The Amazing Otis Vale

Chapter 9

Otis came through the door and closed it behind him.

His mother was awake now after he had successfully infused his Spiritual energy so seconds ago and went outside.

Making sure he wasn't in the room when she wakes up immediately.

She had been awake for a while, he could tell by the way she was sitting up in the bed rather than lying flat, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes moving to him the moment he stepped inside with the sharpness of a woman who had been waiting and thinking.

“You took your time,” she said.

“I had to check something,” he said.

She looked at him. Really looked at him, the way mothers look at their children when they are done being polite about it and want the real information. Her eyes moved over his face and then down, taking in the ruined shirt, the dried blood on the fabric, the marks on his jaw that had not quite faded.

“Otis” she said.

“I'm fine.”

“You are not fine.”

“Mom.” He pulled the chair to the side of her bed and sat down, and he looked at her properly for the first time since he had run into this hospital, and the thing he had been holding in his chest since the corridor, since he had stood over her and felt that faint flicker and known there was still time, pressed hard against the inside of his ribs.

She was here.

She was sitting up in a hospital bed in a worn patient gown with the fluorescent light making her look slightly older than she was and she was here, and her eyes were clear, and she was looking at him.

He exhaled slowly through his nose and looked down at his hands.

“I need to tell you something,” he said. 

“And I need you to trust me when I tell you that I know what I'm talking about.”

“When have I ever not trusted you,” she said.

“What's in your body right now is not a cure,” he said. 

“I want to be honest with you about that. What I did tonight, it will hold. It will make you feel strong, stronger than you have felt in a long time, and the pain is going to stay away, and your body is going to function. But it is not permanent.” He paused. 

“There are three herbs. I know what they are. I know what they do and I know how to use them together to make something that will fix everything that is wrong, fix it completely, fix it in a way that will not need to be fixed again.” He lifted his eyes to hers. 

“They are not easy to find. I won't pretend otherwise. But I will find them. I promise you that.”

His mother was quiet for a moment.

“What are the herbs,” she said.

He told her their names. Crimson Root Marrow, which grew only in high elevation stone crevices and was the color of dried blood, its properties centered in blood purification and cellular restoration so thorough it was considered lost knowledge in most medical traditions. Ghost Spine Lotus, which was not a lotus at all despite the name but a thin, waxy plant that grew in total darkness near underground water sources, used specifically for spinal tissue and nerve pathway repair. And Veilseed, the smallest and rarest of the three, a seed pod no larger than a thumbnail that produced a resin when properly processed that carried medicinal properties directly to the liver and eliminated disease at its source rather than managing its symptoms.

His mother listened to all of it with her hands still folded in her lap and her eyes steady on his face.

When he finished she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “How do you know all of this.”

He looked at her. 

“It's a long story,” he said. 

“And I'll tell you all of it. But not tonight.”

She considered him. Then she nodded once. The nod of a woman who has always known when to push and when to wait. “Okay,” she said. “Tonight we go home.”

“The bill—”

“Is not something we are going to solve tonight,” she said firmly. 

“And I am not spending another night in this bed when I can feel my own legs properly for the first time in eight months.” She was already reaching for the folded clothes on the bedside table. 

“Help me with this.”

He helped her.

They did the discharge at the front quickly.

And they walked out together through the main hospital doors into the night air, which was cool and damp, the rain having settled down to nothing more than a fine mist that sat on the skin without really falling.

His mother breathed it in.

She stood at the top of the hospital steps and breathed in the night air with her eyes closed and her face tilted slightly upward and Otis stood beside her and said nothing because some moments do not need anything said inside them.

Then the headlights hit them.

Two cars, expensive and dark, pulling up to the hospital entrance with the particular deliberate slowness of vehicles that want to be noticed. They stopped directly in front of the steps, engines idling, and the doors opened.

Diane Harrington stepped out first.

Then Cara.

Then two of the guards from the mansion, taking up positions behind them with the practiced stillness of men who did this for a living, they can here for Cara motherly drugs appointment, but they came late this around, because of her date night.

Otis went still.

His mother's eyes opened. She looked at the cars, at the women stepping out of them, and something moved through her face. Relief first, the automatic warmth of a woman who had always tried, always made the effort, always extended the hand regardless of whether it was taken. “Oh,” she said softly, and there was something almost hopeful in it. “They came to see me.” 

“Mrs. Harrington,” she said, moving toward the bottom of the steps.

“I'm so glad—”

“You're walking,” Diane said.

It was not relief in her voice. It was not gladness but Disgusting. 

Otis mother stopped on the second step. 

“I'm feeling much better, yes. Otis, he—”

“He lied,” Cara said. She was looking at Otis over her mother's shoulder, not at his mother, directly at him, and her voice had the same emptiness it had carried back at the mansion, that terrible practiced flatness. 

“He came to our home tonight. He stood in front of my family and said you were dying. He begged. He made a scene?”  Her eyes did not move from Otis face. 

“And here you are. Walking out of a hospital on your own two feet.”

“He told us she was on the verge of death,”  Diane said, to the air more than to anyone specific, as though she were simply noting a fact for the record. 

“He came to our home in the middle of the night, soaking wet, disrupting our evening, asking for a hundred thousand dollars for a woman who is apparently well enough to stand outside in the evening air.”

“That's not—” Otis's started.

“A thief,” Cara said. The word came out clean and certain. 

“That's what he is. He was going to take that money and do what with it? We'll never know, because she is clearly fine.”