Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,31
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