True to her word, Rachelle waited until he had finished the last swallow of his shake before she stood and offered him a hand. Remembering what she had said about her joints, Brady ignored it and pushed to his feet with the help of the wall. Rachelle gave him a little smile as she motioned him in the opposite direction from the way he’d first come.
“Down this way. The den is our own mostly private space. Dr. Mattox keeps her quarters there, and we can get a nurse if we need one. But we’re pretty isolated from the rest of the center, and I think everyone prefers it.”
“Who is ‘we’ and ‘everyone’?” Whatever was in the drink had taken the edge off his shakiness, but his brain still hovered on the brink of overload. Every time his focus slipped from her, the world around him threatened to crash in—noises of lab animals, smells of food pellets and bedding, glimpses of cages and charts through walls that shouldn’t have been transparent.
“Myself and my sister to start. And a couple of others like us—like you and me, I mean, not Grace. She’s perfectly healthy, thank the Lord.”
“When you say ‘like us,’ you mean—”
“I mean roughly the same combination of debilitating chronic conditions, willingness to try a totally untested treatment, and the resulting weird, for lack of a better term, superpowers.” She turned down another hallway and paused at a door with a keypad lock, where she entered a four-number combination.
Brady couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t try to shield it in any way and wasn’t sure if that indicated some level of trust or just surrender to the fact that he could have gotten the numbers if he wanted to, no matter how she tried to hide them. Not that he would have done that—at least, not on purpose—but it wasn’t like she knew him yet, no matter how much of his background the doctor had given her.
“I’ll take you to meet them later, but I’m not going to dump that on you right now. Just keep quiet and come with me.”
She led him down a short hall and turned opposite a doorway leading to what looked like a large, open room. The hallway facing it had much more the appearance of a regular hospital corridor, with three doors evenly spaced on each side and an exit at the far end. Rachelle pointed him to the last room on the left and sat down on the end of the bed, motioning for him to join her.
“You don’t have to make a choice right now. But this is your room if you want it. I know it’s small and a little bare, but you wouldn’t have to keep it that way. Bare, I mean—there’s not much you could do about the size. There’s a connected bathroom, so you’d have total privacy in that regard. Although we take care of each other as much as possible, so we tend to have pretty free access. But if you wanted your room off limits, we’d definitely respect that.”
“Rachelle.” Brady rubbed his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Thanks for—all this, but—I still don’t understand. So the treatment gives me—us—superpowers, but—you said it doesn’t last?”
“Right.” Rachelle slipped her shoes off and crossed her feet beneath her. “If you hadn’t gotten the treatment—if today was one of your normal migraines—what would tomorrow look like?”
“Just like today.” That was much too easy to answer. “Two days is the minimum for a bad one. Sometimes three. I can’t stand light, noise, or smells, and I can’t keep anything down until it’s past. After that, there’s a day where I can barely drag myself out of bed, and then I might get a few days of close to normal or regular headaches or lower-level migraines before a bad one hits again.”
“Well, if it works for you like it does the rest of us, you can expect that pattern to continue. We usually get one day symptom free—and with our…enhancements—before we snap back to our baseline. The good news is that the treatment, and any exertion from the days we have it, doesn’t seem to make us any worse. We basically get to skip a day out of our worst episodes.”
“But only with superpowers.”
“Yes, that’s the catch.” Rachelle sighed. “There are ways we—keep ourselves busy—on those days, but it would be totally up to you what you wanted to do with yours.”
“Please don’t talk in riddles.” Brady hated the way the quiver in his voice made him sound like a lost little kid, but he was way beyond the point where he could even pretend to understand her.
“I’m sorry.” Rachelle put a hand on his knee, and the regret in her voice said she really was. “I feel like a bad comic book, but I’ll try. We can’t be—what you’d think of as normal crimefighters. I guess we really can’t be ‘normal’ anything. It’s too inconsistent. Too unpredictable. Too short-lived for anyone to depend on. But we—well, I—can’t help but think God must have a purpose for it, so—we try to do what good we can when we can.”
“So you’re telling me I’m—some kind of discount, knockoff, temporary version of a superhero?” Brady closed his eyes and lifted his face to the ceiling in a silent, desperate prayer. He’d been ready for the possibility that things might go horribly wrong, but nothing had prepared him for this.
“That’s not what I’m saying, Brady.” The pressure of her hand tightened on his knee, and his sharpened senses traced the slight tremor of her fingers and the unnatural slipping of her knuckles. “I’m saying that there’s a place for you here if you want it. And maybe work that God can do through you. This is the last available treatment, for all of us, so I can’t offer much hope on that score, although maybe they’ll have more ideas in a year, or two, or five. Or you can go back to your sister and the life you know. You have that choice. Most of us don’t.”
She let the silence stretch between them for a long moment before gently tugging his chin down to meet his eyes again.
“Don’t try to decide right now. You’re exhausted, and for good reason. Try to rest for a while. See if you can’t catch a nap. You’ll feel a lot better afterward. I’ll check in on you in a bit, and you can meet the others then, if you’re up to it. Or if you can’t rest at all, come find us in the common, just across the hall. But give it a chance first, okay?”
Brady managed a nod, and Rachelle squeezed his shoulder, then slipped off the bed and back into her shoes before leaving the room and closing the door behind her. Brady curled up on the bed and buried his head in the pillow, letting a quiet moan escape him.
God, how can this be Your plan? I don’t understand. Please show me what You want from me.
With nothing left to do but wait, Brady closed his eyes and worked to surrender the control he had fought so hard to gain. His heightened senses sharpened, swirled, and faded. And an answer came on the gentle wings of sleep.
😍 I love this story!