Touched (8 page)

Her favorite color is red. She likes to make construction paper snowflakes. She lost her favorite aunt in a car accident. Her first pet, a goldfish, was named Harry. She has a bright-red birthmark on her upper thigh. The list went on and on. I’d known there was something about her, something that crushed my chest every time she turned to walk away, and here it was. I knew her well. Better than Sue, my former wife. Better than anyone. The weight of all that knowledge that a day ago hadn’t been there pushed me down to the rotten planks. She looked at me, lying on the boards like a dead fish, and I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t find the words. What could I say? Nice birthmark? The script had me fumbling around, tripping over my words again. And if I went off script, if I messed anything up, she could just become a stranger to me again.

But I had to go off script, as much as possible. I had to save Nan.

So we sat there for a moment, not saying much, while my mind was working overtime. Follow the script? Veer off a little and hope she still liked me? It wasn’t hard to follow the script; it just had me sitting there, next to her, quiet, afraid to say anything and mess things up. When I was almost dry, the script had me packing up to go home. I started to pull in my lines.

“Why don’t you just come with me?” she said, tugging on the sleeve of my T-shirt. “I want to show you something.”

There probably was nothing I wanted more than to follow her. But the thought of my grandmother kept intruding. That and the nagging suspicion that this undeniably cute girl couldn’t be so into me after all the stupid things she’d seen me do. There had to be something behind it. Maybe I’d wanted to know her so badly that I just made it all up in my head.

That was it. She was the one talking about how people always wanted things from her. Maybe she was thinking she could use me. Maybe she thought I could provide her with the winning Pick-6 numbers or tell her who was going to ask her to the homecoming dance. “Why?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Because. I might be able to help you.”

“You? Help me? Don’t you mean the other way around?”

“No. I mean, you can’t help me. No one can—”

“And the idea of picking winning lottery numbers never entered your mind?” I asked, crossing my arms.

She swallowed, looked away. She could have said something. She could have denied it. Instead, she said nothing. Her silence told me everything. The sun was so hot I was already almost dry, but because of the salt, my skin felt tight and itchy. Of course she wouldn’t be interested in me. How could I even think that? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Something stuck in my throat, making my words come out clipped and distorted. “Your grandmother used her”—I wiggled my fingers again—“powers to learn that I can see my future. Great. The secret’s out. I can fulfill my lifelong dream of appearing on national television as America’s Biggest Freak.”

She stared at me, confused.

“Don’t you get it? I can’t help you become a millionaire. And I can’t help you find true love or whatever. It doesn’t work that way. It sucks.” My muscles were so tense and my body so hot that I had the momentary compulsion to bolt out of there, leaving her, the fishing equipment, everything far behind. But then I took a breath, counted to ten. Exhaled. Felt better. My voice was calmer when I spoke next. “Look. I’d rather people not know. I just want to be normal.”

The confusion wasn’t leaving her face. And that’s when she said it. Well, she didn’t say it, because she didn’t have to. I heard her next words, clear as day in my head, before she even thought them. My grandmother did this. They were crazy. Absolutely insane. I interrupted her as she opened her mouth to speak. “That’s not possible.”

She stopped, her jaw slowly falling.

“How can your grandmother have anything to do with this?” I muttered, getting more and more disgusted by the minute. What the hell did she think this was? Some nifty little parlor trick? Our seeing the future was more than a living nightmare. It was constant, unstoppable, and wholly devastating. Something so terrible could only be explained as an act of God. It couldn’t be something that one being, one human created. That would make it seem so trivial, so silly, so small. And it was big. Big enough to ruin my life a thousand times over.

Taryn swallowed. She didn’t have to say it, but I let her words come out anyway, because maybe if they were outside of my head, that would make them more believable. And so she said it, exactly as I had imagined. But when the words were out there, hanging in the humid summer air, it didn’t help.

“Say that again,” I murmured.

Her face was serious. There was a hint of remorse in her eyes. “Nick. It’s true. My grandmother made you this way.”

I needed to get away from Taryn. Taryn, who was just as crazy as her grandmother, her all-powerful grandmother who somehow made me this way. Yeah, right. Once I scurried across Bayview Avenue and past Charlie’s ice cream shop, the cycling became a little steadier and I could make out some of the visions passing through my head. I could see my grandmother lying in that now familiar position at the bottom of the stairs, almost as if it had just happened. Somewhat more faded was the image of sunlight glimmering on the deep mahogany cover of a closed casket.

The sun was still hot enough to roast my shoulders and create a haze on the streets as I climbed the decaying concrete steps at the front of the house, flung open the screen door, and let it slam behind me. My mom had retreated to her bedroom, of course. I didn’t think she could stand being outside her tomb for longer than a few minutes. I climbed the stairs two at a time and they creaked as if the house was going to fall down. When I burst into her room, I realized I was sweating, out of breath, and still holding my fishing gear. Salt water sloshed from the bucket onto my feet and the hardwood floor. I knew Nan would scream bloody murder if she saw.

My mom looked up from the latest issue of
People
. I didn’t know how she could read that trash, but she had piles of celebrity tabloids in her room, littering the chairs, floor, and the tops of the dresser and night table. Who seriously cared what celebrities did in their effed-up lives? Most of them had everything going for them and still couldn’t manage to hold it together. But hey, I guess anything that worked to keep her mind off the future. She stared me up and down. “You got sunburned.”

I looked cross-eyed and saw that my nose was the exact color I’d seen in my vision. I wiggled it a little and it stung. Perfect. “Mom. Why is some fortune-teller on the boardwalk claiming that she’s responsible for making us the way we are?”

Her eyes went back to her magazine. “No idea,” she murmured.

I used my index finger to push the magazine down to her knees so that she’d look at me. “This girl knows I can see the future. I never told her. She just knew.”

“Is that so?” she asked, clucking her tongue. She shrugged and went into the same speech she used to give me when I was a kid and wanted to show off my abilities at show-and-tell. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would stay away from her. You know what could happen if you say too much. If you trust too much.”

“But she knows. I didn’t have to say a word. She just knows.”

“Oh, Nick. She doesn’t know. She
suspects
. That’s dangerous. The curious ones are always dangerous. Maybe she’s just perceptive. Some people are. Bill Runyon was. I still think that he might know. But they don’t have any way of proving it. And it’s not like this is of any use to anyone. If you keep your distance, she’ll leave us alone. We don’t want people coming around, asking questions. Believe me.”

“I got the feeling that she really understood it, though,” I said, sitting on the edge of bed. “And Mom, if she knew what started it, she might be able to tell us how to stop it.”

She shook her head. “That isn’t possible.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t you think I already tried everything possible?”

Actually, I didn’t think that at all. From my earliest memory, she’d been confined to this bed, hopeless. She’d never once talked to me about finding a way to stop the visions. “Did you?”

She sighed. “Do you really think I wanted you growing up like this? I did everything I could before you were born. And then I just prayed that it wouldn’t be passed on to you. But of course, I knew it would be. When I was pregnant with you, I went to fortune-tellers and gypsies and all those charlatans, hoping one of them could help me reverse the curse. But none of them could.”

“Curse?” I stared hard at her. It was the first time I’d ever heard it referred to as a curse. Usually it was just “the thing.” The thing I got, somehow, when she was pregnant with me. “But why did you say that Dad—”

She looked away. “We’ve been over this before. I don’t know what it is. I did a lot of stupid things, though, before I knew I was going to have you. One of those things was being involved with your father. You know it started around the same time I met him. Maybe … I don’t know. But I do know that there’s a good side to it, too.”

“Good?” She always insisted this, and yeah, she was right. Sometimes, every once in a while, we could juggle our futures and prevent bad things from happening. But ninety-nine percent of it sucked. That cool one percent never seemed worth it.

“Look, I’m tired. Can you please—”

“But what could Dad have done? And why does this girl know about it? What if she knows how to fix—”

“She doesn’t.” My mother cut me off, fuming. She leaned back in her bed. “And I said I’m tired.”

That was one problem with us communicating. We could have whole conversations without them ever taking place, but so many topics were completely closed to discussion. My dad was one of them. Nan was better about it, but every time I asked her how Mom and I ended up this way, I got the same story. My mom was normal until she was my age. She was pregnant and planning to marry my dad that summer. And then, something changed. Something intervened. This illness, this curse, whatever it was. It tore everything apart. By the end of the summer, my dad was gone and my mother, six months pregnant with me, had locked herself in her bedroom.

Nan opened the door to Mom’s bedroom then. Her eyes focused on the net and dripping bucket before anything else. She gasped at the water puddling on the hardwood. “This is not a bait shop!” she said to me, disappointed, and suddenly I had that feeling. The prickling feeling on the back of my neck, whenever something big was about to happen. I whirled around and Mom must have felt it, too, because her eyes were wider than silver dollars and her face paler than its normal pale.

My grandmother stepped toward the staircase, muttering something about how I needed to be more responsible and how she was always cleaning up after me like I was some three-year-old, and the entire scene flashed before my eyes.

You will hear her muffled groans as she slips on a puddle of salt water and falls down the stairwell. You will rush to the top of the stairs and slip once yourself on the water you spilled. She will be dead before you get there. You will see the pool of blood already—

I’m not sure how I ended up at the top of the stairs. I slipped twice on the salt water and kicked up the worn braided throw rug on my way, but before I could take even one breath I was beside Nan. She’d just begun to lose her balance on the top step and I saw her bare feet slipping out from under her. She turned her head toward me with a frightened look in her eyes, her mouth shaped as if letting out a silent scream, at the same time I moved toward her. I reached out and grabbed her by the upper arm, using, in my overexcitement, far too much force than common sense would dictate I should use with her. When I pulled her up toward my chest, toward safety, there was a sickening popping sound.

But she was safe. I hoisted her in my arms to the other side of the banister and set her down on steady ground, while she let out a little terrified squeak. “My arm,” she said.

It hung down at her side, limp. She tried to lift it but winced. The cycling began at once in a torrent, a hailstorm thudding against my eye sockets, but I knew for sure that her arm was broken. Despite the pain in my head, I sighed with relief. The alternative was a lot worse.

My mother stood in the doorway to her room, clutching the side of her head with one of her hands and wincing a little despite a small, contradictory smile on her face. “See?” she said to me. “The good side.”

If I really wanted to give myself a headache, I can think back to what exactly it was that put Nan’s life in danger. I wouldn’t have dripped water up the stairs, making them slick, if I hadn’t been so rattled by my talk with Taryn. I wouldn’t have gotten rattled by talking to Taryn if I hadn’t met her on the boardwalk the day I was supposed to save Emma. I wouldn’t have gone fishing if I hadn’t lost my job and had nothing better to do. I wouldn’t have lost my job if it hadn’t been for Taryn.

Taryn, with her innocent angel face, had already wrought havoc on my life. That was enough of a reason to forget about her.

Instead, though my mind was again screaming with visions being threaded out and replaced, the one thing it kept hitching on was her. Nan was safe now. Taryn had the power to make me feel normal somehow. Being with her felt right. And she was the only person in the world who knew what I had. So what if she’d somehow deluded herself into believing her grandmother caused it?

Maybe her grandmother
had
caused it. Maybe Taryn was telling the truth. Why would she lie about that? What else did she know?

I sat in the hospital room with Nan while her cast set, itching to get out of there and find some answers. The vision of her at the bottom of the steps was nothing more than an image from a vivid nightmare. It was realer than if I’d just imagined it, but now when I thought of her death, I saw her back in the old recliner, dozing peacefully into oblivion. The thought was a pile of bricks off my chest, yeah, but my hands shook and my mouth tasted sour, thinking of what new bricks would be laid down, one by one, as the images settled. Right now, all I could see was this: red velvet, LUVR, powdered sugar. I heard a tick-tick-ticking-ticking sound.

I really hoped my new future didn’t suck.

Nan sat on the hospital bed, looking so fragile and small in the fluorescent light. Her bones were delicate twigs, so it was no surprise I’d broken her arm in two places. She needed one of those giant casts that covered everything from wrist to underarm. It looked mega-uncomfortable. “Don’t worry yourself, honey bunny,” she said to me. “If you can just help me pick tomatoes when we get home? That was what I was heading out to do when …”

“Oh. Yeah. No problem.”

She put her hand on mine and patted it. I was supposed to be there to soothe her, but as always, she was the one doing the soothing.

“Nan, it was—you were going to—” I started to explain, but she raised a finger to shut me up. She’d come to accept our weirdness without question.

“I understand,” she said. “No explanation needed.”

The cycling still whirred through my brain a mile a minute, making all the outcomes impossible to see. I guess it was pretty obvious to Nan that something big was up, considering I was resting my head in my hands, massaging it to lessen the pain. I would bet a thousand dollars that back home, my mom was doing the exact same thing.

“Why does Mom never want to talk about Dad?” I asked.

“Too painful for her,” she said, sticking out her foot to rein in her massive leather purse on the floor. Her first attempt to hook it failed, so I grabbed it for her. She reached inside and pulled out a few hard candies in yellow wrappers. They were covered in specks of dust like they had been there a while. From the time I was a kid, she had a never-ending supply of those candies on hand. I think I sucked on them continuously from when I was in preschool until I learned they would put me in dentures by age fifty. I stopped eating them, then. Seemed like every pleasure in my life got sucked away by this “curse.” “I need a butterscotch,” Nan said. “Want one?”

“No. You didn’t know him?” I asked, already knowing the answer. I’d asked her before. When she murmured yes, I said, “I thought he was the reason we’re like this. That’s what she told me whenever I asked. I would say, ‘Mom, why can we see the future?’, and she would say, ‘Maybe it has something to do with your father.’ But she wouldn’t say anything else, so I didn’t know what to think. I thought that his blood poisoned us or something. And so I’d ask you, and you would tell me that my father was a good man in a bad situation. She wanted me to hate him so I would accept he was the reason for this and wouldn’t ask any questions. But you didn’t think that was fair, right?”

She removed her bifocals and massaged her eyes. Without her glasses, she looked like a completely different person. “Wow. You’ve certainly been thinking a lot about this, Nick.”

It wasn’t a direct answer, but I could tell she agreed with my assessment. “Today, someone told me something.…”

She stared at me. “Told you what?”

“I was told this fortune-teller on the boardwalk made us this way. Is that true?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Finally she pressed her lips together. “Could you scratch my left shoulder blade? I have an awful itch there.”

I stood up, reached behind the pillow she was propped against, and scratched her back. The line of her shoulder blade was so sharp it could cut through her T-shirt.

“The weirdest thing happened when I shook her hand, though. Just being near her, I feel calmer,” I said. “But when I touched her hand, I could think clearly. I couldn’t see the future. I felt—I think I felt what normal was like.”

“Whose hand? The fortune-teller?”

“No. This girl. Her granddaughter. So it made me think that this fortune-teller knows something.” I rubbed my eyes. They felt sore. “Also. It’s crazy, but I think I’m in love with her.”

“Who? The fortune-teller?”

I sighed. “The girl, Nan. The girl. My whole future is tied to hers now, I think. I feel like I know her. Like, really well. I know her favorite color. I know about the birthmark on her—” I stopped. Too much information. Nan just smiled at me as if she understood the whole thing. “But ever since I met her, things have started to turn bad.”

Nan cocked her head. “Bad?”

“I can’t explain it, but the future is changed. Monumentally. It started with meeting that girl. It led to you falling down the stairs, but I get the feeling there’s more. Mom and I haven’t made it out yet, but something is just wrong. The girl is going to hurt me. Maybe she’s like a drug. Bad for me, but I’m already addicted. Probably because I think she has the answers to why I’m like this, or because she’s beautiful, or because I’m stupid and I like asking for trouble.”

Nan shrugged. “Maybe a little of all those things. But how do you know that she’s responsible for all that?”

“I don’t, but I also don’t know if a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas,” I muttered, then threw up my hands. “She may be indirectly responsible, but I don’t know anything for sure. As usual.”

“Look, honey, I don’t know what’s true anymore. Your mother used to be a very free spirit. Funny to think that when she was your age, I had trouble keeping her home at night. The day she graduated from high school was the day she told me she was pregnant with you. She was so happy. She had such plans. She was going to marry your father and move inland and start a curio shop. And then, one day, in the summer, I remember it so clearly … you know all this, though.”

I nodded. “This thing couldn’t have just happened to us, though, right? There’s got to be a reason.”

She nodded sadly. “I wish I knew, honey bunny.”

I thought about it some more as my mind slowed to a dull thrumming. Some things did just happen. People developed weird diseases. Bridges crumbled. The good died young. Crap like that. And nothing, nobody caused it. All my life, I’d never dug too deep because I thought our curse was likely one of those things. And maybe it was.

But if there was a reason for it, I had to find out.

And I had a good idea where to start.