“When we all finalized our specialties,” he said. He was staring at his hands now, smile gone.
I added sugar to both teas and real cream to his, and set it down in front of him. “Tea just the way you like it,” I said, smiling, hoping for one in return.
He warmed his hands over the steam like it was a fire and the day had turned cold. The sunlight was still warm; it was Southern California, it wasn’t cold.
“Talk to me, Jamie, please.” I sat down at the table not across from him, but in the chair facing the window so I could be closer. We weren’t eating now, so elbow room wasn’t an issue.
“Levi, my name is Levi now.”
“Okay, Levi, sorry but it’s going to take me a little bit to get used to the new name.”
“Like it took for you to finally call me Jamie.”
“You had been Levanael since we were seven. I didn’t even remember your birth name by the time we were nineteen.”
“Nor I yours.”
He was somber again, almost sad.
“You look great, Jam . . . Levi,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and chase the shadows away.
“I look a lot better than I did two weeks ago.” He took his first sip of tea and closed his eyes as if he was letting it melt on his tongue like it was his favorite candy.
“What happened two weeks ago?” I asked, my voice soft, tone neutral like I’d learned in interrogations when the victim was potentially fragile.
He opened his big brown eyes and looked directly at me with that burn of intelligence and insight fully behind them. It sent a thrill through me that was somewhere between sexual and scary. I’d wanted this for so long, but I didn’t trust the change to last, and I didn’t know if I had another crushing disappointment in me. I wasn’t sure I could take it if he reverted. I prayed, prayed that this would last, that he was cured, well.
“I woke up,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do either, but did you ever have a dream where you think you woke up, but it’s just another kind of nightmare, so that you keep dreaming you get out of bed, but you’re actually still trapped in the dream?”
“Yes, I guess everyone has them sometimes.”
“Maybe, but everyone else wakes up. I’ve been trapped in a nightmare for over thirteen years.”
“Do you think the last fifteen years have been just dreams and nightmares?” I tried to study his face, to see his answer there, but he was looking down at the tea so I saw mostly the top of his thick brown hair and a rim of face. His hands looked so much darker as he lifted his cup to drink more tea. They were tanned and weathered more than his face, as if the beard and wild hair had protected him like fur, but his poor hands . . . they looked like they belonged to someone older. Someone who’d worked outdoors their whole life maybe, but not the soft, smiling boy I remembered. He’d been the best of us all, the gentlest soul, the kindest heart, and the highest scorer on all the tests for psychic ability, as long as it was pure power being tested and not control of that power.
He sipped the tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. His eyes looked very dark for a moment, almost black, the way they’d get the few times he got truly angry.
“Maybe I just want to think of it as a nightmare so I don’t have to think too hard about everything I did while I was sick.” The voice was deeper, not a hint of laughter in it; this was how he’d sounded on good days over the last decade.
“I can understand that.” I finally sipped my tea and it was good, but I’d let it start to get cool. I didn’t want tea, I wanted Levanael, I wanted to undo the shadow in his eyes and the tone in his voice.
“I can feel your questions hanging like something heavy around you.”
“You can’t hear them?” I asked, and took another sip of tea.
His eyes held that bitterness I’d come to dread, but it was better than the rage, or the terror. That was the worst. “Not right now. I told you my head is quiet, quieter than it’s been since I hit puberty. You know the theory that God doesn’t let our full powers hit while we’re too little to cope with them?”
“Of course, that’s why they recruit so early for the College. They want to train us to control our powers before they are fully fledged. Untrained psychics and witches who suddenly grow into their power as teenagers are dangerous to everyone, including themselves.”
“I don’t remember when I couldn’t hear other people’s thoughts,” he said, and upended his teacup like you’d finish off liquor, or maybe his was getting cold, too.
“I remember that your parents brought you into the College to see if the angels could help you.”
He flashed me a smile and asked, “Could I have another cup?”
“I’ll make us a pot if you want.”
“Do you have a real teapot?”
I grinned and went to the cabinet over the microwave. I got down a carefully covered bundle and set it on the cabinet by the stove.
“Is that a tea cozy on it?” he asked, and sounded happy again like I hadn’t heard him in so long. I didn’t want the serious sad coming back; it made me feel like the positive change was only temporary. I wanted it to last.
“Yes, though I like thinking of them as tea sleeping bags,” I said, and lifted off the deep blue tea cozy.
He laughed again, head back and just so happy. “I’d forgotten that we used to call them tea sleeping bags when we were little, and how did you get a nice heavy teapot like Master Sarphiel had?”
“I sent away to England for it when we bought our house.” I pushed the thought away that Reggie had packed it up in a box with some other things she thought I’d need in the apartment, as if I wouldn’t need a big teapot at the house anymore.
“What did Master Sarphiel here call it, a Brown Betty?”
“Yes, though since this one is a deep blue is it still a Brown Betty, or is it a Blue Betty?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. It takes me back to those endless pots of tea when we were all still together before we had to choose specialties.”
I nodded. “I’ve told Connery it’s a tea cozy, but when he asked what that meant, I told him it was a sleeping bag for the teapot to keep it warm.”
“Does he call it a tea sleeping bag?”
“He says, ‘Don’t forget the sleeping bag, Daddy. The tea needs to be warm.’ ”
“That’s great, I’m sorry I scared him the last time. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know you didn’t mean to.”
The sadness started to slip back over his face as I put enough water in the teakettle to fill the big pot. “You can feel my questions, so I’ll just ask, how did your head get so quiet? How did you clean up and get . . . better?”
He smiled, chasing back the shadow in his eyes. “I was sleeping in an alley, I’m not even sure where I was exactly, but I woke up and there were people standing over me. I thought I was going to get robbed or beaten up again.”
I fought to keep my face neutral at the again. I’d taken him to the emergency room at least five times myself. I’d hated that he wouldn’t stay in the shelters where he was safer, not safe, I knew better, but safer than that.