The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  What I was concerned about, however, was the sun coming up, and Ethel’s safety. Wanda hadn’t been lying when she said she didn’t kill Daniel Ashlock. She had never been a good liar like Lilly had been so I was inclined to believe the lack of purple oval outlines over her body when she said she didn’t was still an accurate indicator of the truth. Problem was, if not her, who then? Which other person with the ability to fly would want Daniel Ashlock, a three-year-old who hadn’t yet done any harm to anybody, dead? My girls? They wouldn’t. They were arrogant and selfish and reckless because of their youth but they weren’t cruel like Lilly and Wanda were. They were of a different time; a more innocent time. I trusted them with my pets and would have trusted them with Daniel had there been the need for it. Lilly might have done it but she had been inert and stuck in that tank of pink goo when Daniel died so she couldn’t have. Who did that leave? No one. I didn’t know of any other person who could fly.

  The best thing to do was get Ethel away from Northridge fast, lest whoever killed Daniel came back looking for seconds. And I had to do it before the sun came up fully because I couldn’t risk being seen without legs, suspended in mid-air like a ghost. Not when so many people at Northridge knew my face already. I had experienced for myself how quickly things turn bad when normal people realise you’re in no way like them and I didn’t want to have to deal with any of that ever again. I had been shot at and screamed at enough times to know it was best to be staying out of sight when unusual. Always.

  I slid down the roof of Baker’s house the way one would slide down a slide and popped myself through the kitchen window I left open when I left.

  Because I didn’t have legs and thus couldn’t stand by the sink, I sat myself down on the granite counter next to it and curled my body sideways to drink from the tap I kept running. It had been hours since I last had a drop to drink and boy, did it taste good!

  I knew I had to be fast. I knew Wanda. She was thorough. She would come looking for me at Baker’s house next, just to be sure I was truly gone. But all the same, I couldn’t resist my body’s urges. I needed water and food, having gone almost a full day without, and I needed it now!

  I flew to the refrigerator, flung its door open and hovered in front of it while I put all edible items within into my mouth and chewed and swallowed with the ferocity of a predator that hadn’t eaten in days. There was ham in there and slices of cheese and Snack Packs in chocolate pudding flavour… I ate them all with my hands and tossed empty plastic containers and wrappers onto the floor when I was done because the cleanliness of Baker’s house was no longer my concern. I was leaving and never coming back so I no longer cared what he or his mother thought of my habits.

  It might hurt him to find me gone, and I was aware it was theoretically unfair of me to have used him, an unsuspecting victim, but I didn’t thoroughly care either. I’d been used and hurt enough times to feel deserving of every opportunity I had to do the same to someone else. Life was cruel anyway. Look what happened to Lilly, and Violet, and Daniel, and my parents and grandparents and cousins and brothers.

  When somewhat full, I flew back to the sink and drank from the tap again while also hovering in front of it.

  Something moved on my right, some distance away from me, behind the window of the house next door. I heard a soft gasp, likely produced by a human female, then the ringing of a vintage telephone in my ears, followed by drumbeats. Sour lemons appeared in my mouth… telling me I was being watched.

  I removed my face from the revitalising waterfall of tap water and turned slowly, my jaw clenched and my limbs loose and nimble, ready for whatever I might find standing behind Ethel’s kitchen window.

  If it were Wanda, I would flee. I had already sussed out a good hiding place within the vicinity so I knew exactly where to go and how to get there without being detected. If it were Ethel, better yet. I would tell her everything and take her away with me.

  To my surprise, it was neither of them. It was only Gigi. With her hand over her mouth, in her nightgown, her hair dishevelled and uncombed, her face unmade and paler than usual, her eyes wider than I had ever seen them. Her eyes were on my stumps and I realised then the light from the refrigerator I had neglected to close was helping her see, without any doubt, the state they were in.

  “You’re… floating,” she said, as she turned completely white. “Floating,” she said again, as if to help herself process the information better.

  The tap next to me continued to flow, its sound repetitive and soothing like a trickling brook out in the deep of a forest. I wiped water, oil and chocolate smears away from my lips, swallowed the taste of sour lemons and I turned the tap off.

  Unnerving silence was all there was then.

  Without bothering to give her any chance to be prepared, I flew, faster than the speed of light, right into Ethel’s kitchen, through her open window, and stopped when I was right behind Gigi, hovering inches above the floor. “Yes. But I’m every bit as human as you are,” I whispered into her ear the second I got there. “Just, a little bit enhanced. Like you are now. Too.”

  She screamed, just as I expected she would, so I grabbed her from behind and pressed my hand over her mouth before the sound came out so that it would be properly muffled when it did.

  “Did my cure work?” I whispered when she gave up trying to scream and was instead trying to wrench her mouth and body away from my grip. “Your bruises are gone.”

  Indeed they were. Her face and arms, as far as I could see from the awkward position I was in, were completely undamaged. All the bruises that had been on them the last time I saw her were gone. I had never seen her unbruised before and couldn’t help but feel somewhat proud that I’d contributed to her looking so healthy.

  “What are you?” she mumbled, barely audible under the weight of the hand on her mouth. She sank limply into my arms shortly after, tired from all that struggling, but the drumbeats in my ears never stopped thumping.

  “I won’t hurt you. If you promise not to tell anyone about me.”

  That was a lie. I had already sussed out the kitchen and found a rack of knives I would be able to use to silence her if the situation called for it. As much as I pitied her for everything life had thrown at her, life, and Lilly, had also taught me it was every man for himself out here. Wanda was right. I wasn’t above killing an innocent person to protect myself. I had come too far, overcome too much, to want to give it all up this easily.

  “Will you promise not to tell anyone about me?”

  She gulped and began shaking a little and she nodded ever so slightly. The hand I had over her mouth became cold and damp as her tears began landing on it.

  “Say it. Out loud. Will you tell anyone about me?” Say it, so I can see whether or not you’re lying. Say it, so I can know if I should cut your head away from your body since my ‘old Floridian cure’ will make you immune to physical damage unless I remove your brain, the command centre for chemical signals.

  “I… won’t tell anyone about you,” she mumbled. “Promise.”

  No purple oval outlines anywhere. Not lying. What a relief. I let go of her and turned her around as tap water replaced the taste of sour lemons in my mouth.

  Clocks began ticking in my ears as I stared into her damp wide eyes then warplanes flew past overhead. I heard the screeching of bad violin notes too, though the frantic drumbeats that had been in my ears since she first caught sight of me never once stopped pounding.

  What did that mean? What was she thinking about? I had never heard a combination of sounds quite like it in a person who had only just seen me fly so I had no reference for what might have caused it. Why would a person be feeling thoughtful, hopeful, shame and fear all at once?

  She bit her lip and, while turning into a deep shade of blue and developing many red circles of equal sizes over her cheeks, very unexpectedly said, “Do you...”

  Puddles of tears appeared within her eyes. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get
why she seemed more sad than afraid. “Do I what?”

  “Do you...” She inhaled sharply and hesitated for a really long time before spitting the words out. “Do you have a cure for dead people?”

  What? I immediately thought of Ethel and tasted sauerkraut as the possibilities of what might have already happened spilled into my mind. A chill ran over the surface of my skin. I contemplated removing my hands from Gigi’s shoulders then decided it would be more convenient to leave them there, just in case. “What happened?”

  Gigi became a shade bluer and turned the parts of the kitchen closest to her blue as well. “He’s dead. Please help me. Please.”

  He? “Who’s dead?”

  “My husband.” Tears ran down her cheeks in lines so straight, they looked like they’d been guided into position by a ruler. “He… had an accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “In our kitchen. He fell and hit his head.”

  I saw the purple oval outlines I’d been looking out for appear over her mouth, eyes, hands and feet then. Now, she was lying. But why? “Tell me the truth, Gigi.”

  Her eyes grew wide again and she turned completely white. She looked like she wanted desperately to speak but was too paralysed by fear to.

  “I won’t tell anybody. I promise. And, I might be able to help you.”

  She took in a few difficult breaths then burst into tears again. After what felt like a full minute of crying, she gathered herself, became oddly calm and composed and said, “I hit him with a frying pan and he fell against the edge of our dining table and hit his head bad. He was screaming at me for looking different, for suddenly having no bruises, and I was making breakfast for him, and I just lost it.”

  She bit her lip as more tears ran down her cheeks but she didn’t crack the way she had done before. She remained unusually stoic and confident, very unlike her previously insecure and needy self. “I hit him with everything I had. With that burning, heavy iron pan and…” She gulped again. “…he never got up again. Then Charlie called, and I came here, but… he’s still there. On our kitchen floor. And I don’t know what to do now.”

  I saw then my being a legless, flying human being was just about the least of her concerns then, and that my secret would be safe with her because I had her secret to use against her too. Now that she’d killed her husband, nobody would ever think of her as ‘normal’ ever again. I could easily say, once my legs grew out, that the trauma of having murdered her husband had been too much for her to bear and made her see things that weren’t there. Everybody would believe me because they had been taught that only crazy or inherently evil people ever did really bad things and believing she was so, would never trust anything she spoke of ever again.

  Tap water. Lots of it. I let go of her shoulders and dropped my knapsack, no longer concerned about what I was letting her see. “I can’t bring dead people back to life just yet, unfortunately,” I said as I dug through my stash of passports and money. “But, I wasn’t lying when I said I can help you.”

  I pulled out the stack of American passports I had and flipped through them till I got to one with the name ‘Maria Diaz’ listed as the owner. The age of ‘Maria Diaz’ was twenty-three years of age in the passport, just about the same age Gigi looked. And like all the other passports I had in my bag, it had no photograph pasted in it yet.

  I handed it to Gigi, along with a wad of American dollars I suspect contained about fifty thousand dollars, and told her to paste her own photograph within it. “Go somewhere crowded, start that bakery you want to start, leave Garbine Guerena Guerrero behind and don’t ever look back,” I added.

  “How did you know my real name?” she asked, with brown squiggles over her eyes. “And about that bakery? I never told anyone.”

  I smiled and put a finger to my lips like I’d seen many human beings do in my lifetime. “Our little secret. Tell no one about me and I’ll tell no one about you.”

  Gigi dropped her eyes down to my stumps and observed them hovering in mid-air, inches above the floor, along with the rest of my body. I expected to hear more drumbeats when seeing her do so but there turned out to be none of that. Instead, Rachmaninoff’s Italian Polka began to play. She was fascinated and no longer afraid.

  “Who are you? Really?” she whispered.

  I smiled again, flew over to her ear and whispered all the truths I wouldn’t normally tell other people.

  I trusted her then simply because she was, like me, no longer ‘normal’.

  She was one of us now.

  Chapter 37

  5 August 1975, Tuesday

  Gigi got changed, collected her bags and left Ethel’s house the second we finished talking. With the wad of American dollars I’d given her safely tucked away in various parts of her clothing, she lost all interest in sticking around for the pittance Charlie would have given her for staying on till the end of the week.

  Once she’d gone and I was done chewing the bag of hams I found in Ethel’s refrigerator, I flew up to the second floor and opened Ethel’s closed bedroom door to let myself in.

  I was hoping to find her asleep or at least too pissed drunk to notice how my legs, or lack thereof, looked, but, as always, I didn’t get lucky at all.

  Despite it being only about 4am in the morning, her eyes were wide open and more sober than they usually looked at breakfast. She saw me fly in, saw my stumps, saw how I was defying gravity and floating above ground, and she screamed.

  Startled doesn’t even come close to describing her reaction to seeing me. She turned extremely white and made the bed she was lying on, the side tables it was connected to and the carpet they were on turn white too. A storm of drumbeats exploded in my ears as she picked herself off the bed and did everything she could to crawl away from me.

  As I had done with Gigi, I flew over faster than the speed of light, went behind her and put my hand over her mouth to muffle her screams before the neighbours got wind of it.

  “I have to leave, Ethel,” I said into her ear. “Come with me!”

  “You’re one of them!” she screamed as she kicked and clawed at me to try to get me to remove the arm I had across her shoulders and chest.

  Her sharp, uncut nails went right into my flesh, caused me quite a bit of pain as they tore bits of skin apart, so I let go.

  Once free, she ran to the corner of her bedroom that was furthest away from me and stared at me with wide, wild eyes that made me hear drumbeats and also the siren of fire trucks. “You’ve been one of them all this time? You... you tipped the aliens off in La Paz? When you went into that toilet for ages... It was you! All this time! Not the Germans!”

  “Yes—”

  “You’re evil!”

  “I’m not! Look, I came back for you. I’ll look after you and make sure you’ll always be happy from now on—” I tried to fly towards her but stopped the second she screamed in the pitch women only ever used in the presence of mice or cockroaches.

  “Stay away from me, you alien! Don’t you dare come any closer!”

  “I’m not an alien, Ethel! I’m as human as you are. We’re all as human as you are.”

  She shook her head as her eyes moved around my legs to the rhythm of search lights. “Human beings do not fly, Helen! You’re flying! And you… you don’t have legs! How can you possibly call yourself human!”

  “I had an accident! And I wasn’t born knowing how to fly! I figured out how along the way, just as men figured out how to make planes—”

  “That’s not possible!”

  “Nothing’s not possible. Everything can be done if you just take the time to analyse the possibilities and work on getting the best one fixed up.” I sighed. “Look, nobody would let a person like me fly a plane and I wanted to fly as much as you did so I figured out how. On my own. It’s as simple as that.”

  Ethel laughed but did not sound at all happy. “I don’t buy it. It’s obvious you’re not of this world. You’re an alien.
You and your kind killed my sweet, innocent, baby son! You’re evil! You are dangerous!”

  No saxophones in my ears, no pink and gold sparkles anywhere, just… gunshots and blood-red smoke.

  My chest began to hurt. The taste of muddy grass appeared again in my mouth, along with the taste of whisky. “Some people like me may be dangerous, but I’m not. I love you, Ethel! I never knew I could but you showed me I can.”

  “Shut up!” Ethel turned a very deep blue and began to cry which made me hear bad violin notes and the scrubbing of brushes all over again. She grabbed a huge wooden cross from the wall next to her and shoved it towards my face. “Be gone, devil! Be gone, Satan! Be gone! You are not welcome here!”

  A mound of muddy grass appeared in the middle of my throat. “I am not a devil. I’m just... I’m just autistic.”

  “Your art is the art of the devil!”

  “I didn’t say I’m artistic, I said I’m au-tistic. I have autism.”

  She frowned and made me hear the chugging of a heavy, overloaded train so I just knew she, like most of the people of her time, didn’t understand what I was talking about.

  “It means I was born… slightly different. Like how you’re different. My brain is connected in ways the average brain isn’t, and works in a different way. It’s not quite ‘normal’ but it isn’t necessarily bad or inferior either.”

  The chugging of train continued in my ears. “Do not compare me with you, Satan! I am nothing like you!” She held the cross up to her forehead, squeezed her eyes shut and began praying fervently out loud.

  “What happened to you, Ethel?” I whispered, as the mound of muddy grass in my throat began to choke me, making it difficult for me to breathe. Where was the love I’d found so bothersome before? Where was the love she wouldn’t stop showering me? How could it have vanished into thin air so easily? After all we’d been through together? “Please just tell me what really happened. Why won’t you talk to me anymore?”