Текст книги "Touched"

Автор книги: Cyn Balog

Соавторы: Cyn Balog
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

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.

I’d wanted to seek Taryn out the minute I got home, but by the time Nan’s cast was set and we found someone willing to drive us back to Seaside, it was after ten. We didn’t have any money for a cab, so one of the orderlies who had just gotten off work offered to drive us. The guy had a shifty look to him, like a snake, and a vanity license plate that read LUVR. Plus his ancient Pinto smelled like pot, but Nan was so drugged up she kept beaming at him and calling him a “nice young man.”

She also wouldn’t stop muttering to me about how the tomatoes needed to come in. She was probably so out of it she didn’t realize how late it was. But I went outside with a bucket and a flashlight anyway and picked as many as I could from the little plot of earth by the side of the garage. I knew I’d have other things I wanted to do in the morning.

All night long, I had visions of Emma. With everything else going on, I’d managed to bury most of the thoughts of her that were lingering in my brain. But when the lights went down and I lay in bed, they surfaced like jellyfish. All I saw was a once beautiful face, bloated and misshapen. I could see those cold blue lips. In my vision, her lips opened and this eerie whisper came out: Why? Why? When the light of day finally streamed through my window, I saw these things: smiling potato, ugly blue dog, fingertip kiss, bad lemonade. The constant sound of clicking, like teeth chattering, felt buried as deep within me as my heartbeat, and when I shook my head it only seemed to get louder. I could smell something sweet in the air, like sugar doughnuts, so when I got downstairs I was confused to find Nan cooking eggs and bacon.

Two days had passed since Emma’s accident, and I knew those night visions were my subconscious, telling me I needed to go the Reeses’ house, to offer condolences. Even if they hated me. Whatever. It was the civil thing to do.

I remembered that Taryn had said the Reeses lived next door to her. So after breakfast, I rode my bike to Lafayette, where I found a bungalow near Taryn’s house. I saw a lady in a pink terry housecoat, absently watering a bunch of dying flowers in front of the bungalow. Her aim was totally off; most of the water was falling on the white pebbles and rushing down the driveway, into the gutter. I knew that had to be Mrs. Reese.

I stopped in front of her, not doing a very good job of ignoring that Taryn’s house was right next door. It was closed up and looked empty. I wondered where she was, what she was doing, when I saw the smiling potato again. I shook it from my head and concentrated on the frail lady who was now staring at me. “Um. Mrs. Reese?”

She nodded. She looked like she was my mom’s age, and her blond hair was in a tangle on her head, as if she hadn’t run a brush through it in days, which was like my mom, too. She still had a tan, though. She’d probably loved the beach up until two days ago. “Yes?”

“I’m Nick Cross. I was one of the lifeguards on duty when your daughter … um.” I couldn’t bring myself to say more. Her expression never changed, as if she wasn’t even listening. “I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

“I remember you.” She looked down at the flowers, and I braced myself for the attack. But it never came. I sighed with relief before she spoke, when I realized what she was going to say. “It’s not your fault. I only wish you had been there instead of the other one.” Her voice was fragile. “He shouldn’t have been there.”

I knew that. I knew that, and should have said something to someone. But I didn’t. What she didn’t know was that I was responsible. I stood there, trying to think of something else to say that could be of comfort, but guilt ate away the words. The You Wills just had me fumbling around for a few moments and turning awkwardly away, so very me, even though I’d been envisioning this confrontation for the past few hours. I’d come up with better words, then, but now they failed me. I caught my eyes trailing once again to Taryn’s house. “I live on Seventh. If there’s anything I can do, I just wanted to—”

“Would you like to come in? Have some lemonade?”

I jumped back to reality and planted my eyes on Mrs. Reese. She ran a suspicious eye over me and pointed inside her house. The You Wills had me halfway down the block. “I …” Lemonade. I took her daughter from her, and she wanted to give me lemonade. “All right.”

I followed her inside, lamely, all the while thinking that I’d rather be anyplace else. She led me through the kitchen, which was painted a cheerful lemon yellow but still seemed sad, because it smelled like rotting garbage. There were drawings covering every bit of real estate on the fridge, each one signed by the little girl. I swallowed as I passed them, hoping the next room would be free of memories of her. But it wasn’t. I nearly tripped over a puppet-show stage in the living room, and when Mrs. Reese sat me down on a worn lime-green sofa, I immediately faced a wall of photos. Dozens of Emmas, baby Emmas with little hair and no teeth, toddler Emmas in overalls, little-girl Emmas in pretty dresses and pigtails … they all stared at me, smiling. My throat was sticky and dry by the time Mrs. Reese placed a glass in my hands. I lifted it to my lips. The lemonade tasted strange, like artificial sweetener. Emma’s mom noticed my stare, and her eyes trailed over to the picture wall, but for only a moment. Then she looked down. “Where did you say you lived?”

“On Seventh.” I pointed, but realized that where I was pointing was in the opposite direction. “As I was saying, if you need help with anything, I’m happy to—”

“Seventh. Where you were lifeguard?”

I nodded.

She nodded almost imperceptibly and sat down next to me. I could tell she had other things on her mind because she sat uncomfortably close and I had to move over. “I loved that beach most of all. My grandparents had a house there. That’s why we went there. I know it’s a drive, and why should we drive when there’s a beach just up the street? But we got badges for Seaside Park because of the family atmosphere. It’s not as crowded, too, so I thought Emma would be safer.”

She trailed off, and in those silent moments my stomach twisted and turned until I thought something would snap. I really had nothing to say after that, because I hated myself. She thought Emma would be safer at my beach. And what had I done? A thousand Emmas watched me, silently smiling, like she enjoyed seeing me unnerved. The biggest one was a portrait of the whole family. It looked pretty recent. Emma’s father had gray hair and looked much older than her mother. Emma was sitting close to a boy who had to be around my age. “You have a son?” I asked.

“Yes. He was away at college. He left last week for Penn State. But he’s coming back for the service.” She smiled at the picture of him. I noticed she had a crumpled tissue in her palm. “Emma was very special to him. They did everything together. She was devastated when he left for school. And now … well, my son’s the one who is devastated. He blames himself for not being here.”

I looked at the glass of lemonade. It was still full. “I don’t want to take up any of your time. Just wanted to offer help, if you need it. I’ll give you my phone number.”

She got a pen and paper and I quickly scribbled my information on it. She whispered thank you as she led me to the door. By then, the gnawing guilt in the pit of my stomach had done a number on my insides. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed and die.

Suddenly I heard the tick-tick-tick of the gears of a ten-speed bicycle, and a flash of blond hair and pale white skin whirred by. I jerked my head up in time to see Taryn round the corner onto Ocean, heading toward the Heights. Immediately the You Wills told me to follow her, but that was a given. I couldn’t not. Even if she was bad for me, I needed to find out what she knew.

Mrs. Reese came out and started to water some other patch of asphalt while I took my bike and followed. All the while, the tingles popped up on my shoulders, like it was so obvious I was chasing after my doom.