The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Jenna Fox Chronicles 1)

She sees me staring, and it makes her busier. She chatters, fills space, is careful but does not address my gaze. She treads even faster to keep on the surface, but somehow I don’t count it against her. She said that for months she was in as dark a place as I. Maybe staying on the surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can’t breathe. She measures length and depth as carefully as a surgeon places a scalpel, as though it is a matter of life and death. Maybe for her it is.

She is always careful around me. Is that why the word hovers close in my thoughts? Careful with her movements, careful with her words. Nothing is relaxed between us. Is she careful because she thinks I will break? Or maybe because she will. When I am alone in the dark counting my breaths, is she doing the same in the darkness of her room, wondering … was it all worth it?

Now, with light streaming through the window, she is busy, determined to gain control over what is natural. Each of her movements is like a blow, a punch, a fist kneading something into shape.

‘Accident,’ I say.

Her laser clicks off. She looks at me, instantly pale, her eyes sunken. ‘What?’

‘I’ve learned how to say it. Accident. I assume that was another suggestion you and Father planted, to never bring up the accident.’

She sets her laser down on my nightstand. She looks at me blankly. Weak.

‘No,’ she says, easing herself down to the edge of my bed, ‘I think it was something inside of you not allowing you to say it.’ She nods her head, like she is plucking together words she has been saving. ‘And we didn’t want to push you.’

‘They’re dead,’ I say.

Her eyes glisten. She holds her arms out to me, and I slip through space like a feather on a current of wind, effortlessly carried by the force that is Claire.

I sit on the bed next to her, feeling her arms holding me, rocking us together in primal rhythm. ‘We tried to bring it up at the hospital,’ she whispers, her breath and tears warm on my cheek. ‘It was too hard for you. You went into distress just trying to communicate. Shortly after, you slipped into a coma. We were afraid that we had made it worse, pushing you too hard. We didn’t want to make that mistake again.’ She pulls away and looks into my eyes. ‘It was an accident, Jenna. An accident. You don’t have to relive the details.’

‘Is that why you blocked it all from our Netbook?’

She nods again. ‘When you woke up, you didn’t seem to remember it. We didn’t want you to come upon something unexpectedly and have a setback.’

She pulls me close again, my head on her chest. I can hear her heartbeat. Familiar. The sound I heard in her womb. The whoosh, the beat, the flow that punctuated my beginnings in another dark place. I had no words for those sounds then, just feelings. Now I have both. I can remember it as clearly as I remember yesterday.

We lie back on my pillows, holding each other without talking, and time becomes a forgotten detail. Seconds and minutes stretch into an hour or more. I don’t want to move. Claire strokes my forehead, dozing, the slant of light through my panes growing golden, then dim, the afternoon passing.

‘I’m sorry,’ I finally whisper. Sorry for Locke and Kara. Sorry for her months of worry. Sorry for how we have to live now. Sorry for pushing her away. Sorry that I’m not perfect.

‘Shhh,’ she says, stroking my head again. And then she adds, ‘I’m sorry, too.’

I see the ring of swatches, sitting on my nightstand. ‘The swatches,’ I say, ‘they’re all blue. Do you have any that are red?’

‘Red?’

‘Can I have red drapes?’

‘You can have anything you want. Anything.’

I close my eyes, pressing my ear to her chest again. Hearing the sounds, the pulse of Claire, the world of my beginnings, the time when there was no doubt I had a soul. When I existed in a warm, velvet liquid that was as dark as night, and that dark place was the only place I wanted to be.

Percentages

I fold a yellowed lace tablecloth and lay it in the bottom of a box. ‘I’m sorry about the vase. I—I wasn’t careful.’

Lily makes a sound. I am not sure if it is a snort or a laugh. ‘That’s an understatement.’

I heard her cursing this morning. I knew immediately why and ran out the back door. She had discovered my rampage in the garage when she raised the door to take the car out.

‘I don’t have any money, but I’ll find a way to replace it.’

She doesn’t address my offer. ‘Breaking things seems to be your new specialty. I almost wish I hadn’t left the morning you started flipping plates for your parents.’

‘It wasn’t amusing.’

‘Not at the time, I’m sure.’