The Cost of Knowing, page 8
“I’m saying exactly what I’m trying to say,” he insists, his face suddenly growing solemn again. “If you could see what you could’ve done to save Mom and Dad, would you want to know?”
I freeze. What the hell kinda question…?
“No, I wouldn’t.”
I have enough to worry about, being constantly reminded of the future while I’m trying to live my life. I don’t need to live in the shadow of the past, too.
“Me either,” says Isaiah. “And I wish I didn’t.”
“You… do?”
“Yeah, I do. I get these”—he hesitates and glances at me before continuing—“I get these… visions,” he says. My heart stops. “I, uh…,” he continues, “I see myself that day in the back seat. And I just… I think about all the things I could’ve done to keep it from happening. And I think about what Dad would say about my height if he knew all I eat now is pizza bites and Lucky Charms, and what Mom would say if she could’ve seen me at my fifth-grade graduation… if.”
The realization hits me.
If.
If it hadn’t happened.
Damn. Isaiah gets visions just like mine, only… backward. He relives what happened every day, suffering inside his own head. It’s like the accident froze him in time and won’t let him move forward. I guess it’s not much different from what it did to me, pressed a wall up against my back that’s always pushing my mind into seeing what’ll happen tomorrow. Isaiah’s shoulders are shaking. He’s rocking back and forth in the grass, and he sniffs again. He looks so small right now, like he’s sinking into the earth, retreating into himself. Imploding. Like there’s too much inside of him for him to handle.
“Why didn’t you just tell me after the accident?”
“I mean, it sounds pretty wild, doesn’t it?
I swallow and suppress this sick feeling in my stomach. It’s like watching him drown. I have to physically fold my arms and focus to keep from blurting out that he doesn’t have to do this to himself, that he has to fight off these thoughts or they’ll pull him under. Even though it never helps when people say that to me about my anxiety, I feel the burning need to say something. To do something.
“Isaiah—”
“It’s… kinda like your worrying, only it’s what’s already happened.” He’s staring at the gravestones, but his eyes are empty. His mind is somewhere else.
“I can see my soccer game,” he says. “I can see me taking that picture with my coach after—I don’t even remember his name. That picture wasn’t even worth it. Nothing was worth it. I took forever getting my equipment in the car, and I was mad about something, so I wouldn’t wear my seat belt. Mom took extra time forcing me to put it on. I could’ve skipped any of that shit. I did a million things that day that put us in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“You… relive that day?” I ask.
“Over, and over, and over. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
Yeah.
Yeah, I really do.
My fingers inside my jacket pocket find the corner of the photograph, and a vision flashes to life in my head. I cancel it before I can see anything else, since I cannot bear to watch more of Isaiah’s funeral, and suddenly I’m back in the graveyard. I sigh and take the photo out of my pocket and stare down at it, with the grass and the gravestones behind it. Then I slip it back where it belongs. Darkness. I absolutely do.
Knowing sucks.
Isaiah looks at me again, his top lip trembling as two tears roll down his cheeks.
“Do you know?” he asks.
I glance down at his hand, resting on his knee, and I want to take it in mine. I want to squeeze his fingers and pull him into a hug and let him know he’s not alone. I want him to know I understand. All this time, I’ve been enduring these visions in silence. Suffering alone. But I had company this whole time, just down the hall from my room. Isaiah’s had company. Isaiah’s been reliving the accident since the day it happened, somehow. He can see what happened just like I can see what will happen. I can’t imagine which is worse—getting premonitions of things you can’t change, or getting flashbacks of how you or someone else fucked up the past.
“Is that what the world screams at you?” I ask.
He nods.
“It screams what happened?” I ask.
He nods again. “All the time.”
“Anywhere?”
He nods. “Whenever I leave my room.”
“So then… why did you want to come out here?” I say, hoping he’ll stop this. Why does he torture himself like this, coming to a place with so many bad memories? My heart is pounding so hard, and my hands have curled themselves into fists. I can’t even process what’s happening right now. All I want to do is make Isaiah happy, but it’s hard enough making a regular kid happy. It feels impossible to do it in spite of this kind of… of… whatever this is. He starts talking again, softer this time. Slower.
“You really wanna know why I wanted to come out here?” he asks, wiping his hand across his cheek. I glance over. His fingers come away wet. “I miss them, Alex. I come out here to see them. I… don’t know why. I guess maybe I’m afraid if I don’t, they’ll get forgotten? Left behind? What if I forget what they look like?” he says, nodding down to our parents’ graves.
“You won’t forget,” I say, nodding down at him decidedly. “We won’t forget. Okay? I won’t let you. Remember that time Dad shaved his mustache off and you cried?” His next sob comes out a bit brighter and rolls into a laugh as he wipes his eyes.
“He looked so weird,” he says. “I never knew his upper lip was so big.”
I nod. “See? And how Mom always used the same tortoiseshell hair clip? Every single day?”
He looks up at me. “I have that in my drawer. I… I asked Aunt Mackie if I could have it.”
My heart swells at that. Part of me wants to ask to see that hair clip, so I can remember too. And then I decide that if we’re truly in our last days together, what have I got to lose?
“Could I see it when we get home? Assuming I’m allowed back in your room?”
He’s silent for a long moment and then says, “Sure. But be careful. It’s in a plastic bag because it still smells like her hair oil. Sometimes I open it and pretend she’s still here.”
I remember the woman on the bus, the one wearing mom’s perfume.
My pulse is racing as the full weight of it sinks in—Isaiah is suffering so much, and I haven’t been there for him. What kind of brother would I be if I didn’t try to stop this? I have to do something. Forget making Isaiah’s last days happy. What good is that if he has to deal with visions like this? I have to find a way to stop them.
We have to find a way to stop them.
“Have you tried to get rid of them?” I ask.
He nods. “I thought about telling the therapist. The one we had to see after the accident? But you know how she was.”
“Felt like she was reading from a book the whole time, right?”
“Like I was the fiftieth kid she’d talked to that day.”
“Box checked, right?”
“Right.”
His smile falls a little and he sighs.
“Once I snuck into the medicine cabinet and took one of Aunt Mackie’s sleeping pills,” he says.
Damn.
“Really?” I ask.
He nods and sighs.
“Don’t tell, okay? I didn’t like it. It made me really tired the whole next day. I never did it again. Swear you won’t tell her?”
“Of course not, Isaiah,” I say. “I promise.”
“Thanks.” He smiles, his eyes glistening. “I really have tried everything, though. I tried praying. I’m not sure God is up there. Or if he even cares. He must not, since I’m still seeing things.”
“That’s not what Aunt Mackie says,” I say.
“Well, it’s what I say,” says Isaiah, his voice shattering into a million squeaky little pieces as he drags his arm across his eyes. “He doesn’t care. I know it. If he did, I wouldn’t be like this. But I get it. It is what it is. So I just avoid ’em.”
“The visions? How?”
Isaiah looks up at me and smirks.
“Why do you think I stay in my room all day?”
Holy shit, he doesn’t stay in his room all day because he hates me or Aunt Mackie or the world. He stays in there because he’s scared. And I’ve been down the hall the whole time, clutching my pride like it’s my last lifeline. That shit stops today.
“It just seems like no matter what I do—”
“It doesn’t stop,” we say together.
I look at him, and he looks up at me, and my cheeks burn hot with tears.
There’s silence where my words should be, and I realize there’s only one thing I can say to make this better, to make him realize he doesn’t have to suffer through this alone.
“The world really does scream at me, Isaiah,” I say. I take a deep breath and say what it’s taken me four years to say out loud. “I can see the future.”
It sounds weird hearing it. He looks up at me for a long time, and I sigh and eventually look at him.
“Wait, you what?!” he practically screams. I shush him and look around. Even though there’s no one else nearby, it feels wrong to be screaming among so many dead people. Irreverent or something.
“You what?!” he whispers again.
“I said what I said,” I say.
“You’re not kidding?” he asks.
“On God.”
“Wait… how long?”
“Since the accident,” I answer.
“Yeah, that’s when it started for me too. But how far into the future can you see?”
“It happens when I touch things with my hands. Anything. The longer I touch something, the further into the future I can see.”
“So,” he says, “when you eat something, can you, like, see what your poop will look like later?”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I laugh, shoving him with my elbow. He giggles, and I wish I could record that sound and play it over and over and keep it in my phone forever. “It’s more like, if I’m holding whatever I’m eating, I can see myself chewing it.”
“Or if you’re like, scooping ice cream, you can see the person eating it.”
“Nah. I can see myself scooping it, though. I can only see what I touch with my hands, so just the scoop. It’s complicated.”
“Sounds awesome, though,” he says, gasping as he realizes something. “Oh my God, you could touch a scratch-off and see if it’s a winner!”
He still doesn’t get it. I would just be able to see whether I’m going to scratch it off, and the numbers that are under it. But if I see myself scratch it, even if it’s a losing ticket, it means I will eventually scratch it anyway. It’s not like I can just decide to put it back and have the universe just accept the difference.
“That’s not how it works,” I say. But his mind is off in another dimension with bad ideas.
“Oh my God, you could hold Talia’s hand and see if you guys are going to get married!”
Okay, maybe he kinda gets it.
“Yeah,” I say.
“That’s not a curse, dude, it’s a superpower!”
Yeah. Sure. Superpower. Seeing things you can’t prevent and don’t have to care about yet. Dandy. But seeing into the past also sounds miserable. To have to live with that every day, forced to dwell on the grim past all the time, I can’t imagine how demoralizing that would be.
“At the same time, though,” I say, half to myself, “being able to touch something and see its history instantaneously, when it’s not significant, sounds pretty cool. But… you didn’t see the history of the gravestone. You saw… Mom. So you touched the gravestone, but you saw…”
“I don’t have to touch anything. I just have to be near someone who’s thinking about their past regrets—”
He stops mid-sentence, and I finish it for him.
“Or yours.”
He nods solemnly. “Or mine. It’s so weird. Sometimes I can just feel what’s around me on another level.”
“Like Spider-Man?”
He smirks at that.
“Yeah, I guess. The closer, the louder. Sometimes it’s like a buzzing feeling, like when you hold a balloon to your arm and all your hair stands up. Sometimes it’s voices, like a play where all the characters are narrating what’s going on. Everything. The trees, the grass, the ladybug that flew off your hand, the girl walking on the other side of this place. She’s across the field over there, visiting her husband who died in the army. That’s why I can see them. She’s wishing she never let him go back again. She’s with her daughter, Mabel.”
Mabel. I follow his eyes, but I don’t see anything.
“She’s like a hundred feet away. You probably can’t see her. Your boss is here too somewhere.”
“What?”
At the thought of talking to either Scoop or the consignment shop owner—what was her name?—Ena, a knot forms in my stomach. Isaiah and I will have to finish this conversation at home, before the start of my shift. I press my hands against my knees, cancel the vision of me standing up in these jeans, and push myself to my feet, careful not to let my hands touch the grass on the way up.
“Come on,” I say. “I think we’ll both feel better if we go home and have some breakfast.” I consider texting Talia and inviting her over before my shift starts at one. But then a realization hits me. What the hell am I doing even thinking about going to work today? If these are really the last few moments I’ll get to see Isaiah, to talk to him, why wouldn’t I call in sick? My hands are suddenly clammy, and I remember sitting at our kitchen table across from Dad. I held up my first “paycheck,” $37.86 cash in an envelope with the balance written on the front. It was more money than my twelve-year-old self knew what to do with. Dad leaned forward over his coffee and smiled proudly at me. He took my small hand in his big, strong one and said, “You know what this means, Alex? This is a big step in becoming a man. You’re a leader. A supporter. An example to Isaiah and other Black men who will follow you. You’re a future provider for a future family.” Isaiah, who was sitting next to me, looked up at Dad and said around a mouthful of cereal, “What does that have to do with being a man?” and Dad replied, “Son, a man’s not a man without his paycheck.”
Is that why I feel guilty now? Is that why calling in sick feels so wrong? Against everything I’ve ever been taught, as we walk to the car, I pull my phone out of my pocket and cancel the vision of me texting Scoop.
Me: Hi Scoop. Sorry but I can’t make it into work today. Feeling pretty sick.
Scoop texts me back almost immediately.
Scoop: ok do u have someone to cover you?
“Are you going to invite Talia over?” asks Isaiah.
“Should I?” I ask.
I don’t know why I asked that out loud. I’m really asking myself. If I have only a little bit of time with Isaiah, do I really want to spend any time at all talking to anyone else? I finish my conversation with Scoop with:
Me: No, sorry. Really not feeling well. Going back to bed…
I hate doing this. I hate skipping out on a shift at the last minute. It makes me physically ill to think that Scoop might think I’m unreliable—that anyone, actually, would think I’m unreliable. Or that I don’t care about my job.
A man’s not a man without his paycheck.
But today, I’m choosing different. What kind of man chooses his job over his family? Isn’t that a cliché by now? You see it all the time in hetero sitcoms. Husband comes home later and later, spends less and less time with his wife and kids. Wife complains that he’s not paying her enough attention, or that he doesn’t care about his family. He wonders how she can complain when he’s working so hard. An affair is usually the last straw, and then a messy divorce, blah blah blah. It’s the classic American romance.
And, as a man, that’s not what I want.
Is that where my dad’s advice would’ve had me?
I’m surprised at the burst of anger that swells in me. I know my dad was looking out for me. Didn’t want me to end up broke. Didn’t want me to end up selling drugs. Didn’t want me to end up in prison, or abandoning my kids, or gambling my life away. I get it. But did he ever stop to ask what he did want for me? Have I ever stopped to think what I want for me? I take a deep breath and dwell on the idea that in thirty years, maybe when I look back on today, I’m going to be glad I climbed back into my car and drove back to the house with Isaiah instead of going to work for another forty bucks. And I’m going to hope I did so quick enough that Scoop didn’t see me.
Just as we drive past the Zaccaris’ house, Isaiah looks up at me and asks, “So… do we ever get rid of this?”
“Get rid of what?” I ask, my mind off in the middle of nowhere.
“This… curse?”
A lump forms in my throat. He used the same word I do. Curse. That’s exactly what it feels like. I decide right then, that if nothing else happens before Isaiah dies, if I get nothing else right, if I can’t make up for years of not being there for him, I have to help him get rid of these visions. No kid should have to live with that.
My hands tighten around the wheel and I take another deep breath.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m game to try if you are.”
For the first time since we stopped rapping “Black Dragon” together, he smiles with hope in his eyes.
5 The Dress
WE MAKE IT BACK to Aunt Mackie’s house with Isaiah still alive.
But the relief lasts for only a moment. With every minute that goes by, we’re inching closer and closer to the end.
This morning in the graveyard, which… has already happened.
The evening I’m going to spend sitting in a chair.
Tomorrow, where the photo will stay somewhere dark, probably in my pocket.
Lights flickering through my jacket pocket.
More darkness for who knows how long.
The morning in the graveyard.
I shake my head.
I guess that’s the case for all of us, but knowing that it’s going to happen to my brother so soon makes me keenly aware of every little thing in this house that could be dangerous. A loose cord holding up the chandelier in the foyer could finally snap and the whole thing could come down and crush him. He could start making his lunch—probably pizza bites—and faulty wiring in the kitchen could blow up the oven. Or he could choke on one of them. Or his heart could give out at age twelve from all that cholesterol.
