Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,40
it.”
“It’s not possible,” she said firmly. She took the book and closed it, then locked it with the key. “But Grandma warns people. She doesn’t just take all their money and give them a Touch. She has seen that, while some of these Touches perform miracles, some of them destroy people’s lives. She tells them that sometimes a person’s greatest desire can be the most terrible curse.”
Of course we would have the luck to fall into the “curse” category. “So let me get this straight. My mother paid so that she could be this way?”
She nodded. “Every one of these Touches is something really cool. Something people would kill for. And long ago my ancestors realized that certain people would not only risk their lives to be Touched but they’d also fork over huge sums of money. Charging a lot also helps to ensure a person is serious about it. Grandma doesn’t want just anyone waltzing in and getting a Touch. When people put together that much money, they’re usually serious. Plus it pays her bills.”
I leaned my head against the table and muttered my mom’s name. “Why?” I whispered, and no sooner had I done that then I saw the answer. I saw my mom, explaining, tears running down her face. I was so scared when I found out I was pregnant. And there was so much uncertainty with your father. He said he loved me, but I couldn’t be sure. When he asked me to marry him, I was so afraid that one day he would leave me, like my father left your grandmother. So I pulled together my life’s savings—a thousand dollars—and went to her. The first thing I saw when I got the Touch was me, alone. Your father was gone. And then the worst thing—I saw I’d given this curse to you. I destroyed every chance of us having a normal—
At that point I started to green-elephant. I didn’t want to hear her whining anymore. She knew. All this time I was searching for answers, and she already knew. It was her fault. At that moment, I didn’t want to see her again.
“What is that?” Taryn asked. “The green elephant?”
I groaned through the pain, through the memory that came up at that moment. Really, anything would work, but I started saying that because when I was seven or eight, I bought my mom this necklace for Christmas that had a jade elephant pendant. I bought it for a buck at school, so it wasn’t real jade, but she wore it every day. On bad days, when my head really hurt, I’d sit with her and she’d hold me to her and I would see nothing but that green elephant, with its trunk in the air. It meant good fortune. Good fortune.
She didn’t wear it anymore. It was probably in a landfill somewhere. That was one of the few times I’d experienced cycling because of something she did. One day the cable had gone out, so she reached behind the set to jiggle the wires, and the necklace’s black cord, which had been fraying a bit, got caught on a screw and snapped. The jade elephant fell to the ground and the trunk broke off in a pile of green chalk dust. That day, it was as if every future memory I’d have of my mom changed just a bit and felt slightly strange, like new shoes that needed breaking in. In each of those visions, the elephant was gone from her neck.
I leaned back in the chair, feeling something close to the numbness I’d get after a night of bad cycling, when my head had been thrashed so much it couldn’t feel anything anymore. “It’s just a nonsense phrase. It doesn’t mean anything. I say it to keep the future memories from invading. To calm my mind. If my brain is concentrating on something else, it doesn’t have time to dwell on the future.”
Taryn nodded as if it wasn’t the stupidest thing in the world, and I loved her for that.
The picture of my mom sobbing kept invading, and I pushed it away. She was lucky we could carry on conversations in our minds, because if I’d been in the same room together, I didn’t know what I might have done or said. “So, what other Touches are in there? What else can this book do?”
She flipped through the pages. “Like I said, there’s only a handful of them left. Um, this one is Poison