by Linda Gerber
Jake stood awkwardly for a second and then stooped to help her. “Where you parked?”
Michelle gave him one of those looks, sizing him up and, apparently finding him worthy, inclined her head, granting him permission to lend his assistance. “This way.” She gestured with her head. “About halfway up the row.”
“This is really not necessary,” I said, but both of them ignored me.
Michelle led the way to her car and Jake walked close, one arm guiding, but not quite touching me. Neither one of them said a word. At least not out loud. The look on Michelle’s face spoke volumes, though. I didn’t miss the curious way she watched Jake, or the speculation in her eyes when she looked at me.
When we reached her car, Jake helped Michelle lower me into the front seat. I didn’t really need their help to sit, thank you, but at that point it seemed easier to just go along with it than to argue.
After I was situated to her satisfaction, Michelle straightened and held her hand out to Jake. “Thanks for your help.”
For half a heartbeat he just looked at her standing there and I wondered if he would leave her dangling the way she had done to him by the planter, but then he took her hand and shook it briskly. “No problem. Hope she’s okay.”
Michelle’s frown showed how far away from okay she believed me to be. “Thanks,” she said. And then almost as an afterthought she added, “It was nice to meet you.”
He just smiled and as he did, his eyes met mine like we were sharing an inside joke. Then he walked away.
“Tell me everything,” Michelle demanded as we pulled out of the parking lot, eyes alight. “Who was that guy?”
I watched as he disappeared behind the parked cars a couple rows over. “You know as much as I do.”
“So what happened? What’s wrong? Have you been crying?”
Images of the vision flashed through my head. I closed my eyes, hoping they would disappear. “It’s nothing.”
She didn’t look so sure, but she was willing to let the question drop to move on to more important matters. “So,” she said, “Jake’s pretty hot.”
I let myself smile at that. “I guess so.”
“You guess so? Are you kidding?” She slid me a sideways look. “So really, you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. Just fine.
When we pulled up to the curb in front of my house, all the windows were completely dark. By the way Michelle was frowning, I wondered if she could tell how empty it was inside. Not unoccupied empty. Broken shell empty. And not just when my dad was out of town, either. He’d been traveling more since the accident, but even when he was home, he was gone. You could see it in his eyes whenever he looked at me; he would rather be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Not that I blamed him.
“Whoa,” Michelle said. “Don’t look now, but we’ve got an audience.”
Sure enough, across the street stood our neighbor Mrs. Briggs in her usual spot—smack in the middle of her huge picture window—her Wonder Woman pose backlit by the front room television. For as long as I can remember, she’s stood in that window, watching our house with the same sour look on her face. I got so used to seeing her there that she’d become a part of the architecture in my mind, like the roofline or the porch columns.
“Should we wave?” Michelle whispered, her hand already rising in parade mode.
I swatted it down. “Don’t.”
She just laughed and waved with the other hand.
“Seriously.”
“Why?” She gave me a sharp look. “What’s going on?”
I wasn’t sure if I could find all the words it would take to explain it to her—if I had the inclination, which I didn’t. I glanced back at my house.
“Wait.” Michelle twisted in her seat to face me. “Your dad’s gone again, isn’t he? He’s got her spying on you.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” I felt in the dark for the door handle. “He just asked her to watch out for me while he’s away.”
“When will he be back?” The pity in her voice was misplaced, as if Dad being gone was the worst thing I had to deal with.
Michelle’s dad owns a construction company in town, so he never has to travel for business and she doesn’t understand the concept. My dad’s a marketing consultant and has clients all over the country, so he’s gone a lot. Before my mom died, Michelle hardly ever noticed when he went out of town. Since I got out of the hospital, it was like her missing-parent radar kicked in. I didn’t have to talk about him being gone. She just knew.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “He’ll be back in the morning.”
She took a moment to digest this. “Do you want me to come in for a little while?”
I forced a laugh. “Would you stop? I’m fine. Really.”
“I could stay with you for—”
“Michelle. Give it a rest.”
She sat quietly for a moment, trailing a finger along the leather wrap on her steering wheel. “So . . . do you think you’ll be up for running in the morning? Because we could take the day off if you need to.”
“I don’t need a day off. I’ll see you at six.” I let myself out of the car and hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder.
Michelle leaned across the passenger seat and looked up at me, eyes searching. “If you’re sure,” she said.
I laughed again and shut the door. “Go, already.”
I watched her drive away, my heart dropping a little as her red taillights disappeared around the corner.
Across the street, Mrs. Briggs hadn’t moved from her spot in the front room window. As annoying as she was, it was strangely comforting to see her standing there, just like always. Even way back when Kyra and I were little I can remember Mrs. Briggs standing watch. We used to curtsy to her or blow kisses or something to let her know we knew she was watching us. I turned and walked to the house, pausing to unlock the front door. It actually felt good to know that there was one thing in my life that had not changed.
4
There are rooms in my house I can’t go into anymore. I don’t mean because those rooms are forbidden. I’m not physically able to enter them because they were hers. My legs start to tremble and my palms sweat and my head hums like a chain saw, shooting pain across my skull.
My mom was really into HGTV. She’d watch shows like Color Splash and Myles of Style and the next thing you knew, she was pulling down curtains to let in the natural light or painting the hallway a vibrant shade of coral.
The front room was one of her pet projects, even though we hardly ever used it. We had a great room at the back of the house where we always hung out, but she wanted a “proper place” to entertain visitors. Not that we had a lot of those—we all kind of kept to ourselves. It’s hard to be outgoing when you’re ashamed.
Mom called the front room “the parlor,” as if we lived in a stately Victorian mansion instead of a tract house in the suburbs. She was always in there—covering a cushion here or adding a flower arrangement there—until she became as much a part of the room as the wingback chair or its matching floral ottoman. Sometimes if I looked just right I could still see her sitting on the couch, thumbing through her House Beautiful magazines. She’d hear me in the doorway and glance up, her eyes hollow and sad. All that designing and she couldn’t do a thing about her daughters.
Inside, I turned the dead bolt with a thunk that echoed through the empty house. As I passed the parlor, I kept my eyes on the speckled pattern of moonlight that danced across the polished wood floor so they wouldn’t accidentally stray to the couch—or to the collection of photos on the wall.
One of my mom’s many decorating ideas was to create a “living wall” in the front hallway—a collection of family photos in matching frames that showed us in various stages of family life. My favorite picture—and the one I couldn’t bring myself to look at anymore—was of Kyra, my mom, and me, taken the summer I turned fifteen. I’d had a sleepover birthday party and my mom had come into my bedroom with us to play cards.
She was in one of her good moods that night. She wore a silk kimono my dad had just brought back for her from a business trip to Japan and her usually perfect hair was pulled back with a clip. We were laughing about something—I don’t know what, because my dad had taken the picture from the doorway unannounced. I loved the spontaneity of it, though. Mom was sitting between Kyra and me, her legs tucked up beneath her. Our heads bent together like we were sharing a secret. Kyra’s hand is half-covering her mouth as if she’s trying to hold on to the laughter. The part I liked most about the picture was the contentment in my mom’s eyes. Like, if only for that moment, she was just where she wanted to be.
I tiptoed to my room, even though there was no one home to hear me, and paused in the silent doorway. In the moonlight, I could just make out the outline of my desk and of the false-bottom flowerpot that sat on the far corner of it. My dad had bought the flowerpot when he was at a flea market with my mom. He thought we could use it in the kitchen to hide emergency cash or an extra set of keys. Mom said it didn’t fit in with the decor and threw the thing away. I felt bad for my dad, so I rescued it from the trash and kept it on my desk to hold loose change. The screw-off bottom section hid other things.
Hesitantly, reluctantly, I crossed to the desk and clicked on the lamp. A small puddle of light washed over the desktop and spilled onto the floor. I pulled out the chair and sat, stalling, stalling until I could make myself reach for the flowerpot. Slowly, I unscrewed the bottom and a handful of folded papers fluttered out. They lay on the desk like little origami nightmares. I drew the latest from my pocket and set it alongside the others and then carefully straightened them all, opening them up to reveal the numbers scrawled across the pages.
The earliest memory I have of the trances is from preschool. I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old, standing obediently next to my mom as the teacher showed her paper after paper filled with numbers I had written. The teacher seemed confused. The handwriting didn’t look like my tiny hand scrawl. I’d correctly worked long strings of equations though I had a hard time counting in class. It didn’t make sense. My mom wouldn’t hear it. She kept insisting I had some kind of gift, just like my big sister, Kyra.
It wasn’t long after that, though, that our parents took both of us to see our first therapist. Everything in his office was bright and colorful and when he spoke to us, he used a perky voice, like Captain Jack or Barney. But we weren’t fooled. We saw the way Mom strangled her handkerchief as she described our writing to the doctor. We saw how Dad sat stiff in his cheery yellow chair and stared out the window.
The doctor sent my sister and me into a room that had a big mirror-window along one wall. In the middle of the room sat a plastic Fisher-Price table surrounded by little yellow-and-blue chairs. On the table lay an assortment of paper and crayons. The doctor asked us if we wanted to write.
We sat on the chairs but we knew better than to pick up the crayons. In those short moments, we learned to be ashamed of the trances. That’s what we heard the doctor call what we did—“trance writing.” We didn’t know what it meant at first, but we did see how our mother’s face crumpled when he said the words. We saw the way she looked at us, her fingers moving over her crucifix. We saw the shame in her eyes. Even though at that time we didn’t understand what kind of power our ability held, we knew. Our gift was no longer a gift. It was a curse.
Opening each paper, I flattened them with my hand. On each one, bold equations had been scrawled in a variety of different handwriting. None of them were mine. I ran my finger over the latest numbers, looking for a clue to their meaning even though I knew I would never find one. Kyra and I had been trying to decipher the writing for years. It just didn’t make sense.
This note was shorter than a lot of the others had been, just three strings of numbers:1 + 1 + 2 + 5 = 9
1 + 5 + 4 + 5 + 2 + 3 + 7 + 5 = 32
3 + 2 = 5
The way the numbers appeared looked like the stuff we saw on the numerology sites Kyra had once followed online. She had learned that in numerology, each number represented a letter, so she thought maybe we could use the numerology system to decipher some kind of message in our writing. The problem was, numerology only assigned number values from one through nine, so several letters could share the same number. That worked great if you were assigning numbers to letters in a word you already knew, but not so much if you were trying to work it backward. There were too many possibilities.
As far as we could tell, the numbers didn’t seem to fit the configuration for a date or a coordinate, either. We still believed the numbers had to mean something, we just didn’t know what it was. Or why they came to us. We both felt like we were supposed to be doing something to prevent the things we saw, but without a clear direction, how were we supposed to do that? Bad things happened and people got hurt and there was nothing we could do.
I folded the notes again and hid them back in the flowerpot, an empty ache gnawing at my chest. I didn’t want the trances back again. I couldn’t stand the responsibility or the pain. For whatever reason, they had stopped once. I needed them to stop again.
Twisting around in my chair, I looked at Kyra’s empty bed against the far wall. Moonlight from the window stretched across the room and rested on it like a spotlight. The bed was made up just the way she left it, except that the quilt she used to keep folded at the foot of the bed was gone and the pillow had long since lost the indent from her head.
My stomach felt hollow, like it did whenever I thought of Kyra being gone, but now another sensation filled the empty space. It felt like desperation. We had always received the trances together. Now I was on my own. It scared me.
Suddenly, I felt like a lost little kid and I longed more than ever for Kyra to come home. I switched off the desk light and, without even bothering to get undressed, curled up on my bed, fighting back the tears. Words from an old nursery rhyme Kyra and I used to sing swirled through my head. I stared at the wall but in my mind I saw Kyra jumping rope out on the playground at our elementary school, singing to the rhythm as the rope swept under her feet.
Two little
Swish!
angels
Swish!
dressed in
Swish!
white
Swish!
try to get to
Swish!
heaven on the
Swish!
end of a kite
My lips moved silently as I finished the song. “The kite string broke and down they fell and instead of heaven, they went to hell.”
I squeezed my eyes tight against the fresh tears that were forming. Kyra always liked that song. I never understood why.
5
When I woke up, the band of moonlight had moved on to the wall at the far side of the room. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat for a long time, staring into the shadows.
I kept thinking of those long weeks in the hospital. I never had any trances while I was there. And after I got home, nothing. It’s like the accident had flipped a switch and turned them off. I had never wanted to look too closely at why they stopped because I was afraid if I did, they might start up again.
In the end it didn’t matter; the switch had been thrown anyway. The trances were back. For years, Kyra and I had tried to find a way to stop the trances from coming. Now that I knew it was possible, I was determined to find a way to make them stop again.
There were certain constants about the trances I knew I could rely on. Like what happened when Kyra or I slipped into one. We would see flashes, tiny glimpses of things that were going to happen. Even when Kyra and I would piece together the images we saw, it was never enough to see the whole picture. We never knew what it meant, but we did know whatever was coming would not be good.
The “warnings” always involved someone we knew, or had at least met. Sometimes we saw who it was before the event, sometimes we could only guess. That’s what we figured the numbers were for—to fill in the missing in
formation.
The numbers were another constant. We never did slip into a trance without writing them. Often Kyra and I would write the same equations, even though the things we saw were different.
Also, until the night before the accident, the trances had always pulled Kyra and me in at the same time. That’s why I figured the trances had quit; because Kyra wasn’t with me anymore. I always assumed it took the two of us together for the trances to happen, but last night proved that theory to be wrong.
But then, of course, it had been wrong before. Only one of us had seen the trance I missed the night before my mother was killed.
I pushed up from the bed and padded into the bathroom, not even bothering to turn on the light. In the darkness I scrubbed my teeth and splashed water on my face. Pressing a cool washcloth over my aching eyes, I tried to push away the image of that dark road, the glistening pavement, the headlights bearing down on me.
Last night’s vision was eerily close to the real-life accident that killed my mom. Could it have been the scene I should have seen months ago? No, that didn’t make sense. Kyra and I never saw visions of events that already happened. But everything was different now. I didn’t know what to expect.
I returned to my bed and lay down, pulling the covers up to my neck. I tried to shut off my brain and go back to sleep, but my attention kept being pulled to Kyra’s empty bed. It sat there in the shadows like an accusation, the silence screaming in my head. If only I had listened to her . . .
I couldn’t take it. I grabbed my backpack and escaped to the kitchen, settling into one of the chairs at the table. May as well get my homework done since I didn’t even look at it when I was at work. A little pang tightened my stomach when I thought of my disastrous first night at the mall. I reached for my trig homework and dug in. If anything could make my mind go numb, math could. I searched for derivatives until my head felt heavy and I couldn’t focus on the symbols anymore. I rested my head on my folded arms and before I knew it, I was gone.
