Текст книги "Touched"

Автор книги: Cyn Balog

Соавторы: Cyn Balog
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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.

I was eight the first time I was called Crazy Cross. It was by a chubby red-haired girl named Carrie Weldon who lived next door and had only a day earlier come over for Oreos and milk. Nan had beamed, excited because I had found a “nice friend,” as she had called Carrie. But the next day, my new nickname was all over the playground. Carrie had told everyone at school that my family was a bunch of monsters.

Until that moment, I’d thought the kids at school were the weird ones for having mothers who would walk them to the bus stop and come to their holiday concerts. To me, that was a job for Nan. Nan was also responsible for feeding me, clothing me … well, basically for everything. She did the same for my mother.

When Bill said, “Get help before you end up like your mother,” he really knew only a part of what being “like my mother” meant. He knew that my mom was a recluse and never left the stuffy second floor of our cottage. Only Nan really understood what was up with my mother and me. Most people would just cross to the other side of the street whenever they saw us coming. They thought we were harmless, but they didn’t want to take any chances. They figured we had something going on, but they weren’t sure what.

I trudged into our house, stuffing the pink sheet of paper from Bill into the pocket of my SPBP Windbreaker. Three months. Three months I’d managed to keep myself together, keep that nice, comfortable future intact. And it was all gone in the blink of an eye. It had been foolish to think I could keep it. My head still throbbed, and I hadn’t yet been able to fully unclench my fists. I kept them in tight balls at my sides. As the door slammed, three competing thoughts popped into my head: spilled milk, clown hair, and Bruce Willis. A You Will sliced through them, and I braced myself for the sound I dreaded.

Immediately, I heard it. Moaning from upstairs. It was the same low buzz of anguish that Carrie had heard ten years ago. Often, it wasn’t bad, and I could block it out. But on the worst days, it nearly drove me mad, echoing in my nightmares.

Nan was playing Journey in the kitchen, which she usually did to drown out my mom. She had a dish towel in her hands, and something that smelled strongly of fish was sizzling in a fry pan behind her, right under a row of tomatoes and cucumbers ripening on the windowsill. She must have been working in the garden today, judging from the circles of dirt on her bare knees. There were bobby pins holding down three almost-fluorescent orange curls at the base of her forehead, over a big, toothy grin. Though the hair was shockingly different, the smile was a constant. You’d think we’d won the lottery with the way Nan smiled all the time.

She caught me staring at her hair and sighed. “Don’t say a word. Must have picked up the wrong color at the supermarket. You know how my eyes are. I’ve already bought new color. I’ll dye it back this week, when I—”

There was a moan, like the hum of an engine. Nan swallowed, but the smile returned, bigger than before.

“How long has she been going on like that?” I asked, even though I already knew. Mom and I were like two sides of a coin. Whenever I cycled, she did, too. Whenever my future spun out of control, her future, which was tied to mine, did, too.

“Since lunchtime. You must have done a doozy.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it. Mom moaned again. It made my eardrums rattle. “Why is she so melodramatic? It doesn’t hurt that bad anymore.”

Nan clucked her tongue and turned down the radio. The band, her favorite, was singing something about holding on to a dream. When I was younger, she used to sing the song to me before I went to sleep. She leaned in as if telling me a secret. “You know how your mom thinks. Why just react when you can overreact?”

She said that all the time. Usually it got a laugh out of me, but now I looked at the ground. “Nan, I screwed up something big. A girl died. I killed her.”

She drew in a breath and crossed herself. Her voice was gentle. “Oh, dear. How?”

“I got sidetracked. It looked like someone was in danger, and by the time I finished with her, the girl I was supposed to save had drowned.”

She exhaled. “You didn’t kill her. You just didn’t save her. There’s a difference.”

“I was supposed to be at my post. And Pedro was—”

“You are always too hard on yourself.”

Her words didn’t comfort me. Because I knew the truth. I gnashed my teeth and dug my fingers into my sides just thinking about it. And then there was the words—You killed our Emma—that echoed in my brain. Her parents, I guessed. “Her parents think I killed her.”

Nan’s eyes narrowed. “They told you that?”

I shook my head. “They will. I’m not sure if they know now, but they will. I saw it in my vision.”

“Your vision? Are you sure? It could have been your imagination. Remember Ginger?”

I nodded. Ginger was the puppy I’d been convinced I was going to get when I was ten. I took him everywhere, and I really loved him … but I never got him. He wasn’t real. Sometimes I would think so much about something, want it so badly, I convinced myself that it was in my future. But those were only things I wanted, and I definitely did not want Emma’s parents hating me.

“Don’t let that bother you, honey bunny. I know you did the best you could.” She whipped my thigh with the dish towel. “Get yourself on course. Give her time to breathe.”

She turned back to the stove and started to season the fish. I realized at that moment that the fish would be too salty, but I didn’t tell her. She didn’t want to know the future, and would usually stop me midsentence whenever I tried to explain anything. Plus, Nan’s life was hard enough, since she constantly had to care for us, so I always tried to tread lightly around her. And I’d like to think I was more sensitive to the living because I could taste the grief that would linger after their deaths. My mother and I both knew Nan would die in just over three years. Despite the many cycles we went through day after day, that was constant. Really, there were only two constants in my life: Mom would never leave her bedroom, and Nan would die in her recliner. She would pass away peacefully, of old age, while watching her soaps. Neither of us had told her that, though, because telling her could change the outcome. And my mother and I figured if there was any nice way to die, that would be it.

Another moan. I looked up the staircase.

Nan, wait—

It wasn’t even a fragment of a vision that popped into my mind that moment. It was just those words, and an overwhelming feeling that racked my entire body with chills. I grabbed the edge of the counter for support, nearly knocking over a milk jug. As I did, I caught a glimpse of the dusty, faded mural that had been under the cabinets ever since I could remember. It said, Heaven’s a little closer in a house by the sea.

Yeah, right.

Your past makes you who you are. You might not remember all of it, but even the things you forget can leave a mark. My future did the same to me. Things I hadn’t experienced yet weighed on my brain like bricks. At any one time, those images of my future would lie in wait somewhere in my brain, waiting for something to happen, something that would call them up. A lot of times, they were just pieces. But because I hadn’t experienced them yet, I couldn’t put them in context. They didn’t make sense. Like the one I saw as I began to loosen my grip on the counter.

The image I saw was me, standing in the dark hallway, looking down the steps, screaming No! In that vision, I couldn’t catch my breath. I’d never felt that pain before. Like everything inside me was being sucked out with a straw.

Definitely not good.

After the pain subsided, I let out a string of curses. I threw the jug to the ground, and milk splattered everywhere. Then I tore at my hair until I heard it ripping at the roots, scraped at the skin on my face until it felt red and raw. I hated myself.

It was stupid to think I could hold on to one future for longer than a few months. But I’d liked that future. I’d liked the way I died in it. I couldn’t remember much after playing in the sand with my grandson; I’d just gone back to the beach house, collapsed into my favorite rocking chair, and drifted off. That memory was like a dream now. Who knew what kind of death I’d have?

I’d screwed everything up.

Nan stared at me, her eyes warm with understanding, though she really didn’t have any idea. She came over and wrapped her arms around me, squeezed me, but I didn’t squeeze back because her bones felt small, breakable, like twigs. The top of her head barely reached my chest, so she had to bend her neck all the way back to look into my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” I answered. Really, it was everything, but my head was still cycling dully, which made even talking hurt.

The lucky and the brave, Bruce Willis, rotting inside.

I helped Nan clean up the stupid mess I’d made. She tried to swat me on the backside with the towel again, but this time I anticipated it and skirted away. I climbed the stairs, which were covered in worn green shag carpet. Since all she had was a measly monthly social security check, Nan hadn’t brought anything new into the house in decades, save for a bunch of crucifixes and worthless statues of saints, which she put on every available surface or wall. All the furniture was from when she was growing up here in the sixties, Formica, with shapes that looked like germs under a microscope everywhere. My sheets had dump trucks and airplanes on them, and the matching curtains were so worn, they did little to block out the morning light. Not that I cared. I didn’t have friends who’d see my room, and I never slept much, anyway.

When I reached her door, there was silence. I stood outside it longer than I had to. Going in there was never fun. I knocked and whispered, “Mom?”, then went inside.

The room was hot and dark and stank of incense and sweat. Mom was lying on her stomach on the bed in boxers and a tank. She’s young as far as moms go. I think she’d be considered a MILF if there weren’t thick dark rings around her eyes that matched the color of her waist-length hair, which was pulled up in a messy loop on top of her head. When I looked at her, I could almost see her resemblance to Nan. They have the same deep-set, fathomless eyes, the same soft, even voice. They laugh the same, boldly, though my mother’s laugh is always tinged with bitterness and irony. They have the same thin lips and I suppose they might even have the same smile, but I didn’t know my mother’s smile. I’d never seen it. I’d always wondered what else she would have in common with my grandmother, had things been different. Would she make great pancakes? Find pleasure in things like gardening and weeding? Go to church every Sunday?

Would she smile?

I kissed the top of her head as she picked up the remote beside her and turned down the volume on the ancient TV set. I looked over at it. Die Hard One or Two, I couldn’t tell which. She was a slave to action movies—they helped take the edge off her cycling.

“Bad day,” I sighed.

Her eyes drooped. “So I felt.”

“Sorry.”

“I know about the girl.”

“Well,” I muttered, “you can see the future, so that doesn’t make you Einstein.”

She sighed. “Do you feel it, too? Like things are going bad?”

I snorted. A girl was dead because of me. It was hard to imagine life going to a worse place than we were at right then, but yeah, I knew what she meant. It was an odd feeling, as if two totally different sensations were competing within me: hunger with queasiness, anticipation with fear. “But what?” Maybe she’d had time to think about it.

She reached down to the foot of her bed and picked up a copy of Star magazine. “My horoscope says this is a terrible day to make changes to the status quo. So you picked one hell of a day to—”

“Sorry.” I snatched the paper from her hands. My mom loves—no, worships—all things unseen. Good-luck charms, horoscopes, superstitions, all that crap. I think that if our seeing the future wasn’t so complicated, like if we could just see one version of the future, and it could never be altered, maybe she would have given it a rest. But as it was, she was constantly consulting the occult.

I turned and surveyed her lunch tray. She’d downed an entire carafe of coffee, as usual, but only taken nibbles of her sandwich. It sometimes pissed me off how well Nan took care of her, and how useless she was in return. Nan shouldn’t have had to deal with that. In the mirror, I could see her settling into her pillow, watching Bruce Willis tiptoeing down a hallway in bare feet and a wifebeater. There were little slips of fortune-cookie fortunes stuck in the edge of the mirror, hundreds of them. Mom didn’t like to toss them away. The one I saw said, Love is for the lucky and the brave.

I shook my head. Luck and bravery were two things that didn’t exactly flow through this house. I thought of the day I learned I had something that made me different. I was four. Nan was making me lunch and I was sitting at the table. I could see the can of grape juice concentrate rolling down the counter and splattering over the linoleum, so I stood there to catch it. If Nan was worried about me, which she must have been, she hid it well. She just smiled and called me her hero. I used to be proud of it. I used to call it my superpower.

“Something with the staircase,” Mom said. “Right?”

I nodded. I’d seen that, and something with blood. But I didn’t want to say it. “But what?”

“I don’t know. I need time to sort it out. Are you on script?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s strong. A strong, bad feeling.”

I agreed. Blood was rarely a good thing to see in a vision. “Do you want me to go off?”

“Maybe. You have track tryouts tonight?”

“I wasn’t going to go. I don’t think I’m going to make the team. And too much has happened.” I knew what she was thinking even without consulting the script. “You think I should go?”

“Well, it might help change things.”

“All right.”

She took the magazine in her hands and began to page through it. “What’s for dinner?”

It was a running joke between us, asking each other questions we already knew the answer to. When I was a kid I used to spend hours trying to come up with really disgusting answers to the “What’s for dinner?” question, like sautéed horse guts and fried iguana feet, but now I barely smirked. It had been a long time since I’d found it funny.