Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,33
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