Lisa Jackson - Wicked Game

But she never forgot. Not completely.

“I’m fine,” she said in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own. Clearing her throat, she fought the blinding stabs of pain that flashed through her head. Another unwelcome part of the visions. “I tripped.”

“Yeah?”

The young man bending over her wasn’t buying it. A small crowd of “tweenagers” had gathered, small enough that Becca figured she hadn’t been out that long, maybe mere seconds. One of the girls was looking at her with huge, round eyes and Becca could still hear the reverberations of the girl’s scream as she’d watched Becca go down. She was holding a soda from the nearby food court. Vaguely Becca remembered glancing their way just before she was overtaken by her vision.

“You were, like, having an attack,” a different girl said. This one wore a hat that smashed her bangs to her forehead and she peeked out between the strands of blond hair. They all looked ready to jump and run. Briefly, Becca thought about yelling “Boo!” and sending them stumbling over themselves, away from the crazy lady.

Click. Click. Click.

Becca heard the snap of a cell phone being shut. One of the guys had taken a series of pictures of her fainting spell. That did it! Stupid punk kid. Becca climbed unsteadily to her feet and gave the boy the evil eye. He looked torn between bravado and fear. Becca was about to give him a piece of her mind but was saved the effort when a heavyset woman in a dusty blue uniform steamed toward them.

“Back off,” she bit out at the boy who attempted to swagger toward his friends, even though he was boiling to escape. They all half ran, half loped toward the food court and an exit door.

“You all right, ma’am?” the security woman asked.

Flushing with embarrassment, Becca nodded, collecting her packages. She was definitely not all right.

“You look kinda pale. Maybe you should sit down.”

“This happens to me. Not enough air getting in. Vagus nerve, you know. Shuts down the whole system sometimes.”

It was clearly mumbo jumbo to the security guard, and it was a flat-out lie to boot. Doctors had once rubbed their jaws, speculating what caused Becca to faint and have visions. They ignored the visions, concentrating on the cause of her fainting, and had postulated and supposed and theorized to Becca’s parents, Barbara and Jim Ryan, but there had never been any satisfactory explanations.

“I’m fine,” she reassured the guard one more time, hanging on to the shreds of her dignity with an effort. Before she could be questioned further, Becca headed out the mall exit and ducked through a drizzling rain to her car, a blue Volkswagen Jetta wedged into a spot between two oversized SUVs. Feeling a twinge in one shoulder from her fall, Becca squeezed through the driver’s side door and tossed her bags into the passenger seat, then climbed in. Her body was still tingling, too, as if her muscles had been asleep. She dropped her forehead to the steering wheel and took several deep breaths. This vision had been different. Almost touchable. She’d actually reached for the girl. That had never happened before.

Was it Jessie? Was it?

Becca shoved her rain-damped hair from her eyes, silently told herself to get over it, then lifted her head only to gaze blankly through the windshield at the mall’s cream-colored stucco walls. A twentysomething woman was standing under the portico near the doorway while smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone, but Becca, lost in her own thoughts, barely saw her.

Becca hadn’t had a vision since that last year of high school. Not once. She’d managed to convince herself over the years that she wasn’t odd. Some kind of freak. That she wasn’t losing her mind.

But this vision of Jessie had been stronger than anything she’d experienced before. And a helluva lot more frightening.

What did it mean?

“Nothing! Face it, you’re just a freak,” she muttered under her breath. What she did not need now in her life, absolutely did not, was any kind of eerie visions or attacks or whatever you wanted to call them. She’d hoped they had died a quick and lasting death.

Trying to shake the weird sensation clinging to her, Becca drove from the parking lot, her wipers slapping at the rain. The sky had darkened, night dropping quickly. One of her packages had tipped over and the baby gift she’d purchased was spilled on the seat, a bright, whimsical mermaid puppet sewn in silver lamé and pink and green sequins.

That old sadness threatened to overcome her again, but she wouldn’t have any of it. Driving with one hand, she stuffed the puppet back into the shopping bag and headed purposely for the condo she’d once shared with Ben. Now the two-bed-room unit was all hers-all nine hundred square feet of “charming midcentury” architecture, as the literature boasted. In layman’s terms this meant an apartment building constructed in the late fifties and converted to condos with a little updating in the late nineties. But it was home. Even without Ben.

By the time she pulled into her designated slot, Becca had managed to push the damned vision and her own case of the unwanted blues aside, but dusk was gathering quickly and the clouds opened up again.

Rain tossed around her in shivery waves as she headed for the front door, fumbling with her keys. The evening paper was in a plastic sleeve on the stoop and she reached down and grabbed it, juggling it with her packages, as she spilled through the door. She dumped everything she was carrying onto the drop-leaf table that stood in the small foyer, then shrugged out of her dampened coat and hung it in the closet as the ticky-tick of Ringo’s nails across her oak floors heralded her dog’s arrival.

“Hey, bud,” she said as the curly haired black and white mutt furiously waved his tail, gazing at her expectantly. “Look what I got you.”

She held up the blue collar with its little white dog bone motif, but Ringo kept his eyes on hers. If it wasn’t food, he simply wasn’t interested.

“Okay,” Becca relented as she headed to the kitchen. She pulled out a jar of small, dog-shaped treats. Ringo barked twice, happily, as Becca unscrewed the lid and fished out a couple of biscuits, tossing them to the dog, who leaped up and caught them in his jaws, one by one, then raced back to his bed and snuffled and chewed them.

“We’ll go for a walk in a minute,” she said, adding some of his regular dog food to his bowl. Ringo quickly finished his treats and hurried to his bowl, munching on his meal with the same enthusiasm as the biscuits. He was not a picky dog.

She gazed out the kitchen window, which faced the back of another condo across an expanse of grass. She could see right inside to the other kitchen, which was festooned with red and pink foil hearts. A young girl was seated at the table, licking the icing off a cupcake decorated with candy hearts.

She recalled last year’s Valentine’s Day. She’d been waiting for Ben. Though she’d sensed-known, really-that their marriage was in its death throes, she’d spontaneously bought a cake and a bottle of champagne. The cake had been heart shaped with white icing, and in red gel script, it read: Be Mine.

Ben had never come home that night and Becca had opened the champagne alone, drunk half a glass, and poured the rest down the drain in the kitchen sink. Calls to his cell phone and text messages had been left unanswered until late in the night when he’d simply texted back: Something came up. Don’t worry. I’m okay. She would have panicked and called the police, but deep in her heart she’d known what was coming. He’d shown up the next day to break the news that he was in love with someone else, and that the someone else was pregnant.

Despite telling herself that she’d suspected something like this, Becca had tried not to be shocked, hurt, and upset, but she’d failed on all counts.