Levitating Las Vegas (17 page)

“Reading minds,” he said.

“How lucky. You’re satisfied with your delusion.”

“Very.”

Deliberately she kept her eyes focused on his, but she thought about kissing him.

Automatically he raised one hand to his tingling lips.

Her chest was so tight, she could hardly breathe. “We need to talk.” She led him by the hand to the bed. They sat facing each other. The curtains were still open a foot, and the afternoon sunlight slanted across the room, drawing a broad line between them.

“If you can read minds . . .” she reasoned slowly.

“Mm-hmm,” he prompted her.

“. . . but you think it’s a delusion caused by MAD . . .”

“Mm-hmm?”

“Are you ever right about what people are thinking? And if you’re right, how do you explain that?”

“Most of the time, I can’t tell whether I’m right or not,” he said. “Sometimes the person will say something or do something that lets me know I’m right. In those cases, I figure I’m really reading their body language or making an educated guess. I’m pretty good at that. I didn’t major in psychology for nothing. And my brain is interpreting that information as mind reading because I am mentally diseased.”

“Right,” Holly said. She wasn’t listening to him, though. She was thinking about her own magical power. She was thinking Elijah’s was hard to prove real, but hers wasn’t.

“Then do it,” he said.

Holly jumped. She watched him warily. “Do what?”

“Show me your power,” he said. His heart was full of dread. How awful, if she thought she was making the pillows sail through the air, and he could clearly see she wasn’t. He liked to picture her as a telekinetic force of womanhood, not a fragile and deluded beauty. But they needed closure. “Make something move.”

“My power isn’t as strong as it was when I was fourteen,” she apologized. “It’s stronger every hour, but not that strong.”

“Because you haven’t been off Mentafixol as long as I have,” Elijah said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

She focused on him. Without taking her eyes off him, she thought about the TV remote on the bedside table behind him. In her mind she fingered the switch.

The TV clicked off.

She thought about the light switch just inside the door in the bathroom.

The light extinguished.

She thought about the curtains.

They raked shut. Slivers of light careened around the room as the curtains swung, but slowly the fabric settled straight down, erasing the line of light between her and Elijah. The darkness was complete.

Elijah’s mind raced. He should do something. He should feel something. All he could feel was Holly. She was hyperaware of the pitch dark and her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. If she had magical power, that meant she wasn’t crazy. But if she wasn’t crazy, her parents had lied to her. Her whole life was built on a lie, and she had no life left.

“Stop.” He couldn’t see her at all in the dark, but he needed to touch her and stop her. He put his hand on what he thought was her bare knee.

Her thoughts did stop, or rather, rebooted, redirected. Now she was thinking about Elijah’s hot hand on her skin. Or Elijah was thinking this. Or they both were, their separate thoughts intertwining in his head until he couldn’t tell the difference.

He slid his hand off her knee and felt around on the bedside table next to him until he found the lamp. He switched it on. In the sudden light, she blinked long brown lashes at him. She had magical power, she was hot for him, and she was real.

“We have to make sure,” he said. “We have to know why. The candy store is open by now.” He stood and held out his hand to her. “Let’s go.”

She had to shower first.

“No, you don’t,” Elijah called from the bedroom. “We’re just going up the street to change our lives forever. No need to get fancy.”

Holly had no intention of getting fancy. She was in as big a hurry as he was. But now that she and Elijah had turned this corner, she felt more self-conscious. She wasn’t sure whether to be mortified that he’d heard her every lustful thought about him, or turned on. But as long as she was freshly showered and wore her false lashes, she could do anything. It wasn’t really her.

Though . . . she cupped her spangled boobs in her hands and turned to the side to examine herself in the mirror. This outfit might be a little much for Icarus. Or a little little. She would stand out, to say the least, and that might not be desirable while she and Elijah were hanging around the candy company, casing the joint. Maybe she should stop at one of the gift shops and buy herself whatever people wore up here. Dungarees. She wasn’t sure what dungarees were.

“I think you should wear what you’ve got,” Elijah called. “That way, if anything strange happens, we can shrug and explain that we’re from Vegas.” He opened the door and hung on the frame with his arms over his head, showing her those muscular triceps beneath his T-shirt sleeves. “I wish
you
could read
my
mind. You look so gorgeous exactly like that.”

She watched her bare cheeks redden in the mirror and her mouth widen into a grin. “You can take the girl out of Vegas, but you can’t take Vegas out of the girl.” She dug in her purse for her false eyelash glue.

He exhaled his impatience through his nose. Even with everything else spinning through her head, she was able to appreciate the beauty of this man hanging on the door frame. She swept on her cosmetics while he watched her darkly.

They cruised up the street in Shane’s car and parked in front of the candy company again. The difference this time was that the storefronts, the sidewalks, and even the streets were filled with pedestrians. Mounting the brick steps to the store, they passed someone going down, a gorilla wearing a metallic green leprechaun hat.

“Wait,” Holly said, spinning to follow the gorilla with her eyes. “I thought we
left
Vegas.” Now that she was about to discover the truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it.

Elijah could read her mind and wouldn’t let her stall. He took her hand and hauled her the rest of the way up the steps. He pulled her through the door of the store and didn’t let her go until they stood in front of the candy case, the café tables around them filled with more gorillas and cowgirls and a few pirates nibbling bonbons.

“What can I do ya for?” asked the portly, white-haired man in a plaid shirt and overalls who manned the old-fashioned metal cash register.

“We would like some Mentafixol,” Elijah said.

“And a half pound of those chocolate-covered seafoam candies,” Holly added.

“Mentafixol!” the candy man exclaimed. He shook open a small bag.

Holly was afraid he would say he’d never heard of the stuff, but Elijah flexed his hand down by his side, signaling her to wait.

“Nobody’s ever come in and asked for it before,” the man went on, scooping candies into the bag. Holly watched him carefully to make sure he was scooping from the seafoam tray and not the nut chew tray next to it.

She remembered their mission and prompted the man, “But you do
make
Mentafixol?”

“Oh, yeah, we make it.” The man placed the bag on a scale. “It’s the only pill we make. We manufacture it in small batches on special order for one clinic in Las Vegas that treats a very rare condition called MAD, which stands for mental addled dysphoria.”

“Mental adolescent dysfunction,” Holly and Elijah said together. They were careful not to look at each other, and Holly hoped the candy man hadn’t noticed their enthusiasm.

“Why do you make it up here?” Holly asked. “You’re a long way from Vegas. Is the clinic that asks for it trying to keep it a secret?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the man. “We’re just convenient. We have the altitude necessary for the chemical reaction. We have the molybdenum. Did you know that the town of Icarus was founded in the nineteenth century as a molybdenum mining camp?” He leaned forward, bushy white brows high, and shook the bag at Holly.

She took the bag from him and popped a candy into her mouth.

“All of us in town work as molybdenum miners when you tourists go home,” the man said. “Here in the shop, we make the molybdenum cores of Mentafixol. Then we just dump them into the coating drum for a hard candy shell and a nice paraffin polish.”

Holly glanced over at Elijah for direction. He watched the candy man with an intense look in his green eyes—an expression Holly had come to recognize over the past day without even knowing she was recognizing it, his mind-reading expression. “Don’t you think it’s kind of unusual for a candy company to be asked to make a prescription drug?” he asked. “Don’t you ever get inspected by the FDA?”

“I
have
had that thought.” The man pointed at Elijah. “I don’t want you to think I haven’t. I’ve even called the clinic to ask them about it. And every time I do, they send somebody all the way up here to discuss it with me right away. Lately it’s been a little blond girl. Something in the way she describes it to me makes so much sense that I change my mind about complaining.”

Elijah nodded like it was all becoming clear. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “We’re here for the parade.”

“I can see that,” the candy man said, eyeing Holly. “You were with the gorillas.”

“Yes,” Holly lied, cheering him with a flourish of the piece of candy in her fingers. She put it in her mouth.

“But while we’re here,” Elijah said, “we wanted to check on the Mentafixol. We have friends at the clinic, and the clinic has run out of medicine.”

“You don’t say!” the man said. “Let me go look at that ticket.” He turned and moved to the shelves behind him.

Elijah leaned down to Holly and whispered, “The blonde is Kaylee.”

“The blonde is . . .” Holly repeated with her mouth full, not understanding. Then, slowly, she understood. Kaylee was the “little blond girl” who kept the candy company from asking too many questions about Mentafixol. The chocolate turned to sand in Holly’s mouth. She swallowed the dry mouthful. “How do you know?”

“I can see her in his mind.” Elijah straightened and resumed his intense look as the man returned to the register.

“Yep, the clinic asked us to halt shipment,” the man said. “And I can’t give you any. It has to go through the clinic. But you know who else in Vegas would have some?”

“Who?” Elijah asked in a tone that told Holly he already knew.

“That blonde,” the man said. “She always takes boxes and boxes back with her, plus we make her a few big horse pills and even some injectables out of the same stuff. God knows what she does with those. You want me to dig up her card?”

Elijah squinted at the man. Now Holly did wish she could read Elijah’s mind, because she had no idea what the next step in his plan was. If he’d been fishing for a way to get the man to fork over some Mentafixol, he’d run out of options.

She concentrated on the box that the man had turned to stare at on the shelves behind the counter a moment before. She thought about sliding it out from the boxes around it.

It moved into midair.

Elijah blinked. “You’ve been so helpful,” he said quickly to the man. “Let me pay you for”—he cut his eyes sideways at Holly’s bag of candy—“that.”

Holly floated the box of Mentafixol up to the ceiling.

As the man bent to peer at the cash register, Elijah widened his eyes at Holly, then gestured with his head at the crowded café tables, warning her to cut out the levitation or they would get caught.

Holly didn’t understand how anybody who happened to see what she was doing could possibly link her with a floating box of pharmaceuticals. She shrugged. “I’m a magician.”

Elijah paid, and Holly took him by the hand. She led him across the shop, then opened the door by backing him against it. “Thank you for the candy,” she whispered. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. Electricity shot through her, but for once she wasn’t fully vested in the attentions of Elijah. She let her lips linger on his while she coaxed the box a few feet downward, under the doorjamb, and outdoors. Then she rubbed the tip of her nose against Elijah’s and pulled him free of the shop, down the sidewalk, to Shane’s car, with the neat white box floating in the air in front of them all the way.

12

Elijah started the Catalina with an
erk
and meant to speed away from the candy store before the old man dashed after them and snatched his Mentafixol back. But Elijah hadn’t driven ten feet before he had to brake hard for a group of men hiking down the street. They weren’t in costume for the parade but were decked out in Western wear like real cowboys. They might actually have been molybdenum miners.

“They put us on Mentafixol to keep us from using our power,” Holly murmured, one pink fingernail tracing patterns on the box on the seat between them.

“Apparently,” Elijah said. He was trying to get his brain around the situation himself. He could read minds. It was real. After twenty-one years as a fatherless nobody, he had more power than he knew what to do with.

The concept just wouldn’t sink in. He had no room in his head for his own thoughts because Holly’s black anger pushed them out.

“And they told us we were crazy so we’d take the Mentafixol.” Her words came faster and faster to keep up with the darkness swirling in her mind. “That’s what my dad meant when he said he’d reveal all the secrets of his magic act to me after his impossible feat of physical stamina tomorrow. He knew I was coming off Mentafixol. The secret is that there’s no trick to it. He has power just like me. That’s how he levitates with no wires. And he’s only number four on the list of the ten biggest mysteries of Las Vegas? Seems like he could pull out all the stops and at least make it to number two.”

Elijah stomped the brakes again and stalled the car to keep from hitting a gorilla. The remnants of the parade flowed around them, and Elijah caught scraps of strangers’ thoughts that he didn’t want and couldn’t use: a recipe for guacamole, the current score of the Rockies–Red Sox game. He put the car in gear, restarted it, and touched his fingers to his aching head. “Your dad could be number one, but he doesn’t want to attract too much attention. People would blackmail him, kidnap him, kill him. And you. He’s been hiding in plain sight.”

In plain sight of everyone including Holly. She took it as a personal slap in the face, and her anger stirred. Then she cocked her head at Elijah. “What about your mom?”

They passed under the single traffic light and reached the edge of town—a good thing, because Elijah was growing impatient with pedestrians wandering into the path of the car. “My mom doesn’t have power,” he said, but come to think of it, he wasn’t so sure. This was one of the things he’d been trying to puzzle through, and Holly’s thoughts kept interrupting him.

Holly’s flamboyant dad was the more obvious trickster. Yet Elijah’s mom
was
the head dealer at the casino. The ability to read minds would come in handy for a job like that. And she’d conveniently taken a vacation just when his Mentafixol was cut off. She hadn’t been around for the past few days, so he couldn’t read her mind and discover all her secrets.

“Am I getting this wrong?” Holly’s voice interrupted his logic again. “You’re not mad at your mom.”

“My dad’s dead,” he said. “It’s always been just me and her. I guess she did what she had to do.”

“My God, Elijah, we’re not saying she worked late at the casino some nights. We’re saying she took your power away from you for seven years. She drugged you and told you that you were mentally ill. She might as well have tied you up in the basement. Get mad! Wake the hell up!”

She shoved his shoulder—not with her hand but with her mind—hard enough that he momentarily lost his grip on the steering wheel, and the Pontiac veered to the center of the road. He stomped the brake. The car screeched to a stop. The engine was dead.

As red dust billowed around them, he glared at her, surprising himself with the force of his anger. “Don’t. Do. That!” he shouted.

She stared wide-eyed at him, frightened at how dangerous he looked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Then you have to learn to control it!”

“Me!” she squealed, her fear turning back to anger. “You’ve been tromping through my mind twenty-four/seven!”

Turning away from her, he took a calming breath through his nose and started the engine again. “I saw an overlook on the drive in. Let’s stop there and we’ll talk.”

That meant they would have to drive through the tunnel. Holly closed her eyes, but the warmth of the sun cut off sharply. Her skin chilled, and the noise of the motor echoed weirdly around them. She sensed the whole weight of the mountain on top of her.

Feeling everything she felt, Elijah gripped the steering wheel and held his breath until they emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the mountain. The darkness of her thoughts didn’t relent. He found himself racing to the scenic overlook. He pulled into the empty parking lot, stopped the car with a jerk, snagged the box of Mentafixol, and leaped out, away from her, out of her thoughts. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.

He led the way up a path between red boulders. Beyond a row of weathered wooden picnic tables, the ground ended in a cliff. He stood as near the edge as he dared and looked way over into the canyon surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains. He couldn’t see the bottom.

Darkness approached him from behind. He turned to watch Holly follow in his steps up the path, beautiful as ever, a faraway look in her eyes the only sign that her world as she knew it had ended. She seated herself on a boulder with her long legs folded gracefully to one side, ankles crossed, very close to the edge of the cliff.

He backed away and seated himself about fifteen feet from her, just out of range of her thoughts.

And suddenly he felt like himself again. Her anger lifted from his shoulders. She was just his beautiful friend, in a world of trouble. He placed the box of Mentafixol on the rock beside him—the land side, where it was safer, not the cliff side, where he might accidentally kick it into the abyss. Not yet.

“It could still be a joint hallucination,” he called to her.

“They would have come after us,” Holly said. “If we really had MAD and we were dangerous when we ran out of Mentafixol, they would have kept a closer eye on us. They would have known you were headed here to get some. They would have called the police to lie in wait for us and make sure we got drugged up. You haven’t heard the thoughts of anyone lying in wait for us, have you?”

“No, but you’re saying two different things. If the police were here, we
would
be insane. If I heard their thoughts, I
wouldn’t
be insane.”

“You’re not,” she said. “Because of Kaylee. That’s what convinced me. She’s been up here to oversee the Mentafixol as part of her security job with the casino. That’s why my parents sent me to live with her, too. I thought I’d gained my freedom, but they were still watching me. It all comes back to the casino.”

“So, what are we saying?” He opened the box and took out one of four plastic bottles. He peeled the lid off the bottle and tipped the contents into his hand. Golden pills poured out and spilled over each other. He grabbed a handful and threw them full force off the cliff. They caught the setting sunlight as they fell, each one a potential shining moment of his high school and college years and Holly’s, thrown away under the heavy influence of a drug and their parents and the machinations of some mysterious power struggle at the casino that they didn’t understand. He watched the glinting pills bounce against the rocks and fall until they disappeared into the canyon below.

He turned back to her. “Are we ready to get rid of all of these? Are we sure?”

“I don’t want to live this way.” The bitterness in her voice surprised him, and now he wondered what she’d been thinking in the two minutes he’d sat beyond range of her. He’d stayed in the kitchen too long during a TV commercial break, and now he’d missed a major plot point in the show. He rose and shifted closer to her again, into her thoughts.

With her mind she lifted the remaining three bottles out of the box. Even after her little displays over the past few hours, Elijah was amazed at the bottles shedding their tops in concert and pouring forth their pills of their own accord. Hundreds of golden pills united in a single stream and raced toward Holly’s head, where they formed a moving, shining halo over her hair.

“But you know what?” she said. “Even if this were all an illusion, I don’t think I could go back.” She would rather die than go back, she thought as she leaned over the edge and looked down into the gorge, the halo of pills still shimmering above her.

Elijah wasn’t sure he was reading her right. He moved even closer to her, trying to decipher her racing thoughts into one coherent line. She didn’t just mean she couldn’t go back to taking Mentafixol. She couldn’t go back to Vegas. Her parents had lied to her. Her friendship with Kaylee was a farce. The home she’d known was gone.

She focused on the chasm in front of them. With her mind she measured the distance to the bottom. Calculated her weight—Elijah sensed that she held herself in her own hand, like measuring the heft of a rock before she threw it.

“Don’t,” he murmured. He’d seen her manipulate small pills and bottles and a box in midair. That didn’t mean she was strong enough yet to levitate her own body.

She stood.

“Holly, don’t,” he said.

She moved to the edge.

“Don’t!”

One second she was there, pointing her toes as if readying herself for her dismount from some Olympic gymnastics event, and then she stepped out, and then she was gone.

“Holly!”

His voice echoed around the rocks. He didn’t even realize he’d moved, but gradually he understood he must have rushed forward and tried to grab her in that last moment. His belly was hot on a sun-washed boulder. His arms stung from scrapes against the rocks. He still reached out for her, grasping at any chance he could still save her—never mind how he would avoid going over the cliff with her. She was gone. He couldn’t even see her in the deep, dry chasm. Oh, God, she couldn’t be
gone
?

“Holly!” he shouted once more. Then he held his breath, wishing his God damned heart would stop beating in his ears so he could listen for her. He didn’t hear her scream or cry or thud below. She’d simply vanished.

Lithe wisps of trees hung from the walls of the cliff. He imagined her catching a branch as she went down, saving herself. He could cling to hope. Even if she was still alive, she was too far away for him to read her mind. But he could run to Shane’s car and drive around the lip of the canyon until he found a road downward. He could make his way back to the place where she must have landed. He would call the police or whatever they had up here in the wilderness—Mounties—to help him.

As he pulled back to run for the phone in his car, he realized just how precarious his position was. To follow the trajectory of her fall, he’d scrabbled way out on a precipice and down the gentle slope it made before its sheer drop. He was clinging to the cliff face, and one false move would send him plunging after her. She would never get help then, if she was still alive to need it. He clung tighter to the rocks under his hands, sliding carefully backward.

Holly hovered inches above the sandy bottom of the canyon. Each grain of sand was a different color—red, orange, pink, white, yellow, even green and blue and purple—dislodged in the last million years from different strata in the vast mountains. The grains gleamed like jewels in the evening sun. A black ant clambered among them, oblivious to their beauty, headed somewhere important.

And so Holly was glad she’d stopped herself at the last moment from hitting the canyon floor. Her parents had betrayed her, her best friend Kaylee had betrayed her, she’d been lied to and deprived of her real life for the past seven years. But here was this ant, navigating his own mountains on a gorgeous summer day, the longest day of the year. The world went on without Holly, and when she stepped outside her own personal hell and looked around, she knew the world was worth staying for, even if she was alone.

She took a cleansing breath and assumed a tree position she’d learned in the college yoga class she’d signed up for on her own, to calm herself before the stress of the ballet class her mom insisted on. She placed her hands to her heart’s center, one leg folded up, the other pointed down. Even as she hovered in midair, she could just brush the surface of the sand with the toe of her shoe. She unfurled her hair in a semicircle around her head.

She rose slowly through the canyon as if riding in a glass elevator, enjoying the view. The mountain changed from white to purple to pink as she lifted herself. The foliage clinging desperately to the rock walls changed species with the elevation. An eagle soared next to her, perhaps alarmed or confused by her presence but more likely going about her own business of being an eagle. That too was worth living for.

And then she saw Elijah peering anxiously over the edge of the canyon where she’d jumped. His fingers were white with pressure on the red rocks.

Her heart went out to him. “Oh, God, Elijah, I’m sorry.” She landed next to him on the tilted rock, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back from the edge to safety with her, onto the boulders where they’d sat before. “I didn’t even think about how it would look to you. I was thinking about myself.”