Immortal Mine (36 page)

When we get to the house, Jean gives Stacy a
key to her second car sitting in the small garage behind the house.
Stacy has an appointment with counselors at a couple different
colleges. Her phone has GPS, so Jean isn’t too worried about her.
We make plans to meet her later for dinner, over Stacy’s protests
that that hardly keeps her away from our weekend.

“Well,” Jean says, “what do you want to do
today?”

“Shop,” I say immediately. In my agitated
mood, I have a strong desire to spend money on myself. This trait I
know
I get from my mom.

“I know just the place,” she grins.

We bundle up and she takes me to an open air
mall that sprawls across three city blocks. We buy new clothes,
shoes, and spring jackets. Then we stop in front of a day spa.

“Let’s go in,” I say. Jean shrugs and
follows me through the tall glass doors. We decide to spoil
ourselves and get both a manicure and a pedicure. As we’re sitting
in the massaging recliners with our feet soaking in the scented
water, I look over to where there are a few women having their hair
done. I look at Jean.

“You should get your hair done,” I say.

She grimaces. “I don’t think there’s much
they can do with this,” she says without lifting her eyes from the
magazine in her lap, lifting a frazzled gray portion of her hair
and dropping it back to her shoulder.

“They can color it back to what it’s
supposed to be,” I say.

Her gaze snaps to mine. Her eyes narrow
slightly, as if trying to decipher the meaning behind my words.

“Why would I want to do that?” she asks
slowly.

“Why wouldn’t you?” I counter. “I mean, most
women color their hair nowadays. How many grandmas actually have
gray hair?”

She continues to watch me then finally
shakes her head.

“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Everyone knows me with the gray hair. If I suddenly show up
looking... well, younger, that might raise some suspicions.”

“C’mon, no one will think anything. We came
to the city to have fun, went to the spa, got our hair done. I’ll
get mine done also so it doesn’t get too much notice.” She still
looks unsure, so I say, “Please. For me?”

She sighs, giving in. “Alright.”

I grin.

Jean dyes her hair brown with lighter
highlights at my urging, and I add highlights to mine. As the
hairdresser’s getting ready to trim my hair, Sam’s face flashes
before my eyes, my hand heating phantomlike. I decide to cut my
hair off. Or maybe not quite off, but so that it resides just below
my shoulders. Jean just raises her brows at my request, but says
nothing.

When we’re done, I look pretty much the same
with shorter hair, but Jean looks amazing. I can definitely tell
that she’s my mom’s mom, but it’s not painful for me to look at
her, her features just different enough. She’s actually very
beautiful.

Stacy meets us for dinner and oohs and ahs
over our hair and nails. We all head back to the house, and Stacy
heads immediately for her room to call her mom with news about her
interviews. I go and sit by Jean on the couch where she’s reading a
book.

“Fun day,” I say.

“It really was,” she answers, putting her
book down next to her. “Thank you, Niahm. I know I don’t deserve to
have such a fun day with you, but thank you, anyway.”

My heart sinks at her words. She thought she
had to walk away from her family to protect them from what she is,
and has spent all this time living alone. When she finally does
reconnect with a family member—me—she gets nothing but rejection
and hatred. Tired of trying to maintain all my anger at her, I
scoot closer and lean against her shoulder. She tenses for a
moment, before relaxing, leaning her cheek against the top of my
head.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so awful,” I say.

“Niahm, you haven’t—” She cuts herself off
at my grunt. “You had a right to be,” she says.

“No, I didn’t. I can understand now why you
felt you had to leave. I think in that same situation,
anyone
would do the same thing. But you came back. For me.
And I’ve only made it hard for you. You’re my family, all I’ve got
left. I don’t want you to go away again.”

Jean’s hand covers mine, and I can feel her
shaking with emotion.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

After a few minutes of silence in this
position, I say, “Can I call you grandma?”

Jean laughs. “Honey, you can call me
anything you want.”

Her hand moves to caress my arm. Then, with
reluctance in her voice, she says, “Stacy told me you and Sam...
broke up?”

I turn my face toward her arm, not wanting
her to ask me, but knowing that more than anyone, she’ll understand
what that means. I nod against her shoulder.

“What happened?” she asks.

I take a breath, hold it, then blow it out.
“He told me he can read minds by holding someone’s hand.”

“What?” Jean sounds stunned. I sit up to see
that she clearly didn’t know. She’s as surprised as I was when he
told me.

“He said that he doesn’t just read minds, he
can see every memory a person has, know everything they’ve ever
thought, or done.”

“He’s read your mind?” she asks, anger and
sympathy warring in her tone.

“Yes.”

She looks as if she wants to explode, seems
to be searching for the words she wants to say as she looks around
the room. Then her eyes come to my face, and all the anger drains
out of her.

“That’s pretty rotten for him to do without
your permission,” she says without malice.

“Yeah, I know.”

“You’re angry at him?” she asks.

“Furious,” I say, the word coming out
sounding pathetically forlorn. I can feel the pain at the base of
my throat fighting its way up.

“He loves you,” she says, surprising me. I
shake my head in denial. “He’s caught in a strange place with you.
He’s bound to you, which forces him to need to protect you. But he
also loves you, which makes you even more precious to him.”

“You’re defending him?” I should be
affronted, but I only feel amazed by her defense.

“No.” Her denial is immediate. “Yes, I
suppose I am just a little.” Her half-smile is apologetic. “I
haven’t ever been bound, but he and Shane explained it to me. It’s
not really an emotional thing, but more of a duty thing. An
immortal might be upset when their bind dies, but it isn’t the end
of the world for them. What Sam feels for you goes beyond that. It
is
emotion for him.” She reaches up and wipes my tears away.
“His need to protect you and keep you safe goes deeper than
anything he’s ever known.” She shrugs. “If I had that power, who
knows, I might be tempted to use it on those I cared about as well
if it meant the difference between keeping them safe or not.”

“How does spying on my mind keep me safe?” I
ask.

“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “Maybe
it’s more for him, to make sure you’re happy. But he might have a
good reason. You should ask him.”

“You’re being pretty magnanimous toward him
when you’ve only ever shown him dislike.”

She puts her arm around my shoulder and
pulls me against her side.

“I’ve changed my mind about them both. I
think they’re good people who would go to any lengths to protect
you. How can I dislike someone who would do that for my
granddaughter?” She squeezes my shoulder. “You don’t seem all that
upset about this,” she observes.

“I’m trying to stay angry so that I don’t
start screaming,” I say. “Since I’ve known Sam, my life has been an
emotional rollercoaster. I guess I’m just kind of tired from it
all.”

“Do you still love him? Even knowing what he
did?” she asks. I have to think about her words. Immediately my
mind says yes, of course I still love him. But there’s so much more
to the answer than that.

“I wouldn’t ever be able to have secrets
from him,” I say.

“Secrets aren’t all they’re cracked up to
be,” she murmurs.

“I wouldn’t have
privacy
,” I say.

“Okay, that would suck,” she says and I
choke on a half-sob, half-laugh.

“Yeah,” I agree. “And I don’t know if I can
trust him again. He lied to me for so long. He didn’t ask if it was
okay to take my memories. It was like he just swooped in like a
buzzard and picked what he wanted without checking to see if it was
his or not.” She nods against the top of my head. “Staying with him
would mean leaving Goshen eventually.” I pause. “I can’t have
children with him,” I whisper.

Jean kisses the top of my head as my tears
begin anew. “I wish I could tell you what to do, Niahm, but this
one has to be your own decision.”

Yeah, I think, and that’s what
really
sucks.

We manage to talk Stacy into spending the
next day with us. We go to a movie, but in a different theater than
the one I went to with Sam all those months ago. I have no desire
to walk into that place and those memories. We gorge ourselves on
ice cream, and find a Farmer’s Market in one of the city parks. As
evening closes in, Stacy goes back to Jean’s house, leaving us to
go to dinner on our own.

Jean takes me to a Chinese restaurant that
she says she went to quite often when she lived with her husband
and daughter, like a “real” person she says. It’s a bit of a dive,
everything inside red and gold and covered with a light layer of
dust.

“I don’t think they’ve cleaned this place
since I was here twenty-five years ago,” Jean says. “But it’s still
the same owners, so the food should be good.”

We order too much food, and Jean shows me
how to use chopsticks, which I can’t really master too well. I
decide that must be the reason Asian people are always thin, and
that if Americans could just start eating with chopsticks, we might
all be thin as well.

The front door opens, the little bell over
it announcing the arrival of new customers. Jean stiffens in alarm
as she looks toward the door. I instinctively follow her gaze, and
see two men standing there. They are dressed in casual suits. One
is tall, with dark, slicked back hair, quite good looking, the scar
that runs along his jawline adding to his looks rather than
detracting. The other is shorter, a shock of silver hair on his
head sticking out in deliberate spikes. There isn’t anything
particularly menacing about them.

I look back at Jean and see genuine alarm is
evident in her expression. She’s lowered herself in her chair a
bit, her hand up next to her face as she brings some noodles to her
mouth with her chopsticks. She’s purportedly watching what she’s
doing, but it’s clear she’s watching them. A thrill of fear runs up
my spine.

“What is it?” I ask. “Do you know them?”

“Who?” she asks, trying to feign innocence,
but the fright in her voice is obvious.

“Je—I mean, Grandma, you know exactly who
I’m talking about—those two guys who just came in.”

She looks at me, and my fear ratchets up to
terror to match her own.

“We have to get out of here, Niahm.
Now.”

“Okay, uh... ” I turn back toward the door
and see the hostess leading them to a booth not far from the door.
Crap
. I look around. “There has to be another exit
somewhere.” I lean toward her. “Who are they?”

She swallows, and as if afraid to say the
word aloud, she mouths,
Sentinels
. I jerk in shock.
Those
are Sentinel’s? I somehow imagined them to be hulking
thugs with horns, scars, and missing teeth. Not a couple of average
looking business men.

I gasp a couple of panicked breaths.
Okay, okay, the important thing is to get Jean out of the
restaurant safely.
I look around again. A server comes through
the swinging kitchen door and I get a glimpse of an emergency exit
sign at the back of the kitchen.

“There,” I say, pointing just above the
table top. She glances behind herself, a look of confusion on her
face. “An exit, at the back of the kitchen.”

“I can hardly go traipsing through the
kitchen,” she whispers, her voice tight with tension. “And I’m not
going to leave you.”

I wave the server over.

“Hi,” I say with a note of beseeching,
lifting my eyebrows, silently asking for understanding. “Listen,
one of my gr—friend’s old boyfriends just came in. It was a really
bad break-up, you know?” I watch her face change from polite
interest to sympathy. “Do you think it would be possible for you to
sneak us out through the kitchen?”

She’s already shaking her head, “I ca—”

“Please?” I ask, handing her a
hundred-dollar bill. “If she tries to go out the front and he sees
her, it could get... ugly.” I drop my voice menacingly on that last
note and her eyes widen. She glances at Jean, then back to me and
down at the money.

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll take her out that
way, but I can’t take both of you.”