Authors: Jen Nadol
Your loving mother,
Helene Diodinis
I let the pages—not a book at all, but a letter written in a journal, century-old advice that could have been from my own doomed mother to me—lay in my lap. I stared across the room at the spot where Nan used to sit, where I had told her about the mark and she’d let me believe I was the only one with this awful ability.
Later, I’m not sure how long after, I walked to the foyer, skirting the stacks of boxes, to reach the door. There was one more visit to pay.
My cab turned into the long drive of the cemetery past the church where Nan’s funeral had been held.
“Which way?” the driver asked.
“Up the hill.”
It was raining. Not an ugly, pelting downpour, but a light summer shower. Tears of the gods, Nan’s mother had called it. I remember her telling me that as we sheltered under an old oak in the preserve, caught by surprise during a walk. It must have been three or four years ago. Had she been sharing a memory or trying to say something more?
“Stop here.” I recognized the gentle slope of the hill and the dark obelisk that stood just behind Nan’s grave. The driver had agreed to wait despite the ready fares the weather would bring. I got out, rain sprinkling my face, and trudged up the incline to the hard block of stone bearing her name, NANETTE DINAKIS, and the dates of her life in the unremarkable font of a newspaper or novel.
There were fresh flowers by some of the graves, but Nan’s was bare. Just me and her. I didn’t want to sit. Not because the ground was wet or I knew I’d get dirty, but because I didn’t want to be close to her. She hadn’t trusted me. She’d told me she did, but her actions said otherwise.
“I’m here, Nan,” I said, my voice loud and angry in the quiet of the graveyard. “I’ve been gone for a while. Three months. I moved to Kansas. Bering, of all places.” I looked around the deserted cemetery, trying to rein in the emotions that felt ready to boil over. “Of course, you know that already. You sent me there.”
I took a deep breath and ran a hand across my face, wiping away the rain. “I went to their graves. That’s what you wanted me to do, right? Find out the things you were too chicken to tell me yourself?”
It was the only explanation for her sending me to live with Drea. I shook my head, feeling my fingernails digging angrily into clenched hands.
“I can’t believe you never told me, Nan. About what really happened to my mother. But mostly about the mark. How could you listen to me after I watched Mr. McKenzie die and pretend you knew nothing about it?” My bangs were clinging to my forehead, dripping rain into my eyes just as they had that day. She’d given me a warm towel. So much easier than the truth.
“And those West Lakes kids …” All these years later, I could still remember them so clearly, kids playing ball, laughing, running. By nighttime, they were dead. “I was only four, Nan. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but you did.” I shook my head again. “That’s not who I thought you were.
“Of course, I knew that girl in New York was going to die.” I admitted softly, “And I let her. So maybe I’m no better.”
I sat finally, tired of standing, my anger seeping out, like the rain running silky trails down my neck. I didn’t even bother spreading my jacket on the wet ground.
“Was it Roberta Bikakis that changed you? Was it your idea to keep her in the apartment that day? My mother’s? Or did you decide together like you and I used to? Of course, our decisions were about trivial things like what color to paint the living room. Hardly life and death. You couldn’t trust me with that.”
I remembered thinking, fleetingly, after I’d saved Lucas how devastated I’d have been if I’d convinced him to stay where the greatest harm waited. Exactly what had happened with Roberta. No wonder my mom ran away.
“I can imagine why you didn’t want to use the mark after that,” I said. “But maybe there’s a reason it happened that way. Or maybe you just messed up, but could have saved others if you hadn’t quit, ones who should have been saved.
“If you’d told me, we could have figured it out together. Am I fate? Were you? Or was the woman who wrote that letter just crazy? My mom too. And what am I supposed to do with this … this gift?” The word felt sour on my lips. It’s what Lucas had called it. I thought the woman who wrote the letter had said it better with
curse
. What must it have been like for her, worried that she wouldn’t live to share her secrets with her daughter? The mark too much of a burden, overtaking her life, just as it had my mother’s.
“Maybe,” I said softly, trying out an idea that hit me as I spoke to Nan’s silent headstone just like I’d spoken to my mother’s twelve hundred miles away, “maybe you were just too afraid. Worried that you’d lose me like you’d lost your daughter.”
As soon as I said it, of course, I knew it was true. I remembered the boxes in her room where I’d looked for clues—letters or a journal—anything that would explain her mind, why she’d withheld the truth. I’d been looking right at it, I realized, holding the pictures and mementos of our life. It wasn’t that Nan had thought the mark shouldn’t be used or that she hadn’t trusted me—she hadn’t trusted herself, having already failed once.
“I would never have left you,” I told her, staring at my hands clenched in my lap. “Nothing you told me could have made me go. I’ve missed you every day since you’ve been gone. Even today.” I saw a tear drop onto my thumb, disappearing immediately on the slick of my rain-drenched skin.
Sitting by Nan’s grave, I could remember a hundred things about her. The way her brow knit while she helped me with homework, how she taught me to make tea, working in the kitchen so fluidly without a motion wasted, the pride on her face at my grade school graduation. I knew what Nan had done, the things she’d withheld, was because she had loved me.
I stood, brushing wetness from the folds of my clothes where it had collected. “I’m going to go now, Nan. I’m not sure where, but it may be a while before I’m back. A long while.” I took a step closer to the headstone, running my hand over the arched top, hoping to feel something of Nan. But of course, it was just cold, hard marble. Nothing like the woman I’d known.
“I love you, Nan,” I told her, closing my eyes and turning my face to the sky, letting the rain beat down as I listened one last time for anything, any part of Nan.
It was probably just the wind and rain hitting the stones around me, but walking down the hill to my waiting cab, I thought I finally heard her. Or maybe it was just my own inner voice, the one that was my guide all along, repeating her trademark phrase:
What now?
I climbed into the back of the taxi, wishing I knew.
The first day of school. The first day of the rest of my life. It was surreal, walking through the doors of Ashville High again. I hadn’t been gone that long, but felt like I’d gone really, really far.
I’d forced myself to come back here, hoping it might make me feel normal again. I really needed that.
“Cassie!” Tasha ran down the hall grinning, her hair cut short in a sleek bob. She looked older, but in a good way. Not the way I felt. She grabbed me in a tight bear hug. “I’ve been trying to get you. You’ve been back for days. Why didn’t you call?”
“Sorry, Tash. I’ve been swamped.”
“What’ve you been doing?”
“Oh, you know …” Yelling at my dead grandmother, packing up the apartment like I have someplace to go, trying to decide if I’m fate or just fated for the asylum. “Sorting through stuff. Getting my bearings.”
“Yeah, it must be weird to be back.”
“Understatement of the year.” The idea of sitting through classes, trying to pretend any of this mattered … I kept trying to convince myself I could make it work, but I felt totally off, like the latch on my old locker, bent in a way so it never quite snapped into place. There were a few things I’d honestly been looking forward to, though. Seeing Tasha was one of them.
“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Tasha said, tucking a sweep of hair behind her ear. “I have soooo much to tell you, but first I want to hear about Kansas and your aunt. And your boyfriend! Oh my God, Cassie, what a crazy summer you had!”
“Yeah, it was.” Literally.
Tasha nudged my arm. “C’mon, let’s find our lockers. You can tell me about it on the way. Where’s yours?”
I looked at the slip of paper telling me what to do, a relief to have this small part of my life mapped out so clearly. “Just down the hall. Three fifty-one.”
Tasha frowned. “I’m downstairs. One twenty-two. Who do you have for homeroom?”
“Milchuck.”
“We’re not together,” she said. “I’ve got Mrs. Allen.”
“Yeah, I saw you weren’t on my list.” I’d also seen who
was
, my breath catching when I thought of seeing him again.
Ashville High looked the same as when I’d left in May, the gray linoleum floors shiny but still not quite clean, tiled walls, kids lingering by their lockers smiling, whispering, picking up right where they’d left off.
“So? Tell me about Lucas,” Tasha urged. “I got all your e-mails. I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk more …”
“That’s okay.”
“It sounded so intense! Was it hard to leave? Are you going to see him again?”
I shook my head. “We broke up.”
“What?! Oh my God, Cassie.” She stopped, grabbed my arm. “What happened?”
If I’d been thinking straight these past few days, I’d have come up with something to tell her. It was obvious we’d come to this. I could say it was an argument, but Tasha would never leave it at that. She’d think I was nuts if I told her it was about a philosophy lesson and probably even more nuts if I explained why that lesson mattered.
“Hello? Cass?”
“I’m sorry, Tasha.” I smiled weakly. “I’m a little out of it.”
“No shit.” She crossed her arms, waiting. “So? What happened?”
“Oh.” I sighed. “Long story.” Tasha frowned. This was the kind of thing best friends shared, but there’s no way I could tell her. Not all of it. “It’s way too much to get into here. We’ll talk later.”
“Well, are you okay?” We started walking again. Tasha was still frowning, but seemed more worried than annoyed.
“Sure,” I said. “It wasn’t meant to be. I’m over it.”
Tasha stopped again and looked at me hard. “No you’re not.”
“No,” I said, actually smiling. This is what I loved about Tasha. “I’m not. But I will be.”
We’d reached my locker and Tasha leaned against the wall while I twirled the knob, setting the combination. The door clicked open smoothly.
“Works,” I said, shutting it. I had nothing to put in there, but they made us check them anyway. “Should we do yours?”
“Yeah.” We walked down the stairs and toward her locker, Tasha telling me about the summer in Ashville, the boy she’d worked with, weekend trips to the beach, concerts. It sounded so nice. Ordinary.
Classmates passed us, waving and nodding. I smiled back, trying to be happy about being back here, among friends. Trying to look as sane as Tasha or as any of them. Trying not to notice the way they looked when they walked through the shaft of sunlight streaming in the window—as if they were marked. They weren’t. Not today.
The bell rang just as we got to Tasha’s locker.
“Ugh! I can’t believe school’s starting again already,” she said. “You’d better get upstairs. Want to come over later today? You can stay for dinner, my mom’s making tacos.”
My fave. “Sure.”
“I’m glad you’re back, Cass,” Tasha said, punching my arm lightly. “I missed you.”
“Yeah, me too.” I
had
missed Tasha and our lazy afternoons at her house, runs for coffee at Jake’s. I didn’t know if we could ever go back there, though. I was a different person now. Of course, so was she. That’s part of what William James was saying with the whole Divinity Street thing Lucas and I had talked about in his apartment: none of us are ever who we were yesterday.
I jogged the rest of the way down the hall and up the stairs to Mr. Milchuck’s room, passing lockers and a string of posters that seemed to shout at me, squeezing through the door of my new homeroom just before final bell.
The only seat was in the front row. I grabbed it, wishing I could turn around, but too nervous to look for the only person I really wanted to see. Afraid that maybe I’d read him wrong or that he’d gotten back with Val while I’d been gone.
Instead, I kept my eyes locked on the blackboard, MR. MIL-CHUCK written across it in large block letters, just like the first day of philosophy. I felt further than ever from answering Professor McMillan’s question. And I wasn’t even looking for the metaphysical, but something much more straightforward. Am I Cassie Renfield, descendant of the gods, or just a girl at the end of a long line of crazy people?
Announcements started. Hamburgers for lunch, cheerleading tryouts next week, tees and sweats for sale after school. I stood with the rest of the class to recite the Pledge, words tumbling effortlessly from my lips. Liberty. Justice. The posters I’d passed on the stairs—Responsibility, Honesty, Choices. I don’t know why they even put that stuff up. No one pays attention. I never had before.
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Maybe. But it’s probably a lot more fun.
The bell rang again. Time for class. I stood, slinging my backpack over my shoulder, waiting for the kids ahead of me to file through the door and trying my darnedest to be what I hoped I looked like—a girl, sixteen going on seventeen, with worries no deeper than guys and good grades.
I was so tired of thinking about the mark, what was right, was wrong. My duty, if I had one. I was afraid. Not just of seeing it and having to decide what to do. Or of the awful confrontation. That all sucked, but mostly I was afraid that I would never fit in somewhere like this again. I feared the same thing as Nan. Being alone. Could I ever find someone to tell my secret to who would still treat me like me?