The Cost of Knowing, page 4
Talia’s eyes double in size and her mouth drops open.
“Shiv Skeptic is going to be within two hundred miles of here, and you didn’t tell me?!”
I shrug.
“I assumed you knew about it already,” I explain, but that wasn’t the only reason. General admission tickets are 150 bucks. Talia’s mom hasn’t been able to afford bread and milk comfortably since Shaun died. His funeral expenses blew away the little she had saved up as a single parent, and her disability checks don’t cover much else. Why would I tell Talia about a Shiv Skeptic concert if there’s no way in hell she’s going to be able to go? What’s the point in me telling her, except to disappoint her?
“Have you two eaten yet?” asks Aunt Mackie, conveniently changing the subject. “Isaiah’s already raided the last of the pizza bites, but you can order something—”
“No I didn’t,” mumbles a voice from somewhere in the living room.
Talia looks at me as if we’re about to enter a war zone. Then she turns to face the big gray sectional facing away from us into the living room. The sixty-four-inch flat-screen TV on the other side of the room is displaying a soccer match on mute, but I know Isaiah well enough to know he’s not really watching.
“Hey, Isaiah,” offers Talia.
No response from the other side of the couch.
I look to Aunt Mackie to press him to say hello when people walk into the room, like my parents used to. But she just shakes her head and turns her attention back to the papers on the table. Not that I really care if we say hello or not, but it was something our parents wanted. More and more of who they were seems to get forgotten every day. She could at least pretend they existed. I step past her, past Talia, and peer over the couch, carefully, without touching it. Isaiah, reclining with his bare feet resting on the cup-holder section—gross—is holding his phone only inches away from his eyes, tapping the screen to bounce a bright yellow ball up and down to create sound waves against the ceiling and floor of the room it’s in. I’ve played this game before. It’s a music game called BeatBall, in which you have to tap a ball to stay on rhythm with the EDM song playing. Some, like me, get bored of it within minutes. Others, like Isaiah, play it all summer, buy the fifty-dollar expansion pack that lets you add your own songs to the game, and publish custom levels to the app store.
I could ask him if he wants to mow the Zaccaris’ lawn tomorrow morning, like we used to do together, but he probably wouldn’t answer me. But I can’t blame him. Since the accident, he doesn’t really talk unless he has to.
Sometimes, when I’m at work, I wish I had that luxury.
“Well, I’m hungry,” says Talia. She throws up her hands and steps back into the kitchen. “Anyone else want pizza?”
“They have a new number now, Talia. It’s on the fridge,” says Aunt Mackie without looking up from her papers, which I notice, now that I’m standing right behind her, are actually photos. The burgundy photo album lies closed on the table. I hate photos. Not the ones on my phone. Actual physical photographs. I picked up a stack of them once for a school project last year, and the rapid-fire visions I got were a full-blown assault on my psyche. I couldn’t focus on anything. Stressful as hell. And dizzying.
“I don’t see anything on the fridge,” calls Talia, a little too loudly, from around the corner. This house is so big, you get an echo if you stand in certain spots.
Aunt Mackie sucks her teeth in realization, calls back, “Oh, right, I put the flyers in the top drawer. Hold on,” and stands up from the table a little too fast. Her left elbow catches the corner of the photo album, sending it flying off the table to the floor. Only a few loose photos scatter away from the album, which is lying facedown on the carpet. I watch one fly under the sofa. Aunt Mackie sinks to her knees and begins picking them all up and carefully sliding them back into the album, all except the one that slipped under the sofa. But before I can inform her that she missed one, she’s standing back up and jogging into the kitchen to help Talia.
“It’s in this one,” I hear from the kitchen. Their voices dwindle into nothing, and I weigh my options. I could just wait until Aunt Mackie is back in the room to point out that the photo is under the couch, but then I’d have to sit here and remember to let her know. But then she might wonder why I didn’t just pick up the photo myself. I’ll tolerate one more vision just to keep her from asking questions.
I kneel and reach my hand under the sofa, palm up, so I don’t let it touch the floor.
My fingers find the photo and take hold of the edge, and the vision begins. It’s strange to see what the photo looks like in my vision when the actual photo is under the sofa where I can’t see it.
Mom. Dad. Isaiah. Me.
Dad’s holding the camera at an angle that captures all four of us. His smile is crooked, like it always was, and one of his front teeth is grayer than the others. He’s wearing his favorite black hat with the Chicago Bulls logo front and center, and his dark eyes, full of warmth, are staring up at me. I sometimes forget what he looks like, but now, looking at this photo, I remember everything. I remember him leaning down to kiss my forehead after I went to bed angry once, right before the accident. I pretended to be asleep, but he kissed me anyway. Maybe he knew I was awake and wanted to tell me he loved me, and maybe I pretended to be asleep because I didn’t want to hear it.
Mom is wearing a matching Bulls hat, holding her backpack strap with one hand and glancing over her shoulder at the camera, as if the camera caught her off guard—Dad loved taking pictures that were posed for him but impromptu for the rest of us. Her eyebrows are perfectly arched. She looks so young she could be mistaken for a college student—bright smile, bright eyes, ready for the world. I guess that’s what she hoped I’d look like in college, whenever I got there. Looking at her now, I can almost remember what she smelled like. It was a sweet smell, unmistakable. I noticed it once getting off the bus downtown as a lady in her forties walked past me to get on. By the time I realized what it reminded me of and turned around to look at her, the doors had closed and the bus was taking off down the street.
Maybe it was a perfume she used to wear? A soap she used to use? I don’t remember now. I hope I meet that woman on the bus again. If I could just get the name of whatever that scent is, I’d buy a bottle or a bar of whatever it is, I wouldn’t care how expensive—one for me, and one for Isaiah. He wouldn’t even have to thank me. I would just know that he understood, and he would know I did too.
I look at the two of us in the background of the photo. Mom has her arm around me, pulling me close, and I’m smiling like I probably never will again. There’s a light in my eyes that’s gone now. I barely recognize myself when I look in the mirror in the morning. I look tired. All the time. But here, in this photo, my mouth hangs open mid-laugh with braces, and I look like I’m excited about what’s going to happen next. We’re about to walk through the gates at United Center to watch the Bulls play the Spurs. It’s my first live game ever, and Isaiah’s, too. I look at his face. I look at his smile, at his sparkling eyes. There’s something in the curve of his mouth that indicates this photo caught him by surprise just like Mom. But he looks happy. He looks curious. He looks hopeful.
That was when he used to talk to me. We used to play ball outside in the summer and Smash Bros. inside when it rained, and I used to obliterate whatever strategy he’d have cobbled together in Catan. We had game night every Saturday, and Scoop’s was our favorite after-school hangout spot before Mom and Dad came home from work.
Everything was so different back then.
As always, the vision lasts for only a moment in real life, so I prepare to cancel the vision and wait for Aunt Mackie to come back into the room. But just before it fades into darkness, I notice something. I hesitate. I expect to see myself slip the photo into the album, or put it on the dining table next to the others, or hand it to Aunt Mackie.
But I don’t.
The photo sinks down to my waist, and I stuff it into my jeans pocket.
Why would I do that?
I have no intention of continuing to relive this memory. Mom. Dad. Isaiah. Me. The Spurs game. A week before it happened. It’s easier to just forget we had a life before we lost them. It’s easier to forget. Forget everything.
But… apparently, I won’t.
I’m back in the living room, staring down at the photo in my hands.
Think, Alex.
Why would I put this thing in my pocket?
If there’s no way I would decide to put it in my pocket with what I know now, I must discover something in the next few moments that will make me want to put the photo in my pocket. Something significant. And if I can’t tell why, from the past or the present, there’s only one other source of information I haven’t checked.
I set the photo on the dining room table and, with trembling hands, pick it back up again, triggering another vision.
I watch the photo shifting around inside my pocket, pitch black. Shortly after, I pull it out again, this time with my ceiling behind it. I’m lying in bed looking at it, torturing myself, dwelling on memories, so it must be night. Then darkness takes over again as I slip the photo into the pocket of my jacket, wadded up on my nightstand.
It feels like I stand in the dining room for hours, watching this vision, but I know the whole thing is taking a split second. When I take the photo out again after watching the darkness for forever, I see the photo in my hands again, with grass behind it, and when I look up past it, I see gravestones. Hundreds of them. In a lush green field with morning sunlight peeking through the trees, and colorful flowers dotting the hills where the grave plots are. The photo goes into my jacket pocket this time. Darkness again, with occasional flickers of sunlight through the mesh waterproof layer, in different colors. Looks like a rave in my pocket, wherever I am. Darkness again.
Graveyard again.
This time, my eyes travel. At first I’m looking at the photo with more gravestones behind it, dotting the hillsides, scattered among the trees. But then I look down, at the gaping rectangular hole in the ground, and my vision goes red.
Red.
Red, like I’m looking through one lens in a pair of 3D glasses. Red, like I saw in my vision of Shaun before he died. I freeze, staring down at the rectangular hole. My shiny black shoes, peeking out from under my black slacks, are covered in dew from the grass, standing only inches away from the edge. I watch myself reach my hand forward and let the wind carry the photo from my fingers. It falls, like a leaf, landing squarely in the middle of a floral arrangement on top of a small white casket at the bottom of the hole in the ground. Before I can will the vision to stop, I see the inscription on the side. I see the name before I can backpedal out of this nightmare.
ISAIAH RUFUS, DEARLY BELOVED.
3 The Graveyard
MOM AND DAD USED to tell us, when we were still young enough to believe people can understand anything about the universe, that people are always chasing after impossible things. We want what we can’t have. We ask questions we don’t fully understand, looking for answers we wouldn’t be able to handle. People pay accountants and psychologists to give them power over the here and now, and they pay life coaches, fitness trainers, doctors, and tarot readers so they can control more of the future.
But none of them really want to be sure of what will happen.
You can’t convince me that anyone really wants to know when they’ll die, or when they’ll get married, or when they’ll have kids, or how many. The not-knowing is what makes life meaningful, the surprise of my girlfriend picking me up at work with blue hair, the suspense of wondering if she’ll turn to me and kiss me, or if we’ll get into a massive fight and she’ll break up with me like in my vision, whenever that night comes. Spending summer days on the sofa across the room from Isaiah, the two of us on our phones, not acknowledging each other except to ask if the other wants a snack, happily unaware of the hours we have left to get to know each other. My visions took all of that away.
I sigh and roll from my side to my back to stare at my ceiling.
The moment I saw him, the last living piece of my immediate family, lying inside a box at the bottom of a hole in the ground, he was already dead.
I know that I can’t stop it, but I shut my eyes and begin ripping through the facts I have in my head regardless. Everyone dies. Isaiah’s going to, just like me, but is it really in only a few days?
Less than a week left?
Lying in bed looking at the photo, which is happening now.
The morning in the graveyard. At least, I think it was morning.
The evening I’m going to spend sitting in my chair looking at the photo again.
Darkness.
The evening—what I assume is evening—lights flickering through my jacket pocket.
More darkness. The morning in the graveyard.
I shake my head.
There’s no way this is happening. Isaiah’s a healthy—excluding all the cereal and pizza bites—twelve-year-old kid. He can’t just… no. It’s not happening. Maybe I’m stuck in one of those time-loop things I’ve heard about. Maybe I’m still stuck in a vision of me lying in bed, staring at my ceiling. Maybe I’m dreaming.
I shake my head and pinch the back of my hand. No vision, since touching my own body doesn’t count.
The pinch doesn’t help.
I reach down and grab my comforter and shoo away a vision of me, fast asleep in bed, probably years from now.
Nope. This is reality.
Maybe Isaiah fakes his own death?
Then I shake my head and scoff at my own thoughts. How the hell would he pull that off? He’d have to be some boy genius, and Isaiah is no genius. He’d have to dig or hire someone to dig a rectangular hole, get a casket off eBay, and convince me the whole thing wasn’t staged. There’s no freakin’ way.
And that red in my vision. The whole world looking like I was watching through blood. My heart races out of control again. I don’t want to believe it, but that red can mean death and nothing else.
But what if…
I’m out of ideas, but desperate for another.
What if anything but this?
My heart is thundering. Then another thought crosses my mind. Maybe it’s a different Isaiah Rufus. I dive for my phone, banishing a vision of me unlocking it, and unlock it. I take to Google.
“Rufus last name how common,” I search. I click the first result and read, and my stomach twists into a knot. Apparently, the last name Rufus hasn’t been in circulation in the US since… 1988? That can’t be right. Isaiah and I are here. Our parents were here. Did we not even show up on the radar? I scroll and see that even in 1988, our last name only belonged to .005 percent of the US population.
We’re likely the only two Rufuses left, and even more likely the only two Rufuses in Chicago, Illinois, USA, which means the Isaiah Rufus who’s going to be at the bottom of that hole in the ground in that graveyard in less than a week is probably my brother.
Panic crawls into my stomach like a colony of ants, and I try to breathe as the futility of this whole situation sets in. What do I know? What can I piece together? In a little while, I’m going to pull the photo out of my pocket again, in a graveyard. Why the hell would I be in a graveyard? Which graveyard?
Why am I doing this to myself? It doesn’t matter what I know, or what I do. Isaiah is going to die. So why am I still anxious, like I can do something?
Why do I still have adrenaline coursing through me like there’s some way to fight this?
I open my eyes, stare at the ceiling, and follow all the steps that are supposed to calm me down and help me sleep:
Take a deep breath.
Hold my breath and count to ten.
Count to a hundred.
Lie in corpse pose.
Get up and get a glass of water.
Open the window and get some fresh air.
Stare at the ceiling.
Lie with my ass against the wall and my legs up, so my body makes an L shape.
None of this works.
The window is open, the blood that was in my feet is now in my legs, there’s water in my stomach and air in my lungs, and I’m still wide awake. Even as I stare at my ceiling, which is a solid white sheet of nothing, my brain charges full speed ahead through the hypotheticals, the what if I just…, the same fear that swallowed me after I foresaw Shaun’s end.
It happened the summer after I’d lost my parents.
We were both thirteen.
I didn’t really know how to handle my visions yet or understand the damage they could do to me, until that day we stood in Shaun’s backyard, kicking a soccer ball around, just the two of us. It was an otherwise normal day. Sunny. Summer. Shaun offered to teach me how to make the Shiv hand symbol, and for some reason—must’ve been a moment when I wasn’t thinking—I agreed. There’s a certain way you can bend your fingers to spell S-H-I-V, and Shaun was determined to teach it to me by the time I left his house. But I couldn’t get it. My ring finger wouldn’t bend into a sharp V for anything, so Shaun put down the ball, rolled up his sleeves, and took both my hands in his, guiding my fingers into the correct positions. I was sucked into a vortex of colors. Brilliant flickers of what was once the sunshine and Shaun’s tan skin and dark eyes, and the green grass in the backyard and the clear blue sky, faded into a dull gray-green hue. I was suddenly in the back seat of a car with soft fabric seats and mud stains on the back of the front passenger seat. The rain was so violent, the droplets dancing against the windows made a consistent collective hissssss instead of infrequent pitter-pattering. Twin headlights emerged from the darkness before I could realize what they were, zooming straight at me, and the sound…
The sound was like something out of an action movie, the ones where everyone important miraculously dodges every bullet, evades every crash, and survives every explosion. But we weren’t in a movie.
And then, the red.
Once Shaun let go of my hand, we were back in his backyard, with the soccer ball on the grass between us and my hands in the perfect position, spelling out the word S-H-I-V. He was smiling at me. His eyes were searching mine, like he could see through me, like he knew I’d seen something. Or maybe I just thought he was looking at me like that. Maybe I wanted so badly to tell him what I’d seen, I mistook the approval in his eyes for curiosity.
