Charlie circles adara, he thinks he’s working on his own. He explains why all the files have gone to adara, and she admits she idolized him. Get proof of this.

He thinks she stole from him, and then became a dr of psychology so that she could steal from the weak.

It’s franco, methra paige. They can’t reach adara by phone, but she’s able to call out for help and they hear her.

Silent Jimmy only takes several hours to recoup, but he hasn’t regrouped yet. Fr. Preston told him about Adara, and that her and her daughter’s special gifts were being misused, and they were pillaging the tree of knowledge by knowing more than the average person, and they were a danger to his work.

Charlie circled me like prey. I remembered the crushing blows, the blacking out, back when Paige was too young to know, and too old not to forget. While part of me was planning an exit strategy, the instinctive side was bracing for the next surprise attack.

“Adara, my wife, you’ve done quite well for yourself.” He glanced up at the frame on the wall. “Well, well, lookie here, Mrs. Too Good for the World became a doctor! Masters of Psychology, UNLV—guess that’s where my child support checks went all these years. Wonderful life you’ve carved out here in Sin City, hon’. Great place to raise a daughter!”

On my knees I bowed, prayed silently, clutching the paperweight to my chest hoping he didn’t see it. Then came the attack.

“My daughter!” His kick met my ribs and lifted me off the ground. The paperweight dropped and the wood floor made a cracking sound under its weight. Internally I heard the bony clicks of stress fractures. I’d have to protect that side because another kick would pierce my lungs. It was already hard to breathe.

“Let’s visit the wonderful life of Adara. Blows off her husband, kidnaps our daughter, flees to the armpit of American society and finishes her schoolin’. She doesn’t want the husband, oh, but she’s too good for the world, so she’ll take her husband’s wallet.”

“Damn right,” I managed. It hurt to breathe and I couldn’t catch my breath.

~~~~~

Jimmy Silent lay on his cot, facing the wall. He had only rested a few hours, but this human stew was getting so close to boil that he didn’t have the patience to regroup. Fighting a fever, his eyes shut, an athlete’s pulse might get as low as 40 beats per minute. Jimmy Silent’s was down hovered around 20 at his last self-checkup. This rate, he noticed, was inversely proportional to his ability to travel and control his agents. And currently, he was in his most beloved of all agents, through whom he could be close to a wife who had had a daughter with this agent. Jimmy Silent liked to test the daughter like a kid puts a piranha in a tank with a goldfish. He loved the abuse he could put on his wife, though. That’s right Charlie, he thought. You may have the ring, and she may have your wallet, but she’s been mine the whole time. And she ditched you because you’re a moron, but I’ve put you back with her so that I can be with her again, and things can be like they once were. Jimmy Silent was so thrilled to be using Charlie to be back with Adara, that he paid no attention to his rising fever.

~~~~~

Charlie kicked the paperweight out of reach. “Oh, what were you gonna do with that!”

“What do you want from me!” I shouted, face down. I was a young girl in love when we were first married 12 years ago, and it was tough to admit to myself how naïve I was. Several years of my own therapy to come to grips with my naiveté. Charlie was the “bad boy” and I was drawn to him and his chiseled beauty. He was 10 years older, and I idolized him. That was my sin.

That beauty had turned to ogre from heavy drinking and drug abuse. I was into the party scene with him at first, and I was part mesmerized, part too afraid to say no when he started ordering me to dabble with injecting myself. When Paige was born, his self destructive habits intensified, allowing him to tune us out. I had to quit cold turkey, and that isolated us both. Now, he stood there like bloated Elvis.

“This is bigger than you,” he continued. “Can you believe that! Bigger than Adara!

You were so smart you stayed behind when your colleague, Dr. Lipscomb fled. You were so self centered, you didn’t even realize when we sent you a new group of patients who were being picked off one by one. This world is so much about you that it just made plain sense, didn’t it!”

He kicked the stack of patients files that I had earlier dropped by the door, then walked by my desk and swiped everything off the table in my direction. I discreetly dragged a Time Magazine issue toward me, which I began rolling tightly, hoping it was out of his line of vision. I needed to get out of there to find Paige, hoping his barrage soon ended.

“Adara, my Love, I’ve been trying to reach you since you left. I called, but didn’t want you to know it was me, so I pretended I was Nona’s seestur.”

The hair on my neck spiked like charged steel bristles at the sound of Charlie’s accent change.

The beady rats eyes knew I was watching and turned to see me. I held the stare, looking for any signs of awareness that I was entering his head.  Nothing. If anything were left of our rotten marriage, there was a split second where we both realized it had been 20 years or more since I’d had the courage to look him in the eye. “What!” he bellowed. But he didn’t rush me. My ribs couldn’t have handled it either. For a moment he looked, old, lonely, broken. This ogre, this bastard that I had to run from to save my own life and my daughter’s, seemed to realize that his reign was over. And like picking a lock I was in his head.

            I closed my eyes and felt my weight drift to ether. Sure as a remote control , my thoughts dashed above the oxygen in the room. l dispelled quite a bit of the oxygen I discovered, and traveled into Charlie’s orifaces which seemed open as an ocean, pouring into his thoughts through osmosis. Tell Adara, I urged. Tell her what you know. I felt like the wind. I opened my eyes and powerfully observed his nonplussed, twisted grimace. The fear was over. Charlie may have put the fear of God in me when I was a child, but I’d left, gone back to school, damn right on his dollar, and more recently I was growing into my powers. The nightmares would stop at this moment, I knew. I may experience terrible visions, but as I inhaled and closed my eyes again, I understood that the nightmares were derived from a sense of fear and helplessness. This moment was like scripture—a final meeting between me and Charlie that had to take place, that would come full circle. Everything in my life that had ever happened to me was part and parcel, of me and us and allowing me to get to this stage now and—“

“Methra,” Charlie mumbled.

“What was that Charlie?”

“Methra and Paige are with him.”