Windows
by Kelly Wright
Sara squinted, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight pushing past her half-closed curtains. It had to be late morning for the light to be landing right on her face like this, which meant Sara should feel a sense of urgency to climb out of bed and start the day. She paused, took a breath, and did an internal inventory, during which she found no such sense of urgency. All she wanted to do was curl up and go back to sleep.
A cacophony of thoughts filled her mind — not her own, but Jeffrey’s, projected from the kitchen downstairs. He was annoyed, and broadcasting that annoyance loud and clear.
There was no getting back to sleep now, not without blackout curtains and banishing Jeffrey from the house, neither of which she was going to accomplish this morning. So, up and at ‘em.
Sara pushed back layers of blankets — too many, but she hated waking up cold, so she’d rather wake up too warm and de-layer as needed — and rolled herself out of bed and onto her feet in one smooth movement. She grabbed her thick robe off a hook and walked to the stairs.
Jeffrey appeared at the bottom of the stairs, light from the kitchen windows creating a halo around him. “You can’t put on your robe while you’re walking down the stairs. You’re going to trip yourself.”
“Noted,” Sara said, while shoving her arms into the robe’s sleeves and dodging the dangling belt as it tried to entangle her ankles. One step at a time. His thoughts were still spilling into her head, a prickly mass of disappointment and disapproval, more distracting than the robe. Still, she managed to navigate the stairs unscathed.
“It’s late,” he said, watching her tie the belt firmly around her waist.
“I’m aware.”
“I’m going to have to report this, you know,” he said, his gaze scolding.
“And what good will come of that?” Sara looked him right in the eye, holding his gaze as she said it. Willing him to really consider the ridiculousness of their situation. “Someone at the agency will make another tick mark next to my name. The case manager will shake her head and cluck her tongue, and send me another message about how I’m not getting any closer to release at this rate. But since we all know they’re never going to release me, I can’t see why they think I’m going to care about that.”
Jeffery’s thoughts changed then, the paternalistic disapproval scattering into mild shock and discomfort. Sara wasn’t supposed to say it out loud. They were supposed to pretend that her “period of observation” was temporary, and for her own good, and only until she learned to “regulate” herself.
Then Jeffery’s eyes narrowed. “Sara, are you reading my thoughts right now?”
“I don’t know, Jeffrey, are you thinking thoughts?” She asked it in a sickly sweet tone, and smiled a simpering grin at him. “It’s so hard to tell the difference between your simplistic thoughts and the general background noise of the universe that I really couldn’t tell you.”
He frowned and opened his mouth to reply, but she beat him to it. “‘I’m going to have to report this, you know,’” Sara said, mimicking Jeffrey’s gruff, stern voice. “Yes, Jeffrey. I know.”
Jeffrey deflated a little. “Come on, Sara. I’m not your enemy. Why can’t we work together?”
“Are you serious?” Sara brushed past him and walked into the bright kitchen behind him as she spoke. “You’re my minder. My babysitter. You think you’re the boss of me. Why would we be on the same side?”
“Sara,” Jeffrey said, his thoughts now wounded. “I do not think I’m the boss of you. I don’t think anyone can truly be the boss of you. The whole point of this is to help you, not control you.”
Sara snorted. She reached for the coffee Jeffrey had brewed and poured herself a steaming mug. “Honestly, I’d have more respect for you if you didn’t feed me the company line all the time.” She edged past him again, into the tiny sun-filled breakfast nook off the kitchen. She sat in one of two chairs at the small table and looked out at the rolling green landscape that stretched for miles behind the house. In the distance, she could just see the edge of the coast, and a threatening cloudbank that looked like it would just miss them.
Jeffrey followed her and stood beside the other chair. “May I?”
“I can’t control you,” Sara said.
“So on that score we’re tied,” he said, taking a seat across from her. His thoughts were tangled now, hard to decipher, but there were notes of chagrin, of regret, and maybe an edge of self-recrimination.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, both gazing out at the tall grass and wildflowers that covered the hills behind the house. After a time, Jeffrey spoke: “This is a perfect location for you. How did you find this house?”
Sara saw what he was doing — redirecting her, defusing the conflict, bringing her back under his benevolent control. But she found she didn’t want to fight with him, not right now. She was tired, and a little sad, and she just wanted to drink her coffee and stare into the distance.
“I got lucky,” she said. “My friend Jani knew I was looking for an isolated house, far from people, although she didn’t know why. This was her grandmother’s place, but she couldn’t live alone anymore. They needed someone to buy the property so they could afford to move her into a nice assisted living community in the city.”
Jeffrey nodded. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you pay for it?”
“I do rather mind,” Sara said, but without much anger behind it. “I used my inheritance. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.”
Jeffrey nodded again, and was quiet.
“Are you going to tell the agency how cooperative I’m being now?” she asked.
He sighed, and shook his head. “It isn’t like that. I wish you’d believe me.” He turned to look at her, and she reflexively met his gaze. “If you can read my mind, why don’t you understand that I’m on your side?”
His eyes were a bright blue, like the icy depths of glacial waters. He usually avoided meeting her gaze, as if he thought that would give her a wider window into his soul. But this time he held it, and the earnest entreaty of both his eyes and his thoughts was magnetic. What does he see when he looks into my eyes? she wondered. A monster? A puzzle? An inconvenience?
At length, she looked away, back out to the verdant hills. “It’s not like that,” she said.
Jeffrey shook his head, confused. “What’s not like what?”
“I mean, I don’t really read your thoughts. I know that’s what the agency calls it, and that’s how everyone thinks of it, but that’s not what’s going on. I don’t hear the words you’re thinking. I just get a general sense. You’re annoyed with me. You pity me. You’re confused by me. That sort of thing.”
“Oh.” She could sense his surprise at that. Heh. He thought she’d been picking through his darkest secrets. She wouldn’t if she could. What could an agency stooge like Jeffrey possibly have going on inside his head that she’d want to dwell on?
“So if I think words at you, you don’t hear them?” he said.
“Nope.”
“All this time …” he trailed off, before beginning again. “I thought you knew.”
“Thought I knew what?”
His thoughts changed, now guarded, closed. Hesitant. But also hopeful. What was that all about?
“Never mind, never mind,” he said. “Listen, can we talk this through? I really am on your side. I’d love to prove it to you. The agency has their ideas about the gifted, but they’re as confused as everyone else about what you do, and how you do it.”
Sara laughed. “You don’t say.” She was wary of looking straight at him again, scared of being caught in that gaze again, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him testing out a small smile. Had she ever seen him smile before?
“No one knows that better than you, I imagine,” he said, still smiling. “I can’t change the law, and I can’t make the agency leave you alone until they’re good and ready. But I’d like to be your ally.”
“Why?” Sara asked. She wanted to be suspicious, but every sense she was getting from him was earnest. He was hiding something, certainly, but she didn’t think he was lying about this.
He turned to look at her, but she kept her gaze firmly on the hills.
“I think we can help each other,” he said. “I can help you placate the agency, and meet the legal requirements so they will release you from observation. And you can help me … with a challenging situation.”
A creeping unease started to grow, from the pit of Sara’s abdomen, winding around her lungs, and reaching up into her throat. His emotions were steady, hopeful, and just a touch of something more energetic — eager? Gleeful? It danced around the edges of her sense of him.
“I’m not interested in a trade,” she said. “I won’t do anything with my ability that makes it hard for me to sleep at night.”
“Given how late you slept in today, I don’t think you’re having much trouble sleeping.” Jeffrey’s tone was gentle ribbing, just having some fun. Since the two of them had never had that sort of friendly relationship in the past, it caused Sara’s unease to grow, spreading from her throat into her mouth, her ears, her eyes. This way lies danger, she thought.
“I swear, it wouldn’t be a big deal for you. Wouldn’t take more than a few hours, and then I could start talking to the agency, telling them how helpful and cooperative you are. They trust me. My word would go a long way.”
Sara was silent for a long while. She hated Jeffrey’s constant companionship, hated the agency, hated the law that restricted gifted people, making her a prisoner in her own home. There were loopholes, ways to get around the surveillance. She’d read about gifted people who broke free. But the agency had her firmly under its thumb, and she figured she was stuck. She hated Jeffrey for offering this glimmer of probably false hope.
He took her silence as an invitation to keep talking. “They’re starting to accept gifted testimony as admissible evidence, you know. You could read someone, listen to their thoughts, and then tell a judge what you hear. You could make all the difference in a trial.”
“But I can’t really hear those kinds of details. Someone’s emotions about a crime can’t possibly be considered evidence.”
“But they don’t know that. No one understands how your ability works. You could tell them whatever you want, and they’d believe you.”
Sara finally turned to look at Jeffrey again. “Why would I do that? What are you saying?”
Jeffrey met her gaze. “I’m saying you could help both of us, if you wanted to.”
***
Sara hadn’t been in town for months. She tried to avoid it whenever she could, and since you can accomplish almost everything with a computer and an internet connection, she could avoid town most of the time. She was required to show up for in-person meetings at the regional agency office four times a year. But the agency had only found out about her, and installed Jeffrey as her caretaker, a few months back, so she’d only been to one of those appointments so far. It had been torture. She was out of practice dealing with so many minds pressing on her, all at once, all shouting their base, unrestrained impulses at her. She’d come close to having a panic attack in the middle of her evaluation, which hadn’t helped matters any. Smug, self-satisfied Jeffrey had hauled her back home while she huddled in the passenger seat of his car, semi-comatose. That memory was what made her finally agree to Jeffrey’s proposal. If she could get the agency to agree that she wasn’t a threat to society, she’d never have to go to another one of their in-person evaluations. She could live a happy, quiet life in the middle of nowhere with her regular food deliveries and internet access and vegetable garden and solitude.
They were back in Jeffrey’s car, heading back into town, and Sara focused on her deep breathing exercises. She wasn’t sure whether they actually helped her calm her thoughts and block out all the minds trying to intrude on her, but at least it was something to focus on. Jeffrey drove, filled with satisfaction and anticipation. He had been overjoyed when Sara had agreed to cooperate. He told her about Alice, a young woman who was accused of brutally murdering her fiancé. Jeffrey knew she had done it in self-defense, that she was a harmless, pitiful creature otherwise, although he wouldn’t tell her how he knew that. “They want to give her the death sentence, but you could save her life.”
“I’m not making any promises here,” she warned him. “If you take me to meet Alice, and her thoughts are violent or angry or dark, I won’t lie about it.”
“Of course, of course,” Jeffrey had said. “But it won’t be like that. You’ll see.”
Sara fiddled with her phone as they drove, considering backup plans in case this all went sideways. They limited her access to most things, including her own bank accounts, but she still had a few social media apps and assorted games they graciously allowed her to keep.
As towns go, Pine Bluffs was petite. Sleepy. Charming. On a busy day, there might be a thousand people in the town limits. Still, it was about 999 more people than Sara wanted to deal with. As they approached the center of town, she could feel all their minds pressing on her, forcing their loud, undisciplined emotions on her. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Jeffrey drove to a quaint little building, formerly a residence, now the Law Office of Burke and Bradley, with a two-space parking lot where the front lawn used to be. Sara could tell there were at least three people inside, although the other parking space was empty. She tried not to hunch in on herself as they got out of the car and walked up to the front porch.
It didn’t feel right to just walk in without knocking, but knocking on the front door of a business also felt ridiculous. Sara stared at the front door, paralyzed by indecision. Jeffrey, fool that he was, misunderstood. A thread of alarm twisted through his presence, dampening the eagerness that had been fueling him ever since they got in the car back at Sara’s house. “Are you having second thoughts? Because I swear this is going to be fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
There. Something in his background emotions — grim satisfaction. Smug anticipation. He was lying to her, misleading her, and he was looking forward to watching it play out. And fear — fear that his plan wouldn’t work. How had he kept that dampened all this time?
Inhale. Exhale. How to proceed? She was walking into a trap, she could now see. What to do? Play along until she knew what was going on? Be direct, and call Jeffrey out on the emotions that betrayed him?
From inside the building, she felt a swirl of strong emotions — anger, resentment, fear, sorrow, but also determination. And a vulnerability — someone inside needed help, desperately.
Sara knew that, as she had tried to explain to Jeffrey, feeling someone’s emotions never really gave her a full picture of what was going on. She didn’t trust Jeffrey — that wasn’t new, but now she saw that she had let down her guard after he’d seemed to open up to her back in the kitchen. Well, she still didn’t trust him, but she didn’t know for sure what was going on. She could tell that someone inside was in distress. Maybe she could help. Maybe she’d make everything worse. But now she was on alert. Proceed with caution, she thought.
She looked at Jeffrey, smirking. “Dude. I just didn’t know whether to knock or not. I mean, it’s a house.”
Jeffrey’s ice-blue eyes were blank for a moment, and then relief filled him. “It’s a business,” he said. “Just open the door.” Which he then did, leading the way into a cramped living-room-turned lobby. She pulled her phone from her pocket and opened an app as she followed him. A few swipes, a few clicks, and then she slipped it back into her pocket, still turned on.
Inside, a man sat at a small desk. He smiled when they walked in. Not him, Sara though. This man was not the source of the distressed emotions she could still sense. He was quietly calm, content, a little distracted, harmless.
Jeffrey nodded at him but didn’t stop, and led Sara deeper into the building. Down a short hallway, they encountered what had once been a dining room but was now a conference room. Here, two women sat at a table. One was older, stern, serious. Her emotions were annoyed, impatient. But it was hard to get a sense of her, because the room’s other occupant, a younger woman who looked about Sara’s age, was a screaming ball of distress. She looked up at Sara, her eyes wide, and gave the barest shake of her head.
“Thanks for finally joining us,” the older woman said, not sounding terribly thankful. “We can get started now. You’re Sara?” she said, glancing at Sara before looking away. “You can sit here.” She pulled out a seat directly across the table from the other woman. The miserable woman.
Sara sat, and focused her attention on that other woman. She was hunched in on herself, sitting slumped down in the oversized office chair. But she was watching Sara, and her distress had stretched to make space for a touch of curiosity, a bit of cautious optimism. She held Sara’s eyes and again shook her head. She mouthed something. Sara couldn’t be sure what it was, but she thought the woman had said “It’s no use.”
“I’m Gina Burke, and you already know Jeffrey,” the first woman, apparently Gina, said. “This is Alice, and she’s in a great deal of trouble.”
Alice. Her distress spiked again, run through with fear, misery, despair.
“Your role, Sara, is to confirm or deny Alice’s story, under oath. Your assessment of her guilt or innocence will be considered submissible evidence.”
Alice had closed her eyes, a look of concentration on her face. She was focusing intently on something, wanted something, but Sara couldn’t tell what.
Sara took her phone out of her pocket and slipped it face-down onto the table. Still on. “I told Jeffrey that my abilities don’t work like that,” Sara said. Her best defense here had to be honesty, right? She wasn’t going to lie, not for Jeffrey, not even for her own benefit.
Whatever Jeffrey’s trap was, he certainly didn’t expect her to announce that she couldn’t read thoughts the way everyone thought she could. Both Jeffrey and Gina registered a moment of shock. Alice opened her eyes, surprised, curious.
“Whatever you want me to find out about Alice or what you think she did, all I can tell you is how she feels about it. If that’s admissible evidence, our justice system is a mess.”
Gina considered Sara, chewing over her words. “Well. Jeffrey, this isn’t what you told me we’d be doing today.”
Jeffery’s shock was fading, replaced by a rising discomfort and even anger. Anger directed at Sara. “No. It isn’t. Sara, are you telling me you can’t read Alice’s thoughts?”
Sara turned to Gina. “Are we recording this conversation?” she asked.
Gina looked confused, and felt concerned. “Why do you ask that?”
“Because I don’t want anyone misrepresenting my words, or twisting them to imply that I agreed to something I didn’t. I don’t think Jeffrey has been telling you the truth about me.”
Gina’s frustrated glare took in both Jeffrey and Sara. “Yes, Sara, we are recording, but this recording is never going to see the light of day, because Jeffrey has apparently ruined everything.”
“How is this my fault?” Jeffrey asked, his own anger growing.
“Because your job was to gather evidence on the misuse of powers by gifted individuals, and here you are bringing me a gifted telepath refusing to cooperate.”
Aha. Sara was right — it was a setup. Alice was still cowed, but increasingly relieved. What role did she play in this?
Sara stood. “This situation has been misrepresented. I’ll be returning to my home now. And lodging a complaint with the agency, Jeffrey. Entrapment like this can’t possibly be sanctioned behavior for an agency minder such as yourself.”
Jeffrey barked a laugh. “Who do you think put me up to it, Sara? Don’t be a fool. The agency doesn’t want to preserve your rights and protect your freedoms. They want to be done with you. All of you.”
Out the window, Sara saw a van pull up in front of the building. The local news station. Perfect.
“What do you mean, be done with us?” Sara asked Jeffrey, but Gina answered.
“We all know it’s only a matter of time before you freaks turn on us,” Gina said. “Best to lock you up now. But the Gifted Persons Act says we have to respect your basic freedoms, unless you break the law. And even though you’ve chosen not to cooperate with Jeffrey’s half-baked scheme here, no one needs to know that. We’ll tell them all about how you fabricated evidence to get Alice off the hook, knowing she was truly guilty, in hopes that it would win your autonomy. The public will be outraged. You’ll go to prison, that special new one they’ve built for the gifted. And our work getting the rest of you freaks locked away will be that much easier.” Gina paused, satisfied. “Who would believe your word over mine?”
Sara glanced out the window. “Well, for starters, I think everyone who’s watching my live feed right now will have a few questions.” The TV news van had opened, spilling out a camera crew and a reporter. They began setting up just outside the law office.
The man from the front desk appeared in the conference room door. “Uh, Gina, something’s happening outside.”
Gina finally looked out the window, noticing the activity in the parking lot. Fury filled her, incandescent rage. “How dare you?” she sputtered.
“All I want, Gina, is to sit alone in my remote little house, far away from angry, ugly thoughts like yours. If we’re done here, I’ll get back to it.” Sara left the conference room, walked through the front lobby, and stepped out onto the front porch, where the reporter was filming.
The reporter cut off what she was saying and turned to Sara. “Sara, everyone is watching your live stream right now! Do you have anything you’d like to say?”
“I believe I’ve already said it. Can one of you give me a ride home?”
***
This is a full short story developed as a part of the 500Words Short Story Project. It may continue to evolve beyond its current state.
