by J. M. Miller
“You should get to work. I’ve met Simone. You might get in trouble if you aren’t back to the property on time.”
“Right,” I agreed, straightening up and moving toward the door. “Thanks, Ms. Mitchell.”
“You’re welcome. Oh, and Ben,” she said just as I stepped into the hall. “No more locker abuse.”
“It’s Sunday. There’s a wedding today,” I said, tossing the sponge into the sink before pulling the plug in the tub.
“No. I already told you, you’re not going,” Dad replied sternly from the bathroom doorway. “I just said your name ten times before you even heard me, LJ. You’re not going to work.” He raked a hand over his face, trying to contain his emotions.
I watched the last of the tub’s water spiral down the drain. My thoughts. My memories. They were disappearing the same way. But I couldn’t dwell on that. I had to hold it together. I had to stay strong. If I fell apart now, it would only make things harder. For all of them.
“The in-depth eval is Wednesday,” Dad said, when I didn’t respond. “We’ll find more out then. In the meantime, Simone understands. Everyone understands.”
Everyone understands?
No one understands.
Except Ben.
“I was looking forward to working today,” I uttered, glancing at him. “I’ll do whatever Simone asks. I don’t have to go near the wedding. I’ll stay in the office and sort papers or something. It’s not a big deal.”
Dad ran both hands through his hair. “LJ,” he sighed. “School. Work. They aren’t important right now. Let’s wait until we find out what’s going on, okay?” The pain of a million questions filled his eyes, burying the happiness he’d recently discovered.
I felt bad for him. I hated seeing him this stressed over me. Yet I still wouldn’t tell him about the well or the curse. What would be the point? There was nothing he could do. No one could fix it. No one could fix me.
“Fine,” I conceded. There was no reason to fight with him. I’d find a way to get out of the house while he was at work.
“Good,” he said, tapping his fingers on the vanity. “Since Ben took it upon himself to pick up your school work for the rest of last week, I’ll ask him to grab next week’s too. It won’t be a full week anyway with Thanksgiving.”
My heart surged at Ben’s name. He’d picked up my schoolwork? He was there Wednesday when I’d left Ms. Mitchell’s office. His eyes were the only things that stood out that day. The rest was a jumbled mess—talking to Ms. Mitchell, the ride to the doctor’s office, the chill of the waiting room, the talks of preliminary tests and evaluations—but I clearly remembered the way he looked at me. His dark eyes destroyed the barrier I’d stacked between us with one brooding look, etching deep into my mind. If I had one memory in the end, his eyes would be what I wanted to see.
“I was able to keep your mom at bay for a little while longer,” Dad said. “She called again an hour ago. She’s really worried about you.”
“Turning tables,” I mumbled.
Dad reached out and gently set his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be.”
He smiled weakly. “I will always be sorry for the burdens I’ve put on you. And I’ll say it over and over, even if you tell me not to.”
“Thanks,” I replied as he leaned in and kissed my forehead. His cologne was subtle and familiar, shifting my thoughts to summer movie nights, years ago, when I would fall asleep on the couch and he would carry me to bed. When everything was simple.
He’d already made peace with me for his mistakes, but now I think he felt an urgency to say so much more. Fear was the driving force. He was afraid I’d be gone soon.
And he was right.
Despite picking up LJ’s schoolwork, my interaction with her was nonexistent. As far as I knew, she’d been inside the house since I’d seen her last Wednesday. No school, no work, for a full week.
Carson was tight lipped. He kept our exchanges short, assuring me that she was okay and resting. I wasn’t offended. He wanted to protect her. Not from me alone, but from the reality of it all. Saying the words out loud often had a way of making them solid. Real.
I’d felt the same way. When I first discovered the truth, I didn’t want to acknowledge it with words. Unfortunately, unlike Carson, I knew the whole truth. This wasn’t just some chance at illness. It wasn’t some bullshit probability that could be jinxed into fruition. It also wouldn’t fade with silence. The curse was already solid. Real.
“Have you heard anything new?” Spaz asked, pushing past a few bodies in the hallway to get to me. His blond hair laid flat today, slicked back with no spikes.
“Nope,” I admitted.
Following the drug accusation on LJ last week, I filled Spaz and Iz in on the basics of LJ’s nosebleeds and “possible” memory issues, linking all the info to Janine while keeping my descriptions vague. Iz had called LJ a couple of times since then to check on her, but she said their conversations never lasted longer than five minutes.
I knew Carson wasn’t the only one keeping LJ away. LJ was doing it to herself. If she really wanted to see us, she would. This was her way of letting us go. I knew that now. The night she came to my basement, when she last kissed me, she told me that she knew I’d do anything to help her. That’s why she walked away.
“Iz tried to call her again last night, but she didn’t pick up. I hope she’s okay, man. Are you taking her books over there today?”
“Yeah, I’m going after work. I’m heading to check in with Ms. Mitchell before I leave.”
I hoped she’d found something, anything that could be more than the genetic link. Our options were vanishing. Pop had gone into LJ’s house two more times to fix random crap since last Wednesday, and all he left with were grease stains and back pains. I went online again and hit up the library, searching for more info involving the Stockton family and anything relating to curses, but I found nothing useful. I was still trapped inside a cardboard box.
We weaved through people, passing the front of the cafeteria. “Good luck, Benj. If there’s anything you need, let me know.”
“Thanks,” I replied before he disappeared through the doors.
“Ms. Mitchell,” I called through the open door when I got to her office.
“Come on in, Ben,” she replied, sliding back the room’s polka-dotted curtain.
“Any news for me?” I wanted to cut to the chase. Carson was working a later shift tonight, so I decided I’d go over to visit LJ after I finished a few hours’ work. I was sick of not knowing, sick of waiting. I needed to see her.
Ms. Mitchell tossed a half-eaten salad in the trash can and nodded sideways to the skinny kid lying in the first bed, holding an ice pack to his knee. I tipped my head back to acknowledge him and he did the same.
“I found some information, yes. Let’s step outside a second,” she said, scooping up a manila envelope with her neon blue nails and walking toward me. Closing the door behind us, she held out the envelope. “Here are the copies.”
“Thanks.” I flipped the envelope open and ran a finger over the edges of the pages.
“I dropped off the original copies to Mr. Wayde yesterday afternoon while he was at work. He isn’t looking so great.”
“He looked tired when I dropped off LJ’s class assignments Monday night, but he didn’t say much.”
“The doctor’s assessment last week combined with Genie’s medical history got LJ an appointment for a more in-depth eval today. Hopefully, the results come back quickly so they can look into treatments.”
“There isn’t a cure, though,” I said, knowing it was true for the traditional road. The curse, however, remained a mystery. One I’d die trying to solve.
She shook her head and pinched her lips together. “No. But there are medications that can help curb memory loss and cognitive issues. Diagnosing this early is usually the problem. So we have to cross our fingers that they make the connection, or find another
cause.”
“Right,” I replied, pinching a few of the papers inside the envelope, ready to tear into them. A silent moment passed and I looked back at her. She was studying me behind her dark eyeliner. Her eyes weren’t critical, only pensive. “Thanks, Ms. Mitchell. This really means a lot.” I held up the envelope.
“You’re welcome, Ben,” she replied simply. “I hope something in there helps.”
“Where did you get these?” Pop asked, watching me dump the papers onto the dining table.
My shift had technically already started, but this was far more important than pruning trees and bushes. If Simone had a problem, she could suck it. I doubted she’d say anything, though. Now that she was involved with Carson, she had to have already witnessed the pain this was causing everyone involved.
“Ms. Mitchell, the school nurse. Her mom was—”
“Elise. One of Genie’s best friends,” he finished for me. “They met well before Genie and I had.”
I picked up one of the photocopied pages and pointed the county clerk seal. “Apparently, Janine was doing genealogy research when they first met.”
“She told me she’d been replacing some lost documents. She never mentioned research, but she did tell me she helped Elise get out of a bad marriage.”
His thick fingers grasped a page and pulled it close to his face. “This is a death certificate for an Ann Stockton. Died at birth, eighteen eighty-eight.” He dropped that page and grabbed another.
I held a copy of another old document. Its worn edges and fold creases had printed darker than the writing. “This one’s a birth certificate. Thomas Stockton, nineteen oh five.”
“I’m guessing she knew about the curse before she met Elise because this looks more like research.”
“That’s what I was thinking too.”
“Here’s an interesting one,” Pop said, squinting at the paper. “It says George Stockton, son of Charles and Sarah, died in April, eighteen eighty-one while being treated at the Pennsylvania State Lunatic Hospital. It looks like he was only fourteen.”
“A mental facility? He was one of Charles’ sons. He had another son, right?”
“If memory serves right, his name was Charles like his father. I’m sure we could piece together most of their family tree with all of these pages.”
I took the page from his hand and stared at the words. Some were illegible, either from messy script or fading. Cause of death was one area that I couldn’t read. “He was a young. He had to have been there because of the well. When was Alzheimer’s first discovered?”
“After the turn of the twentieth century, I believe. They probably thought a young kid with those symptoms was crazy or mentally challenged. His parents must’ve opted to send him away for treatment.”
I swapped out another page. “I can’t imagine what that kid went through.”
“Horrible things, I suspect.”
The paper in my hand suddenly felt like it weighed a ton, and sweat formed on my palms in response. How many family members had gone through this torture? I looked down and tried to refocus on the new page, my eyes finally settling on the name Samuel Stockton.
The patriarch.
I continued reading. “Sam Stockton died of Remitting Fever in October, eighteen sixty-four.”
“Malaria. That was one name for it back then,” Pop commented, twisting his mustache.
“The picture that LJ and I found of Charles and Sarah’s wedding was dated September eighteen sixty-four. That means his father died a month after his wedding. Maybe that had something to do with Charles marrying Sarah instead of Dahlia. His father had pressured him before leaving for war two years prior, but he refused. Maybe his sickness forced Charles’ hand somehow.”
Lines deepened in Pop’s forehead. “It’s possible. We know he didn’t have any siblings. It could’ve been his father’s last wish, or perhaps there were financial obligations that would be handled with the right marriage.”
“Shit,” I said with a sigh, imagining the pain he had to have felt making that decision.
“Look at this,” Pop said, sliding one paper aside for a better view of another. “It’s a census document for eighteen seventy.” I watched Pop’s thick finger trace down the third column, listing the family names. “No Stocktons. But here,” he said, pointing at one of the rows. “Dahlia Platt, married under Joseph Platt.” He scrolled his finger across the columns. “She was twenty-seven, and keeping house is listed under her profession.”
“So Janine tracked down Dahlia too.”
“See here,” Pop continued. “She had a son who was only a year old in eighteen seventy. Joseph Platt the second.”
“That was a few years after she had left the property.”
“She went on with her life.”
“Leaving a crap load of pain in her wake,” I said bitterly. “Is there anything else that can point us in a new direction? It’s good to know that Janine was searching for Dahlia’s information too, but it doesn’t tell us what her lead was. What was she hoping to find tracing these lines?” I pressed my palms against my head and rubbed my short hair irritably.
“I wish I knew,” Pop replied. He flipped through more pages while I paced back and forth. “Here’s her death certificate,” he said, thumbing over another page. “Physician’s certificate. Dahlia Platt. Died eighteen seventy-five of Choleric Fever. There’s no father listed, but Catherine Wentz is listed as her mother.”
“Wentz was her maiden name. That was definitely her.”
“I’m going to grab some paper to sort this out. Maybe if we connect the pieces something will turn up.”
“What about work?” I asked.
“I’ll call Simone. Randall and I got enough done today. The grounds are clean and the next wedding isn’t until Saturday.”
I sat down at the table and stared at the pages, hoping, wishing we’d find something that would end it all. I couldn’t accept this as LJ’s fate. I refused to let her consider this curse a penance. She didn’t deserve to lose anything.
“What do you mean inconclusive?” Dad’s voice floated down the quiet hallway.
One bare foot after another, I followed his voice to the top of the staircase.
“You said that it’s usually pretty accurate.” His voice continued its worried tone.
I stepped down two stairs and sank to a seated position, pushing my forehead to two of the thick bannister posts like I did as a kid in Summerlin. I knew we weren’t in Nevada anymore. We were in Pennsylvania. But I found myself struggling to remember how long we’d actually been here.
“I don’t understand how… So we can schedule other tests like the MRI… When? … No, it has to be sooner than that. I’ve already told you she’s… I’m trying to stay calm, but I told you before. Whatever is happening is happening fast. God, I…”
I held my breath as his body moved into sight, walking out of the kitchen with his head down, pressing his phone to his ear. He stalked a couple of steps then stopped and raked his free hand down his face before turning back toward the kitchen.
The call was about me. My second doctor’s appointment was today. It consisted of questions, a physical eval, questions, memory games, and more questions. The whole time I wondered how quickly they could reach a conclusion. How far gone was I? How much had the curse already taken? It was stripping me faster than I’d anticipated. But I didn’t regret the wishes. Whether their problems were big or small, all those people might be a little better off than they were before.
My only concern now was the end game. I hated hurting Dad and Gavin. I hated seeing Dad like this, so helpless. The worry in his eyes brought tears to mine. For once, he didn’t have all the answers. He didn’t even know the real question.
“I’m telling you,” Dad’s voice wavered as he stood in front of the kitchen entry. His shoulders started to shake and his free hand covered his eyes. “It’s going to be too late. It’s like she’s… fading away. Why is this happening to her?” His last words
dropped to a whisper as he moved back into the kitchen.
I jumped up and padded back to my room, holding my focus with every bit of concentration I possessed. I had to write things down. He had to know my wishes before I lost it all. I didn’t want him holding on to me out of obligation. That wasn’t a burden he needed to carry.
A bell rang in the distance. A door bell.
I had fallen asleep.
What day is it?
Straightening my sweater and jeans, I stepped out of my bedroom and into the hall.
It’s still Wednesday. I’d had my appointment this morning. Glancing down at the dull light coming through the front foyer windows, it had to be late afternoon. Is Dad at work?
Ding dong.
Peeking through Gavin’s open door as I walked past, I called, “Gav?”
No response. Where was he? Did he tell me he was going somewhere?
I trotted down the stairs and opened the heavy oak door.
Mom.
She wore a knitted winter hat with the long strands of her chocolate hair escaping below, clinging to the neckline of her wool coat. Her eyes settled on mine with an inquisitive stare. She looked good. Different, but good. I wasn’t sure what she was waiting for so I chose to speak first.
“Hey. C’mon in,” I leaned in and gave her a quick one-armed hug, inhaling her familiar flowery smell that I knew so well, yet, for some reason, felt so distant. The stinging chill of late autumn pricked at my skin as I closed the door behind her.
Something felt off, but I wasn’t sure what.
When I turned back to Mom, the look on her face had changed. Her eyes were so large I could almost count the specks of green amidst an ocean of blue. “What’s up?” I asked, wondering why she was staring at me as if I’d grown a second head.
She took a deep breath and covered her mouth with her hands.
I glanced around behind me. Did I say something? “What’s wrong?”
