For our Christmas Mom Project this year, Dad and I built an outdoor firepit for the backyard. My grandparents used to have a firepit in their yard and mom and Uncle Magnum would sit outside for hours and talk about their future plans. When mom and dad started getting serious, she’d invite him over to sit with her by the fire. Dad said that she could be out there without saying a word for long stretches at a time, mesmerized by the waving fire. I hoped that some day she’d get to sit by this firepit, but she’s been gone for thirteen years already and despite my decision not to give up on finding her, I didn’t really hold out much hope.

Choosing what to make for dad this year was a lot harder than usual. I had tons of ideas, but nothing that screamed, “Yeah! That’s the one.” I ended up making him a metal pillow to use to take naps at the forge. Dad laughed when I explained what it was for. He got the contradictions right away and appreciated them. Dad had never taken a nap in the forge in his life and if he did, a metal pillow would not be anyone’s choice for comfort. He did take the time to appreciate how I’d basically created two heavily modified interlocking armor breastplates and latched them together to form a hollow ‘pillow’. I’d added a fur trim all around the edge of the pillow to soften the effect. It looked good enough to sleep on.

For his part, dad forged a giant metal syringe for me that you could actually fill with water and spray out through the tip. It was his interpretation of the ‘needle’ from the needle decompression that I’d used to save Stephen. It didn’t look anything like the one I’d used, but that didn’t matter. I was a really cool piece of art and it would get some prominent display space in my room.

Just like last year, dad left right after Christmas morning to spend a week with his parents and siblings. He knew how I felt about his family and didn’t suggest that I join him. He also didn’t try to get me to go stay with Uncle Magnum and I took that as a sign that he was seeing me more as an adult and that he trusted me to take care of myself. His daily phone calls to check up on me did nothing, much, to dispel that impression.

With the exception of Uncle Magnum, I was all alone again this year. Margaret had gone home to Georgia for the holidays and Uncle Magnum had decided to stay here and keep Sifu Zhang company by training with him every day. Meanwhile, Eva and James were off visiting family again. I didn’t know why their families couldn’t come here to visit them once in awhile.

Even Bobby was away. At least in his case, he wasn’t visiting family. He was touring several west coast universities that had invited him to see their campuses. Bobby and I hadn’t talked much about our futures and I think that we were just trying to ignore what we both knew. In the fall, he’d be playing football at a university out west and I’d be running my foundation out here. We didn’t have a future together, but we did have the next six months. We enjoyed each other’s company and had a good time together. Double dating with Eva and James was nice too.

The day after Christmas I headed out to Hannah’s Home and surprised Uncle Magnum and Sifu Zhang as they were about to start their morning training. Since Sifu Zhang usually spent the evening teaching at Uncle Magnum’s school, as per my deal with him, Uncle Magnum decided that he’d train with Sifu at the foundation in the mornings.

“Abby! I thought you’d be sleeping in during the holidays.” Uncle Magnum greeted me with a big hug.

“No time, uncle. Too much to do. I’m going to be helping Sister Clara at the clinic for the next few weeks. The other sisters are on holiday visiting with their families. With the clinic opening at ten for the holidays, I have enough time to join you old timers in a bit of stretching.”

“Old timers, huh? We’ll see about that you young whippersnapper.”

“There’s also something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s start and you’ll see soon enough.”

We started stretching and moved into forms once we were warmed up. Sifu Zhang led us through a few of the early forms and then paused, as if he were wondering what forms I should work on while they did theirs. However, this was the main reason that I was here this morning and I took advantage of that pause to continue with their normal sequence of forms, which I knew by heart from when I used to join them in R1 before school started.

Uncle and Sifu stopped their own forms and watched. I flowed from one form to the next, not giving them the chance to interrupt, performing each move with precision and grace, exactly as I’d learned from watching the two masters. At the end of the last form that Uncle Magnum usually did, Uncle Magnum was about to say something, only Sifu Zhang’s light touch on his shoulder stopped him. Sifu Zhang nodded to me once and I continued with the forms that I’d learned from watching him perform while he trained alone.

“I’m guessing that display was what you wanted to talk we me about?” Uncle Magnum asked me when I finally stood still.

“Yup.”

“Yup? I’m going to need more that ‘yup’, Abby. How about where and when did you learn all that? How about an explanation of how you’re able to do forms that I haven’t even learned yet?”

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“She learned them from us, Paul. For the forms that you know, her movements are an exact copy of yours. For the ones that you don’t know, her movements are a copy of mine. At one point, she has watched us doing our forms and I suspect that even seeing the forms once is enough for her to know them forever. It is a form of eidetic memory. Some people are born with it, others can develop it in their teenage years. A few have been known to get it as a direct result of a head injury.”

“Is he right, Abby?” Uncle Magnum was looking a little bewildered.

“Yup!” This time I got a laugh out of both of them and I continued, “It’s not just Kung Fu. I’ve been able to absorb whole medical textbooks lately and I’m fluent in German, Spanish, and French. I can pick up a language in a few weeks. That’s why you’ve seen some strange jumps in my learning over the past year. The enhanced memory isn’t just an ability to pull up facts. I’ve been able to integrate the knowledge and with a little practice it becomes second nature. I seem to understand my opponents moves better and understand what move is coming based on slight adjustments in their body movements.”

“Holy Shit, Abby. That’s awesome! Now I understand why you said that it wasn’t something that I’d be able to use to teach anyone else.”

“Yes. It also presents us with a unique challenge in training up Abby’s Kung Fu. Usually a teacher will have time to balance the student’s fighting experience with the forms, ensuring that the new moves used in the forms are incorporated into the student’s fighting style. In this case, she already knows considerably more from the forms than she uses when fighting. In addition, she will need to work on her stamina, speed, muscle strength and flexibility.”

I groaned at those last words. More stamina training. Ugh! Do something cool, get punished for it.

It turned out that the groan was not a sufficiently invective reaction to the next hour of training. I’d thought that working with Uncle Magnum and Charlie was tiring. Working with Uncle Magnum and Sifu Zhang was way worse. At least with Charlie I had someone who would take pity on me every now and then and give me a second to rest. Charlie was also a newer master of Kung Fu and wasn’t nearly as inventive in the ways of torturing students.

I had just enough time to shower and change before meeting Sister Clara at the clinic. She hadn’t realized that I’d had any interest in medicine but was happy to have any help. We had a few minutes before the clinic opened and she gave me an exclusive backstage behind the scenes look at the glamorous life of the medical professional. In layman’s terms, she showed me where the bandages and supplies were kept and taught me how to sterilize instruments.

As I grew familiar with the supplies, Sister Clara gave me a short course in triage, the art of managing which patients could wait and which ones needed help right away. I also learned how to answer the phones, schedule patients, create a chart, fill out the chart and take a patient’s history. Billing was trickier, as the clinic was a non-profit medical center that provided health care on a sliding scale that started at free for those that couldn’t afford it to full price for those that could.

By the third day, I had learned to take a patient’s vitals and I was occasionally assisting Sister Clara with some of her procedures. She even showed me how to put in an IV on a willing patient. Much of the work involved writing out prescriptions for various medications or diagnosing the flu, but it was necessary, and our efforts were rewarded with mostly thankful patients. One of the women who had brought in her four children for a checkup even baked us an Oreo pie. It was heavenly and didn’t last to the end of the day.

Everyone that came into the clinic underwent one of my scans and between the clear descriptions in the books that I’d absorbed and the insights from Sister Clara, the scans no longer presented as a series of noisy alarms. Now the scans produced results that were closer to the ones that I got when I scanned for minerals in the ground, except with the body scans the field would only highlight anything that was outside the range of normal human tolerances. How the field knew what was and wasn’t normal was still a mystery to me, but for now I was just accepting the fact that it did. Once something showed up as abnormal on my scan, I could focus on that abnormality and get even more information on it, actually see it in 3D in my mind.

As before, the trouble for me would be how to deal with a scan that showed a life changing problem in the patient. I couldn’t just tell the person that their liver wasn’t working properly or that they had hypothyroidism. I was just a volunteer and had no status. Even Sister Clara would have her doubts about anything that I said so I had to learn to ask the patients the right questions in order to get them to remember symptoms that they’d forgotten to mention. For example, if a patient was complaining of fatigue and weight loss and I detected hypothyroidism, I’d ask them about the other symptoms for hypothyroidism such as an increased sensitivity to cold or constipation, things they may not have noticed so much, and put those down on the chart. With the extra clues, Sister Clara would order up the blood work to confirm what was suspected.

This worked well most of the time. On a few occasions though, a patient came in for regular checkup and wasn’t showing any symptoms of illness, yet my scans would detect a problem that could be life threatening if left untreated. Luckily, a standard checkup included many of the tests required to discover these illnesses in advance, but in a few cases, the clinic’s standard blood test wasn’t enough and I’d have to sneak in more tests on the blood work form. That worked fine for the fifteen year old girl with gonorrhea who needed an STD profile added to her testing and the thirty year old guy with very early stage prostate cancer who needed a PSA test added to his. It didn’t work for Nathan, a retired police officer with lung cancer. He wasn’t a smoker and there was no reason to suspect that he had lung cancer. There was even no history of it in his family. At best the blood test would hint at the problem.

There wasn’t any way for me to make him aware of his condition without sounding crazy. “Excuse me sir, but I’m Abby and I’m a volunteer with no medical training whatsoever, but I can scan people with my mind and you have lung cancer. You should go get it checked out.” Nope. That wasn’t going to fly. I needed to think of a way to make that believable or the cancer would continue to grow inside of him until it was too late to do anything about it. The cancer might even metastasize and travel to other parts of his body, precluding surgery as an option.

I though about the problem constantly for several weeks without finding a solution. I was on the verge of calling the guy anonymously and blurting out that he has lung cancer when I got a call back from Howie and I finally had my solution.