The Cost of Knowing, page 6
Somewhere that doesn’t progress the vision any faster than it has to? If we go to the graveyard this morning, that leaves four events.
“I never said I wanted to talk,” he says.
“That doesn’t sound like a no.”
“Fine, I’ll go. But no questions,” he says, grabbing a pair of pants off the top of a pile of clothes on the floor and stepping into them. He grabs his black Vans sneakers from the foot of his unmade bed and steps past me. “Let’s go.”
Once I get back to my room and get through visions of my jeans, my socks, my shoes, my jacket, my wallet, and my keys, Isaiah and I tiptoe through the front door and get into my car, looking out at the winding streets of Santiam Estates.
The sun is peeking over the city skyline, dulled by morning fog and pollution, like a glow stick at a Wiz Khalifa concert. Isaiah is slumped against the window with his hood over his head, staring out at the driveway. It’s surreal having him in the passenger seat. I’m so used to seeing Talia next to me. I realize I don’t remember the last time he rode in my car. Must have been at least a year. He was so much smaller back then, his legs fit just fine without adjusting the seat. Now he’s had to slide the seat back six inches just to keep his knees off the dash.
I realize he’s not wearing his seat belt.
“Hey,” I say. “Seat belt, please.”
He glances over his shoulder at me and sucks his teeth.
“Now,” I insist.
My vision wasn’t specific. I have no idea when or how it’ll happen. In my vision, I didn’t see him in the graveyard with me that first time, I didn’t see him while I was lying in bed staring up at the photo, and I didn’t see him the whole time the photo was tucked away in darkness in my pocket. I didn’t see him until I took it out at the funeral and looked down. I don’t know when my last moment with him will be. We could crash in the next five minutes. And even though I know I’m powerless to prevent it, Isaiah’s seat belt gives me the illusion of control.
My chest tightens as an idea hits me. I could… what if I just… touched his hand? Or arm or something? If I want to know exactly when it’ll happen, I could just…
My hands are clammy around the wheel, and my heart starts pounding. I remember to breathe, trying to ward this off before it turns into a full-blown anxiety attack. Breathe, Alex. Isaiah’s here. He’s fine. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.
It would be the smartest option. If I could just get over my fear…
Do I really want to know?
Would it change anything?
I’ve taken too long to think it over.
Isaiah rolls his eyes and reaches for his seat belt, clicking it into place and resuming his mopey slump against the window. I sigh and focus on a spot on the driveway pavement. The hum of the engine isn’t enough to cut this silence. I feel my shoulders getting tense, and I become desperate to fill the air with something, even if it’s awkward conversation. My mind wanders to our destination.
“So, of all the things you could choose to do today, you want to visit Mom and Dad?” I say, probably a little too flippantly, conveniently leaving out the implied or Shaun? I try to soften it with, “I just want to know if I should be mentally preparing for—”
“Yeah.”
I have to ask.
“Why?”
His voice is softer this time, and I swear I can hear an unsteadiness in it.
“I just do.”
I’m not going to force him to keep talking. I turn to the other thing I often use to fill silence, so I don’t let my mind wander to whatever embarrassing thing I said the day before to someone who has probably already forgotten about it, or any other social interactions in my past that I’ve utterly butchered.
Music.
When I’m lying on my bed with my eyes closed and headphones on, just listening, nothing can touch me.
As I pull out of the driveway, I flip on the radio, and it finds my phone, automatically starting my playlist off with “Black Dragon” by the great Shiv himself. This song goes so hard. The lyrics always stir something deep within me that I’ve never been able to identify. When those first four bass booms come pounding out of my sound system, I feel like I could park this car, hop out, and sprint ten miles. If I were alone in here, I’d be rapping and dancing to those opening lines. I glance at Isaiah and decide, screw it, life is too short.
I’m going to do it anyway.
“Bangin’, ballin’, bobbin’, bouncin’, bumpin’ Black Dragon.
Got them bottles poppin’, yeah we hoppin’ in the station wagon.
Bitch, yo’ Lam ain’t paid off, made of money? More like made o’ debt. Bet.
Call me when yo credit score is set like Aquanet.”
I glance at Isaiah, who’s looking at me like I’ve lost it, and I launch into the next verse. This is my car. I’ll rap if I want to.
“Let my crew find out you slingin’, bringin’ Crissy to my shows, bruh.
Shit turn you a zombie, leave yo body for the crows, bruh.”
At “crows, bruh,” I hear my voice double. Isaiah raps with me through the next lines, and that lift in my chest from earlier, that feeling like I could run ten miles, multiplies by fifty.
“Niggas think they’ll catch me slippin’, sippin’ on this juice, mayne.
Cobra got my keys cuz had enough to get me loose, mayne.”
“You listen to Shiv?” asks Isaiah. His eyes are wide, and his hands are on his knees. He’s leaning forward in his seat and looking at me, totally perplexed.
“The king?” I ask. “Of course.”
“Since when?”
What a question. Since his first EP, The Rush, which he dropped six years ago. Most people haven’t even heard of it. I glance at Isaiah, turn down the radio, and decide to test him.
“Goin’ down to the corner store armed with my hatchet, machete, grenade, and my gun,” I rap. Isaiah, without hesitation, jumps into the next part with me.
“Just to have company, someone to talk to, but I make it look like I play this for fun.”
Holy shit! He knows “The Rush”!
“How did I not know this about you?” I ask. He gets suddenly quiet, and I feel the weight of what he said earlier, when I said I feel like I don’t know him.
You don’t.
I haven’t been around enough to know him.
We’ve had the same favorite artist for—what, months? Years even?
“I’m sorry,” I say, glancing down at his hands, which are still resting on his knees. I wish I could offer him some kind of solace in resting my hand on his. But the vision I’d get from that might dissolve whatever sanity I have left. I decide that, no, I don’t want to know what happens to him in the next few moments, or hours, or days.
“For what?” he asks.
I shrug and sigh. “For not getting to know you.”
“You still have time, you know,” he says, so softly I almost don’t hear him. That catches me off guard, and for a second I wonder if he knows. I look over at him, but he keeps his eyes staring straight ahead until he notices me.
“What? I don’t graduate for another six years.” He shrugs gloomily. “I’m not going anywhere.”
It sends a pang of hurt through my chest, the fact that he’s counting down the years he has until he gets to leave—where to, I don’t know. I bite back the next question at first, wondering if I want to start that conversation. But we’re heading to the graveyard.
Lying in bed.
Graveyard.
Sitting in my chair.
Darkness.
Flickering lights.
More darkness. Graveyard.
We’re about to head to the first event that happens before it happens, and I decide that if we’re on some Final Destination shit, I’m not going to waste the little time we have.
“Where are you going when you graduate?” I ask.
There’s silence, and then he shrugs. He rests his head in his hand, with his arm propped against the door, dead eyes ahead.
“I don’t know. But wherever it is, I’ll be writing rhymes.”
“You?”
He frowns at me.
“I didn’t mean that like I’m laughing at you,” I say. “I’m just surprised!”
“You think I’ve been spending all that time making BeatBall beats and not writing lyrics to go with any of them?”
Fair point.
Silence drags on for so long that I start to get jittery. I don’t know what to say, so I turn to the road and crank the music again just as the chorus drops, wanting to return to thirty seconds ago, before I posed the question, when we were singing together as if we didn’t have a care in the world. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to be trying to do? Making his life easier?
“Say it wit me, ooh, there go my crew that’s Black Dra—”
The music vanishes, and I look down to see Isaiah’s hand on the dial.
“Shh,” he urges, pointing past my face out the driver’s-side window. “That’s the Zaccaris’ house.”
I look out the window at the white house with the white rosebushes and slightly overgrown front lawn that I’d be offering to mow any other day. But with Isaiah’s time dwindling, there’s no way I’d waste a minute over there. Not today.
“Right,” I say.
The Zaccaris have always been nice to Isaiah and me, ever since we moved in. They have a son who’s never home, but they don’t talk about him much. I heard his name’s Eli. I’ve never met him in person before, and Aunt Mackie says she hopes I never do. I haven’t told her that he sent me a friend request on Facebook. She told me once, “Eli is always strung out on something, running from somebody for some kinda charges.” Apparently, he’s only a few years older than me.
I glance at Isaiah and thank God he never got involved in shit like that. As mouthy as he is to me, he’s never been in trouble with the law, and he knows how to sound professional when he leaves the house. He can rap “Black Dragon” as well as I can, but once we knock on the Zaccaris’ door, it’s “Good morning, Mrs. Zaccari. How are you today?”
As I drive past the house at a responsible speed, the wooden gate at the side of the house swings open, and in one fell swoop, Isaiah yanks off his hood and clicks the radio off completely. Mrs. Zaccari steps through the gate in her shiny pink silk pajamas, with a matching silk robe over the top. Her shoulders are hunched, and her arms are folded as if it’s too cold for her to be out here. Her hair, which I imagine was once all blond and is now mostly a warm gray blond, is tied into a loose braid at the nape of her neck, so loose actually that bunches have fallen down into her face, indicating she probably slept with her hair like that. She immediately spots us, and her face melts into a smile. She waves, and we wave back, and she steps forward as if she wants to talk to us.
“You think she has cookies for us?” asks Isaiah. Mrs. Zaccari’s white chocolate macadamia nut cookies are the best. She chops up the nuts really small so you’re not even mad when you find out the bite you took was more nuts than white chocolate. But it’s wishful thinking to imagine she has any freshly baked right now.
“At six in the morning?” I laugh. I slow down to a complete stop and roll down the driver’s-side window.
“Morning, boys!” she calls, stepping gingerly across her front lawn and down the slope to the sidewalk in her black Nike flip-flops. “Up early?”
I nod and glance at Isaiah, who’s looking at me. I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing I am: I don’t really leave the house except to go to work, Isaiah is practically nocturnal, and the Rufus boys are never out together. Especially not at no six in the morning.
“Thinking about starting a paper route,” Isaiah hollers out the window. Smart. That’s something we can easily explain to Aunt Mackie if she happens to notice my car is gone this morning. People in this neighborhood talk too much to keep secrets. “Thought we’d try out waking up this early to see if we like it.”
“Oh, that’s so responsible of you!” She beams. “I love that.”
“Thanks,” replies Isaiah convincingly.
I’m not gonna lie—I’m impressed at his quick thinking. He whipped up that lie faster than I could think of one. Maybe I’ve underestimated how much street smarts he’s learned without me already. I forget sometimes that he grew up in East Garfield Park too.
Mrs. Zaccari looks around, up and down the street, before stepping forward and continuing in a lowered voice, like she’s telling a secret, “Y’know, if you do decide to do a paper route, you could get some exercise and take Eli’s old bike. We were about to sell it in a garage sale next Saturday, but if either of you can use it, it’s yours!”
Isaiah and I look at each other. He’s probably, like me, realizing how much money the Zaccaris must have to just be handing out bikes like that. Back in East Garfield Park, you couldn’t leave a bike chained up in the backyard without somebody jacking it. He looks past me again, out the window to Mrs. Zaccari, and I answer for both of us.
“Thank you! We’ll let you know!”
She nods.
“And be safe out there. And don’t stay out too late tonight, okay? You know with that concert tomorrow night, we’re supposed to get all kinds of people around here.”
I’m used to it by now—the code-switching, the two-facedness, the pretending to empathize with white people’s concerns about Shiv Skeptic concertgoers, while in another reality in which I mowed Mrs. Zaccari’s lawn several more times and could afford it, and I wasn’t so scared stiff of huge crowds, I might be one. And, in another reality in which Isaiah gets to grow up, he might have made it big as a rapper himself.
My chest tightens.
“Aunt Mackie told us,” I say. Mrs. Zaccari even went as far as to start a petition about the concert, when, as far as I know, the Wall is a public venue. It’s fair game for any artist popular enough to fill seats. Shiv fits the bill.
“Even right here, in Santiam Estates,” she says. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is pursed with disgust. “People around here shouldn’t be allowed to rent out their house to just anybody with a concert like this going on so close, especially in a gated community. It’s just dangerous. I don’t want you boys getting hurt, okay? Tell your aunt to sign my petition as soon as possible.”
“Yes, Mrs. Zaccari,” we say, almost in unison.
Her stern expression melts into a smile before she continues.
“And come over later for cookies. Double the white chocolate chips this time.”
Isaiah and I exchange glances, and something sinks in my chest. Is eating cookies at the Zaccaris’ house really going to impact Isaiah’s time left? Is it really going to help him so much that we shouldn’t do anything else instead? I guess we have time to decide that. Maybe.
We wave our goodbyes, and Mrs. Zaccari gets her mail while Isaiah and I sail down the road.
The radio stays off.
4 The Cemetery
ELGINWOOD PARK CEMETERY IS only a mile away from Aunt Mackie’s house. I’ve walked past it late at night when Aunt Mackie is out of town at a conference and I can’t sleep, and Talia’s not awake to text me.
I park my little blue Geo in the mostly empty parking lot. The only other car here is a single white hearse. I intentionally park as far away from it as possible, because I don’t want to look at it. I shut off the engine and take in the silence as the engine clicks a few times while it cools down. A few birds chirp sweetly nearby, welcoming us to this place of the dead. I take a deep breath and open the door. Isaiah hasn’t moved since the engine shut off. He’s just staring straight ahead at the sea of gravestones and plaques dotting the field, just like I’d be doing if I hadn’t trained myself long ago to avoid unnecessary silence.
I rest my elbow on the door and run my fingers over my curls, twirling one around my finger nervously. My heart is racing as I stare out the windshield. I’d rather be anywhere but here. But if it’s what Isaiah wants, if it gets him out of his room and talking to me, then here we go. Mom and Dad and all. Shaun and all.
“Ready?” I ask.
He nods, and I take that as confirmation that he’ll follow me once I climb out of the car.
The morning air is crisp, and the birds are even louder out here. I’ve always enjoyed that sound, but today it just makes it hard to focus. I shove my hands in my pockets and cancel the vision of me walking across the grass in these jeans. I hear Isaiah’s door slam shut.
“Did you lock it?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder at him.
He nods and steps over the curb onto the dewy grass.
“Hey, watch out,” I say. “You might slip.”
If he falls and breaks his neck right here in this graveyard, I swear to God I’ll never forgive myself. He’s still looking around, looking especially small now, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. He looks like he’s about to walk through Shelob’s lair. Eventually, he nods and falls into step beside me, hands still in pockets. I wish he’d hold them out for balance as we walk through this slippery grass, but I decide the argument isn’t worth it. He’s quiet. He’s calm. He’s scared of something. So instead, I walk, ready to catch him if he slips. I’m wondering why he wanted to come here to visit our parents when he could have been anywhere else, and why he looks so terrified.
“Hey, you okay?” I ask. “You look a little… nervous. What’s up?” I can feel the dew soaking through my cloth Vans, and I suddenly wish I’d worn my leather ones like Isaiah’s black pair he has on. I breathe in the morning air, listening for Isaiah’s reply, which takes forever.
“A lot,” he says.
Moments go by, and I realize it’s going to take some gentle nudging to get more out of him.
“Like what?” I ask.
He lets out the biggest sigh I’ve ever heard him make.
“Like, weird questions that nobody else thinks about.”
Now I’m curious, because I too think of weird questions nobody else thinks about, like why are the letters of the alphabet in the order that they are? Who decided that vowels should be scattered throughout instead of neatly organized at the beginning? What would happen if Batman were bitten by a vampire? Why do we have to wash bath towels if we only use them to dry clean hands and bodies?
