Touched (2 page)

I’d grown used to the cycling of my future “memories.” Before that summer, it had happened every day, just a little. When I was a kid, before I’d learned to deal with them, my mind would shuffle constantly, weaving in new futures in place of the old ones, leaving others in the dust, like dreams. Maybe I’d forgotten, but back then, the cycling hadn’t seemed to hurt this much.

Of course, I’d never been able to go so long without any major cycling. Somehow I’d managed to make it almost three months without veering away from the future I saw in my head. It was a good future. A future I wanted desperately to keep. And now it was gone.

I collapsed on the pavement, breathing hard. Lifted my arms over my shoulders and squeezed my head between my elbows like a vise. Senseless images of people I’d never met, things I’d never done, shattered fragments of my future, sputtered through my head.

You will … can.… be.… not …

“Hey, are you okay?”

It was a girl’s voice. The angel. In my blurry vision I could see two silvery pink running shoes, toes pointed at me.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I blurted out, trying to look up at her, when a surge of agony pulled my head down again. “Sun glare.”

She didn’t speak. I tried to raise my head, but it was a no-go, as if a fifty-pound dumbbell was dangling from my neck and someone was playing the drums on my cerebral cortex.

“Well, thanks. I didn’t see. I, um …,” she babbled, all the while forcing me to the sad recognition that this girl was intensely sweet and shy and everything I would look for if I didn’t know I was destined to marry a redheaded nurse named Sue from Philly in ten years. Except, I realized as my memories shuffled at a maddening speed, that outcome was gone forever. Sue existed somewhere, still, but she’d probably never be with me. And now my crash-and-burn with this girl was inevitable. I’d lost two hot girls in one morning.

Without warning, I smelled apples laced with cinnamon, like someone was baking pies nearby. I could almost taste them. My salivary glands kicked into overdrive and my mouth began to water. Then, suddenly, the memory disappeared. Whoosh. Gone.

The girl was trying to tell me about how she was new in town. It was where any normal guy would say something like “Where are you from?” or “Can I show you around?”, but instead, my eyes bulged, heavy, and I couldn’t bring myself to raise them higher than her perfectly shaped ankles. To top it all off, I felt drool bubbling over my bottom lip. Awesome. Just my luck. Why couldn’t she just leave? Leave now, but come back later so we could continue this conversation at a time when I wasn’t cycling, when I felt more normal? But for me, abnormal
was
normal. I’d been fooling myself, thinking I could change who I was.

Suddenly I saw craft paper and a paperback romance novel and water dripping on hardwood. Fear curdled in my body. A scream bloomed in my throat but came out as a muffled moan. A jolt of pressure rocketed through my eyeballs, seeming to slice them in half. I pushed my palms hard against my eye sockets. “No. No. No!”

Most girls ran screaming from me, but this girl wouldn’t leave. Perfect. She put her hands on her knees, and though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was squinting at me like I was some experiment gone horrifically wrong. “Are you having an aneurysm?”

“No, I’ll be …” Another jab in my eye, and then a picture

Me, screaming flashed in front of my eyes. My next word was a muffled groan—“Fine”—because another memory was fighting against the rage of others, floating to the surface kissing soft lips, blond curls in my eyes and giving me a warm, tense feeling between my legs. What? I get to kiss her? Seriously? I was drooling in front of her, for God’s sake. I hadn’t completely ruined things with her with this moronic display? Just as I inwardly started to celebrate I caught another … it is unexpected tragedy that brings us together today the unexpected is often the most difficult to deal with and clenched my fists. Sure, in the future I’d perfected, there were funerals. But nothing horrible. My mother wouldn’t go until she was in her sixties. And my last official memory was digging for sand crabs in the surf with my grandson—I could even feel the ache of my bones with that memory, so I had to have been old. My poor grandson. That little blond kid. He was gone now, cast into dreamland with the others. God, I’d loved him. When I was young, I’d always hoped that when I cycled away from an outcome, all the progeny I remembered wouldn’t just disappear forever, that they’d have a chance to exist somewhere, with other families, like Sue. The more kids and grandkids I recycled, though, the less I believed that was true. Every time the experiences started to shuffle, I felt like I was murdering them.

Murderer! You killed her!

The words sliced through my head. I smelled something sour and felt a hot breath on my neck. The voice was so vicious and the memory so vivid, I thought it was real; I looked around and saw a small crowd of a dozen or so people in bathing suits, carrying their beach chairs and towels, staring at me. But no one was standing close by accusing me of being a killer. I would have wondered where the hell that came from if I hadn’t already known. The weirdest and most unimaginable things only came from one place: the land of the yet-to-be.

I shuddered and gripped my head tightly in my hands. “Green elephant,” I muttered under my breath.

She leaned forward. Apples again. Her hair smelled like apples. I inhaled deeply, feasting on the smell, since it was the only nice thing I could find about the moment. “Excuse me?”

I clenched my teeth. “Green elephant, green elephant. Green elephant.”

I figured that if anything could send her away, me muttering nonsensical phrases would be it. The phrase “green elephant” didn’t mean anything to her, but I’d invented it when I was nine or ten, and it meant everything to me.

“Do you want some water or something?”

Why did she have to be so damn nice? I pulled my head up and stared into her eyes, blue and endless, and

Blood on the staircase

I knew right then I was going to be sick. “Look.” I tried to keep my voice even, but it came out as more of a growl. “I don’t want anything from you, so just get the hell away from me.”

I was surprised by two things. First, at how I could bring myself to sound like a total jerkwad, which was what I probably was, but I’d always been too absorbed in my future to dwell on it. And second, at how she just nodded, as if it all made sense. She hurried up the ramp and jogged off, fastening the headphones over her ears as if we’d been chatting about the weather.

I sat alone for a moment, eyes closed, green-elephanting until the pain subsided and my mind slowed to a peaceful lull. A thousand new memories of the future bubbled under the surface of my eyes. On the bad side, there was something about blood on the staircase, and I had this strange ache in my chest. On the good side, there was kissing that girl. The rest I would have to sort out later. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds of a heavyweight title match. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the cycling or because the new memories would prove too horrifying to bear. I could change them. I could change the bad things, sometimes, by going off script.

The problem was, changing the bad things usually took away the good things, too. And there always seemed to be more bad things to replace the ones I managed to escape. The future I’d given up was a one-in-a-thousand future. I went to college, married Sue, who understood me as well as anyone could, had children and grandchildren. It wasn’t anything awesome, but it was normal, and that was all I wanted. The other hundreds of futures were like episodes of some bad television show. High drama, all the time. Once, I’d choked to death in my teens. Once, I’d accidentally caused a fire while making bacon in the kitchen and ended up homeless. Once, I’d wound up addicted to crack, in a loveless marriage to a Vegas stripper, and murdered in a drug deal in my early twenties. I’d done it all. In my head, at least.

And sometimes … sometimes, try as I might, I couldn’t change things. It was like certain past events sealed that certain future events would occur, and they couldn’t be changed, or it wasn’t clear how to change them. Once, when I was ten, I was trying so hard to follow the script that I tripped and broke my wrist. After that, I had this strong feeling I was going to get a huge bump on my head, but I couldn’t tell how. I tried not following the script, hoping to avoid that bump. But it didn’t work, because I didn’t know what in the script to change. Turned out that I had to give up skateboarding until my wrist healed, so I put my skateboard on the top shelf of my closet. I opened it one day and the skateboard fell out and whacked me on the head. So sometimes bad things were just impossible to avoid.

You will climb up to the boardwalk and smile at Jocelyn. She will eye you up and down, and a couple of children and a man with a Boogie board will step aside to let you pass
.

Crazy Cross. That was what they called me at school, and as I felt the eyes of all the beachgoers on me, I knew it wouldn’t be too long until they thought the same. I knew they’d run home and tell their friends what they’d seen, and I’d be the talk of the town again, and not in a good way. As I climbed up the ramp, quickly, trying my best to ignore the stares, that same sinking feeling resurfaced. For three months, I’d shed it, but now, it wrapped around me, heavy, like a winter coat.

You will bury your feet in the sand and hurry down the beach
.

I groaned and stepped off the boardwalk, sinking ankle-deep into the hot sand.

You will hear the radio crackle with “Ambulance … Seventh Avenue.” You will see the crowd gathered at the waterline. Chaos. Shouts. Pedro will narrow his eyes at you when you break through, and scream, “Where the hell were you?”

They will tell you there’s no hope of saving the girl in the pink bikini. And you will know it is because of you.

I was usually too busy getting tripped up by my future to think about the past. But that afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about the past. I couldn’t get that little girl’s dead blue lips out of my mind. Those long eyelashes, coated in salt water and sand. She wasn’t one of my dreamland kids; she’d been living and breathing and growing on this earth. And now she was dead.

The girl had been playing in ankle-high water. We’d had a storm the night before, and she’d been dragged out by the strong undertow. In my memory, I’d shaken Pedro awake in time for him to point out the little girl. At the time I’d thought he was pointing out a piece of ass, but eventually I would have realized it was a drowning and I would have saved her. I
did
save her, dammit. I had the sore neck muscles to prove it, where her mother had hugged me so tightly, shrieking an endless supply of thank-yous into my ear.

In reality, though, Pedro slept through the noon siren, only to be awakened by the little girl’s mother screaming. Yeah, outwardly, it was Pedro’s fault. But my lunch break was up at noon, and I’d been late. I’d also known Pedro wasn’t in any condition to man the stand himself. I could easily have prevented it. But I didn’t.

It would take days or weeks or months to sort out what lay ahead in this new future, but I already knew some things. I knew that Bill Runyon, our captain, had summoned me to headquarters to can me. I knew he would give me that pity look, the one teachers reserve for students who “had so much potential” but still manage to become total screwups anyway. I knew he would use phrases like “good kid” and “take a breather” and that he would shift uncomfortably behind his desk while fingering the cords on the hood of his SPBP sweatshirt. He could single-handedly carry a four-man rowboat down the beach, but he was piss-poor at confrontation. I guess I could have left my whistle and ID on the bench outside headquarters, then biked away and considered my three-month tenure as Seaside Park lifeguard finito. That was what Pedro did; he’d wandered off quietly somewhere in the middle of the chaos, and I found his things lying on the bench. But I went in for the torture anyway. I had nothing better to do.

Besides, if I listened to Bill, chances were I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else. It was the thinking that killed me.

You will sit on the chair at Bill’s desk and start to fidget. He will pretend to be going through papers, but you will know he is just avoiding this
.

I sat down and laced my fingers in front of me. I fidgeted even when I wasn’t nervous, though I couldn’t actually remember a time I wasn’t nervous about something. Bill riffled through papers, and I wondered if he was thinking about my mom. Supposedly, they’d gone to high school together, which was why he always asked me how she was doing. Usually with the same kind of face you’d have if you were inquiring about a puppy that got run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

No, I wasn’t the first Crazy Cross he’d had to deal with. But I knew that if he—if anyone—had the chance to see things the way my mom and I did, he’d be just like us. I’d been the only one who’d seen the happy ending—the one where I’d carried the kid to the sand and performed CPR until she regained consciousness, coughing up seawater, in my arms. Now that outcome existed only in broken fragments, bits of sensation—the relief when she finally began to stir, the feeling of her sandy cheek against mine as she hugged me—somewhere in a corner of my mind. The rest of the world—the real world—had seen me arrive on the scene minutes too late and try to get her going, screaming “Breathe!” and pressing on her tiny little corpse chest over and over again, way past the time any normal dude would have given up. People in the crowd turned away, disgusted, but did I care? No. Instead, the EMTs who arrived with the ambulance five minutes later had to tear me away from the dead body.

You will hear the faraway screams of glee from the children on the Tilt-a-Whirl at Funtown Pier and you will think of the little girl in the pink bikini. Bill will turn at that moment and see the anguish in your face. “Tough day,” he will say
.

The children’s shouts made me cringe. The dead girl was probably in kindergarten, at an age when kids love school. Her friends would probably wonder where she was on that first day in September and then they would learn the awful truth. It would be their first taste of death, of mortality. It would likely scar them for years, maybe forever. Way to make your mark on the world, Cross, I thought. A dozen kindergartners will wet their beds for years to come because of you.

Once, Nan had sat me down to watch her favorite movie,
It’s a Wonderful Life
. I hated that movie, maybe because I envied the Jimmy Stewart character. He had such a positive impact on the world. Everything I did always turned to crap. I mean, lifeguarding? What was I thinking? Of course I couldn’t be a lifeguard, not when I could so easily go off script and have thousands of futures competing in my mind, destroying my concentration. It was like Betty Crocker running a weight-loss clinic.

“Tough day.”

You will nod but say nothing
.

I pushed away the thought of five bright-eyed tots being reduced to tears in the back of the school bus when another kid let the news spill that the little girl was dead. That wasn’t real. After all, I assured myself, I couldn’t be on the school bus with them. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish my thoughts of the future from the spirals of my imagination. Still, I could clearly see that snot-nosed kid sputtering “—is dead.”

Hell, I didn’t even know the little girl’s name.

You will—

Sometimes I could think something so hard, I couldn’t see the script. I did that now, picturing instead my old standby, the green elephant. “What was her name?”

My mind began to shuffle before I could finish the sentence. But it wasn’t like the cycling had gone on a rampage, like before. It was only a small pang-pang-pang against my temple. I rested my elbow on the padded armrest and dug my fist into the side of my head to steady the throbbing.

Bill’s eyes were always soft. He was the good-natured, back-slapping, even type whose voice never rose beyond a whisper. He’d been readying the Good Kid speech, but his eyes narrowed. “Come on, Nick, let’s not go into—”

More shuffling. “Tell me.” But the truth was, I really didn’t need him. All the answers were already there in my head. I just needed to commit in my mind to travel far enough down a path to retrieve them. I could do it, if the answer could be found somewhere in the immediate future. I could find out anything if I wanted it badly enough. I just had to contend with the pain. I sat for a moment, imagining myself tracking down the answer, the pain escalating all the while. If I stopped right now and went back on course, followed the script like a good boy, the cycling would stop. But I couldn’t. I needed to know. Once I followed the path far enough in my head, the one where I lunged over the side of the desk and ripped the paper from Bill’s hands, receiving a punch from him that would make my lips bloody and swollen like raw sausages for weeks, I squeezed myself back in my chair, digging my fingers into the armrest to keep my body from actually doing it. Then I pressed my eyes closed and silently green-elephanted until only two words appeared in my mind.

Emma Reese

I opened my eyes. My mouth still smarted from the punch I’d never receive. “Emma? Emma Reese? Is that her name?”

Bill’s eyes flashed surprise for only a second before melting into acceptance, and I knew he was thinking of my mother. I really didn’t know what strange things he’d seen my mother do that summer before she confined herself to her bedroom, but it was clear he’d seen something. I was afraid to know what. “Yes, it is.”

Finally, peace. That lasted about one-tenth of a second. Somehow, knowing her name made the burden heavier.

He put his hands up gently, as if motioning a car to a stop in a tight parking spot. “Listen. This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have done any more than you did. Jocelyn said you were helping her with a situation on the boardwalk.”

I’d been so busy concentrating on what I needed, the mention of Jocelyn surprised me. “She said that?”

He nodded. “Pedro, well … I’ll deal with him separately.”

I cringed at the mention of Pedro. Maybe he thought his mirrored sunglasses could disguise a little catnap, but in my vision, he’d been out like a light, snoring. I could have done something. I could have told headquarters that he was hungover. I could have stayed at my post instead of getting lunch. I could have ignored everything else and arrived at my post five minutes earlier, like I was supposed to. Bill went on about how “these things happen,” but he didn’t see what I saw. It was my fault.

He closed a thin manila file. On the tab, I saw
CROSS, NICK
in black block letters. “I’m sure a bunch of us will attend the funeral, and you’re more than welcome to—”

“Let me ask you a question.” I leaned forward, took a breath. “If ‘these things happen,’ like you say, and it’s not my fault, then why am I being fired?”

He sighed. “Aw, kid. Look. It’s politics. And you don’t want to be caught in the middle of an invest—”

“I killed her.” I spit out the words. “It is my fault. You can tell them whatever you want, but I could have saved her.”

I wanted to see what else he had written in the file. Maybe Terminated. Crazy as His Mother. But I didn’t want to get punched in the face again. Just the memory of the punch hurt. I flinched at the thought. My mind revved a bit more, like a computer’s hard drive being tested to its limits. I could almost feel the future memories, memories I hadn’t even sorted through, being plucked from my mind. A crease grew at the center of Bill’s forehead. I wondered if my mother had seen that crease.

Shutting my eyes, I spoke. “I want to—” I held out my hands but dropped them to my sides again when I realized they were trembling. My voice was, too. The pain was intensifying by the minute. I crunched down on the words, biting off each one. “I. Need. To.”

In that memory I’d had prior to entering Bill’s office, the one where he’d given the Good Kid speech, his features were a lot softer and, on the whole, more sympathetic. Now he looked disgusted, worn out. “What you need is to go home.

Get some rest. Take a breather.”

“What I need”—my voice cracked—“is …”

I wiped my eye and looked down at my hand. Wet. Perfect. When had I started crying?

He stood up and walked to the edge of his desk. Sat down on it so that his flip-flop dangled off one tanned foot. “Look … it’s not your—”

I closed my eyes again. Clenched my fists. Sometimes I hated people. They didn’t see things the way I did. “You. Are. Wrong.”

He went back behind the desk and began to scribble something on a notepad, all the while saying that he recommended I settle down before heading off, as he put it, “half-cocked.” My mind cycled a little more, so I squeezed my head between my hands and let the memories fall into place.

“Emma. Emma Reese,” I said aloud.

We know who you are and what you did and because of you she is dead you killed our Emma

The words lingered in my brain; a man spitting and growling them in such a way that I could feel his breath on my ear and smell something sour and dank, like old milk, on him. The vision that accompanied this was of a vaguely familiar brick ranch house, surrounded by pretty white pebbles. And there was the taste of lemonade. Lemonade and blood. Even though some of the images made no sense, it was clear that they blamed me. Whoever they were.

More cycling.
You will …

I tried to green-elephant, but all I could see was a picture of the girl lying dead on the sand, surrounded by a circle of onlookers.

When I snapped back to reality, I realized that Bill had come over to my side of the desk. I found a piece of paper, folded, in my palm. I stood and thanked him. A cool ocean breeze greeted me when I opened the screen door and stepped outside.

The pain in my head subsided.

You will pick up your bike, straddle it, then open the sheet of paper in your hand
.

I did so, but before I even read the paper, I cringed at what I knew was written on it. Scrawled there were nine words:

Get help before you end up like your mother
.