The Cost of Knowing, page 7
“Questions that nobody thinks about. Like what?” I ask.
He glances up at me and folds his arms tight around himself before answering.
“Do you ever feel like the world is screaming at you?”
Screaming at me? I hadn’t thought about my visions like that before, but that’s a great way to describe them. It’s like having someone behind you all day and all night, yelling facts about the future into your ears.
“Yeah,” I say, “I do.”
He nods. “Me too.”
Him too? For a split second I think he could be talking about having his own visions. Maybe he sees the future too. But then I remember how casually he uses his hands, opening the freezer door with them instead of the back of his fingers like I do, picking the note up off the fridge instead of leaning down to read it. He doesn’t seem to care what he touches. The hope of solidarity was nice while it lasted.
We meander in silence across the grass.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I ask. I certainly don’t.
“Yeah,” he says. “I walk here all the time. Mostly at night, after you and Aunt Mackie are asleep.”
Again, why would a twelve-year-old kid want to go to a graveyard, much less at night, by himself? As if he can read my mind, he answers.
“It’s easier to think when nobody else is out here.”
I feel that.
“Please don’t tell her,” he says, his voice on the verge of pleading.
I don’t even need to ask who he’s talking about. If Aunt Mackie ever found out her nephew was out walking around in a graveyard in the dead of night, she’d snap completely. Not gonna lie, I’m a little alarmed myself. I know how dangerous it is for anyone to do that, and if you’re Black and out walking, at night, in the wrong neighborhood, the danger doubles.
But I’m not here to judge him, or try to be Dad. I’m here to just be here.
“I won’t, dude.”
We walk a few more yards, stepping between gravestones and over flat grave markers, and suddenly Isaiah stops and stares at the ground, hands deep in his sweatshirt pockets, and he looks up at me. I turn around and take my place next to him.
“Here they are,” he says.
I look down at their plaques, nestled side by side in the grass, and read them both quietly to myself.
Levi Rufus
Born February 9, 1977
Died November 8, 2016
Katie Rufus
Born June 19, 1976
Died November 8, 2016
It’s weird reading these. This is the first time I’ve seen them, because I haven’t been back here since the funeral four years ago, and these markers were installed later. It seems like forever ago. I was twelve. Isaiah’s age. I remember not talking much after they passed, mostly because everything just felt weird. Mom wasn’t around to drive us to school or pick us up, and Dad didn’t go to work in the morning or come home in the evening. It was just me and Isaiah at Aunt Mackie’s house again, except we kept getting reminded that our parents were never coming to pick us up. Both people who I used to talk to, the two people I saw the most, were just gone. It happened so fast, I didn’t really know what to talk about, with anybody. Add my visions to the mix, and I turned into a complete shut-in. Besides school, I didn’t go anywhere, didn’t talk to hardly anybody except Shaun and Talia, who came over all the time afterward to keep Isaiah and me company and take our mind off the fact that we were orphans. Isaiah and I reciprocated the company after Shaun and Talia’s father left for a business trip months later and never came home.
But after the accident, Isaiah and I stopped talking. We went to therapy, as ordered by the courts, and we moved in with Aunt Mackie, also eventually ordered by the courts, although we were already living there. I guess in avoiding the elephant in the room, we both shut ourselves off from everyone, including each other. Maybe I was afraid to lose him, too?
Well, the universe is cruel. Now I’m really about to lose him, and I’ve been pushing him away instead of using the time we have.
Isaiah sinks to the ground and sits crisscross in the dewy grass. I almost launch into something like, You’re not getting back into my car with your ass soaking wet, but I realize this may be the last time I have the privilege of riding in the car with him, and I let it go. Not to mention that he’s much less likely to slip on the grass if he’s sitting instead of standing.
I even decide that if the passenger side is going to be wet, the driver’s side might as well be too, and I lower myself to the grass, careful not to touch it with my hands, and sit beside him.
Isaiah looks shocked.
“You know this grass is wet?” he asks.
“Yeah, I know.”
Silence.
“Your car seats are going to be wet.”
“I know,” I say again.
“And you’re okay with that?”
I nod.
“I… I thought you’d be mad… at me.”
Before today, I would’ve been mad. I would’ve been furious. That’s how you get moldy seats and mildew smell and fungus and shit. But not today. Not me. Not anymore.
More silence passes until I break it.
“What do you do when you come out here?” I ask.
He’s staring at Mom’s plaque, which is white with loose blades of grass over it. I’m relieved when he reaches forward to brush them off, but I’m surprised when he rests his fingers over her first name—Katie—and closes his eyes, leaving the grass blades right where they are. He bows his head and sits perfectly still, the only movement the slight expansion of his back as he breathes.
He looks like he’s praying. Maybe he is.
Then he speaks.
“I listen.”
I get it. He loves the silence as much as I do.
I pull my knees up to my chest, close my eyes, and sigh. My breath comes out in a cloud, like Shiv Skeptic does with smoke on stage. I still can’t believe my own brother knows The Rush, and I didn’t know until today.
“Listen to what?” I ask.
He’s quiet for a while, until I look at him.
“Nothing,” he says, but his sigh reveals there might be more he’s not saying.
“What does nothing sound like?” I ask.
Come on, Isaiah, give me more than just one word at a time.
Out of nowhere, he changes the subject. “Do you think the dead would talk to us if they could?”
I feel something tickle the underside of my left pinkie finger, and before I can look at it, I’m snatched into a vision. A ladybug flies past my face, and I cancel the vision and look down at the little red creature crawling down my baby finger toward my nail.
“I don’t know,” I answer absentmindedly, as the ladybug lifts its wing shells, which I’ve always thought look like a spaceship, and zips off into the air to join whatever other insects are waking up in this place. “I would guess they might? I mean, I would. If I were dead.”
“Me too,” he says.
“You would?” I ask, surprised. Isaiah doesn’t talk much as it is, so I’m surprised to hear him say he’d want to talk in the afterlife. “Why?”
He shrugs. “I’d give advice to people who outlive me. I’d tell people what I know.”
“Do you think you’d know anything in the afterlife that you don’t know now?”
“I think Mom and Dad do.”
Mom and Dad.
I look down at their plaques. I read the fine print at the very bottom of each.
Beloved sister, daughter, wife, and mother,
who loved as fiercely as she lived.
Cherished brother, son, husband, and father, with the heart and soul of an angel.
Such short captions to sum them up. Two whole lives, most of which happened before I was even born, and so few words. I remember the day I was finally old enough to sit in the front seat of the car. I felt grown up, back when growing up sounded fun. Even though it was just the passenger seat, I felt like I was being given a privilege and a responsibility that I took way too seriously. My seat belt was on as soon as I sat down, and my hands stayed folded in my lap the whole time. The windows were bigger than the ones in the back, there was way more legroom, and I could look in the visor mirror and see Isaiah back there, pouting, jealous.
“Why can’t I sit up front?” he seethed, arms folded, brows knit together in an angry knot.
Mom just smiled. “Because you’re not a big boy yet, Isaiah. Just wait a few years.”
It’s been a few years, Mom, I think. Neither of us are “big boys” yet. Not big enough not to need our parents.
My mind wanders.
I wonder what they’ll say about me after I’m gone.
Alex Rufus. Son, brother, hopefully husband one day. Afraid of everything.
“You ever wonder what they’d tell us if they were here?” he asks. “What they’d say if they could see us now?”
I don’t want to think about it. I take a deep breath and pinch the skin on the back of my hand to calm me down, but it doesn’t get rid of the lump in my throat. Everything in me wants to change the subject. Not all men are comfortable being “in their feelings” like Drake. We’re wasting time out here! I’m supposed to be helping Isaiah, not sitting in the middle of a graveyard with him, talking about shit we can’t change. But if this really is going to be his day, I guess I need to give him space. I did ask him to talk to me, after all.
I’ve taken too long to answer. He continues.
“I think Dad would wonder why I’m not taller,” he says.
I have to chuckle at that.
Dad was always reminding us about the height that runs in our family, and how we could both go pro if we kept up our practice. I had a mean bob and weave that would leave Isaiah on the ground while I went straight for the hoop.
“You’ve got time,” I say without thinking, and then when the realization hits me all over again, I clear my throat and continue with, “I think Mom would be happy with our grades. Heard you got straight As this semester.”
He looks up at me.
“I have to keep them up, or Aunt Mackie will yell at me. She and Mom are like… clones or something.”
“They both want the best for us,” I say. “But Mom was… softer.”
“She would let me sit in her lap, and she’d rub my head and ask what’s so wrong that I’m bringing home grades like this,” says Isaiah. His voice trails off into nothing, like he’s stopped mid-thought. “I miss her, Alex.”
“I miss her too,” I croak.
“Do you… ever wish you could talk to them?”
Maybe this is how he grieves.
Ever since the day we lost them, I’ve been running from everything death-related I possibly can. That’s how I grieve. I don’t grieve. I run. And now, here I am, sitting next to the last piece of my parents left on earth, who I’m about to lose, and all he wants to do is hold their memory in front of my face. He wants me to face it.
He wants to face their death with me.
Breathe, Alex. Let me just calm down and answer the damn question.
No running now.
“Yeah,” I concede. “Yeah, I do sometimes.”
“Do you think there are people who can talk to the dead?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, and then I realize I’ve said I don’t know twice in five minutes. I have to give him something more than that. “I mean, I hope there are?”
So I can talk to Isaiah.
“But then,” I continue, “I feel like I’d also hope that dead people are actually at peace, like, not having to think about what’s happening in the world. If they can still talk to living people, wouldn’t that mean they actually care about what’s happening on earth? And if they care, wouldn’t that mean it stresses them out when bad things happen to the living? The ones they love, anyway?”
I’m probably overthinking things again.
“They mostly talk about the past,” he says.
The silence that ensues happens mostly because it takes me a solid ten seconds to realize that he said they talk instead of they would talk. I look over at him. His eyes are open now, staring straight down at Mom’s grave, where his fingers are still resting. They’re trembling even as he presses them against the stone, and his forehead looks especially shiny, and I realize he’s broken out into a cold sweat.
“Isaiah?” I ask.
He sniffs, and I realize he’s crying.
“You said the world screams at you, too?” he asks.
I don’t know what to say. Is this kid really telling me he can talk to the dead? Would it be so impossible? I can see the future, after all. Maybe he does have powers?
I nod.
“Yeah, it does,” I say.
“How?”
Oh, how.
“I feel like I can’t stop thinking about what’s going to happen. I just… worry,” I explain. “I can’t stop worrying.”
“Worrying?” Isaiah says, wide-eyed. There’s realization in his face, like he’s put something together in his head, like everything’s clicking for him. “What do you worry about?”
Talia hating me. Scoop’s going under. Aunt Mackie’s new door. Mrs. Zaccari’s lawn.
“Everything,” I say. “All the time. That’s what anxiety is, Isaiah. It never stops.”
It never sleeps, and consequently, neither do I.
I would give anything to be rid of the visions. Once, two years ago, I was sent home from school after having my first panic attack, to be expected after years of vision-induced anxiety, right in the middle of the lunch line, out of nowhere. Aunt Mackie was at work, and Isaiah was still at school. I texted him and told him he’d need to take the bus alone that day. I stood by myself in Aunt Mackie’s kitchen, staring at the knife block for a solid twenty minutes, working up the nerve to rid myself of this torture once and for all. I picked up the smallest paring knife I could find, about three inches long, as if the smaller the knife, the less intense the pain would be. I tested the tip against my left thumb, pressing harder and harder against the pink of it, the underside where my print was. I wondered if I was ready to let go of having fingerprints, not to mention the rest of my palm. How I’d explain this stunt to Aunt Mackie. I could cut a small bit every day and swap out Band-Aids and maybe no one would notice.
“Everything?” he asks. “You can’t… relax? Like, at all?”
I remember jumping at the searing pain, drawing blood. A cut as long as the width of a dime spanned my thumb, red slowly filling the crack. I took a deep breath and steadied my head. I knew there was no way I could bring myself to raise the knife against my thumb again. Not with blood already all over my thumb. So I put the knife down on the counter, took the skin between my other thumb and index finger, and pulled.
“Nothing,” I say, my eyes transfixed on somewhere in the distance across the grass as I relive the rest of the memory. “I’ve tried everything. I’ve meditated. I’ve prayed. I’ve—”
I remember thinking it would rip like a Band-Aid and be over in a second, but I yelped and slipped my thumb into my mouth, wincing against the pain, knowing it would be a long journey. By the time I worked all the way up to my thumbnail, my forehead was coated in layers of sweat that had dried over the course of hours, and bloody paper towels were piled high on the counter. I thought the taste of copper would never leave my mouth. But I looked down at my thumb, half in horror, half-hopeful, and I reached out my arm, found a clean corner of a paper towel on top of the pile, and pressed my thumb against it, making sure to touch only the bloody exposed part. It stung, but not nearly as much as the disappointment that came with the vision of the paper towel.
After all that pain, it hadn’t worked. The skinless spot on my thumb still brought visions, so there was no use even trying to cut away the rest.
I went to bed that night, hopeless. Helpless.
I would give anything.
“Trust me, Isaiah,” I say, my voice breaking, “I’ve tried everything.”
I look up at him.
He’s gone silent, his fingers still trembling against Mom’s plaque. The company of his grief is like a radiating heat lamp next to me in the middle of this cold morning. I’m suddenly so glad we came out here. Somehow, he needed to get this out. I want to help. I want to know what he’s thinking.
“What does the world scream at you?”
He looks up now, at me, his eyes red and brimming with tears. “Different things.”
“Like what?”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“What might’ve happened,” he finally says.
“If?”
“Just, if.”
I’m getting nowhere with him. He’s plucking at blades of grass and pressing his thumb into them, flattening spots into a darker shade of green.
“What might’ve happened if what, Isaiah?”
He shakes his head. “You’re not going to believe me.”
I want to laugh. If he knew about my visions, he’d know that whatever he’s about to say can’t be nearly as unbelievable as I can see the future. But I don’t want to push him. The whole point of today was to do whatever he wants—needs—to do.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—”
“Yes, I do, Alex.”
Again, he said my name. I guess that’s his way of saying he’s serious.
“Okay,” he breathes. “So, you said you worry about everything. Would you worry more or less if you spent all day thinking about what could have happened differently?”
What could have happened?
“What could have happened differently if…?” I ask.
“If,” he says again with a shrug.
Goddamn it.
“If what, Isaiah?”
“If a million different things, Alex!” he says, slapping the back of one hand against the palm of his other between each of his next words. “Come on, bro, keep up.”
“I’m trying!” I have to laugh. He’s smiling now, still staring straight ahead at the millions of other gravestones around us. I continue, “Clearly, you’re just too smart for me. Break down what you’re trying to say.”
