“So that means if the entanglement stuff is for real — that means you and Charlene are—”
“Friends.”
“Friends.”
“Right.”
He winks at me knowingly. “Gotcha.”
“No, no. Don’t do that, Xav.”
“What?”
“That whole innocent ‘gotcha’ routine. We’re just friends.”
“Who are entangled.”
I open my mouth to respond, change my mind. “Never mind.”
He produces a pen from his pocket and flips open his leather-bound journal. Actual paper. Very old-school. “You mentioned that Tanbyrn told you about something called Project Alpha.”
“He said it involved two men, twins. He just called them ‘L’ and ‘N.’ Said they’d fly in …” Something else the doctor mentioned comes to mind, distracts me.
Right before you smelled the gasoline, what did he say?
Negative?
Negative what?
Xavier waits. “You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m just…” My thoughts scurry off in a hundred directions.
“So they’d fly the twins in… and …?”
“Sorry. Right. He mentioned that the studies involved communication and physiology, alpha brain waves, that identical twins are more capable of… well, he didn’t clarify. I assume that he was studying the negative effects of something concerning the mind-to-mind communication. He never had the chance to explain.”
Xavier writes in his journal while I verbally try to sort through what we know: “RixoTray is funding research on mind-to-mind communication. According to Fionna’s research — wait …” This was high-stakes conspiracy stuff, right up his alley. “Dr. Tanbyrn was studying the phenomenon of one person’s loving thoughts nonlocally affecting the physiology of the person he or she loved.”
“Uh-huh. And your results with Charlene bore that out.”
Not this again. “I told you we’re—”
“Friends.”
“Right.”
“Gotcha.”
“Stop that. And don’t say ‘gotcha.’”
“See, you really can read minds.” He crumples up the wrapper from his sandwich. Sets it aside.
“Xav, my point is, it’s two people who genuinely care about each other. I’m not certain they would need to be lovers exactly.”
He sees where I’m going with this. “So, you’re thinking family members in this case? These two twins?”
I stand. Pace. Weave the 1895 Morgan Dollar through my fingers to help clear my head. “Right. Tanbyrn mentioned they were special. Well, what if they have a really close emotional connection like my boys did? Drew and Tony. You remember that. At times they seemed to almost read each other’s minds.”
Even though Xavier wasn’t related to the boys, he’d fulfilled the role of the cool uncle every kid wishes to have, and I know he misses them acutely.
“Yeah, I do remember. There were times when they would finish each other’s sentences. Like they were connected in a way no one else is.”
For a moment I’m quiet. “I don’t think I ever told you about what happened one day with Drew. When his side started hurting.”
“What was it?”
“I was playing with him outside. T-ball. I was behind him holding his arms, helping him with his swing, when suddenly he dropped the bat and turned and clung to me, hugged me. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him. And he started crying. I knelt and held him. ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘It hurts, Daddy!’ He was holding his right side. That’s when I heard Rachel calling for us from inside the house. It was Tony. His appendix had burst.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Drew’s pain went away while we were driving to the hospital, but still, I wracked my brain trying to figure out how it had happened. It couldn’t have been a coincidence — but if it wasn’t, then what was it? What caused Drew to feel Tony’s pain?”
Xavier taps his pen against the page. “You hear stories like that sometimes. People waking up in the middle of the night with chest pains and finding out later that their mom or dad had a heart attack at that very moment, or having a gut feeling not to walk down a certain street and then finding out there was a mugger who was caught down there. Once when my sister and I were in high school, she had the sense one night that she was being watched, and when she turned off the light to her bedroom, she saw a face of one of the boys from her class outside her window.”
“That’s disturbing.”
“You should have seen what I did to him when I caught up with him the next day. Anyway, all this stuff, these gut feelings, déjà vu, premonitions, UFO sightings, stigmata appearing on people — I know you don’t like to hear this, but there’s a lot that happens out there that just can’t be easily explained.”
Discounting his reference to UFO sightings, he’s right that there are a lot of things out there that can’t be explained, at least not in the typical ways, and since I’ve spent the last year trying to prove that those things can be explained, the fact that he’s right annoys me.
He goes on, “Do you think there might be senses that some people have that others don’t?”
“You mean a sixth sense?” I don’t even try to hide my skepticism at that. “No. I don’t buy that.”
“Step away from the idea of psychic powers for a minute.”
“And aliens.”
“Okay, and aliens. Think about it, what if there are senses that we’re supposed to have, that aren’t breaking any physical laws or depending on any divine or malevolent forces — only gifts, skills, talents that aren’t any more supernatural than twins sharing behavioral traits that genetics can’t explain. Nobody calls autistic savants who can perform complex quadratic equations in seconds ‘psychics.’”
“You mean even though they haven’t studied math.”
“Yes. Or Down syndrome children who can hear a tune once on the piano and can perform it flawlessly—”
“Okay, I see what you’re saying.”
“In the past those people, or maybe child prodigies, might’ve been considered psychic or witches or demon-possessed, but modern science — although it can’t always explain the behavior — has, for some reason, grown to accept them as unusual, outside of the realm of normal experience, but not paranormal.”
He pauses, then out of nowhere he waves his hand through the air as if to erase our conversation, and I’m not sure why; he seemed to make a good point. “Anyway, I don’t want to lose my train of thought. You were telling me that these twins, ‘L’ and ‘N,’ they flew in, Tanbyrn did some sort of tests, they’d fly out. We don’t know what the tests are about, but we do know that RixoTray has been funding them.”
I’m more than happy to leave the topics of psychics and UFOs behind as well. “Last night Charlene was reading over the notes that Fionna drew up on RixoTray, and she came across the name of a doctor in Philadelphia. Riah something.”
Negative.
The doctor said he was studying the negative effects—
Oh.
Flipping the coin faster. “Xav, what if it’s not just loving thoughts that affect people?”
“You mean negative thoughts? That’s what Tanbyrn was looking into with these two guys?”
“I don’t know, but—”
Negative.
Why would the Pentagon be involved with this?
Xavier waits. “But?”
“But what about this.” I stop finger-flipping the coin. Stare at him. “If one person can affect the heart rate of another person — even slightly — just by his thoughts, could he learn to do more than that?”
He straightens up. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”