Touched (24 page)

The rest of school was just as weird. People didn’t swerve to avoid me. Girls smiled at me. I ate lunch with the guys I’d hung out with earlier, and it was clear that I fit in. Or at least, I had, once before. They kept talking about things I’d done, or at least, they all seemed to
think
I’d done them. “Hey, Cross, remember in seventh grade when you went into the girls’ locker room and Spanner caught you and you said you were just looking for deodorant?” and “Hey, Cross, what store was it on South Street that you got those fake hamster pellets last year?” I just nodded or grinned or said “I don’t know” more times than I could count.

When the guy I spent too many brain cells trying to remember not to call by a certain part of the posterior anatomy and not to bring up his dad’s death, since he was my best friend and all, dropped me off at home, I walked into the backyard and got a little sad to see that Nan’s garden had been replaced by one of those sad, lopsided metal swing sets. As I stared at the spot by the garage, I walked face-first into the pole to a basketball net. After the resulting
thrunk
I cupped my hands over my face and checked for bleeding, wondering who in the family played basketball. I certainly never did. Organized sports were far from my thing.

“Hey, kid. Want to shoot a few?” a voice called. It was my father. He was lying back on a lounge chair that also wasn’t there the day before, wearing sunglasses and clicking on his phone. “I’ve got about ten before I have to pick the twins up at preschool.”

The answer was obvious. I wouldn’t know how to dribble if you held a gun to my head. But surprisingly, I had this urge to wrap my hands around the ball, to shoot. And I was even more surprised when I opened my mouth and “Sure” popped out instead of “No way in hell.”

We started to play. To my astonishment, when I dribbled the ball, it didn’t fly out of my hands. I didn’t fall to the driveway in a heap. And when I raised the ball to shoot it, it felt strangely comfortable. I made the first basket. And the second. In fact, I made them all. I was even able to do some pretty quick moves to get around my dad and yeah, so what, he’s an old dude, but I almost felt like I knew what I was doing. When I sunk another basket, I asked, “Am I on the basketball team?”

My father just laughed like I was an idiot. Understandable.

Okay. So if I’d played basketball before and I was this awesome athlete, shouldn’t I have remembered that?

After a few minutes, my dad started to double over, breathing heavy. I kept dribbling as he sat down and slurped a bottle of water. It was weird the things that I knew now. Before I never knew really what I’d be like in twenty years. But my dad was pretty okay-looking. He had all his hair. He wasn’t a hunchback. All of these things boded well for me. “Dad,” I said, still feeling really weird even speaking that word, “how did Nan die?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Nan. You mean, your mother’s mother? Why all this interest in a lady you never met?”

I shrugged, nonchalant. “We’re doing a genealogy project in school and it made me wonder. You met her, right?”

He nodded. “I did. She was very nice. But I didn’t know her well. I only met her twice before …” His voice trailed off. I could tell it was something he didn’t feel right discussing with me.

“Before what?” I prompted.

He said, “She’d been acting strangely that night. I was supposed to meet your mother for a late meal, but I got a call that something was wrong. By the time I got there, she was gone. Heart trouble, we were told.” He shrugged. “Simple as that.”

“B-but …,” I stuttered, “there’s got to be more than that. Were they talking about something? Is there a reason she had the heart attack?”

He thought for a minute. “Well, now that I think about it, there was something about missing money. Your mom’s entire summer’s savings disappeared that night. We were going to use that money for a wedding, but we ended up getting married at town hall.” He sighed. “As far as your grandmother, it could have been that she overexerted herself, helping your mom look for the money. They tore the house apart trying to find it. The place was a mess when I got there.”

I rubbed my eyes. It didn’t make any sense. The money disappeared because it went to Taryn’s grandmother so that Mom could get the Touch. Or did it? In this alternate version of reality, Mom didn’t have the Touch. Then what happened to the money? It made my head ache to think about it.

“Come on,” he said, wrapping his arm around my neck in a choke hold. “Let’s go get the little monsters.”

I smiled. Alternate reality or whatever, it did have its benefits.

My dad had a sweet brand-new Ford Explorer, I realized when he opened up the door to the three-car garage. There was also an older, but still awesome, Jeep Wrangler in the slot next to it. Maybe I should have been freaked out after what had happened in the last Jeep I’d been in, but I was surprised at how much it had faded from my memory over the past few hours, almost like it had never happened. Had it happened? And this was my Jeep. My totally sweet ride. In a ride like that, I might actually learn to like driving.

I didn’t get the chance to drool over it because at that moment, I turned around and saw Taryn standing in the garage entrance. She had a messenger bag slung over her shoulder and was fiddling with the pull on her hooded jacket, looking nervous. “Hi,” she said, giving me a half-wave.

“I’ll go pick up the twins on my own,” Dad said, climbing into the SUV. “Nice seeing you, Taryn.”

She stared at me as if she expected me to say something. I’d probably forgotten something big. Maybe we were supposed to hang out. Maybe she’d expected me over at her house. I felt like I needed to apologize, so I did.

“What are you sorry for?” she asked.

I shrugged. “It just felt like the right thing to say.”

“Can we go inside?” she asked when my dad had pulled out of the driveway and disappeared.

I nodded and led her inside. I offered her lemonade because that was what Nan always did on the rare occasions when we had a visitor, but then I realized I didn’t know if we had any lemonade. I was glad when Taryn declined. She reached up to swipe a short corkscrew from her face and I saw a picture painted on the back of her hand, a blond-haired, lopsidedly smiling girl. I grabbed it. “Cute. I didn’t know you were an artist.”

She wrinkled her nose at me, teasing. “I just came from babysitting Emma. She says hi.”

Emma. I swallowed. “You mean … Emma? Emma Reese?”

She nodded. I instinctively doubled over as if I’d just ran a marathon, trying desperately to suck air into my lungs. Emma Reese. Emma. The little girl.

Taryn moved beside me, put a hand on my back. “Hey, it’s okay. Having flashbacks to that day on the beach?”

Her words echoed in my head. “On … the … beach?” I managed to cough out.

“Yeah. When you pulled her out.”

Every part of me tingled, as if readying to spring to life for the first time. I thought about those cold blue lips, about how I’d tried, over and over, to bring her back to life. Somehow, I’d done it. Somehow everything I remembered—Emma’s death, Taryn’s death, all of it—was nothing but a dream. “I guess … I guess I keep thinking of what could have happened.”

“It could have been bad, yeah. But everything’s okay,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “Now come on. I have something to show you.”

It was weird to see how comfortable she was in my house. She went right to the staircase, climbed the stairs, and entered my bedroom, where she threw her bag on my bed. “How did you know about it?” she asked.

“Know about what?”

She reached into her bag and pulled out the book. It looked, like everything, different and yet the same. The cover was a deeper brown, the edges not as battered, the pages a cleaner white. The lock was missing. It looked as if someone had ripped the lock off, trying to get inside to read the pages. It seemed more ordinary than before, more like any other book. “This is it, right? The book you were talking about?”

I nodded. “Where did you find it?”

“My parents have a bunch of my grandmother’s things in a bedroom upstairs. They’ve been putting off going through it because it’s a lot of junk. I found it in a box, with a bunch of other books. It looks like a witchcraft book, but a lot of the pages are mostly blank, like something was written there before but erased.” She stared at the book, a disgusted look on her face. “So how did you know about it?”

I sat down next to her. “You’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I already think that.”

I studied her. How could I tell her? I couldn’t expect anyone to believe a story that warped. But this was Taryn. The Taryn that, once upon a time, I knew I’d be with forever. Things were different, sure … but in some ways, like the way she looked at me, very much the same. “Okay,” I said.

So I told her. I told her about the book, and what it used to be able to do. What it had done to me. She listened, her face stone. She didn’t make any comments, didn’t react to anything, even the most unbelievable things. She didn’t even gasp when I told her that only three days ago, I’d held her as she died. When I finished, there were tears in her eyes.

“Oh,” she said. She looked like she was trying to think of something to say, but nothing was coming out.

“Crazy, right?”

She shook her head. “Well, yeah. But it’s not that I don’t believe you. I can’t not believe you. It’s obvious you believe every word of it.”

“The thing is, I’m the only one who still remembers the old version of the past. And I don’t remember what happened in this version of the past. Not a thing.” I exhaled slowly.

“Why?”

“Got me.”

“And so much has changed. How can it be that we were together then, and we’re together now?”

“Well, that I can answer.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And?”

I shrugged. “Because some things just have to happen. Like, the sun has to rise and set. Time has to go by. We have to get older. And I guess we are one of those things. It’s destiny. Unchangeable.”

She smiled. “Corny. But I like it.”

She swallowed and then opened the book. She frowned at the first page. After a few minutes, I realized why. If she hadn’t had to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps, she wouldn’t have needed to learn the language of the text.

“It’s in Hungarian,” I said. “You can’t read that, can you?”

She grimaced. “A little. When I was a kid Grandpa and I were pen pals.” She flipped the pages. “You said your grandmother was supposed to get Flight of Song that night? What was her name?”

“Evangeline Cross.”

She stopped at one of the pages. “Here it is. And the signature looks like
Marilyn
. Marilyn Haas. Who is that?”

“No clue. Okay. So she didn’t get it. What did she get, then? Anything?” I asked, standing over her as she flipped the pages. “There. There’s her name. What’s that one?”

Taryn read it. “Um. I can’t … It has something to do with time.” She was quiet for a moment. “The taker of this Touch … may return to one moment in time and change anything she wants.” She looked up at me. “That’s it. She—”

I stood up. “Architect of Time. Of course. She went back to the day my mom got the Touch. And she …” I thought back to my father’s words. Nan and Mom were upset. They’d spent the day looking for my mother’s money. And then Nan … “She hid the money. That was why she had the heart attack. She hid the money that my mom would have used to get the Touch.”

Taryn pointed to some scrawling beside the name. “Look at the date.”

I inspected it. It was signed yeserday. “It makes sense. That’s when she took the Touch out.”

“But that has to be a misprint. This book was under a pile of junk yesterday. When I found it today, it was covered with ten years of dust.”

I shrugged. It made no sense. And yet …

“Wait.” She flipped the pages again. “What was the name of the Touch your mom got?”

“Eagle Eye, or something like that.”

When she found the page, I recognized the name. It took a moment to realize from where, but it came to me. The music wing. The Edith Laubach Memorial Wing. The poor girl who’d ended her own life because she’d had to live with a terrible, life-destroying curse.

Taryn just gasped. “Poor girl. Now we know why she killed herself.” She looked at me, her face grave. “It was that bad?”

I nodded. Though it wasn’t my curse anymore, I could still feel the pain from it. The overwhelming grief of Taryn’s death, the fear of knowing what might lie in the future. It was like scars running deep under the surface, and who knew how many years it would take to erase them?

“Where would your grandmother have hidden the money?” Taryn asked softly.

I looked out the window. “In her garden. It’s under the swing set now,” I said. I was more certain of that than anything. And then I laughed, Nan’s words still ringing in my ears. “The root of all evil.”

“Should we try to dig it up?”

I shook my head. I felt strangely light. Light in a way I’d never felt before in my life. It was then I noticed something dangling in the mirror above my dresser. Something small but glistening brightly in the small sliver of light shining through the window. As I neared it, I knew it instantly. Nan’s Miraculous Medal. She’d once told me it was a symbol of faith. I slipped the chain over my neck. Then I looked at Taryn, who watched me without question. “This was Nan’s,” I said as she inspected it. “Thanks for finding the book.”

She wrapped her arms around me, stood on her toes, and kissed me. “Thanks for telling me everything.”

In the days that followed, I thought about tracking down Edith Laubach’s family, to provide them with answers they might have been searching for. But I never did. I wasn’t sure it would serve any purpose. Taryn and I did leave flowers under the plaque in the hallway, though, on the very date she’d died.

We did the same at Nan’s gravesite. I tried hard not to talk about the old past, the past that really hadn’t happened, but every once in a while I would quietly bring up something about Nan to Taryn. It was like not talking about her was denying the existence of the wonderful, amazing human being who sacrificed everything to save my mom and me.

I still miss her, every day. I miss everything about her, from the way she used to paint smiley faces with ketchup on my eggs to the way her bones used to creak and her engagement ring clinked against the railing as she climbed the stairs. Sometimes I think this Touch was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it allowed me to spend seventeen years with her.

But then I remember the hell it put me through. Sometimes I have nightmares. I will wake up and feel a You Will popping through, but then I will force my eyes open and realize that I’m okay, that it’s just my imagination. Anything swirling in my head now, creating chaos, is just my imagination.

It took some time, but after a while, I learned enough to settle into this drastically different life. I learned that my mom has a beautiful smile. I learned not to assume that a person staring at me meant I was a freak. I learned to stop pushing Taryn away, to feel comfortable and relaxed when she put her arms around me. I learned to adore Izzy, Tommy, Elliot, and my dad as if I’d known them every day of my life. I learned to get along without Nan, because I knew that was what she wanted most for me. I learned that the negative doesn’t always accompany the positive, and that some things can be all good. I learned.

I learned to love the gift of every single day I’ve been given.

Now the thing I love most is when Taryn calls me up and asks me what we’re going to do this weekend, saying I have no clue.

Turns out, I love surprises.