couldn’t leave Bea, and I knew that Olly wasn’t healing all that well.
I wondered what would happen if I made a conscious effort to heal them, if it would work.
I mean, it was worth a try, wasn’t it? As soon as the nurse left, I floated the idea to Olly, who was on board.
I mean, if you could get healed as if by magic, wouldn’t you want to?
I had no real idea what I was doing, but I just knew somewhere inside me that I could do this.
This had to be a power siphoned off one of the psychics in the ballroom, and directed to me by Olly.
I dimmed the lights a little bit in the room, closed the curtain to the window and the one around the bed, so we had a not really dark at all but cozy atmosphere for me to try this.
I remembered what the incision looked like when the nurse had been fussing with the bandages, so I didn’t feel the need to remove them.
I had Olly lie flat in the bed, and put my hands on the incision, but didn’t push down or anything.
I then closed my eyes and forced myself to focus as much as possible on my task.
Heal. Heal! I thought, and my hands started to get warm rather quickly.
Something was happening, be it good, bad, or ugly.
I heard Olly take a sharp intake of breath, and they nodded, saying they thought the staples were coming off on their own.
I held in the ‘Holy shit,’ I wanted to say, and kept my hands over them for as long as it was comfortable.
When my hands started to feel scalded, I said, “I think that’s all I can do,” and Olly grabbed my hands and saw the redness on them.
“I hope to holy hell this worked, because you need to heal your own hands, or have them treated and wrapped. That’s a burn you’ve got, on both of your palms.”