“In any case, right after they died, I met my mentor, Olivia. And Olivia...She stepped into my life and gave me a job, fed me, even let me live with her. I was grateful for it.”
Really grateful. My mom and dad had left Jack and me a little money, but so much went into the funerals, and then to the mortgage. Jack, whose grief was so great he could hardly look at me, ended up staying at the house, which was probably a lot easier for him to face than a hysterical teenage girl. None of our distant relatives were interested in housing an eighteen-year-old who should be taking care of herself anyway.
Olivia had taken me in, made me a little family. Gotten me to love her. And if it was a shadow of my old life, well, it was more than nothing. And there was a new world to learn about, and a business, and for a long time, that was all enough to get by.
“Anyway, so a couple years later, Olivia was in the hospital, dying of cancer, and she asked me to go to her house and get a few things. Water the plants and stuff. I knocked over a potted plant in the house, and I felt terrible. I didn’t want the plant to die, too, you know?”
He nodded.
“So I went to find some potting soil in this crappy old gardening shed that Olivia had behind her house. I’d never been in there; I hate gardening. But when I went in and poked around, I found something tossed behind a bag of potting soil. It was one of those instruction manuals that comes with your car.”
Comprehension spread across his face. “But this one was for your parents’ Jeep.”
I nodded. “And the thing was, Olivia drove a Saturn. Before that, she’d had a Toyota sedan; she’d told me stories about it. Even so, I probably shouldn’t have put anything together, but there was just this...feeling. So I went through her house, found some pictures of me, one in a frame. It was taken at my high school graduation.”
Jesse winced. “Ouch.”
“Yeah, ouch. There were a couple of other things, and I finally put it together. She’d found me, somehow, months before my parents died. Olivia couldn’t have kids, see; for some reason, it’s usually hard for nulls. And here I was, this young, impressionable null, perfect for her to take in. She wanted to sort of adopt me, I guess, except I already had parents. So she switched out the brake pads and...herded me toward her. Wormed her way into my life and became like a second mother to me.” Much, much later, the thought had struck me that I was lucky she hadn’t killed Jack, too. I never told him about Olivia, which is just one more reason why we avoid each other.
I pulled my knees up to my chin, hugging my legs to my chest. “She told me once that she’d grown up around cars, but I had no idea...” I trailed off. “Anyway, Will liked me, and he was irate when he found out about Olivia. Dashiell...Well, he’d known about Olivia and my parents, but he didn’t care. It made no difference to him that Olivia was the mayor of Crazytown; he was just happy she had found a null apprentice.” That still stung. Even then, I hadn’t been so naive as to think Dashiell and I were friends, but that level of coldness was still a shock.
“Did you...What did you do?” Jesse asked quietly.
“Nothing. I did nothing. I went to a ratty hotel, and I locked the door and went to bed for ten days. She called my cell, and I didn’t answer. Then on the tenth day, it was the hospital calling, and she was dead.”
“You didn’t confront her?” His voice was shocked.
“No,” I said flatly.
That wasn’t the whole truth. Two days after I figured it out, I had crept into the hospital late at night, way after visiting hours. The nurses all knew me by then, though, and one of them, a stout older woman with a hundred extra pounds, gave me a little smile and nod to let me know it was all right. “Visiting hours” doesn’t always apply on the cancer ward.
Olivia was barely alive by then, almost swallowed up by the machines and tubes keeping her alive. She looked pathetic, her long chestnut hair missing in great patches, her skin yellowed and cracking. Only a few days before, I had been gently rubbing lotion onto her arms, crying over her condition. Now I watched my hand reach toward her, saw it rising up to her mouth. It would be so easy to just plug her nose, cover her mouth. I wouldn’t even have to press down hard. There wouldn’t be an autopsy.
A strand of long, near-black hair fell in my face, and I froze with my hand in midair. It was my mother’s hair. I stepped across the room to the mirror. In the half light, with my hair clouded around my face, I looked just like her. Stricken with shame, I left the room without another glance back at Olivia. It took seven more days for her to stop breathing, but at least it wasn’t my hand that did it.
“Anyway,” I said, trying to push the memory away, “I did...um...”
“What?”
I winced. “I did sort of burn down her gardening shed.” I’d made no effort to conceal my guilt. It had cost Dashiell a lot of money to pull the right strings so I wouldn’t go to jail. Mostly, I figure he did it to make sure I’d keep working for him, but he’d never taken any bribe money out of my pay. Sometimes I think it was his apology for not telling me about Olivia.
Jesse gave me a bemused half smile, part reprimand and part approval. He thought for a few moments and finally said, “What was going to be your major?”
Not the question I was expecting. “Um, veterinary science.”
He gave me a baffled look.
“What? I like science, and I love animals.”
“You do?” He seemed genuinely surprised.