Gifted

Chapter Twenty-four

Sadie

Damn that Nathaniel, always late to everything! Today’s Nathaniel’s Registration Day, and dear Jesus, he’s late. I’ve heard you can’t miss this. No one ever says why.

I tap my foot against the floor, counting the beats and waiting for the old fool to get himself down here.

While I wait, I let myself remember the day he showed me that...well, that there was more to him than met the eye, that’s for sure. It was 1946, and I was twenty-two years old, he was thirty-four, and we’d been dating for almost three years now. He took my hand, that warm day in early May, and said, “Sadie, dear, let’s go for a walk.” He took me to the town park—we were living in the quaint Bloomsbury, Maine at the time—and we walked until we were in a place where no one else was.

“Sadie, as far as you know, I’ve kept no secrets from you. Remember, that’s the first thing you told me when I asked you to date. ‘I don’t want any secret-keeping, you hear, Nathaniel? You tell me everything, from this point out.’ That’s what you said. Well...that’s not entirely true, see. There’s one thing, and it’s quite a peculiarity of mine, so you can understand why I’ve kept it quiet, can’t you?” He stopped and looked at me, but I was a bit confused, and simply waiting for him to go on with whatever he needed to say, so he went on: “Well, I don’t think I can rightly explain it to you, in words, it’s that...bizarre, see? So, I guess I’m just going to have to show you.”

He held out his hand, palm up, but when I automatically reached to hold his hand, like always, he shook his head. “Just watch,” he instructed. So I watched. And from the very center of his palm erupted a positive fountain of purest water, clean and clear as a mountain spring. I simply looked at it, and then to his face, and back to his hand, and then to his face again, attempting to comprehend this strange miracle of a man who must surely be an angel.

It was many years later that I grew to understand many fantastic quirks about my lover. As Nathaniel and I grew older, I began to notice a strange phenomenon: while I aged, developed a subtle lattice of tiny wrinkles about my face and a spreading gray in my auburn hair, Nathaniel remained untouched, as though he’d been captured in stone. He confessed it to me, once, his growing confusion: “Sadie, I don’t know if you would believe this, but I don’t think I’ve aged a day in years.” Now, in my time, such a statement as that would lead to inquires of sanity, but even then I knew enough of Nathaniel by that point to consider his pronouncement seriously. And as time went by and by, his statement proved true: He did not seem to physically age. Nathaniel is now in what should be his ninety-seventh year. Yet he still appears a youthful thirty-four, as he was all those years ago, not having aged a day since.

Finally, I hear his footsteps coming down the stairs. I turn toward the doorway into the sitting room to see him enter, his bright brown, cataract-free eyes shining, his curly reddish hair as unruly as always, a broad smile on his face, and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his corduroy trousers.

“Are you finally ready, you old coot?” I tease and he laughs and bounds lightly into the room to sweep me gently off my feet, and kisses me.

“Always,” he says softly, kissing me again.

I laugh. “Yes, but we do have an appointment, you know.”

The drive into the city is quiet and pleasant. It’s a warm afternoon, the sun just barely beginning to sink toward the trees, casting a soft reddish glow over the gently-turning leaves of fall.

Nathaniel parks beneath the shade of a tree hanging over the lot adjacent to the Registration building. He is genteelly assisting me up the steps (why they have no access ramp at a citywide gymnasium, I cannot fathom...) when the very ground beneath our feet rocks and an awful roar fills the air. A blast of heat and chipped concrete explodes towards us and Nathaniel flings himself sideway just in time to shield me from the worst of it. The two large front entrance doors sail over our heads and land on top of a car parked across the street, crushing it.