40. Clark
FORTY
CLARK
The first time I went to Big Tancook Island, it was in a helicopter.
I had rented one for the day because we didn’t want to take Bea, as small and vulnerable to temperature as she was, out on the ferry.
I mean, it was a beautiful July day, so it’s possible we were being a tad overprotective, but if we had the means to be overprotective, we were going to use them.
It wasn’t a very far ride, but still, we felt an hour each way by car, and then an hour each way on the boat was a bit much for a three-month-old.
Plus, we’d have to secure someone with a vehicle who could take us to the cottage, which I was told was a muddy drive this time of year.
We should probably just get it paved, or resurfaced with new gravel, I thought, if it was going to impede us from getting to and from the mainland.
We brought Bea in her car seat for the helicopter ride, and had plenty of blankets and even a lamb plushy with a warm water bottle tucked inside.
We’d had utilities hooked up to the house after an engineer had visited and declared everything structurally sound and move-in ready.
The local caretakers had done an excellent job, apparently, and I asked my real estate agent to communicate to them that I would like to retain their services for outdoor maintenance, and perhaps cooking, or some help with the housekeeping.
Jobs weren’t exactly in abundance on an island with so few people, so I didn’t want to take a cent of income away from the older couple who had been managing this beautiful cottage while its former owners seemed to have lost interest in it, and its current owners were trying to course correct a corporation that had been one major boondoggle after another.
As much as we had tried, we couldn’t fix the corporate culture of Rose Financial while we were not present.
We each took turns in the beginning, but Olly wanted to be with Bea at home and not hire a nanny just so they could do the people in the former Organization a favor, so I held the fort there most days, and Olly Zoomed in as needed.
As we approached the island from the air, at one point, Olly leaned forward and said, “There she is!” and burst into uncontrollable giggles.
I’d take them to a trip to Kauai any day to go on a Jurassic Park helicopter tour, if this was their impression of Big Tancook Island, and Kauai had been freakin’ Isla Nublar.
I suddenly thought that would be the most epic honeymoon destination but didn’t let my thoughts linger there.
So what if I had the perfect ring in my dresser?
Olly might not be anywhere near ready, yet.
We’d had the engineer, who was a man of many talents, hook us up with a surveyor and their team because we wanted to be certain where it would be safe to landscape to create a permanent helipad.
When they came back and said that there was a section of flat land on one side of the cottage that could be turned into a helipad with minimal labour, we asked them to go for it.
It was finished last month, and now we were finally using it.
It might seem like an extravagance, but Olly wanted us both to take pilot lessons and eventually buy one if we were comfortable with flying.
I was slightly terrified of crashing us into the ocean, but we could work that out in couples therapy, which we were certainly going to be getting, because of everything that had happened to us this past year.
And Olly was adamant that we both also start, separately, PTSD therapy, and make it a priority.
Not after Bea got over a urinary tract infection, or after we had finished rebuilding trust with Robert—not “after” anything.
So, we had sessions next week, which would apparently help us as individuals, which would in turn help us as a couple.
I suppose I did need some adjusting to the fact that I had dormant psychic powers which led to the absorption of the powers and abilities of hundreds of people.
I mean, it was impossible to process all that overnight, or hell, even over the last three months.
I think owing to their prior friendship and working relationship, and Olly’s attachment to Aaron as a friend, rebuilding that trust with Jeff came far easier.
Especially after they both consented to a good old-fashioned lie detector test. Olly had been given permission to dive into their heads and see where they were at with the whole “being high up in an evil cult” thing.
It turned out that Aaron was completely innocent, and Jeff had made sure to keep him away from anything to do with Edward Evans and The Organization.
Jeff himself, however, was heavily involved as Dear Leader’s glorified puppet.
Jeff and Robert had been operating under a bit of mind control, as out there as that sounded, and had nothing but apologies for their roles in everything, including the kidnappings, which was like an implanted order into their heads.
They both described it kind of like watching TV.
They knew they were going through the motions, but didn’t have the ability to intervene and stop it all.
I remembered months ago calling them “pod people,” and I guess I wasn’t too far off the mark.
So Jeff and Aaron were a presence in our lives, and while offers of babysitting had come in, we weren’t quite ready yet to trust anyone with the most precious thing we had.
And there I went, talking like her father, again.
It was hard not to be resentful of Shepard, especially when he didn’t want to spend every spare moment he had while he was still whole and alive with his daughter.
By the time we landed on Big Tancook in our side yard, I felt a sense of peace. The photographs hadn’t lied, and as Olly used the key to unlock the front door, they gasped as they stepped inside.
“I know this place. I drew it when I was a child, over and again, from different angles. I think...” They closed their eyes and spun around in their red sundress which had been cut up a bit and placed over some jeans, in the light that came in through the two front windows which were perfectly placed to see the ocean, and they looked so darn happy that I put a sleeping Bea down in her car seat and walked over to Olly, wanting to propose right then and there.
But more than that, I didn’t want to take advantage of a moment that obviously meant so much to them and was already full of high emotion, so I joined them in twirling, twirling through the living room, into the kitchen, and back toward Bea.
The space was cleverly used, the finishings all high-end—Olly had me watching those home reno shows now, too, because we were sure we’d need them—and I scooped Bea up, and we checked out the other rooms. The laundry was at the back, and then there were two spacious bedrooms. One had a king-sized bed and its own bathroom, while the other was a surprise for Olly.
A beautiful nursery set up in yellows, beiges, some pink and blue, and it all went together so artfully that I knew who I was going to hire as a designer should we need one in the future.
There was even a set of adorable bunk beds for either when Bea got older, or for if Maya and Rosie wanted to come by for a sleepover.
Who knew if ghosts actually slept. It was the gesture that mattered, I thought.
Not that we’d seen much of them lately. I decided starting that night, I would search for them in dreams, trying to initiate a visit, and give them each access to my own well of power so they could interact with us physically during the day.
But what was I saying about “us”? This was Olly’s home, their dream from childhood apparently, and they had sunk their own funds into everything to do with the house, including reimbursing me for the original buying cost. I hadn’t been invited to live here, technically.
A shy smile came over Olly’s face just then, and they turned toward me and wrapped their arms around me, with Bea between us.
“It’s perfect, Supes. You’ve done an amazing job. Does this mean I get a roommate?”
My heart soared. “For as long as you want one, yes.” I leaned down to capture their lips with mine, and they did that biting my lower lip thing that drove me crazy.
This might qualify as the best day of my life, right here.
Definitely top three. Invited to live with Olly, surrounded by the ocean, helping to raise their beautiful daughter.
“I want to swim,” Olly said before we got into the helicopter.
Our pilot, Phil, had been hired for the full day, so we weren’t punching a clock, and there was nice swimming access just down the hill from the house.
I mean, the wooden dock was right there.
It would be nothing for them to use either the rocky beach or straight into the ocean off the wharf.
Of course, I had watched a nature documentary about the dramatic spike in Great Whites in Atlantic Canadian waters due to climate change.
Warmer waters meant that seals and other food sources were heading farther north, and the sharks were following them.
And not just the Great Whites, but other sharks which were far from harmless: mako sharks, tiger sharks, and bull sharks were also hunting these waters, especially now that we were on an island out to sea.
“Clark, I won’t be foolish. I’ll read the...
room, for lack of a better word. Don’t worry, if there are any sharks nearby with intent to do harm, I won’t go in, okay?
” I instantly felt better. Olly couldn’t exactly “talk” to animals.
I mean, they weren’t Dr. Doolittle, but once a species reached a certain level of intelligence, Olly was able to sense that and sometimes ask or command them to obey an order or request, again, depending on what the species was.
They had done the bulk of their research at the Toronto Zoo.
It was the great ape they saw, a new mother gorilla.
But within minutes, they were sitting down on the floor across the glass from this gorilla, and they read its mind to understand the sign language that the zookeepers used with her.
Olly spoke in English while moving her hands in slow, deliberate ways, telling the new mother that her baby was beautiful, and then asked me to grab Bea from her stroller, which I did eagerly, because I somehow knew this would be good.
I noticed a few people had their phones pointed at Olly as they held a sleeping Bea next to the window, and the gorilla copied the motion, then told Olly in sign that they had a beautiful baby, too.
They must have sat there for like a half hour, showing each other ways they cared for their children.
It ended when there had been complaints about Olly breastfeeding in public.
The customer experience person gently suggested we move on and let others see the gorilla and infant, so we did, with Olly muttering in my head about “bullshit corporate rules” and “anyone with a brain could see that that mother and baby deserved to be in her mother’s homeland, not in the Toronto Zoo.
” They were pretty upset, so I agreed with everything they said, though I did point out that the mother gorilla was raised in captivity, so the Toronto Zoo was their homeland.
I had decided we needed a little vacation, and as Toronto had excellent theatre and Olly was a huge theatre fan, we took a short flight, and there we went.
I had surprised Olly by bringing along our nanny, whom we wound up hiring after all, and whom we trusted implicitly after we both read her mind during the job interview.
We would be leaving them comfortably in the hotel suite while we went to see & Juliet and Some Like It Hot.
Thinking of our weekend in Toronto made me smile, and I watched as Olly boldly just stripped off their jeans and sundress top, leaving them in boxer briefs and a sports bra, and run down to the dock and take a feet-first leap into the sea.
“Ahhhhhh!” they screamed, and I almost went running down after them when they cried, “My nipples! The water is so cold!” They stayed with just their head peeking out, treading water and then floating on their back with their eyes closed.
I kept having Jaws-related feelings of stress, but decided instead to take Bea down to the dock so we could talk easily with Olly.
We made it back to the city just as the sun was starting to set, and it was a beautiful omen of nice weather for tomorrow, Olly insisted. They leaned over and kissed me on the lips long and hard before we left the helicopter. “Thank you for today. I can’t wait to see what life brings us next.”
“Finding you has been the joy of my life,” I replied and meant every word. I had found my inner peace in the arms of two of the most amazing people I’d ever met.