“You can’t. Only a man can, but we have to direct it at the one we target when we’re ready, when we have chosen him.”
“How?”
“Just concentrating on him,” she had told me, and then she’d laughed.
I had never asked Daddy or Mrs. Fennel about it. I’d thought she was just teasing me. Anyway, if she had been telling the truth, I didn’t think I had concentrated on any young man long enough or with any sort of desire yet. I did the best I could to avoid that with Liam, and I certainly didn’t feel any sexual attraction to Jim Lamb.
“When will you make up your mind about whether you will stay here or not?” Jim asked mournfully.
“I don’t know. Soon, perhaps,” I said. “I don’t want to get too involved if I think I’m not right for this place. Anyway, don’t you worry about that now, Jim. Concentrate on yourself.”
“Who else have I had to concentrate on?” he asked, angry enough to bring some heat into his face.
I couldn’t help it. Whenever any of us saw someone soaking in self-pity, we were literally nauseated. “There’s no one at school?”
“School? Oh, no. All of the women there are old enough to be my mother.”
“Maybe Quincy isn’t right for you, then,” I said, a little more harshly than I had intended, but Julia’s words still rang in my ears about how I would deal with Jim’s interest in me: “Somehow, I think you know how to handle that.”
I was doing so right now, but I couldn’t escape knowing that it was cruel to do it while he was so weak, just beginning his recuperation. I hadn’t thought I had this hard impatience and indifference in me. I guessed I was learning more about myself during this escape than I had thought I would, and I had to accept the possibility that I might not like everything I learned.
“I’m a little tired myself,” I continued. “I think I’ll do a little reading and go to sleep. You have a good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks for stopping by.”
I smiled at him and turned to leave.
“Oh, there was one other thing,” he said before I reached the door.
“What’s that?”
“At the risk of your thinking I’m crazy or still very shaken up from the accident . . .”
“What is it, Jim?”
He looked down again.
“Just say it,” I told him, now impatient with his shyness.
“I feel like such a silly teenager, having spied on you like that at the mall.”
“Yes? I’ll live. So?”
“Last night, when I was going over the accident for the hundredth time, I remembered that I had seen that elderly man before.”
I turned completely back to him. “Where?”
“In the mall. He seemed to be spying on you, too.”
I stared at him. I had felt nothing in the mall, no threat, no sense of being watched. That was unusual. “Are you sure of that?”
He shook his head. “So much of it is a blur now. It’s an image I see, but . . . maybe that is part of my nutty imagination. I mean, I see him in the mall, and then he just appears in front of the car, and then no one can find him or claims to have seen him rushing off? Sounds nuts. I know what I’m doing. No one has to tell me.”
“What are you doing?”
“Searching for a way to blame someone else for my own stupidity.”
I wanted to reassure him, but I didn’t. There was no way to do that without opening a portal to a world that would surely make a man like him afraid to take one step out of his room, much less out of the Winston House.