Sight

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos

  “You need to ask your mama about that pickle jar,” she says, a slow tremor of impatience making it sound like she’s been pushing me to do this for years.

  I peek out from under the covers. No bats. Just my greatgrandmother, watching me.

  “Wha… what?”

  “Ask her,” she urges, more kindly.

  All of the questions I’ve ever wanted to ask crash into one another in my brain. All I can come up with is, “Does it hurt to be dead?”

  She doesn’t answer, but leans toward me, making me cry out when, with a flicker, she appears sitting right next to my head. My great-grandmother reaches toward me and rests her hands on either side of my face, the conclusion of the movement she started so many years ago in the nursing home before she died.

  “How’d that song go?” she asks in her two-tone voice, and then she disappears.

  I sleep all night. Dreamless and perfect sleep.

  When I wake up, rested for the first time in a long time, I can tell from the hush outside that it snowed hard during the night. I walk across the cold floor and look outside, happy to see the trees caked with thick bunches of snow.

  Mom is downstairs in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. She smiles at me when I walk in.

  “Did you see the snow?” she asks.

  I nod, surprised at the shyness of my smile.

  “I thought I’d make us omelets for breakfast. I think you’ve had enough Chocolate-O’s lately. Then maybe…”—she glances at me—“we could talk.”

  I sit down at the kitchen table, and Mom goes back to chopping. “I saw Great-Grandma last night.”

  Mom stops her chopping for a moment, shakes her head, and starts chopping again. “She beat me to it.” I tip my head to see the side of Mom’s face, to make sure she’s the one who’s talking. Because it’s not her voice coming out of her mouth; instead it’s a drawl, warm and slow and teasing, spoken gravelly from the little hollow at the base of her throat. Goose bumps ripple their way up and down my arms and across the back of my neck.

  “What’d she say?” Mom asks, the unfamiliar smoothness of her words nearly hiding a sharp edge under their surface. “Come on, now,” she teases. “Grandmama never was one to keep thoughts to herself. Hers or anybody else’s.”

  “She said to ask you about the pickle jar.”

  Even Mom’s laugh is different, her mouth wide, her head tipped back, her eyes closed. I wonder now, watching her, if she’s ever been happy before right now. “That old bag never could let a thing rest.”

  “Mom? Why are you talking like that?”

  “Because, darling, this is how we’d reel ’em in; voices like sugar syrup warmed up by the sun.”

  “Mom …” I’m pleading.

  She clucks and then turns to smile at me. “It’s me, baby. You just never really heard my voice, is all.” And it’s true. This voice, this unfamiliar slowed-down voice that lilts and curls and takes a nap midword, sounds more like my mom than her almost carefulsounding mountain accent.

  “Yes, I have,” I say, a memory tickling at me.

  “You do remember,” Mom says, smiling. “They wanted you, you know. They wanted me to leave you there when Grandmama died. Well, they said they wanted me to stay too, but I didn’t believe them. It was you they wanted.”

  I remember then, my mom holding me in a crowded woodpaneled room. I was too old to be held and I kept squirming to get down. It was the funeral, I realize now, the funeral for GreatGrandmama. There were hands reaching for me, a woman with eyes just like my mom’s, a woman who smiled at me and said, Come here, child. My mom held on too tight, made me cry out. You can’t have her, my mom said. She’s not like you. And the woman with my mom’s eyes laughed and said, Bull crackers. That child’s as touched as the day is long.

  “You want me to tell you a story?” Mom asks, wiping her hands on a dish rag and sitting down next to me.

  I nod.

  “Let’s have us a story, then,” she says. We make tea first, or tea for Mom and hot chocolate for me. We go into the living room and sit down on the couch. For once the television isn’t on.

  “Our house wasn’t in town,” Mom starts. “That was the first thing. It was miles from anywhere worth going. Some people didn’t trust us. Females, living out there alone. A lot of people didn’t think it was right, or proper, all of us women with no men around. Especially with the way things were at our house.” Mom laughs. “I swear to you, it was a house full of people plumb out of their minds. Your aunts Ruby and Peg, my mom, my grandma—all of them. Crazy people.”

  “What was so crazy about them?”

  “Oh,” she says, sounding annoyed, “they all had… notions. Lies, mostly. Maybe some of it was true. I never could tell, and that’s what drove me so crazy. It wasn’t unusual at our house to sit at the breakfast table and hear everyone but me talk about someone that they’d visited while they slept. No, darling, you are not the only one who gets dead people creaking the floorboards in the middle of the night. My sisters would come downstairs with stories about Granddad said this or Great-Aunt Rhonda said that.”

  “You didn’t believe them?” I ask.

  “Sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes not. That was the problem. I never could tell when they were lying or putting me through the wringer for being the only one who had some sense in that house, the only normal one, the only one who wasn’t…”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  Mom sighs. “I was embarrassed by my mother, Dylan, by our rickety old house, and by my sisters. We had multicolored Christmas lights strung up on our porch all year round, and a dozen wind chimes, made out of wood or silverware or glass or anything else we could find lying around the house that would clack and clunk and ting and ping, but they never chimed. I wanted wind chimes that made a delicate tinkling sound when the wind blew. I didn’t want a chorus of broken sounds coming from broken objects strung up together and hung wherever you could hammer a nail to hang them on.

  “Our front porch was screened in and half-sunk into the ground, but that’s where we spent most of our time, especially in the summer, because the fan on the ceiling kept things tolerably cool. There was a white wicker couch out there with a faded rose-pattern cushion, and a few other chairs that didn’t even match each other. That’s where we would do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “That’s where,” Mom says, leaning closer to me, her eyes wide, her voice dropped to a whisper, “we would tell the future.”

  My jaw drops. “You… You know how to do that?”

  “Me?” Mom says, laughing. “Not me. I could do numbers, but that was 99 percent horse crap. It didn’t take any real—”

  “Numbers?”

  “Numbers. Think of a number between one and ten.”

  I think of the number nine.

  “Now picture what it looks like when you write it.”

  I do, picturing a thick black marker on a piece of white paper.

  “Now look, in your mind, at the number you just wrote.”

  Mom settles back on the couch and commences staring at me, her eyes holding on to mine, not letting me look away. The expression on her face doesn’t change, it keeps the same intensity for a full minute.

  “Seven,” she says.

  I laugh. “Wrong!”

  “Really?” she asks, the same calm expression on her face.

  “Well, yeah. I guessed number nine.”

  “Did you?” she asks.

  “Yep!”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  I was until she asked me that question. I did pick nine, right? I try to remember the number I drew, the thick black line, but now all I can see is a drawing of the number seven.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Made you doubt yourself,” she says, laughing. “Pay me a quarter and I’ll tell you how old you’ll be when you marry and how many babies you’re going to have. And then by the time you find out if I’m right or not, I’ll be so far gone from this one-horse town,
people will barely remember my name.”

  I study my cup of hot chocolate.

  She touches my shoulder. “You can do numbers, can’t you?” she asks.

  “Fifteen,” I say, looking at her.

  She laughs so hard I almost spill my hot chocolate. “Your aunt Ruby is going to love that! She does numbers too, among other things.”

  “Why’s she calling so much lately?”

  “Because she’s damned psychic, that’s why. You ever notice how she calls only when I’m not home? She knows she’s not supposed to do that, but she does it anyway. I made her swear she wouldn’t tell you about our crazy family.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Good.”

  “So … tell me about my crazy family.”

  “They looked ridiculous, first of all. Ruby and Peg. Flimsy dresses, wearing two or three at a time, and strings of beads and heavy rings they’d pull from Grandmama’s jewelry box. It was like Halloween every day with them. And our mama wasn’t much better. She’d wear these high-collared black dresses that went down to the floor, and pull her hair up on top of her head, and she’d just look really severe, like this.” Mom narrows her eyes at me. “You remember, from the hospital.”

  I nod.

  “And Grandmama. Well, she just wore Granddad’s old clothing. His boots, his pants, his button-up shirts, his hats. She looked ridiculous, just like the rest of them. I guess it worked, though. It brought people in.”

  “In to what? Mom, I don’t understand.”

  “People would come see us and set on our front porch, and they would ask us to tell them their future. And we would. Or at least Ruby and Peg would. Like I said, I just did numbers and made up future husbands for the little girls. Ruby and Peg did the serious stuff. Ruby especially. Everyone, except for me, could tell when somebody climbed up our porch steps with bad news coming. Peg hated giving people bad news. Ruby would do it, though, even though we all told her it was okay to lie about some things. She would tell anybody anything. She’d sit cross-legged on the wicker couch on the porch and pull the giant hairball of a porch cat onto her lap. She’d narrow her eyes at whoever was sitting across from her, and she’d tell them.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “Tell them everything. That their sons weren’t coming home from war. That their wife was cheating on them. That there was poison in their blood and that’s why their babies kept dying. Sometimes, if Grandmama saw somebody coming up on the porch before Ruby saw, and if Grandmama could tell just by looking at that somebody that Ruby would have a chance to tell some real bad news, she’d make Ruby go inside and she’d go out on the porch herself. And then she’d lie to whoever it was, and send them on their way. She said those people would find out the bad news themselves eventually, and it was better just to tell them they’d be lucky in love with a house full of babies. The pickle jar got filled, either way.”

  “The pickle jar!” I say excitedly. “That’s what she meant.”

  “Yes, that’s what she meant.” Mom laughs. “There’s more to that story, though. I tried, for a long time, to be like my sisters. To be like my mom and my grandma. I would come downstairs and announce that Granddad had come to visit me in the night, that he had told me where he’d hid stashes of money before he died, just like he did to my sisters. When my sisters would tell your great-grandmama to look in his old hair oil container, or the toe of the right-footed wool slipper that had lost its left a long time ago, there would always be a neat roll of bills, dusty and bent from being stored so long. But when I would tell Grandma to look in the broken sugar bowl in the shed, or in his favorite jazz record album sleeve, she would just find the quarters that I’d taken from the pickle jar and stashed there myself. After a while, I realized that I was the normal one, not them. And I wanted a normal life. I wanted to wear neatly pressed slacks and eat real meals, not breakfasts of lemon candies and pretzels, because that’s what some broke joker had paid us with the night before. I wanted a proper life, and that’s why when your dad came through town—”

  “My dad?”

  “He was a college boy on a cross-country trip. He had all of this camera equipment in the back of his car and had come to take our pictures. He said he’d heard about us three counties over. I fell in love with him right off. And he—I think he fell in love with my family more than he did with me. But his clunky old station wagon stayed parked at our house for that whole summer, and in the fall we were married. And then in the spring…”

  Mom touches my nose. “We had you.”

  “And then you left.”

  Mom laughs. “We sold his car and bought bus tickets and…” She sighs. “We stole the money from that week’s pickle jar. Which is why my mom still won’t talk to me. I sent her the money back as soon as we got here, but she said it wasn’t the same. I felt like she never really loved me like she did my sisters. All I ever wanted was for her to put her hands on my face”—Mom lays her cool palms against my cheeks—“and tell me, ‘You’ve got the sight, girl, you have it strong.’ Like she did with my sisters.”

  She stops talking, but doesn’t move her hands. “You’ve got the sight, girl,” she says, smiling at me. “And I’m sorry I ever made you think it was something less than wonderful.”

  I half-expect Cate to be waiting for me at the bottom of my driveway, but there is only Dottie idling the bus in the snow. She’s been doing that lately, waiting for me, I think because the Drifter came back. I appreciate it.

  Ben doesn’t get on the bus, but his mom is there with JJ and Tye, wearing snow boots and a bathrobe. She motions to me to open my window.

  “Tell Benji to call me when you see him, okay?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “He stayed at Frank’s last night, and he was supposed to call to check in, but he didn’t.”

  “I’ll tell him to call.”

  She waves at the boys and then walks back down the driveway.

  Fifteen

  I forget my math book in my locker after homeroom and go back for it. The halls are empty, just like homeroom was. The only people there were Thea, MayBe, and me. I’m shutting my locker and walking to class, when I see Ben leaning against the science lab door. He looks like he slept in his clothes, and his usually friendly face looks drawn and gray.

  Ben looks away from me when I walk up to him.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says, still avoiding my eyes.

  “You making moonshine in there?” I try to see past him, through the window into the classroom.

  “Go to class, Dylan,” he says stiffly.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, the hairs starting to stand up on the back of my neck.

  “Go to class, Dylan,” he says again. He almost growls it.

  “Why?”

  Ben looks hard at me. “Because we don’t trust you anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I try to see again into the empty classroom. Now I can see the lights are off and that someone is hunched in a chair, facing the back wall.

  “Who is that?” I ask, pushing Ben out of the way and opening the door.

  “Dylan, I’m handling this,” Ben says. He steps into the classroom behind me and shuts the door. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the light; there is a charred, acrid smell to the air.

  The person in the back row is slumped so far he is almost falling forward and out of the chair. I walk closer and see his arms are limp by his sides, his fingers lightly brushing the floor.

  “Frank?” I say, stepping in front of him and touching his shoulder. He doesn’t move.

  “Ben, what’s wrong with Frank?”

  He doesn’t answer me, just looks nervously to the door.

  I kneel down next to Frank, my nose stinging from the acrid stench wafting off him. “You guys go camping?

  “Frank!” I say louder, shaking him. “Frank!” It’s then I see his neck, the charred and blistered skin spreading up unde
r his chin.

  I jump back and grab Ben’s arm. “What did you do?”

  Ben pulls away. “I’m handling this, Dylan.”

  “Handling what? What the hell did you guys do?”

  For a second Ben looks completely helpless. “We didn’t do anything,” he says, “because they didn’t call me. I waited for them in the barn, all night. And Cray didn’t call until this morning, and then it was too late.”

  “Where’s Cray?”

  “He took off after he called me.”

  “What did they do, Ben?”

  “They burned it,” he says, looking at Frank. “At least they tried to.”

  “Burned what?”

  “The Willows,” Deputy Pesquera says, walking quickly through the door and turning on the lights. We all flinch at its brightness, all of us, except for Frank. His burn looks even worse in the light, and I can see his shirt melted to his skin, the burn extending down to his left hand.

  “Dylan, go to the office and get the principal and the nurse. Ben, stay right here where I can see you.”

  “Is he dead?” I ask, faltering by the door.

  “Not yet,” the deputy says. “Go.”

  Ben and I wait in the back of the deputy’s truck while they load Frank into the ambulance. I’ve never ridden in the back before. Ben won’t talk to me. He just keeps staring out the window. He’s shaking. So am I.

  The sight comes suddenly, piercing my vision, tearing it in half, until I am seeing a little red snow boot, half-buried in the snow.

  “She’s freaking out,” I hear Ben say when the front door to the truck opens. I feel his hands on my back, my own hands pressing against my eyes. “Jesus, what’s wrong with her!”

  The vision leaves as suddenly as it came, and I am looking at the red-black color made by pressing my hands against my eyes. I am leaning back against the seat, and Ben is whispering, “Dylan, are you all right?”

  I shake my head. “Deputy…”

  “We’re on our way,” she says.

  I cradle my head in my hands, the rocking of the truck making it feel like my skull is going to splinter into pieces. Ben keeps his hand on my back, rubbing small circles. I shake my head when he asks me what’s wrong.