2
On the south side of Detroit, St. Thomas Hospital loomed up with its dark gray stone structure against the night sky. Only a few lights dotted the darkened exterior. From the front, bright lights illuminated the entrance with fountains and gardens but the back entrance near the Emergency Room could possibly be haunted, and there were many who thought it was. Dr. Johnathan Michael Dorian had heard the stories, but basically ignored them. His life was mostly about being haunted by patients and hypochondriacs. Marcy Walker was the head nurse on charge. She was a chubby, almost cute, brunette matron for her job, but her position was mostly about bad-mouthing the higher staff behind their backs. Dr. Dorian respected her, as did most of the resident doctors, but Marcy's best friend in the hospital was Cate Hennessey. The tall raven-haired medical assistant had been going through a lot of personal issues. Two of her children were away at college, but the oldest had just vanished on her. Bridget's disappearance had pushed her into therapy. Her firstborn daughter's absence had pushed her into depression, sending her into three months of psychoanalysis in the Sterling Heights Medical Center. Her husband, Paul, visited her everyday, and her parents gave her as much support as possible even as their marriage was breaking up. When Cate finally got home, her father had come to live with her, and a year later, Paul gave her nephew C.J. permission to move in as well. Dealing with her father and nephew trading snipes was not easy to deal with at all. Paul eluded the confrontations by rushing to the newspaper where he had once again regained his position as sports writer and was doing the sports commentary on Detroit's WSMV-Television News. Things were going well, but Cate still missed her daughter. She wondered where she was and how she was doing. For part of a month, the police thought they had found Bridget floating in the Rouge Waterway, but that body turned out to be a body washed out of the cemetery by last year's violent storms. Wherever Bridget was, Cate hoped she was well, even as she wandered through her own life with her constantly on her mind. In the hospital's third floor break room, Cate routinely tipped back the coffee pot for her regular dose of caffeine. After pouring a cup, she ripped open two packets of sweetener and poured in their contents. As she tossed away the sugar packets under the counter, she looked over. Oliver the janitor was sitting at the table by her reading the newspaper in the minutes left over from his lunch break before he had to go and clock back in to work. He was reading the article up top about the success rates the local police had using bait cars to catch car thieves, but down below the middle article on traffic flows was a small headline Cate could not avoid not noticing. It read "Costumed Blonde Prevents Near Tragedy." She tried to lean in to read it, but Oliver leaned his big head in to her way. In doing so, he must have seen the same article.
"Hey, guys…" Oliver looked up with his large Frankenstein-like head. "Guess what? Super-babe came home last night."
Somewhat offended at that remark, Cate took her tray and bounced it off his head. Moaning like a wounded buffalo, Oliver scowled, turned his head up and looked up to her like a wounded child.
"Cate?" He looked confused. "What was that for?"
"What?" The brunette working mom reacted ashamed and embarrassed. "Oh, uh, Oliver… I'm so sorry!" She didn't want anyone know it was his remark about Bridget in the paper that had annoyed her. "It was an accident!" She responded like an embarrassed mother, turned round making a shameful face and left the tray in the usual spot for the staff in the hospital cafeteria to pick up later. That was a stupid thing to do, but then anytime "Super-Babe" appeared in Detroit, it was big news. The nameless flying blonde girl in the Supergirl costume had been Detroit's sole local legend for half a year, but then she started increasing her fight plan. She appeared in Chicago, New York City, Boston, San Francisco and then Los Angeles. What was once Detroit's local mysterious phenomenon was now turning up as far away as Brazil and Japan. No one knew where she lived, but everyone wanted to know who she was. Cate just didn't want to share her with the world.
"She's back…." Marcy danced up to Cate giggling.
"Who? What? Where is she?" Cate looked around anticipating good news. "Is she here?"
"Super Blonde…" Marcy gave another newspaper name for the alleged blonde superhero and lead Cate into the Emergency Ward. Like a magician doing a trick, she whipped back the curtain around one of the beds to a police officer guarding his prisoner. Handcuffed to the bed and lying on his stomach was career criminal Lewis De Vore. Wanted in Toledo for the murder of a gang member, the twenty-something on the bed writhed and fussed from his underwear pulled up his back and over his head, driving all parts of his manhood deep into his body where they were not meant to go.
"Lewis De Vore, 27,…" Officer Eric Finlayson started. "We caught him burglarizing a liquor store on Decatur. He tried fleeing the crime, but we found him a block away hanging off a cell phone tower and swearing about some blonde in a Superman costume."
On the other side of the room, Dr. Lizzie Masterson turned away from her appendicitis patient suddenly interested by the conversation.
"What? Did you see her?" Cate bent down next to De Vore. "I mean… did she look okay? Does she look as if she's been eating? How'd she look? Well?" She sounded like a distraught mother.
"What?" De Vore was in too much pain to understand that insane query. Cate just looked back to Marcie and Officer Finlayson with a slight nervous grin, and Marcie looked at her a bit confused. This was not the first time Cate had acted a bit out of it around a Supergirl sighting.
"Oh, um…" Cate tried to nonchalantly repose herself. "The usual… pain-killers, sedatives then cut the underwear off him." She rolled her eyes away and headed over to another patient at another bed, taking their chart to check off her supervision. Standing in the far door to the room, Dr. Masterson watched Cate as her mentor. Her hair was longer now, pulled back into a ponytail over her doctor's white coat. Her head slighted tilted toward Cate as she gestured her over, her slender arms pulling her clipboard to her chest as the two of them turned in unison out into the hall.
"Cate…" Liz was almost a full foot shorter than her friend. "Are you sure you should have returned to work after therapy? I mean… things can get stressful here. Bridget is going to be sending us a lot of business. Are you going to be okay dealing with people who are running into your daughter while you're… not?"
"I can deal with this." Cate liked being able to share her daughter's secret with someone from out of the family. "I need to work. At home, I've got nothing to do except… stress out."
"I know it must be hard sharing your daughter with the world, but Cate…" Liz and Cate stopped several feet from the nurse's station. "She's doing a lot of good in the world."
"But I want her home…." Cate was grieving. "Liz, I miss her so much…. I mean, you'd think in the last few years she could have called me once! Just once!"
"I know…." Liz stopped with her chart pulled to her chest and her All-American blonde good looks beaming back. "Cate…" She rubbed Cate's shoulder with her left hand. "You've got to go home eventually." She paused. "Are you still seeing hallucinations of Bridget around you?"
"Yes…" Cate confessed with a light sigh. "But… how do I know they are hallucinations? Couldn't they just be signs that Bridget is checking in on me? How do I know?"
"Has Paul seen her?"
"No."
"Kerry? Your father?"
"I never told my father about Bridget's powers." Cate confessed secretly in the hallway. "It's only you, me, Paul, Kerry and Rory. No one else." Her exasperated sigh petered out to a tired gasp.
"Cate…." Liz looked up with a long tired breath. "Go home."
"I can't."
"You have to." Liz turned and pointed to the clock. "Your shift was over twenty minutes ago."
"Oh…" Cate looked over. Rhonda had pulled up her purse and jacket and had them waiting on the counter for her a few feet away. An embarrassed sigh on her breath, she looked over to Rhonda and then back to Liz. They were right. She had to go home sooner or later. Except for Bridget's absence in her life, she was right back where she was when her daughter had started the secret and creating her own worldwide urban legend of the flying blonde girl in the "Superman" costume. It wasn't like her daughter was hiding Bigfoot or swimming with the Loch Ness Monster, but it was very close. Cate just had to realize that her daughter was an urban legend, and whether she wanted it this way or not, her status as the world's only possible existing superhero was something she had to live with in her life.
"Honey, I'm home…" She walked into her Maple Street home and tossed her keys into their usual place.
"How was your day?" Her father and husband echoed in unison, paused, looked at each other and grimaced together in competition for her attention.
"My wife…" Paul told his father-in-law.
"My daughter, I had her first." Jim Eagan looked up through his reading glasses from the big easy chair, but it was Paul who Cate headed toward first, kissing her husband on the lips before turning and casually kissing the top of her father's thinning hairline.
"I love you too, dad…" She stroked her father's shoulder briefly. "So…" She looked to Paul. "You're home tonight."
"Yeah…." Paul exuberantly turned to the kitchen. "And I brought dinner home too."
"It's got cabbage. You know I can't eat cabbage." Ed reminded Paul.
"Then don't eat it!" Paul sniped back at him. He mugged and turned back to his wife. "Cate, he's been getting on my nerves a lot more. It's as if we have another kid… one who's old and senile."
"Watch it…" Ed flipped the newspaper up from his lap to read more of it. "I gave you my daughter, I can take her away…"
"All right, you two…" Cate found herself playing mediator again. In the five years since Paul's surgery and her father moving in, things had been turbulent but manageable. Her father was staying in the basement bedroom and C.J. was in Rory's old room while the boy was off attending Michigan State. Kerry was in her fifth year of law college and working as a junior law assistant for MacNichol, Bellows and Flockhart where she was specializing in criminal law, sort of following Bridget into the crime-fighting business to a lesser agree. Rory was on a basketball scholarship without a major. He was into paranormal research after meeting writer William Collins, an acquaintance of his parents, but he couldn't take the science or the history. He had tried drama, but he couldn't remember lines then dabbled through physical fitness only next deciding he wanted to be a cop and then a comedian. In another month, he'd possibly want to be something else. After scolding her father, Cate took the local news part of the newspaper, which he had already set aside. Setting it under her arm secretly, she turned to Paul preparing a plate for her from the dishes he picked up at the local Worsham's Restaurant.
"Paul…" Cate whispered over the counter. "Did you see this?" She slid the neatly folded newspaper about the Taylor Swift concert over to her husband.
"Yeah, did you see this one?" He slid toward her a copy of the New York Times. In a page-five article at the bottom corner of the page was the headline, "Mystery Blonde Busts Drug Ring." A brief perusal of the story told how a team of drug smugglers who had eluded the state police for seven years were discovered in Hudson Harbor atop their sunken craft. In prison, they claimed that one single girl in a red cape had wrecked their boat barehanded, dropping five million dollars of street value cocaine to the bottom of the bay near Bayonne. Cate turned her head up to Paul; he was grinning ear-to-ear.
"That's my girl." He shined secretly.
"She's my daughter too."
"Well, there's no mutants on my side of the family." Paul lowered his voice to hide their conversation from his father-in-law. Cate made a face back at him.
"So…" He gave Cate her dinner at the counter. "How did your day go? Any more…" He wafted his hands around her to suggest her hallucinations of Bridget around her. They had begun during his stay in the hospital after his heart surgery. She had seen Bridget in the hospital parking lot, in the grocery store and in the shower at home. It was when Cate had the mental breakdown after seeing Bridget at school that she had to go into therapy, but she was doing much better now.
"No, Paul…" Cate looked at him. "I haven't…."
Paul leaned over the counter top close enough to kiss her as she ate her meatloaf and rice.
"Why do you think that you get to see her, but I don't?" Their eyes met over the plate.
"Because…" Cate looked into her husband's vibrant blue eyes. "I'm her mother." There was a sound to her right and the happy couple looked over to the back door to the garage and the backdoor. Something dinged the outside screen door and pushed its way inward. A waft of long reddish auburn hair, the shade of an expensive burgundy jacket, and Kerry slipped into the house with paper work and a folded newspaper curled up in her left arm and the doorknob in her right hand. She had blossomed into a beautiful young lady. Her light mascara brought her blue eyes to life, and her hairstyle established her as a career woman. She turned on her right foot, looked to her parents and settled her paperwork to the counter. Her mother looked to her with a big beaming grin, but her father stood up straight and shined at his daughter the future lawyer.
"Still bringing home, homework, Care Bear…" He tried to make her smile.
"I've got studying to do, plus I'm helping Miss Flockhart in some backed up paper work." The twenty-four year old law student responded tiredly. "She also asked me to sit third chair in a liability case."
"Kerry, aren't you hungry." Cate reacted with loving concern for her daughter.
"I got something at the diner." Kerry turned away grabbing up her files and started to head upstairs, but she drifted from her course briefly to kiss her grandfather on the head. Paul and Cate shared a secret furtive moment between themselves. Since Bridget had vanished five years ago, Kerry had become quiet and withdrawn. She had skipped meals at times before, but now it was becoming obvious that they had not seen her eat in quite a while. However, she was not losing weight, so she was not going without eating. She just wasn't eating with the family if but rarely and at those times under forced personal restraint. Psychologically, they weren't sure what it meant, but it seemed she was unconsciously waiting for her sister to come home.
"Kerry, look…" Cate fetched the newspapers and brought them over to Kerry. "New articles of you-know-who…"
"I already got copies." Kerry jostled the newspapers in her newspaper. "Excuse me…" She turned vanishing up the back stairway. Cate looked back to Paul exasperated. From his chair, her father looked over and reared himself up to come into the kitchen.
"That girl is working too hard, Cate." He braced himself on his cane. "Another thing, when was the last time she ate at home?"
"I know, dad…"
"You know what I think…."
"Do tell us, Ed…" Paul prepared his father-in-law a plate with a helping dose of cooked cabbage.
"I think she'd eat more at home if you were here more." Jim slid into one of the stools. "I mean… all Paul can do is bring home restaurant food."
"Hey…" The offended father posed a bit in disbelief. "I cooked last week."
"That was your cooking?" Jim acted as if he had gas. "No wonder I had that dream I was back to eating Army rations…"
Upstairs in her old bedroom, Kerry lightly sighed and placed her papers and folders on her desk. Removing her jacket, she turned to hang it in her closet. Some of Bridget's old clothes were still in it; some of it her grandmother on her last visit had secretly packed away in the attic. Turning round to her sister's old bed, she looked at it cleaned and primped neatly once again. Her mother had freshened the blankets on it again. It often went weeks without someone sleeping on it, but sometimes her grandmother or Aunt Maggie stayed with them and slept on it. Sometimes at night, Kerry woke up and looked over and thought she saw her sister sleeping on it again, but she'd turn on the lights and the dream would be gone. Kneeling toward the base board, she pulled out two large albums from under the bed, both were about the same size, the thicker one closer to green than the other, which was faded and frayed. Setting the older one on her bed, she spread the second more recent one out on her desk. It was her scrapbook for the last few years since her sister had vanished. The edges of newspaper articles extended from its pages. Taking the scissors from their place, she unwrapped her copy of the New York Times first to clip out the article about the mystery blonde. Snipping it from the rest of the paper along imaginary lines, she next turned to the article from the local Detroit Tribune, which was just a bit bigger than the first by a half-inch. Once she had both articles, Kerry unfurled the album across her desk. Over two years of stories both taped and loose filled the first thirty pages. Stories ranged from New York City to Seattle and from San Diego to Jupiter, Florida and abroad. Drug runners terrified by a girl who bent automatic weapons, terrorist street gangs thrown into dumpsters flipped over on top of them, serial killers found hanging from electrical wires, flood victims from Nashville carried aloft by blonde spirits in blue costumes, abducted children who fell in love with red-caped angels… the stories were just as abroad the criminal spectrum as they were across the globe. There was the occasional blurry photo, the familiar blonde girl suspend in the air, the cryptological articles debating the existence of a supposed blonde girl posing as the comic book character. After all this time, the rumor was still persisted that they were all promotional stunts for a movie in progress, but both DC Comics and Warner Brothers denied that. What movie could afford to create thousands of these stunts with normal people across the globe? Things became truly bizarre when Discovery Channel's Mythbusters became involved to bust the sightings. Their female co-star was slid pulled aloft on lines to fake the flights, they used explosives to flip the cars and they showed what it took to bend an automatic rifle in a car crusher, but all they could do was confirm they were just as mystified by the absence of regular special effects. Kerry, meanwhile, knew the truth, and she kept it secret even as she grieved the loss of her sister. Pulling off a few more inches of tape, she went to tape in the other article.
"Hi, Care-Bear…" Cate helped hold the article down as Kerry taped it down to the page. "I brought you a snack." She placed down a meatloaf sandwich with a glass of juice. "You're thinking of Bridget, aren't you?"
"Kind of hard not to when she shows up in the newspaper." Kerry sounded snotty and annoyed. "I mean… we can go months not hearing anything from her, but then she gets reported in Jamaica or Australia or Japan, and… Mom, how hard could it be to come home once in five years between having bullets bouncing off her chest or…" She looked at the new clipping in her scrapbook. "Dropping a 747 in the middle of a Taylor Swift concert?"
"Well, like your father says, she's busy…"
"Mom, she can't possibly be that busy!" Kerry rose from her desk, her attractive features stressed and overwhelmed by pangs of regret and misdirected angst. "I think I finally figured what's going on. After living here and denying that she was "that girl," she refuses to come home so I can bust her. She knows I saw her. She knows I got proof, and she…. Won't come home because she won't let me have the last word."
"Kerry…" Cate stood and lightly shook her head in denial. "I don't think your sister is that devious."
"Yes, she is…" Kerry slapped her scrapbook together and tossed it over the other one to slide back under the spare bed. "She was devious enough to hide her secret from me while she was still living here. She refused to share her secret with me, and she still refuses to share it."
"Then why collect the newspaper articles." Cate asked.
"Because…" Kerry tried to be angry, but couldn't fake it. "She's my sister!" Her eyes filled with tears and she reverted back to a little girl, holding her arms out and turning to hug her mother. All Cate could do was embrace her daughter and try to squeeze the bad feelings out of her. Swaying a bit over this moment, her eyes looked up and caught the framed photo of Kerry and Bridget together on the wall when they were still sisters who loved each other and shared the same room.