by Jen Nadol
I was walking down the path toward the pond when I saw a woman pushing a stroller. As she came closer, what I first suspected was confirmed: there was a misty glow inside the hooded carriage, a mark on her baby. I slowed down, not wanting the moment to come when our paths would cross and I either would or wouldn’t do as I’d promised.
This was exactly the kind of untimely death that should be prevented, I thought, gritting my teeth. My mind raced, working through the things I could say, but she was nearly upon me and I was so nervous that I knew I wouldn’t be able to stammer anything coherent. She smiled pleasantly. I glanced inside the stroller. The baby was small. An infant, wrapped in a blanket monogrammed JDS, sleeping peacefully amid a pool of light. And then she was past.
“Excuse me,” I said, too loudly.
She turned back. “Yes?”
“I … I …”
She looked concerned. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”
I shook my head. “I … This is going to sound crazy,” I said hoarsely, “but I think something’s going to happen to your baby.”
She drew back sharply, as if I’d threatened her. “What are you talking about?”
I held out my hands, trying to soothe. “I don’t mean to scare you. I … I’m a little bit psychic. I can see things sometimes …” She was backing up, angry and afraid.
“Stay away,” she said shrilly, looking around for help. “Don’t get near me.”
“No, no, I won’t.” This was going terribly. I had done it all wrong. She wasn’t even listening. “I’m just trying to help, to warn you. I think your baby might be in danger. Has …” I looked back at the stroller, trying to get the gender right, but she had turned it fully away and was standing in front, blocking my view. “Has he or she been sick?”
Her voice was low, barely controlled. “If you say one more word to me, I’m going to scream and then call the police. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“There is nothing wrong with my baby, but there’s something seriously wrong with you. Get the hell away from me.” With that, she turned and practically ran out of the park, the stroller jouncing along in front.
I sat on the grass, shaking as I fumbled for my phone.
“Hello?” Lucas whispered.
“It’s me. I saw one.”
“Hold on.” He was back on the line thirty seconds later. “I left my meeting. Tell me about it, Cassandra. Is the person still there?”
“No. She left.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“I tried. It … it was a mess.” I started crying.
“Oh, Cassie, I’m sorry. Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
“No, no, it’s okay.” I wiped at the tears and took a deep breath. “It was a woman. With a baby. The baby had the mark.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I tried, Lucas. I really did, but I guess I didn’t do it right, because she didn’t listen, she got scared and pissed …”
“Tell me what happened.”
So I did. When I was finished, he said, “I’m proud of you for trying, Cassandra. I know it wasn’t easy. Who knows? Maybe she did hear you. Maybe she’ll think about what you said later, when she calms down.”
That made me feel a little better. “Maybe.”
But she didn’t. Or, if she did, she wasn’t able to protect the baby anyway. We found his obituary two days later. Jacob Daniel Stern, four months old. Crib death.
Lucas left for school, but I stayed in his apartment, unable to drag myself through the routines that would get me to work on time. Did she think of me when she found her baby that morning? What had I done but compound her guilt about something she had little, maybe no control over? I wanted to bang my head on the table or scream my guts out. It was so unfair.
Lucas tried to cheer me up that night, but I could tell he felt it too. There is nothing poetic about death. It is ugly and awful, and the more time you spend around it, the uglier and more awful you feel.
“You’ve got to keep at it, Cassandra,” he told me in his “buck up, little camper” speech. “You tried. It’s not like you made anything worse. It was going to happen anyway.”
I was too exhausted and depressed to argue or tell him that I probably had made it worse. I had stayed in bed all day. Lucas brought me soup and tea for dinner and didn’t even try to make me get up.
I skipped class that week, called in to work too. I moped around Drea’s apartment during the times I wasn’t at Lucas’s. Drea had gotten over her brief bout of guilt or responsibility, whatever it had been, and was back to her usual absent self. They’d won a new client, she’d told me, were totally immersed.
Finally, by the weekend, I decided it was time to put it aside. Being at Cuppa helped. I dug back into my philosophy lessons too, anything to take my mind off what had happened.
On Sunday, five days after my day in the park, Lucas asked gently if I didn’t think I should try again.
“You know, get back out there, see if you can find another that you might be able to help.”
“I don’t think I can do it, Lucas.”
“Wouldn’t it help if it worked? Erase the sting of … of this last one?”
“And what if it didn’t? You saw how hard this was.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”
“Cassandra, you’re the only one cut out for this. Who else has the ability? You’re stronger than you know. It’s hard, but …” I stopped listening, knowing how the speech went, having heard a hundred iterations of it already.
“Fine, fine,” I said, holding up my hands, anything to stop the barrage of words.
I could have just lied to Lucas, told him I didn’t see any. After all, more often than not, it had been months, even years between times I saw the mark. The truth is, as much as I dreaded having to talk to another one, I did wonder if Lucas was right. I mean, there had to be a reason I could see the mark, didn’t there? One attempt was hardly a fair test.
I read the coroner’s statistics: one hundred seventy-some accidental deaths a year in a population of over eighty thousand. I tried to figure out how many people I saw each day. Working at Cuppa alone—between customers and those who passed our window—the number had to be in the hundreds. Realizing that made me feel better, helped explain why I’d seen more here than in Ashville. Then, if I added making the rounds, as I’d come to call it—visiting downtown, the malls, the parks—I had to be hitting the thousands. It wasn’t like I needed to be close to the person. The light made them stand out, even in a crowd, like the girl in New York.
I didn’t want to live with the idea of myself as a coward. So I gutted it out and went back to looking.
I saw him from two blocks away, sitting by the skeleton of a building. He was a construction worker, his yellow hat on the bench beside him, next to a steaming cup of coffee and a white wrapper holding half a sub.
I strode right up to him, determined to get it out before I lost my nerve.
“Jes?” His voice was warm, but heavily accented.
“I’m going to tell you something that will sound strange,” I said calmly. “I’m a little psychic, sometimes I can see things.”
He had stopped eating, staring at me expressionlessly. For a minute I thought maybe he didn’t speak English.
“Do you understand?” I asked slowly.
He nodded, his eyes wary.
“I think you’re in danger,” I told him.
“Dios mio,” he muttered, crossing himself.
“I don’t know what you have planned today, but if you can, go home and stay there. Don’t go back to work or drive your car or …”
He was gathering his things, knocking his hat clumsily off the bench. I bent to pick it up for him, but he snatched it away before I could touch it. He glanced back at me, his eyes wide, his right hand fluttering, repeating the sign of the cross, I realized.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but he was already backing away. Then he turned and ran.
“Is he there
?”
I had told Lucas about the construction worker when I got to his apartment the night before. He said I did a great job, that it sounded like it had gone better. I guessed it had. He hadn’t threatened me with the police or started screaming, though that seemed a pretty low bar for success.
Reluctantly I scanned the obits that Lucas had dropped in front of me first thing in the morning. I felt a jolt of elation. There was no one under sixty.
Lucas saw my expression. “That’s what I thought,” he said, smiling. “You did it.”
“Let’s not celebrate yet,” I warned. “Maybe something happened later, after the paper went to print.” But he wasn’t in the next day’s either. I felt sure he was local, that it wasn’t an accident on the road, something that wouldn’t make the Bering News.
Lucas took me to dinner at Gianna’s the day after, the paper still absent news of the worker. Over champagne, he asked, “How do you feel?”
“Honestly, I’m still trying to digest it, Lucas. It’s hard to believe that it worked.”
“Why? It worked with me.”
“Yeah, it’s just that … well, it’s a lot to absorb.”
He nodded. “It’s just like I told you, Cassandra. There is a purpose to your gift. You can save lives.”
“I guess the key is getting them to listen,” I said, sounding more reasoned than I felt. The idea that something I did or said had that kind of power was overwhelming.
He nodded. “That’s right. And you’ll get better and better at it over time. There will always be people who don’t heed your warning, but doesn’t it feel great to have saved someone who did?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
chapter 24
It was three days later that I saw him again. This time, on the front page of the paper. My first thought was that you can’t cheat death after all. Then I realized he was in handcuffs.
I pulled the folded sheets out of the newsstand rack to read the caption:
EDUARD SANCHEZ, 39, IS LED FROM HIS
APARTMENT BUILDING WHERE POLICE
RESPONDING TO A 911 CALL FOUND HIS
WIFE, STABBED FIVE TIMES.
“You gonna buy that or not?”
I gave the newsie a buck and walked away skimming the article. Multiple domestic disputes, fired from his job the day before, no children or nearby relatives.
I found myself at the edge of the park, five blocks from Cuppa, where I was due in three minutes. I pulled out my phone.
“Doug? It’s Cassie,” I said when he answered breathlessly. “I’m so sorry for the short notice, but I’m not going to make it in today.”
He hesitated. I think I’d called in more times in the last few weeks than I’d showed up. “What’s wrong?” he asked finally. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just … not feeling good. I was on my way in, but I don’t think I can do it.”
Mechanically I entered the park and found a bench near the pond, deliberately facing away from the fields and paths, unable to bear the thought of people. I still held the paper but couldn’t bring myself to look at the article again. He’d stabbed his wife. Maybe upset about losing his job, one I’d sent him running from. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I needed someone to talk to, but Lucas was no good. He was becoming zealous, always talking about our purpose. He was the last person who could help me sort it out.
Briefly I thought of Drea. No. Impossible.
There was no one who knew and no one I could tell, not after the way these past weeks had gone. If only Nan were still here, I thought, and then suddenly realized exactly where I should go. They say dead men tell no tales. I decided to give it a try. Maybe they were the perfect ones to listen.
I found them at the second cemetery I went to. A single headstone with a single word: RENFIELD.
“Hi guys,” I whispered. I sat on the grass beside the marker, curling my legs tight to my chest. The cemetery around me was deserted.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to come,” I said to the smooth gray marble. “I’ve been meaning to. I’ve thought about you a lot since I’ve been here. It’s a great town, Bering. I bet it would have been a great place to grow up.”
It was easy to picture: a farmhouse in the sunflower fields I had passed on my ride from the airport back in May or one of the trim brownstones near school.
“I came today because I need help,” I said softly. “If you’ve been watching me—and I’ve always thought that you do—you know about the mark. It’s an awful thing. Or maybe … maybe it’s a good thing and I just don’t know how to use it.” I sighed. “But I don’t know what to do. The thing is that it looks like I really can warn people, maybe prevent their death, but I can’t tell if I should. I mean, Lucas is still here and that’s a good thing, but he and I are a mess. So I guess I saved him but ruined our relationship.” I took a breath, realizing how much it hurt to admit that he and I were over. Even though I kept going to his apartment, executing the motions, I knew it was only a matter of time.
“Not that a relationship is worth even close to as much as a life. He’s young and smart. It had to be a good thing to save him.
“But last week,” I said, “I warned the wrong kind of guy. I saved him and he killed his wife. I don’t know how I could have known. He was young too. It seemed like the right thing …”
I shivered, a chill running down my spine. “Lucas makes it sound so logical—if I can save lives, why wouldn’t I—but I just don’t know if these lives are meant to be saved. What if it’s truly their time?”
It always came back to that—my gut instinct that fate wasn’t meant to be tampered with. All around me, marked by these headstones, were people whose time had come. Life had gone on for those around them—for me, when my own parents had gone—and my time with Nan had been good, maybe the way it was meant to be.
“Anyway,” I said finally, “I know you can’t tell me what to do. Even if you were here you wouldn’t be able to, but thanks for listening. Mom. Dad.”
Their names, spoken aloud, sounded weird and wistful. I’d never said them before.
I stood, stretched, felt better. I didn’t have any answers, but it’s funny how talking to someone, even if that someone is mostly yourself, is cathartic.
I’m not sure what made me do it, maybe the feeling that it was odd there were no names or dates on the stone, but I circled the marker and sure enough, there they were. First my grandparents—Samuel and Paula—and the start and end dates of their lives, such a brief summary. Then, below them, my parents: Daniel and Georgia. I squatted, tracing the letters with my finger, trying to remember anything about them, not things I’d been told, but things I’d experienced. Of course, it was all too far back.
Then my eyes shifted to the dates. I had to look twice to be sure I was reading them right, that the elements or vandals hadn’t changed them, but they were crisp and clear as if they’d been carved yesterday.
And they were wrong. According to the headstone, my mother died four years after my father.
chapter 25
I sat in the apartment, still and quiet. I’d wanted to see Drea. When she didn’t answer my voice mail, I texted her. Twice. “When r u coming home?” I wrote. “Need to talk.” She wasn’t, she finally responded, had been called away on business, could it wait? I didn’t answer, not sure if it could, not sure if she’d have the answers to my questions anyway.
I didn’t return Lucas’s calls either, his voice on my messages increasingly frantic. “I’m worried about you, Cassandra. Did something happen? Did you see one? Call me.”
After Cuppa closed, I left a message on the machine. “Hi, Doug, it’s Cassie. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to make it in again tomorrow. In fact, I’m probably going to need some time. A few days at least. I know I’ve been out a lot, but I’ve got some stuff going on. Nothing major, just things I have to take care of. I understand if you have to fire me. Just … let me know, I gues
s.”
I waited for the day to end and for the sleeping pill I’d taken, one last one, left over from after Nan’s death, to take effect.
I couldn’t understand why Nan had lied to me. In all the time I’d known her, there wasn’t another thing I could remember her lying about. Nothing. Not stupid things like how I looked in a certain dress or important ones like whether she’d loved her husband. There were things she just didn’t talk about, but this was different. Why would she make me believe my mother had died in a car crash along with my father, if that’s even how he died? What else had she lied about?
I was waiting at the door when the Bering Library opened the next morning. Despite the new building, they were as slow to transition to the digital age as Ashville had been.
“The dates you’re looking for would be on microfilm,” the librarian, a nattily dressed man, told me.
“In the basement?”
He laughed. “No, we won’t send you to the dungeon. It’s right over here.” He led me to a small, glass-enclosed room housing two of the large viewing machines. “Now, what did you want to start with?”
I gave him the date under my father’s name on the headstone. I figured I’d start with the car accident or whatever it was and work forward from there.
The librarian brought me two yellowed boxes. “The week’s papers start with Sunday the third, so what you’re looking for should be right at the beginning, but I brought it all anyway. Do you know how to work this machine?”
It looked just like the ones in Ashville. I nodded, but he proceeded to tell me anyway. I didn’t interrupt, willing to postpone what I was about to read for another few minutes.
When he left, I threaded the dark film into the viewer and pulled up the first page. I expected it would be the headline article, but there was nothing. I scrolled through all of Sunday, just to be sure, then moved on to the Monday edition. Sure enough, it was the lead story:
LENNOX PROFESSOR KILLED IN THREE-CAR ACCIDENT
Daniel Renfield, 38, of Chestnut Street in Bering, was pronounced dead at the scene of a traffic accident Sunday afternoon. Two passengers, his wife, Georgia Renfield, 30, and the couple’s young daughter, Cassandra, were taken to Metro-West Medical Center for treatment.
