The explosion didn’t startle her as much this time as it had before. Lisa glanced at her father, who shrugged.
Littering the field with cans of soda didn’t seem strictly kosher to her, but they did tend to explode with a satisfying crack if she looked at them for too long.
Of course, the task her father had set her was to burn a hole in the side of the can without making it explode, so she wasn’t doing very well.
“How long have you known you were different,” he asked her.
She hesitated. Long habit made keeping her differences a secret second nature to her, and it was difficult to talk about.
“I’ve been hearing things for two years,” she said finally. “I’ve been seeing things for the past few months. All this is new.”
She gestured at the cans littering the ground.
“How long has it been since you’ve been sleeping?” he asked.
She glanced at him, startled. It still surprised her sometimes that he knew so many details about the changes she was going through.
“Just a few weeks.”
“As you get older, you’ll need less sleep. If you are anything like me you’ll only need three hours a night.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. Like that was going to be fun. There wasn’t anything good to watch on television at three in the morning, even if she’d been willing to wake her mother up with the light from the television. With her hearing she could turn it down low, but the programming was boring.
There were only so many MASH reruns she could take before wanting to pull her hair out.
“It’s not all bad,” her father said. “It makes finding time to study a breeze. We’ll find things for you to do while your mother is in bed.”
At the mention of her mother, Lisa felt guilty. Her mother should be here with them, even if she’d agreed that this might be too dangerous for her to be near.
The thought of looking at her mother at an inopportune moment while she was still burning things was the only thing that had kept her from demanding that her mother be there with them.
She couldn’t stand the silence that had sprung up between her parents. Three days and they’d avoided each other. Her mother had spent most of her time with Joshua tracking down leads, and her father…he was gone from the mansion more often than not.
She glanced back at the assorted cans and thought of Lana Lang.
The explosion was even louder than the last.
**************
“So you are telling me that someone bought your necklace for a thousand dollars. You wouldn’t happen to have a card or anything…”
Lois hung up with a frustrated sigh.
“At least we’re starting to get an idea why your guys aren’t getting things done these days. Somebody’s been buying up the necklaces before our guys can get there.”
Joshua frowned. “How can you tell it’s the same person?”
“Um…well, to put it bluntly, the necklaces aren’t worth the price people are paying for them. These are fifty dollar necklaces, and these people aren’t even trying to bargain.”
“Because it’s not their own money,” Joshua said, nodding.
“Furthermore, I’ve talked to four or five people who had their necklaces stolen after they got greedy and started asking for a lot more money.”
“So?”
“These burglaries always happened within three days of the offer.”
“They were the only thing stolen?” Joshua asked.
Lois nodded. “They went missing, and there was never any sign that anyone had broken in. The police couldn’t find any evidence, and have tended to dismiss the cases.”
“You’d think someone would have gotten a number or a business card or something.”
Lois smiled slowly. “I talked to an old woman who got suspicious and wrote down the license number of the car.” She held the card up in the air. “I don’t suppose you’d know someone who might…?”
Joshua shrugged and said, “With Clark’s resources, I’m sure we’ll be able to find something.”
******************
Lisa lay on her back and stared up at the sky. Her father had cleaned the area up so that no one but the ants would ever know they’d been there. She’d been impressed. He’d moved so quickly that even she hadn’t been able to follow him, even with her special vision.
“It’s nice here,” she said when her father returned from wherever he’d disposed of the cans.
“I grew up near here,” he said.
He wasn’t in the suit; between them it wasn’t needed and the last thing they needed was to attract attention.
“It must have been nice,” she said.
From here, she couldn’t hear the sound of a single other person. All that existed was the sounds of nature. The wind, the sounds of the creatures under the ground, the insects, earthworms and the prairie dogs; unlike the usual human noises, these sounds were soothing.
Even at the Kent Estate there was always the sound of people, and in Metropolis it was a constant din that threatened to drive her crazy. Here, though…Lisa just enjoyed the peace and quiet.
“My father used to take me fishing near here,” he said. “Our farmhouse wasn’t far away and it was close enough to walk.”
“It must have been nice to have a mom and dad,” she said. As the expression on his face changed, she hurried to say, “Not that I’m blaming you. I’m just saying…”
“They were the best people in the world,” he said. “Everything that’s good about me came from them.”
“What happened to them?” she asked.
She knew something had happened from the sound of his voice, the sad sense of finality that came when adults talked about people who had died.
“They had a car accident when I was ten.” He closed his eyes. “I was fast even then…but I wasn’t fast enough.”
“You saw it?” Lisa asked, a sense of horrified fascination entering her voice.
“I still see it sometimes,” he said. “Losing your parents…you don’t get over it, especially when you are a kid.”
He reached out to her, and she took his hand. He pulled her up and he gestured in the direction of the sun.
“Would you like to see where I used to live?”
Lisa nodded. She couldn’t imagine seeing her mother die and losing everything.
As they walked, Lisa tried to think of something to say. “Who took care of you?”
“People hired by the government,” he said. “Foster parents.”
He glanced back at her and said,”That’s never going to happen to you.”
“I know,” she said. “My mom has family.”
Her uncle Mike would take her in. Her Aunt Lucy would too. If absolutely necessary, Grandma Ellen or Grandpa Sam would step in. For all that they were sometimes rough and didn’t agree with her mother, Lisa had no doubt that they would step in to help her.
She was blessed that way, she realized with surprise. Her father hadn’t had anyone when he was growing up, and she had no doubt that he had gone through the same things he she was going through.
“You didn’t have anybody?”
“I had an Aunt Opal,” Clark said. “But she was too sick and old even then to raise a child. There wasn’t anybody else.”
Lisa squeezed his hand and said, “You’ve got me now, Dad. You aren’t alone anymore.”
Calling him dad was new and it felt strange, but when she felt him tightening his grip in hers, she knew she’d said the right thing.
Nobody should have to be alone.
***********
After the mansion, Lisa had imagined that her father had lived on a huge kind of farm. But as he showed her the limits of it, she realized that it was a lot smaller than his estate now.
The house and barn were bigger than her house, but they weren’t huge. Lisa had friends with larger houses.
Her father produced a key, and Lisa stepped into the farmhouse. After all these years, it should have been empty and deserted. Instead, she could barely even smell any dust. Everything was carefully placed, and it almost seemed as though the place was ready for someone to step back inside.
The place was a shrine.
“I had to buy this place back from the people who had it. Aunt Opal had kept most of the pictures and things in storage…what I couldn’t get back I bought copies.”
“Why?” Lisa asked. She was a little horrified by the realization that this place that hadn’t been used in all these years had been rebuilt piece by piece by her father.
“It’s all I have left,” he said. “This is the only place I can ever remember being really happy.”
Lisa tightened her hand in his. It was creepy and it made her wonder if her father was entirely stable, but she could understand what it was like to be lonely. She knew what it was like not to be able to turn to anyone and to face the world alone.
In her case, it had only been from fear her mother wouldn’t understand. In his, there had literally been no one. He’d been the last of his kind in the universe, and there had been no chance anyone was ever going to be there for him.
“You aren’t alone anymore,” she said.
“Let’s take a look around,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. He had a far away look in his eyes, and Lisa wondered if he was entirely here with her.
“Ok,” she said. If he needed to show her how his life had been, she’d go along.
***********
“This would have been the perfect place to grow up,” Lisa said. They two of them were lying on the roof of the barn, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun.
“I wish I’d gotten to,” her father said. “My hearing started kicking in after I was already in the system, but at least it was Smallville and not some huge city like Metropolis. I can’t imagine how you do it.”
“Does it get better?” she asked.
“You learn to tune some things out,” he said. “Ignore some things, but it’s always there in the back of your mind.”
“And the vision?” she asked.
“You’ll have relapses for a while,” he said. “But eventually you won’t need the glasses anymore.”
“My mother doesn’t mean it,” Lisa said.
“What?”
“When she pushes you away.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“She does it to everybody. She’s had to be the strong one my whole life, and she hasn’t had a lot of time for guys.”
Grandpa and Grandma hadn’t helped any.
“I’m not taking relationship advice for you about your mother.” Her father stared at the sky.
“You married that woman didn’t you?”
“Yes.” He said. He glanced at her. “So?”
“Obviously you need some sort of advice. I’ve always heard you were supposed to marry nice people.”
“She was nice!” he said. “Well...sort of nice.”
“Sort of nice doesn’t cut it. If you are planning to spend the rest of your life with somebody, they’d better be really nice.”
The logic of that seemed obvious to Lisa. Spending years with someone who wasn’t nice didn’t make much sense.
“That’s why she shouldn’t get involved with me,” he said. “I’m sort of nice at best.”
He smiled at her, as though it was a joke, but she knew better.
Lisa scowled and said, “Not from where I’m sitting.”
The adult world was more complicated than she wanted to admit. How did you take a prince who thought he was a frog and convince him of the truth?
