Excerpt
From the Second in Jessica's Second Romance Trilogy

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ONE

Claire Edwards had just absolutely had it, again, for about the sixth time that day.  She wanted to scream and shout and stomp her feet, but since that reaction was exactly what was bothering her in others, she could not do any of that.  She didn’t want to roll around on the floor in tempera paint like Annie or pee in her pants like Thomas.  She didn’t want to fall into instant and hysterical weeping and cling to pillow in the corner like Sam.  Maybe she wanted to stand shocked still in the corner with the rest of them, but theoretically, she was in charge.

     She was--Claire finally realized as she picked up the thrown barrel of blocks in order to get to Sam--the adult.  She was the one paid for keeping things flowing educationally and psychologically for Annie, Thomas, Sam, and the twelve other children in her charge, all of whom were staring at her right now with wide, frightened eyes.  Claire was in charge of “environment” and “attitude.”  Claire was in charge of “educational outcomes.”

     “Sam,” she said, her voice like the blanket that Sam was missing, the one that his mother insisted he go “cold turkey” with this very morning.  “I promise you that when you get home, your mommy will give you your blankie.  It’s just that it needs to stay at home for now.  While you are at school.”

     “I want my blankie!” Sam wailed.  “I want it now!”

     Annie rolled toward Claire, smearing primary colors everywhere.  Thomas clutched his pants, whimpering.

     The rest of them chimed in, crying in sympathy for this horrible scene, all of them suddenly wanted their blankies, their mommies, the toilet, an afternoon snack, their pets, anything but this classroom.

     Claire knew that she shouldn’t do it.  Couldn’t do it.  Really, really, mustn’t do it, but she wanted to close her eyes, think of a spot, any spot on the planet.  She wanted to focus on the Kelani Resort in Maui or the Mendocino Hotel in Mendocino.  She wanted to think about the Tuilerie Gardens in Paris.  Frankly, she would be happy at the Starbucks on the corner of Masonic and Fulton.  Or the French Laundromat on Stanyan, the air thick with steam and soap.  Anywhere but here.

     The problem always was, of course, that she could go wherever she wanted to.  Anywhere on the planet.  Just like that.  Just by thinking.  By picturing a place, she could be there, and she had performed this trick for herself a hundred times or more since she discovered it when she was six.  She could send herself anywhere, but coming back home wasn’t easy.  Claire wasn’t sure why she just couldn’t bounce herself back home, but there really wasn’t a resident expert on this kind of thing. There was no Teleportation for Dummies at the local bookstore. There wasn’t anyone she could call up and ask, “Hey, can you tell me why I can’t get home the way I got here?   You can’t?  Oh, well, could you just explain to me why I can’t get even close?”

     Sure, she could triangulate her way around, flinging herself from place to place until she ended up closer to home, but mostly she had to do it the old fashioned way:  bike, car, bus, cab, boat, train, plane.  Of course, when she decided on a whim to disappear, she hadn’t managed to pack a thing (not that she could take anything with her) and on one sad day when she failed a college exam in statistics, she’d ended up in Hawaii without a bikini or a credit card.  She cringed when she thought of the phone call she’d had to make to her mother, though the two days’ wait for her passport at the Oahu Holiday Inn had actually been fun.

     But who cared about that now?  In less than a second, she could be away from all of this and drinking a Mai-Tai on the veranda of Kelani Inn—assuming, of course, the staff took pity on her credit cardless self.  Annie, Thomas, and Sam would think they blinked too long and Claire had just stepped out of the classroom.  The children would stop crying, surprised and then excited that they were left all alone, by themselves, no adult in sight.  After a moment of exhilaration, they would start crying again, this time even harder.  Chaos would ensue.  All the children would throw paint, pee in their pants, and sob in the corners.  They would be forever marked and ruined by this horrifying abandonment and become troubled, over-pierced drug-addicted teenagers who would look back on this class and all of their education as an abusive waste of time.

     What was worse was that—if Claire wanted to—she could dive into their minds, see the patterns of shock and confusion and understanding.  As quickly as she could travel to any place on the planet, she could get into the little stream of consciousness that flowed strong through Annie’s mind.  What would Claire find there?  Images of school and home, friends and pets and siblings?  Or something worse, something scary and horrible, images Claire would never recover from. After hearing things meant for no one but the thinker, after seeing grief and despair and sexual positions and partners no one should know about, Claire stopped. She didn’t dip into anyone’s mind but her own, clamping down tight and holding on to her thoughts and her thoughts only. 

     Childhood was too fraught a place, full of dark forests with evil stepparents, confusing events no one explained, and nightmares that made sleeping with the light on crucial.  She didn’t want to do that one last thing that would ruin everything for them.  Claire knew how hard it was to overcome something from childhood.  She had been trying to overcome her “gifts” since forever. 

     “Sam,” Claire said, picking him up and cradling him in her arms, knowing that if she were a male kindergarten teacher, she could never do this.  “It’s okay.  It will be all right.”

     Claire looked out at her class, all of them staring at her, even Annie, who glanced up at her with a blue smeared face; even Thomas who stopped his incessant whimpering.  “I promise you, it will all be okay.”

     They stared at her.  The big white clock on the wall moved its long black hands in clicking seconds.  Claire stayed in the classroom, held Sam who stopped crying, too.

     “Really?” Annie asked, and Claire nodded, wishing she were agreeing to what was true.

     “Yes,” she said.  “It will all be one hundred percent okay.”

     “Little demons,” Yvonne said as they walk out to the parking lot.  Yvonne Meyer taught the morning kindergarten class and was usually present in the afternoon class as Claire was during Yvonne’s.  There, but out of the way, prepping for the construction paper projects that filled slow half hours of time or counting out beans or organizing colored paper or filling out the mountains of paperwork sent each day from the district.  But just before the mini-explosion of emotion and incident, Yvonne had gone outside to call her son who was at home ill. 

     “Thank God it is the weekend,” Yvonne went on.  “I can spend the next two days convincing myself to come back to work on Monday.  Maybe I’ll reward myself with chocolate or heroin.”

     “They aren’t that bad,” Claire said.  “They are just—“

     “Demons.  They should be home schooled or sent to baby boot camps.  Rolling in paint!  And then there are the parents.  Why should we be the ones who have to potty train or wean their children off blankets?  It’s horrid.” 

     Yvonne stopped at her car, putting her hands on her hips.  She was forty-five, a little round, her wild red hair a puff around her face.  She loved to wear outfits with bangles and beads, everything in either reds or oranges.  When she walked, she flumed with patchouli and spice.

     “I’m sorry I left.  I should have seen the Annie fit coming a mile away.”

     “Please don’t worry about it,” Claire said.  “I should be able to control them by now.  It’s my second year here.  I guess I just don’t have it in me.”

     “Nonsense,” Yvonne said.  “You have it in spades.  But teaching—well, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I just feel that there is something else for you out there.  Something bigger.  Something—I’m not sure what it is.  But I’ll tell you this.  Whatever it is, it’s going to be just perfect for you.”

     “But the children—“ Claire begins.

     “Listen, Claire, you are a gorgeous, smart, talented woman.  You have beauty and brains,” Yvonne said.  “Not that teachers can’t be all that.  Not that I didn’t have it all going on when I was your age, of course.”  Yvonne stopped to swivel her hips slightly.  “But you are wasted here, love.  You are fit for some other setting altogether.  I’m not sure where it is, but it’s certainly not here.”

     “Yvonne—“

     “Get out, darling,” she says.  “Get out while there’s still time.”

     “That’s what you say every afternoon,” Claire says over her shoulder.  “And I’m still here.”

     “I have no idea why,” Yvonne calls after her.  “You could do whatever you wanted.  You could be anywhere in the world.”

     Claire waved, knowing that Yvonne had no idea how right she was.

     As she drove home in her used but functioning Toyota Matrix, heading down Fell Street and turning right on Cole, Claire wondered why she didn’t just leave San Francisco and put herself in a place she would enjoy.  After all, if she didn’t like the new locale, she could change that one, too.  She had a college degree, a teaching credential, the insurance money she had from her mother’s death.  She also had the house she’d grown up in West Portal that she rented out because she couldn’t bear to live there.  She could sell the huge, four bedroom place, take the profit, and buy a house or condo anywhere she wanted to.  No matter where she went, she’d be okay, whether it was Hawaii or Seattle or Boca Raton.

     But every time she decided that she’d had it with teaching or the rent increases on her small, one-bedroom apartment or the parking derby with the law students across the street at the university and the tourists going to the Haight-Ashbury district on the other side of the Panhandle, she couldn’t leave.  Maybe it was San Francisco, the only town she’d ever lived in, having gone to the University of San Francisco after completing high school.

     For some reason, she was waiting for something, right here, where she’d always been.

    Claire turned right on Cole Street, and in a small act of magic she didn’t possess, there was a small but available parking space just across the street from her apartment building’s door.  Claire let out a relieved breath, pulled in, and pulled up on the parking brake.  For a moment, she stared at the large cement wall of the law library, thinking.  Yvonne was right.  She wasn’t cut out for teaching.  But she didn’t seem to be really cut out for anything.  She’d majored in liberal studies, which was like a buffet of everything, perfect for a grammar school teacher and not much else.  She couldn’t use her one amazing skill for anything because no one would believe her if she tried to tell them.  And she never had told a soul, not even her mother, not even in the last days when her mother was so sick she wouldn’t have understood anything.

     What would she have said?  “Mom, I forgot to tell you that I can close my eyes and leave.  Disappear.  Really.  Just like that.  And I can go anywhere I want.  It’s a little odd when I arrive, but by the time people start to wonder, I can rush off.  I’ve gone to Disneyland—that was when I was seventeen and you told me we couldn’t afford a trip that summer because we were saving up for my college.  And because of Dad. Leaving.  You should have seen me trying to wangle thirty bucks for a bus ticket to get home before you got off your night shift.  And I’ve gone to Yosemite, Round Table Pizza on Mission, and Alcatraz.  I went to Stonestown mall when you grounded me in ninth grade.  Susie Thompson’s house that night you told me I was forbidden to go there because Susie’s mom smoked pot.  Yes.  All by myself.  No, I can’t take you with me.  I can’t take anything but my clothes.  I tried taking a suitcase once, but it wouldn’t go through.  I even tried a teddy bear.  Wouldn’t fit through either.  Fit through, you ask?  I don’t know.  It’s like there is a small space, space enough for me, and that’s it.  Just enough room for my skin and a millimeter.  That means clothes usually make it.  Not jackets or coats.  But at least underwear.”

     No, her mother would never have understood.  Nor would any teacher or friend or lover (not that there ever really had been a true lover), so this skill was hers and hers alone.  Unused and unnecessary, even now, when she was all by herself—no family, no boyfriend--and could do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted.

     Claire pulled the keys out of the ignition and put them in her bag, carefully opening the door and slipping out, trying not to ding the car next to her.  She wished that others were as careful.  Her Toyota looked as though it had been through a battle with rubber bullets.

     The sky was a light shade of gray, warm, like a perfect wool sweater.  Claire walked across the street and sighed.  This life would have to do.  She could work harder, join Date.com, try harder with the children.  She could go to more foreign films, read more literature, go to a hair stylist more than once a year.  She could take her bike out to the Marin Headlands and get some sun and air and exercise, not to mention a good look at men in spandex.  Things could get better.  After all, her life was a good life.  Just about good enough.

     That night after a dinner of leftover lemon pasta from Beppe’s and a half glass of Sauvignon Blanc, Claire had the dream.  She had thought she would never have the dream again, the images fading almost from her memory.  How old had she been the last time she had conjured forth the images?  Thirteen or fourteen?  And then, when was the last time she had thought about it?  Actually, she had talked about it five, six years ago, back in college, that one drunken night she had told her roommate Marissa the story.

     “You came to Earth on what?” Marissa had burped into Claire’s ear, leaning against Claire’s shoulder, her body heavy with Heineken.  “You came here on a spaceship?”

     “That’s right,” Claire had said.  “A big dark one full of children.”

     “So, um, you were like one of them?”

     “Yeah,” Claire nodded.

     “You can’t remember a spaceship from when you were one,” Marissa said.  “No one remembers a spaceship from then.”

     “I do,” Claire said, feeling the warm soft air of the ship, the breath of the children sitting next to her, feeling it the same way she felt Marissa’s now.  “I was in a spaceship.”

     “Ha.  Spaceship,” Marissa said, laying down on the floor and passing out, her hair a dark brown fan in front of her, her last words a slurry mumble.  “I want to be in a spaceship.  It will take me away from my statistics exam.”

     “A big dark spaceship full of children.  Two of them—two of them I know,” Claire said to no one, burping herself and leaning against the wall.  She fell asleep, and in the morning, Marissa and she had headaches too intense to talk about anything, much less the spaceship saga.  And that had been the last time she thought of it until she woke up tonight, sitting straight up in bed, the pasta a lump of anxiety in her stomach.

     The dream unfolded as it always did.  She sees her knees and shins and shoes out in front of her.  She moves them back and forth, imagining that her feet can talk.  Her feet are her parents:  the left one her father, the right her mother.  But she can’t remember her parents.  She can’t see them or feel them or smell them.  For a second, she imagines a shoulder, warmth, heat, tears, but then she is looking at her feet again.

     “So-phie,” someone says, and she knows that she is So-phie.

     Claire—the Sophie in the dream—doesn’t say anything but she turns to smile, looking at the girl next to her.  The girls is older, her legs longer, her parent feet bigger.

     “Home?” she says, and then leans against the girl.  But the girl isn’t paying attention to her.  She’s listening to a boy, who is much, much bigger, his legs truly long.  He’s enormous, powerful, and Sophie is almost scared of him. 

     There is rumbling under her.  The space darkens.  The children sitting all around them quiet down.  Some cry out, but there is nothing but the movement of the ship, the girl’s constant breathing, the whir whir of some giant engine under her.

     Home, Sophie thinks.  Home.

     But before she can even imagine what or where home is, the dream begins to fade, turn into a smattering of color, bursts of fading dots, disappearing all together.

     Claire breathed in the night of her bedroom, looked out the window to the blinking red eyes of Sutro Tower.  Off, on.  Off, on, all of them winking at her.  She shook her head and lay back down, staring at the ceiling.  Why the dream now?  When she was little, she used to make up stories about the children, imagining that they were her long lost siblings.  They were all going on a trip together, going somewhere safe and warm.  She even named the other children, murmuring their names under her breath.  What did she call them?  Something with an M.  Something full of vowels.  A or E or O.

     Now, Claire couldn’t remember what she called them, but all these years later, she still felt as though she knows them, those children with the longer legs, knobby knees, dark eyes, the same blonde hair as she has.

     Not now.

     Claire opened her eyes wide, straining, looking around the room.  She waited, listening.  Had she heard something?  Or was it part of the dream still?

     Waiting, she breathed into the darkness, hoping for more.  No, hoping for less.  For silence.

     Not right. Go.

     Her heart beat out a surprised rhythm, her body tense and waiting for more words.  Maybe it was finally happening.  She was hearing voices, losing her mind, finally succumbing to the weirdness of her life.  What had she read recently?  That more people than previously believed heard voices.  It was actually kind of common, with support groups and everything.  An adaptive behavior for those who heard voices and talked back to them was to carry a phone and talk into that, a decoy for madness.

     Should she carry a cell phone now?

     How would that go over in the kindergarten class?

     Claire waited, listening in the quiet room, but there was no further message from her brain or the beyond.  What did that mean?  Was she schizophrenic?  Was this the beginning of the end?

     After a few more quiet minutes, Claire laughed.  Probably it was a leftover thought from her dream.  It had to be.  And truth be told, she had more than voices to think about.  Pushing off the blanket, Claire got out of bed and walked to the window. Just over that hill was her mother’s house, the house she used to call home.  But she had to admit to herself that lately, no where has seemed like home.  Not San Francisco, not any of the places she imagined traveling to.  Certainly she didn’t feel at home in her classroom, not with sloshing paints and urine a constant and permanent threat.  But inside herself—in her mind or body--wasn’t any better.  Somewhere in her chest, her stomach, her core, she felt a place of slipping, sliding unease.  No where she stood felt comfortable.  No one or no thing gave her that feeling she had in the dream.  Every time in the dream, even though she was truly in a spaceship traveling to points unheard of and unseen, she was safe.  She was happy.

     Turning away from the window, Claire pushed her long hair behind her shoulders and glanced at the clock.  The red 3:00 shone into the room and then flicked to 3:01.  Four hours until she had to be at her Saturday morning Pilates class.  Over fifty hours before Yvonne and the children would expect her at work.  Hours before anyone would expect her anywhere at all.

     “Okay, I want you to balance on the roller.  Your hip centered just there, and then slide.  Work that fascia.  Stretch it, let your body elongate.  Can you feel it lengthen, open, spread, release?  That’s it,” said Nori, Claire’s Pilates instructor.  “Come on.  All the way to the knee.  That’s it, folks.  Work it.”

     Claire hated this feeling of thigh stretch just about more than any other, though her classmate Ruth told her childbirth was a bit more painful.  Claire looked over at Ruth and wanted to roll her eyes.  Ruth could take the Styrofoam roller and move her body from hip joint to ankle, stretching muscles Claire barely knew the names of.  She knew they existed, however, because they all hurt, all at once, at this very moment.

     “Ruth, you are killing me,” she said.  “Could you stop showing off?”

     “Once you get to sixty, showing off is a way to stay alive.”  Ruth rolled herself along the roller again.  “Use it or lose it, I always say.”

     They both huffed through another up and down, the room filling with heat and the faint odor of sweat.

     “I must have lost it before I got it,” Claire puffed.

     “It isn’t easy.  But I don’t want to just go gently into that good night.  When I married my second husband at fifty, I told him I wanted fifty years with him.  The same amount of life I already had.  So I have some work to do to stay healthy all those long years.”

     Claire took in a big breath, feeling the sweat running down her neck.  She kept rolling back and forth, watching Nori’s and Ruth’s perfect form.  Fifty years with someone?  A man?  A husband?  A long term boyfriend?  A lover?  In college, she’d had boyfriends, boys she dated for three, four, five weeks, half a year, all of them sort of falling away without any big breakup, fight, or tears from either of them.  There were no screaming matches or songs from the sidewalk below her apartment window.  No love letters, no smashed dishes.

     It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with any of the boys, men.  They hadn’t been a drug addict, narcissist, commitment-phobe among them.  They were artists, pre-law, pre-med, teacher-tract types, who took her to movies and plays and parties and meals.  Over and over again, Claire just felt disinterested, wanting to say, “Look, this coffee is just fine, but would you mind if I went to Barbados for a while?  I’ll be back.  Keep my seat, though it might take a while for me to get home.  I just can’t listen to you for one more minute.  I don’t want to hear about the people in your office or that html or xml or C plus code you are talking about.  But really, it’s not that you are boring, it’s that I’m bored.  Bored out of my mind.  Au revioir!”

     But she never left them sitting there.  She never quieted her mind and thought:  Majorca, Ibiza, Aruba, Belize.  She sat through bad date after bad date, pretending to be part of a couple until one or both of them just stopped calling each other.  No real goodbyes, no true break up.  Only apathy and confusion.

     And though there had been moments of desire with a few of the men, her body rippling in a tender line of mouth, breasts, belly, thighs, she never felt the need to open herself up to any of the men she’d dated.  Kisses, fine; a little skin, okay.  A feel here, a feel there, nothing more than a biology experiment going no where.

     And it wasn’t that she had some kind of moral or philosophical argument for not having sex.  She didn’t think it was wrong or outrageous or reprehensible.  It was just that she had never really felt the need, as if she were waiting for the man who made her want to turn to him, kiss him back, say “Yes.”

     “Shift to the front of the thigh.  Quadriceps,” Noni called out.  “Work those big boys. Biggest muscle other than that thing on your backside. Come on, people!”

     Claire shifted, wincing as the Styrofoam dug into her thighs.  She stared at the beige and green carpet as she rolled back and forth, her hair dangling in front of her.

     “Fifty years,” she said to Ruth, slightly panting.  “Won’t you get sick of him?  Won’t you just want to be alone?”

     Ruth looked up, her biceps firm and strong as they held her up.  “Being alone is overrated.  I know, I know.  People say we have to do it.  So important to stand on one’s own feet, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Rite of passage.  Whatever you want to call it.  But when I met Jim, I just knew.  Every single day with him is a blessing,” she said, finally allowing some huffing and puffing to enter into her words.  “Every single day is a gi-ift.”

     Claire waved to Ruth as Ruth pulled out of her parking space and then drove out of the garage.  It was a crowded Saturday morning, everyone trying to work off a week of carbos and fat in one kick boxing session, three people eyeing Claire’s space as they pulled up from different directions.  She knew she had to get out of the spot and didn’t want to see the battle for the one remaining spot begin. 

      She started the Toyota and backed up, putting the car in first and ignoring the cars jockeying for position.  But just as she began to move slowly toward the exit, she heard a voice slip through the garage and car noises, whirl around her and slip into her ear.

     “Sophia,” the voice said.

     Claire pressed down on the brakes so hard, a squeal peeled itself off her tires, echoing in the cavernous space.  The cars waiting for her space honked, her car stalled.  Claire swallowed, blinked, tried to start her car again.  But the car wouldn’t engage, and she was sure that she’d flooded the engine or just gone mental.  She tried again, sweat trickling down her neck.  She stepped on the brake, thinking it was the accelerator.  Panic slipped through her body like a spider.

     “Sophia,” the voice said.  “Imagine this.  Try putting it in first gear.”

     “Huh?” Claire said, looking around the car.  Nothing.  No one.  But the voice was right.  She was in fourth gear, her rushed shifting keeping the car from turning over.

     She shifted the car to first, put in the clutch, and started the car, everything working.  The three cars honked, and Claire wished she was clever enough to throw out some retort or at least flip them all off convincingly.  But what she needed to do was get home and eat something.  She was obviously suffering from low blood sugar.  That and stress.  Fatigue.  She needed rest.  And maybe wine.  Maybe some of the leftover Percocet from when she had her wisdom teeth extracted two years before.

     “What you really need is to pull this car over,” the voice said.  “All I need is for us to have a crash, and then what would my heroic rescue be worth?  All this travel, all this time to spend the afternoon with a Triple A tow truck driver and then a mechanic named Al who smokes a cigar in a recliner and barks out orders to a skinny guy with no teeth.”

     Claire whipped her head around, looking in the back seat, the passenger’s, swerving as she did.  What was she supposed to do?  The car lurched, and she felt an invisible hand grab the wheel, setting the car straight. 

     “You are really pissing me off!” she said.

     “I’m sorry about that, but you need to stop.”

     “Because a voice in my head is telling me to?  I thought that last night’s voices were just from a dream.  But I am seriously insane.”

     “Sophia.  Pull over.  Please.”

     “God dammit, no,” she said, the car slowing and starting as she did, people behind her honking.  “Get out of my head or my car or both!”

     Claire gunned it down onto Brotherhood Way and sped onto 19^th Avenue, hoping that she’d left the voice behind.  She drove close to the steering wheel, looking in her rearview mirror every few seconds, expecting to see some kind of person following after her, like a terrible balloon with its string caught in her back window.

     But there was no bobbing body floating behind her, and as she passed Stonestown Mall and then slowly crawled toward Irving Street, she relaxed slightly, her back almost touching the seat.

     Okay, she thought.  Okay.  Just a few more miles and all this will disappear.

     As she rounded the park, heading toward Stanyan, she wished for the nth time that her mother were alive.  Like so many things, she wouldn’t be able to tell her mother about the voice, but she could at least sit by her and maybe watch a TV show.  Or work out in the garden, digging up weeds or planting the latest in heirloom vegetables.  Anything to take her mind away from the craziness.

     But, of course, her mother wasn’t here any more, and there wasn’t a person she could confide in.  Claire was pretty sure that Yvonne would listen politely and then call 911.  Ruth would likely do the same.  Maybe it was time to go to a therapist and just spill it all and wait to see what a trained professional would suggest.  Maybe she would do it.  Maybe she would just finally take care of this problem.

     “You don’t have a problem, you nut,” the voice said.

     “Stop it!” Claire shrieked, braking hard at the corner of Stanyan and Hayes, a Muni bus squealing to avoid hitting her.

     “Shit, shit, shit,” she said, turning right onto Hayes, and stalling right behind a FedEx van.

     “You need to stop this car right now,” the voice said

     Breathing in small, shallow breaths, Claire pulled over, parking in a rare open spot, ignoring the stares from passerby and the FedEx driver.  The voice might be a product of her own imagination, but it was right.  She was a danger to herself and others.

     “Who are you?” she whispered, convinced now that she was talking to nothing but her own sad thoughts.  “Where are you?”

     “Due to the powers of others, I have managed to render myself invisible this once,” the voice said.  “But I don’t hear that well.”

     “Who are you?” she asked again, her voice louder, clearer, even though she felt her heart pounding in her throat.

     She looked down at her hands in her lap, shaking her head, almost wanting to laugh out loud.  Was she this lonely and sad that she was conjuring up a voice?  A male voice.  A man.  A man who was focused on her.  She had finally cracked.  All these years she really had been crazy.  Those times she thought she’d gone to another country or town or place had been psychotic breaks.  A psychotic break.  She had been delusional, was so right now.  When she thought she could hear other people’s thoughts, she was merely deep in some horrid fantasy of her own creation. 

     She was paranoid, schizophrenic, maybe bi-polar with an affective disorder.  Top it off with panic and anxiety, and she was a psychiatrist’s dream.  A Master’s thesis.  A doctoral dissertation.

     So it was clear.  She had no choice. No more debate here.  Nothing else to argue about.  Claire knew she needed to drive herself right now to Langely Porter Psychiatric Institute at UCSF and check in.  For ever.  Get some kind of commitment.  What did they call that?  A 5150.  At least she’d never have to deal with Annie and Sam again.

     “Oh, what a drama queen!” the voice said, and as she heard the words, a body began to take shape and form in a waver of pixilated air. 

     “You are a jerk,” faded on her tongue, and she blinked her eyes, tried to focus on what she could hardly believe was happening next to her in the passenger’s seat.

     For the moments it took for him to appear, Claire knew that even though she had felt odd her entire life—even though she’d made herself appear in a poof! all over the place--she’d never really believed that magic existed.  She never really thought about the concept of super powers or abilities.  Everything truly odd was contained in her and her alone—she was the holder of the world’s weirdness.  Actually, she thought she was some kind of genetic anomaly, a creation of some weird fluke in a DNA strand.  No one else was like her.  No one on the planet.

      “I would have to say that no one is like you.  But you aren’t alone in this power business,” said the man now sitting next to her.  “Believe it or not, you soon are not going to be all alone any more, ever again.”

     Claire couldn’t focus on what he was saying.  Instead, she slowly moved her gaze from his thigh (a very nice thigh in what seemed to be cotton pants) to his body (strong), shoulders (stronger), neck, and then face.  His face.  Claire wanted to stop breathing because if she did, she would die, and she wouldn’t have to sit here completely embarrassed, her body roiling in heat, her mind just about everywhere.

     “You are just some kind of delusion,” she said, relieved in a strange way that at least she knew what she was dealing with.  “Some kind of sad last gasp of hope in me.”

     “Really?” the man said.  “Strange how I feel so here.  You know, like in my body.”

     “Sorry.  You’re not,” Claire said.  “It’s all about me.  Finally, the cliché comes true.  Hold onto your hat.  We are going to Langely Porter.  It’s close by, so that’s good.  Put on your seat belt.”

     “I don’t think that’s where I want to go.  From the sound of it, there are mad women screaming in the attic there,” he said, and for a brief second, she allowed herself to look at him. He was so—so perfect.  His eyes were dark, looking at her with an intense, humor. Like he liked her and wanted to laugh not at but with her.  His dark brown hair hung in soft curls to his shoulders, gleaming in the sunlight coming through the car window.  He smiled, his teeth white, his lips full.  As if hearing her, he licked his lips, his eyes sparkling, his hand almost reaching out to touch her. 

     “Whoa, buddy,” Claire started giggling, laughing, resting her forehead on the steering wheel and then sitting up and looking back at him.  “Keep your fake hands to yourself.  If I am going to be crazy, I’m not going to add to it by letting the figment of my imagination touch me.  Haven’t you ever seen that movie Fight Club?”

     When the man didn’t answer, she answered for him.  “Of course you did because I did and you are me, so you did.  I’ve split my psyche.  If there were a movie of this car scene, I’d be talking to air.  It’s Brad Pitt and Ed Norton all over again.  The next thing you know, I’ll be hitting myself thinking I’m beating you up.”

     “This is not going the way I wanted it to,” he said slowly.  “It would be easier if you would just be quiet for a minute.”

     “So you have practice in this?” Claire wondered how many other unfortunate women were out there, all certain a handsome man just appeared one day, especially for them.

     The man sighed, shook his head, put his hands on his knees.  Turning to face the street, he sighed.

     “Look, I know this is weird.  And I tend to be a pain in the ass.  So can we start over here?”

     Claire stared at him, breathing in in quick breaths, nervous and scared and amazed.  And then she smelled it.  Him.  He smelled like soap and something citrus, the tang of whatever he used to shave filling the car.

     Do hallucinations have smells? she thought.  Is this a multi-sensory projection of all my sorrows? Can I hear, smell, see him?  God knows if I could taste him, and I didn’t let him touch me.  But smell?

     “You know,” he said slowly.  “I haven’t had much practice with this.  You are the first person I’ve rescued.  And, of course, I have a vested interest.  But I really would like to start over.  If I get out of the car, would you promise not to drive away?”

     As he spoke, the man seemed to become more real.  His movements had weight.  He filled the car space with what Claire could only call maleness:  smells, words, muscles actually rippling under his clothes.  Rippling.  She’d thought it was only a cliché, the men she’d dated skinny or maybe filling out their Dockers a little too fully around the middle, their expensive leather belts pulled tight.

     He smiled again, his eyes so bright, dark but seeming to be full of pinpoints of light.  “Do you promise?”

     Claire nodded, took her hands away from the wheel and folded them in her lap.  What would it hurt to listen to him?  Maybe once he left the car, he would simply disappear.  Hallucination over.  A wonderful hallucination all gone.

     “I promise,” she said.

     “Okay,” he said, not moving.

     “You don’t trust me?  My own hallucination doesn’t trust me?  Does that mean I don’t trust myself?” She wanted to laugh.  “Listen, take the keys with you.  If you disappear, I’ll just find them outside on the sidewalk.”

     Claire pulled the keys out of the ignition and dangled them close to him.  He took them, but she jerked back before he could touch her hand.

     “So you have them,” she said.  “Go on.  Get out and we can start over.”

     She brought a hand to her mouth, pressing back her laughter, the nervous sound that was growing in her chest and pushing upward.  If Yvonne could see her now!  Ruth, too!  Her older friends would finally get how bad things had gotten.

     The man shrugged, opened the door, and got out, the car suddenly so empty of energy and heat as he closed the door.

     I’m counting to twenty, he thought.

     She looked out to see him standing on the sidewalk.  Well, not all of him.  She couldn’t see below his thighs or above his chest, so she allowed herself to watch the grace of his body (his core as Noni would say), the way he seemed to stand so naturally.  Like an animal used to speed and comfort.  A lion, a jaguar, a creature that could go from zero to sixty in six seconds.

     Trust me, I take a lot longer than six seconds.

     Claire listened to his thought, focusing on every single syllable, wondering how it got into her mind, and then she realized—my god!  He could do what she did.  He could hear . . .. he’d heard everything she’d been thinking since the moment he appeared in her car.  Before that, even.  Maybe it was he who had spoken—thought—the night before in her bedroom.

     You—you read thoughts?  You read thoughts!

     You are one quick cookie, he thought.  Now stop thinking.  Be quiet and let me start all of this over again.

     Claire blinked, stared out in front of her.  The person she created in her hallucination would have her abilities and would be able to read her thoughts.  But as she sat there watching people navigate the crosswalk, heading toward the medical buildings on either side of the street, she wondered if this might really be happening.  Was this happening?  Was she really here?  She shot a glance at the man’s torso.  This was happening.  Something was actually happening to her.  Could it be that her life was about to start after all?

     Sophia, he thought.  For god’s sake. Stop it.  Quiet down. 

     Okay, she thought.  She closed her eyes and then opened them.  Sophia?  That name was so familiar.

     Stop thinking, he thought.

     Claire sighed and closed her eyes again.  She swallowed hard and tried to keep her mind empty.

     But it was impossible.  Nothing she’d learned in Pilates or even the occasional yoga class was helping her clear her crazy monkey-mind thoughts.  What could she do?  How could she focus?  She could probably focus on a muscle.  Her calf.  She’d stretch it out, imagining the sinews and tendons elongating.  Claire pushed her heel down, feeling the pull, but then she knew that he was listening in on her, hearing her try to quiet herself.

     She would empty herself.  She’d try to be the way she was sometimes on a spring afternoon when the kids were drawing with the thick crayons on thick construction paper.  In a rare moment, they were concentrating on one thing.  The sun would beat down into the classroom, their little voices would merge into a lull, and Claire’s head would empty, her body soften, relax, adjust into her small-sized seat.

     There, she thought, feeling that warm afternoon feeling, the way it always was just before the bell rang and she could go home.

     He knocked on the window, the door creaking open.  Claire almost jumped straight up, blinking her eyes.

     “Hi,” he said.  “How are you?”

     “Um,” she started.  “Great.”

     “Hey, I’ve come a long way with a couple of messages, so do you think we might go somewhere we can talk?”

     Then the first normal thing that happened since she got in the car happened.  Her stomach growled.  And somehow that feeling began to overwhelm everything else she’d been feeling.

     “Do you like Pho soup?” she asked.

     “Foe?  Like an enemy?” he asked, opening the door and sitting down.  “If it’s made of my foes, I’d have to say no.  They aren’t very appetizing  Scrawny things, really. Not a lot of meat.”

     Claire started the car.  “No, not foes.  P-H-O.  Broth, noodles, vegetables, and meat.  It’s Vietnamese.”

     “Sweetheart, if it has meat in it,” he said.  “I’m in.”

     Claire felt almost perfectly normal when the server brought her the steaming bowl, the soup fragrant with chili and ginger.

    She picked up the large spoon and looked at her lunch companion, his lips, his eyes, the way one dark curl twirled below his ear.  He, however, was mesmerized by his food, ogling his Chinese Five Spice chicken, going for the plate of meat instead of soup. 

     “This is exactly what I’ve been needing.  On the safe—at home, we have food, but nothing like this.  Nothing that I can exactly identify.”

     Claire sipped her soup, trying to stop staring at him.  Where had he come from where food wasn’t identifiable?  Had he escaped from—from what?  A ghostly gulag?  A special prison where people learned how to materialize?  A baby food factory?

     “We are starting over again,” he said, forking chunks of succulent chicken.  “Let’s not get weird.”

     “My thoughts.”  Claire put down her spoon.  “I can turn my ability off.  Can you?”

     His mouth full, the man nodded.

     “So let’s do that then,” she said.  “Let’s really start over.  Do what normal people do.”

     The man was almost humming with food pleasure, probably really unaware of what she was saying.  But she felt him unlink, close off, and she knew her thoughts were her own.  He nodded again, and Claire watched him plow through the food.  How his mother must have loved to feed him, she thought.  How fun to put a plate of food down in front of someone and have him really chow down.

     Claire went back to her soup, looking up occasionally as she ate.  The man was smiling and eating, looking at her, the dining room, mumbling thanks as the server filled his water class.

     “Oh, I wonder what beer they have,” he said finally, putting down his fork.  “God, that would taste good. A cold beer.”

     “Order one,” she said.  “Why not?  If you can’t get identifiable food at home, I would think beer would be even harder to find.”

     “Yeah, it is.  Sort of like a dry state.  But no, I probably need to keep my wits about me, such as they are.”

     “For what?” she asked.  Now that her stomach was full, her completely flabbergasted feeling came back, wrapping over her like a shawl.  She put her palm down hard on the table.  “Moving around into other people’s cars?  I mean, what was that?  And I don’t even know your name.  Who are you?  Where did you come from?”

     “So you’ve moved from thinking I don’t exist except in your mind?  I’ve graduated to actual flesh and blood status?  Am I real now?  Like that rabbit in the story, gone from stuffed to hopping around?”

     Claire pushed her half empty bowl of soup away and sat back in her chair, glad that there weren’t diners at the next table.

     “I think you are real.  You eat real, at least.  And fast, too.”

     “Always the first done.  I had three siblings, so we learned to dig in fast in order to grab whatever was left over.”

     Claire blinked.  A man who materialized in her car had siblings.  Three!  Having always been an only child, Claire couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to fight for food. 

     But could his family do what he could?  Could they read minds?  Were there actually other people out there who were like her?  Real people.  People she might pass on the street?

     “Are your siblings like you?”

     The man sat back, put a hand on his flat belly.  “Not that I can tell.  We never had a sit down where I came out of the weirdo closet.  Once I figured out what I could do, I sort of watched them for clues.  Something kind of held me back, though, and I never said anything to them.”

     Claire breathed in, confused.  So confused.  How had she gotten from Pilates and Ruth’s conversation about marriage and rolling around in pain on the floor to here, eating Vietnamese with a man who materialized in her car?

     He looked at her, shook his head, smiled.  “Come on.  Let’s go.  Of course, I hope you have cash.”

     She almost snorted.  “What a date.  Scare me to death and then make me pay.”

     “Sorry, I have a true lack of dollars lately.  I promise, I’ll make it up to you.”  He winked, his face so open and handsome, she thought she might fall right to it.  How long had it been since she’d been drawn toward a man?  She’d almost given up looking for the feeling, imagining herself the spinster kindergarten teacher Miss Edwards. 

    This wasn’t right.  Not now.  Claire stood up abruptly.  Her excitement was not a feeling she anticipated, and she stormed up the cash register, wanting to somehow make it all stop.  Right now.  Going insane was better than falling for a man who might not even really be real and who didn’t carry cash.

     Outside on Geary Street, Claire felt her head clear.  “So are you going to answer any of my questions?  I think I’ve been very patient.”

     “Of course,” he said.  “If you are going to be with me forever, I have to start somewhere.”

     “Forever?  Excuse me?  What did you say?”

     He walked toward her, and she stepped away, her back against the stucco wall.  “I said I’m going to be with you forever.”

     “Give me a break!  You can’t just say something like that.  It’s too soon!  It’s too weird.  It’s not normal.”

     “Nothing about us is normal, but I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, Sophia.”

     As he spoke, she wondered if this was the same kind of magic that allowed him to be invisible.  He had the rare ability to make women not want to laugh when he said ridiculous things, the things that men maybe thought but never, ever said, except in soap operas and in horrible desperation.  Or maybe they were the things women wished men could say without seeming like weaklings.  But these words from this man’s mouth sounded real and true and, if Claire thought about it, more magic than appearing in her car.

     Claire crossed her arms, but a slim, flickering part of her wanted to believe him.

     “Now I know that it’s you who are crazy,” she said, dropping her arms to her sides.  “Not me.”

     He didn’t say a word, and she looked into his dark eyes, feeling each breath under her ribs.  She didn’t know what was happening, and yes, of course she did.  There it was, like a fan waving a sign at the Oscars.  A kiss.  She wanted to kiss him.  That’s what she wanted to do.  How sick was that?  There was more wrong with her than she previously imagined.  But she really had no choice but to kiss him, and then she was flooded with more heat and shame.  She was thinking too loud.  He’d probably turned on his mind and heard every single thought she’d had.  And that’s when he did laugh, for a second, and that’s when he leaned over and kissed her.

     Claire couldn’t have pulled away, even if he’d been a toad without the prince part.  His mouth was so, well, there.  Warm and soft and insistent, he was telling her everything with his lips and then, gently, with his tongue.  But he was also telling her things with his mind.  She hadn’t opened up her thoughts for years because there hadn’t been anyone to hear her, but here now, as they stood on the sidewalk, was a feeling of warmth, something yellow, golden, sun kissed.  Here was hope, a feeling of connection that looked like rope, thick and tightly wrapped.  Here was travel, darkness and light and speed.  Here was an image of bodies moving together, pleasure in the sound of an Oh!

     His mind opened up to her, and she realized that he was right.  She wasn’t alone.  For once, she was with someone—someone like her.  She was in his mind.

      You are the only one I ever hear this way, she thought, letting him put his arms around her.      

     Shhh, he thought, stroking her arms, her shoulders, his hands running gently up her neck, his thumbs lightly skimming her jaw.

     What is your name? she thought to ask, but then she almost missed his answer, her body so caught up in his touch.

     Darl, he thought.  Now, Shhh.

     So Claire, for once, didn’t think.  She let herself fall back into this kiss, as if it were a soft down mattress that would catch her.  As if this kiss were the last thing she would ever do on this planet. 

     Maybe it will be the last thing you do, he thought, pulling her close.  I’ve got to take you away from this place.

     His hair brushed against her face, her neck, long and soft and silken.  She let her arms wrap around him, feeling parts of her body start up, heat welling in her stomach, her throat, her thighs.

     Where are we going to go?

     Shhh, he thought again, and then the world faded to only him.  Only his lips, only his breath.  She stopped hearing the honking cars outside, barely saw or felt the sunlight or the breeze blowing up from the Pacific.  There was nothing but him.  Nothing at all.

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