Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,21

upstairs intending to take a shower but stopped as I was gathering my towel and things and threw them against the shower curtain. My toothbrush made a little chip in the ceramic on the tub, almost a perfect square. I sat there for the rest of the night staring at it, resisting the script, which kept telling me to get myself clean. It hurt like hell, but I’d fight everything that was in the script, with every ounce of strength that I had. That useless, piece-of-crap script that was leading Nan to an early death.

I awoke the next day, knowing I wouldn’t follow whatever the script had laid out for me. It had me hanging around the house, moping about Emma and feeling guilty. But that could wait. Now, more than ever, I needed to try to throw the future off course.

The clues from my memory told me that Nan had fallen down the stairs while bringing—or taking away—my mother’s breakfast tray. So I decided that I would have to do it. But I met my mom at the top of the stairs. For the first time in I don’t know how long, she was out of bed. She was wearing slippers and a flannel robe despite the early-morning temperature being at least eighty.

“I’ll eat downstairs,” she said, brushing past me.

“Wha?” The shock made me lose my vocal capacity.

“What?” she asked, turning and staring at me like I was the one who’d suddenly decided to make an appearance on the lower level of our house after years of seclusion in my bedroom. “This is my house, too.”

Sure it was, but I could count on one hand the number of times she’d come downstairs in my lifetime. I think the last time, the house was on fire. “You know about Nan,” I said as I set the tray down on the kitchen table.

She took a bite of her toast. “Yes.”

“If you eat downstairs, that ought to fix it.”

She shrugged. “Fix one thing, another breaks. I’m so tired of this.”

“I know, but we can’t let this go.”

She nodded slowly. “So did that change things?”

I tried to think of Nan’s death. There she was, lying at the bottom of the stairs. “No.”

My mother squeezed her eyes closed. “How could it not? I said I was going to eat all my meals downstairs, so—”

I concentrated on the picture in my mind. Then I noticed that the remains of my mother’s meal were no longer surrounding Nan’s crumpled, fragile body. So she would still fall, just not carrying the tray. Great. My mother must have noticed that at the same time I began to say, “It doesn’t matter. She still—”

“Still what?” Nan appeared in the kitchen. She took one look at the burnt eggs and toast I’d made for my mom and smiled. “To what do we owe the pleasure of you cooking, honey bunny? And why are you downstairs, Moira?”

“How could you tell it was my cooking?” I asked, but I knew the answer the second I asked. I burn everything.

“You burn everything.”

It was true. I never cooked because every time I got the urge to, I’d think forward to the vile end result and give up. Nothing about being able to see my future could stop me from sucking at cooking. Actually, it didn’t stop me from sucking at a lot of things.

Mom and I looked at each other. She nodded. She understood the plan.

That was the cool thing about us both being able to see our futures. Sometimes we could have whole conversations without them ever taking place. In my head, I saw Mom pulling me into the living room, telling me, Well, we need to change things up as much as possible. Go off script. And I said to her, I have been, but it’s not helping. She said, Well, we just need to change the right thing. It could be something really small. She grabbed her head just then, so I said, But how will you take it? Because I know her headaches are way worse than mine when the cycling starts. At least, her moaning and carrying on is way worse. And she said, I don’t know. I have to try.

I nodded back. But the flipping had already started and my head was beginning to ache. This was going to be a long day.

I burst outside into the humid air and gulped it in like a fish. It was already late morning; my lifeguarding job would have had me