The Speculist

“Actually, I’m 13. They’ve had my age wrong all along, and I was never able to tell anyone. But let’s not quibble about nonessential matters.”

“Hey,” said Judy, in spite of herself, “we’re the same age. I didn’t know that.”

Todd nodded.

“It’s true. But we need stick to the business at hand.”

“Right,” she said. “Miss Lufts, please believe what Todd says. I know it sounds crazy, but we really are running the home. For a while longer anyway. And we need your help.”

“There aren’t many adults we could turn to,” said Todd. “Not who could understand. There’s only one who we’re sure we can trust, but she can’t help us. Not right now.”

“Who?” asked Sybil.

Todd cleared his throat.

“Grace’s mother. Jolene. She always did what she could to take care of us. But she’s away at the state home right now. And as much as she wants to help us, she can’t.”

Grace got wide-eyed at this mention of her mother. It was the second time that day. Since coming to the home, I had rarely heard anyone mention Jolene. I knew that Grace had a picture of her hanging on her wall. And it seemed like…somebody would bring her up once in a great while. Or Grace would ask about her. Or something. It seems that there was some vague notion that Grace would one day go to the state home and visit her mother. It was all a little fuzzy. I figured Todd wouldn’t mention Jolene without a good reason, and I knew he wouldn’t say anything as stupid as what Miss Baker had said earlier that day about Grace seeing her mother soon.

But I could also see how disturbing this all was for Grace. I took her hand in mine.

Sybil looked at Grace. I thought she was maybe going to cry when she first saw the little girl and realized who she was. She looked so upset. And now she kind of looked that way again. But as I was to learn over the years, Sybil didn’t like to give herself over to messy, soft emotions.

“It’s funny you mention Jolene. I think she was the smartest girl I ever met. And now I listen to the two of you talk…don’t they have any kids in that home who actually belong there?”

Judy couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

“We all belong there,” said Todd. “All except Grace. But that’s a long story we’ll have to tell you about some other time. We don’t have much time. We need your help now. We’re perfectly willing to pay you for helping us out. But this isn’t really about the money.”

Sybil looked at him skeptically.

“I think you’ll help us for Jolene’s sake. I think you’ll do for us what she would, but can’t.”

“Yeah?” said Sybil. “what makes you think so?”

Todd reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn gray envelope.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Sybil.

She made a move like she was going to grab the letter out of Todd’s hand, and then thought better of it. Todd opened the letter. There were two pages. He scanned the second page.

“Here we are,” he said. “…and even though saying I’m sorry isn’t enough, I want you to know that I am truly sorry. I never wanted anything but the best for Jolene and I still want that now. What happened to her…”

He skipped a bit, mindful of Grace’s presence.

“…and I will do anything I can to help her at any time. Please accept my apology and my offer to help. I hope to hear back from you very soon.”

Todd put the letter down and looked Sybil directly in the eye.

“Sincerely, Sybil Lufts,” he said.

No one said anything for a while.

“So,” said Todd, “did you mean it or not?”

Sybil sighed. She reached in her purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I noticed that her hand was shaking as she lit one.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“It was well hidden,” said Todd. “I don’t think anyone has seen it for a while.”

Sybil took a long draw off her cigarette. Grace was fascinated. I don’t think she’d ever seen anyone smoke before. Sybil shook her head as she exhaled.

“So tell me what you want.”

Todd outlined the plan for her. She would go home and gather whatever belongings she wanted to take with her. In two hours, she would meet me at a street corner a few blocks from the home. (It was best, Todd reasoned, to avoid having Sybil seen anywhere near the home.) I would have the money with me along with my personal belongings. Plus I would have a sealed envelope containing additional instructions. She would take me with her out of town. Preferably out of state. Todd suggested that Florida might be a good idea, but emphasized that neither he nor any of the rest of them wanted to know where she was going.

“If we don’t know, we can’t tell,” he said.

The instructions that I carried with me were not to be opened for five years. These were directions for how and when Sybil and I would meet back up with them. If the timing was not right on either end, the instructions also included contingency plans. The $8000 (minus the $30 Todd had ended up lavishing on the waitress at the all-night diner) was a down payment. Sybil would be compensated to the tune of $25,000 per year for each year she took care of me. The amount would be increased 3% per year should we have to resort to one of the contingency plans.

None of us knew how outrageous these sums of money were, but Sybil obviously did. She looked skeptical when Todd mentioned the $25,000. When he told her about the 3%, she laughed out loud.

“You kids kill me,” she said. “Where do you think you’re going to get your hands on that kind of money?”

Todd started to answer, but Judy cut in.

“Well, not to brag or anything,” she said. “But we got $8,000 just today and we didn’t even have to try very hard. If we had a week or so to plan, we would probably have paid you the full amount in advance.”

Sybil looked like she was about to make a sarcastic remark, but she stopped herself. She looked at the bag full of cash again, seeming to consider what it implied about Todd and Judy (and the rest of us) and what we might be capable of.

She glanced at her watch.

“If I don’t go in right now, I’m going to be late for work,” she said.

“Of course, you’ll have to quit your job,” said Todd.

“Of course,” she said bitterly. “I’ll have to drop everything and just run out of town like a criminal, which I probably will be if I accept your money.”

“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” said Todd. “But to be perfectly frank, it doesn’t look like you’ll be leaving that much behind.”

He glanced towards the backdoor of the strip club as he said it. He continued before she could respond.

“You don’t think anybody’s going to notice that I’m gone?”

“Let me be very frank,’ said Todd. “With everything else that’s taking place, I doubt that your disappearance will get much attention. If any.”

“And you don’t care if it means that I just have to drop everything? Leave everything I have behind?”

“We can sympathize with that,” said Judy. “We’re all going to lose our home, too. But none of us get any say in where we’re going next. Unlike you.”

Sybil took another drag off her cigarette and then threw it down, still lit, in the gravel.

“Why?” she said. She looked at me. “Why do you want me to take this kid? Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to take Grace?”

I remembered the debate earlier this morning that Judy, Todd, and Lucinda had had about whether Grace should go with us. Todd and Judy knew that Grace’s presence would carry a lot of weight with both of the people we were planning on talking to, but Lucinda feared the discussions she would be subjected to. Like this one.

“No,” said Todd. “We’re going to keep Grace with us for as long as we can. That isn’t a negotiable point. She’s going to be placed with a family soon. I’ve read the papers at the home. They’ve been working on it for a long time.”

“What?” said Grace. “What family? I don’t want to. I want to stay with Lucinda.”

“Never mind that for now,” said Judy. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“No,” said Grace. “I won’t go. And I don’t want Corey to go either.”

She began to cry. I put my arm around her shoulder, but she broke free. She stood off to one side, wailing.

Judy glared at Sybil

“Now look what you’ve done,” she said.

It looked to me as though the blame really belonged to Todd, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Especially since I couldn’t talk.

“Grace,” said Todd, his voice quiet and reassuring, “you can’t do this. Not now. Do you remember what we talked about this morning?”

She continued to wail.

“Corey is in danger. We’re the only ones who can keep him safe. Just us and this lady. Everything is going to change for a while. But someday soon, we’ll get things back the way they’re supposed to be. You’re going to have to go live with a new family, and it’s going to be fine. They would never…I mean we…”

Todd struggled to figure out who it was he was talking about. The same question occurred to me: who exactly was trying to find Grace a family? One of our missing persons, it seemed.

“We would never send you anyplace that wasn’t great. But we have to talk about that later. If Corey goes away with Miss Lufts, then we’ll see him again some day. We have a plan. It’ll be okay. But if he doesn’t, other people are going to take him away and then we don’t know when we’ll ever get to see him again.”

I could see now what Todd was doing. He wasn’t explaining my situation to Grace, he was explaining it to Sybil. He had manufactured the entire scene, including Grace’s crying, just to be able to get the message across the way he wanted to. It struck me that he was being a little hard on Grace, using her fears like that, but after the bank and the diner, I wasn’t about to question Todd’s rhetorical strategies. He apparently knew what he was doing.

Grace grew quiet. She looked up at Todd, tears streaming down her face.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

“But who wants to take Corey away?”

“Government people,” said Judy. “People who don’t understand.”

“Are they mad at him?” said Grace. “Because of the mountain? But we have to tell them that it wasn’t just Corey. It was all of us!”

She stopped talking, realizing the indiscretion about a half second after it occurred to the rest of us. I wasn’t sure whether this was part of Todd’s plan or not. But I guess it must have been.

All eyes turned to Sybil. She was looking from one of us to the other, her mouth wide open.

“Hold it,” she said. “Bullshit. Do you meant to tell me that this kid…that that thing that happened…”

“The Phenomenon,” said Todd.

Sybil’s eyes grew wide. She laughed strangely.

“Right, the phenomenon…”

She turned instinctively towards the mountain, but it was blocked by the Cheri Lounge. She studied the crumbling brick building for a moment, anyway. She turned back to Todd.

“You kids did that?” she said.

“We didn’t mean to,” said Grace. “It was an accident!”

Sybil looked at me for a long while.

“You did it,” she said.

I nodded.

There was no good reason for her to believe that this was actually the case. But then, she didn’t have to believe. Somehow she seemed to just know it. She let out a long sigh which ended in a kind of shudder. She turned to Judy.

“And now you want me to run away with him. If I take you up on this deal, what else is he going to do?”

“We don’t know. Nothing bad.”

This was more or less a lie. Earlier that day, Judy had said that she didn’t think it was a good idea to ask me to try to bring about any more changes. What she didn’t know at the time was that I couldn’t. For all any of them knew right then, I might fall asleep that night and dream up something much worse than the ants. Or even than the Remover version of myself. I had no way of telling them what Angela had told me -- that I had lost the my lucid-dreaming ability, the means by which I had previously communicated with them and shaped the world into forms I liked better.

Sybil turned to me again.

“Listen, kid. Corey. I don’t need any of this shit, okay?”

I nodded.

“I don’t go in for all this spooky stuff. If I go along with this deal, you have to make me a promise that you won’t pull any more stunts like that. Do you understand?”

I nodded again.

“I mean it, kid. No spooky stuff, Do you promise?”

I nodded for the third time.

“You can’t talk, can you?”

I shook my head.

“Well…” she said. She seemed to be chewing on the implications. Not just my inability to speak or my role in causing the Phenomenon. All of it.

“Okay, then,” she said after a moment. She turned back to Todd.

“All right, ” she said. “Let me just be sure I’ve got this straight. You want to pay me $8,000 to leave town with some mute, miracle-working kid that the government’s after. Right?”

“Nobody is looking for Corey,” said Todd. “Not yet, anyway.”

“And they may never,” said Judy, “if we get him out of here immediately.”

“And as I already explained,” Todd added, “the eight thousand is a just a down payment.”

“Right,” said Sybil. “A down payment…” She took one last look at her wristwatch and at the door to her place of employment. “Twenty-five thousand a year. I know.”

“You’re going to help us, aren’t you?” said Grace.

Sybil gave Grace a very faint smile.

“Your friends here never doubted it. It’s like…Todd says -- it’s what your mom would do if she were here.”

She was right. After he read the letter, Todd was sure that Sybil would help. What he didn’t tell her was that he wasn’t 100% sure that she was the right person to go to. In addition to the instructions he was to give to Sybil, there was another set that he gave to me. What to do if Sybil “proved unreliable” as he put it. It wasn’t much of a fallback plan. He gave me Dr. MacHale’s telephone number, which I was to present to the authorities when I turned myself in. Only as a last resort.

Sybil walked over and picked Grace up, giving her a long hug. My little friend didn’t ordinarily much care for this sort of thing -- and she had never seen many strangers -- but she didn’t protest. After a moment, Sybil set her down and started towards her car.

“It was nice meeting you kids,” she said, over her shoulder. She stopped by the car, turned, and looked straight at me.

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours,” she said.

Then she drove away.