Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,9
so melodramatic? It doesn’t hurt that bad anymore.”
Nan clucked her tongue and turned down the radio. The band, her favorite, was singing something about holding on to a dream. When I was younger, she used to sing the song to me before I went to sleep. She leaned in as if telling me a secret. “You know how your mom thinks. Why just react when you can overreact?”
She said that all the time. Usually it got a laugh out of me, but now I looked at the ground. “Nan, I screwed up something big. A girl died. I killed her.”
She drew in a breath and crossed herself. Her voice was gentle. “Oh, dear. How?”
“I got sidetracked. It looked like someone was in danger, and by the time I finished with her, the girl I was supposed to save had drowned.”
She exhaled. “You didn’t kill her. You just didn’t save her. There’s a difference.”
“I was supposed to be at my post. And Pedro was—”
“You are always too hard on yourself.”
Her words didn’t comfort me. Because I knew the truth. I gnashed my teeth and dug my fingers into my sides just thinking about it. And then there was the words—You killed our Emma—that echoed in my brain. Her parents, I guessed. “Her parents think I killed her.”
Nan’s eyes narrowed. “They told you that?”
I shook my head. “They will. I’m not sure if they know now, but they will. I saw it in my vision.”
“Your vision? Are you sure? It could have been your imagination. Remember Ginger?”
I nodded. Ginger was the puppy I’d been convinced I was going to get when I was ten. I took him everywhere, and I really loved him … but I never got him. He wasn’t real. Sometimes I would think so much about something, want it so badly, I convinced myself that it was in my future. But those were only things I wanted, and I definitely did not want Emma’s parents hating me.
“Don’t let that bother you, honey bunny. I know you did the best you could.” She whipped my thigh with the dish towel. “Get yourself on course. Give her time to breathe.”
She turned back to the stove and started to season the fish. I realized at that moment that the fish would be too salty, but I didn’t tell her. She didn’t want to know the future, and would usually stop me midsentence whenever I tried to explain anything. Plus, Nan’s life was hard enough, since she constantly had to care for us, so I always tried to tread lightly around her. And I’d like to think I was more sensitive to the living because I could taste the grief that would linger after their deaths. My mother and I both knew Nan would die in just over three years. Despite the many cycles we went through day after day, that was constant. Really, there were only two constants in my life: Mom would never leave her bedroom, and Nan would die in her recliner. She would pass away peacefully, of old age, while watching her soaps. Neither of us had told her that, though, because telling her could change the outcome. And my mother and I figured if there was any nice way to die, that would be it.
Another moan. I looked up the staircase.
Nan, wait—
It wasn’t even a fragment of a vision that popped into my mind that moment. It was just those words, and an overwhelming feeling that racked my entire body with chills. I grabbed the edge of the counter for support, nearly knocking over a milk jug. As I did, I caught a glimpse of the dusty, faded mural that had been under the cabinets ever since I could remember. It said, Heaven’s a little closer in a house by the sea.
Yeah, right.
Your past makes you who you are. You might not remember all of it, but even the things you forget can leave a mark. My future did the same to me. Things I hadn’t experienced yet weighed on my brain like bricks. At any one time, those images of my future would lie in wait somewhere in my brain, waiting for something to happen, something that would call them up. A lot of times, they were just pieces. But because I hadn’t experienced them yet, I couldn’t put them in context. They didn’t make sense. Like the one I saw as I began to loosen my grip on the counter.
The image I saw was me, standing