Cold Fire

that were in the shop, though he'd never been in there in his life 'cause he lived with Jamie and Cara down in Los Angeles.”
    He paused and took a few deep breaths. The slur in his voice had begun to thicken. His right eyelid drooped. Talking seemed to tire him as if it were a physical labor.
    A male nurse with a flashlight was at the fireplace. He was squinting up into the flue, past the cracks around the damper, trying to see if any birds were trapped up in there.
    The shrieking was now overlaid by the frenzied flapping of wings.
    “Jimmy would touch an item and know where it'd been, bits and pieces about who owned it. Not everything about them, mind you. He just knew whatever he knew, that was it. Maybe he'd touch a personal item of yours and know the names of your parents, what you did for a living. Then he'd touch a personal item from someone else and only know where they'd gone to school, names of their children. Always different things, he couldn't control it. But he always came up with something when he tried.”
    The nurse, trailed by three patients offering advice, had moved away from the fireplace and was frowning up at the air-conditioning vents. The quarrelsome sound of birds still echoed through the room.
    “Let's go out to the courtyard,” Holly said, getting up.
    “Wait,” Henry said with some distress, “let me finish this, let me tell you.”
    Jim, for God's sake, Holly thought, hold on another minute, just another minute or two.
    Reluctantly she sat down.
    Henry said, “Jim's specialness was a family secret, like Lena's and Jamie's. We didn't want the world to know, come snooping around, call us freaks and God knows what. But Cara, she always wanted so bad to be in show business. Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which was where'd he'd met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted. They decided they could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but nobody would ever suspect he really had a power. They played it as a trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring them to figure out just how it was all done—when all the time it was real. They made a good living at it, too, and it was good for them as a family, kept them together every day. They'd been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever after they went on the road. No parents ever loved their child more than they loved Jim—or ever got more love given back to them. They were so close … it was impossible to think of them ever being apart.”
     

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    Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky.
    Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them.
    They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and came back.
    For a while they kited overhead.
    Those dark, jagged forms against the sere sky composed an image that might have come from some poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As a kid he'd had a passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his poetry. Morbidity had its fascination.
     

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    The bird shrieks suddenly stopped. The resulting quiet was a blessing, but Holly was, oddly, more frightened by the cessation of the cries than she had been by the eerie sound of them.
    “And the power grew,” Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly. He shifted in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new position. For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his stroke-altered body. “By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on the table, and he could move it just by wanting it to move, slide it back and forth, make it stand on end. By the time he was eight, he could pitch it in the air, float it there. By the time he was ten, he could do the same with a quarter, a phonograph record, a cake tin. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw.”
    You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought.
    “They never used any of that in their act,” Henry said, “they just stuck to the mentalism, taking personal items from members of the audience, so Jim could tell them things about themselves that just, you know, astonished them. Jamie and Cara figured to include some of his levitations eventually, but they just hadn't figured out how to do it yet without giving the truth away. Then they went to the Dixie Duck down in Atlanta … and that was the end of everything.”
    Not the end of everything. It was the end of one thing, the dark beginning of another.
    She realized why the absence of the birds' screams was more