The Mark (2 page)

Numbly, I stood, undid my ponytail, and dried my straight dark hair, too long and thick for the towel to do more than soak up the heaviest of the rain. I peeled off my dripping clothes, wrapping them in the towel, and slipped on the fleece pants and hoodie Nan had brought, cozy like a hug.

I heard the soft clank of the teapot and mugs, a rush of water, and the closing of cabinet doors in the kitchen. Nan’s busyness was soothing, but I knew she was worried. Nan always hummed while she worked, and her silence gave her away.

When she returned a few minutes later, I was tucked into the dry section of the couch. She handed me a steaming mug, keeping one for herself.

“Tea?” I asked.

“With a top hat.” All grown-up, she meant. With alcohol. “Sip slowly.”

I did. Slowly, but often. She waited until I was halfway through before asking, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

No. But I did anyway. It hurt to talk about it, a clenching in my chest like the heart attack I’d hoped might be the kind of death I’d witness.

Nan and I had known this day was coming, though I think we both wished otherwise. That I’d never see the mark again or it would turn out to be something else—an optical illusion, night blindness, some rare and random problem with my eyes. It had been a presence forever, in my oldest memories, though not many of them. Some years passed when I didn’t see it at all. It was only after Nan’s last stay in the hospital, more than a year before, that I finally realized what it meant.

As she’d gotten older, Nan’s diabetes became less and less manageable at home. We could both handle the drill without panic now: call the ambulance, ride to the hospital, fill out the forms. The nurses knew us and worked quickly to whisk her to the best room available, usually semiprivate. While she was inpatient, I’d take the bus downtown—the B3, as it happens—and walk the few blocks to the hospital.

On the second day of her last lockup, as she called it, I found her reading, lines from her IV draped like ribbons across the bed.

“Hello, sunshine,” she whispered. That and the drawn curtain told me Mrs. Gettis in the other bed was sleeping.

“Hello back,” I said, pulling over a chair and layering it with pillows to lift me to her level. At five foot one I felt small almost anywhere, but next to the hospital beds on their hydraulic jacks, I could almost inspect the underside of the mattress.

“Are you the princess?” Nan teased, watching me climb onto the stack and sit. “I think housekeeping collected all the peas last night.”

“I just don’t want you lording over me,” I said.

Nan was fine other than feeling like an overloaded pincushion. I told her about my math test—another A—and Spanish paper—only a B. I had almost forgotten about Mrs. Gettis completely until the orderly, Norton, pushed through the door.

“Came to take your roommate for her therapy,” he said, nodding at Nan with a smile.

He disappeared behind the curtain and Nan and I paused, knowing it was rude to eavesdrop, but suddenly reminded that we weren’t at home. Mrs. Gettis snorted awake, groaning at Norton’s urging to get up, help him move her to the wheelchair. Mrs. G. also had a chronic condition—bronchitis or asthma, something like that. Not serious, just a nuisance like Nan’s diabetes. But when Norton wheeled her out, both of them waving briefly as they passed, I saw it. The mark.

It’s like the haze at the edge of a flame or the glow of a lightbulb through fog. Constant and surrounding, but not obscuring. I could see Mrs. Gettis perfectly. She wasn’t blurry or misty, but she was outlined with a soft luminance.

“What is it?” Nan asked. I’d been staring after them.

I shook my head, smiled, and turned back to her. “Nothing.”

When I walked into Nan’s room the next day, the curtain was pushed back, sunlight spilling through the plate glass window and across the neatly made second bed. I think it started to connect then because I felt a heaviness in my gut that shouldn’t have been. It was a perfect day. I’d aced my history test and even found an extra five in my backpack on the way to the hospital.

“Mrs. Gettis check out?” I tried to keep the quaver from my voice because even as I asked it, I could read the answer on Nan’s face.

“No, Cassie. She had a heart attack yesterday.”

“Oh no.”

Nan nodded. “She didn’t make it.” I could feel her watching me, but couldn’t meet her eyes, could barely keep myself upright. “Cassie? Cass?” I nodded, trying to get it together. “Are you okay?” I nodded again, but it was unconvincing. “Should I call a nurse, sweetheart?”

“No.”

“Honey, you’re completely pale. Sit down.” It was a good idea, and I sank into the chair I’d piled pillows on just the day before, gripping its wood armrests tightly. Nan was still watching me, her eyes intense, probing. Her brow was furrowed above that strong, patrician nose, undeniably Greek like my own. I could sense her trying to figure out how to help with her stuck in the bed and me in the chair.

“I’m sorry, Cassie. I didn’t know you’d be so upset or I’d have called you before …”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Death is always hard.”

Well, she was right about that.

Mrs. Gettis had been the first clue, eventually leading me to today. The man I’d followed, the nail in the coffin, so to speak.

“So, now you know,” Nan said as we sat snuggled on the sofa, cupping our mugs, both of us calmer than we should be. Maybe it was shock. Outside, rain pelted the roof and window, adding percussion to our Mozart.

Then Nan asked the question I knew was coming, the one I’d been asking myself since the squeal of tires burned themselves into my brain. “What now?”

I wasn’t in a good mood, but I couldn’t help a small smile. It was her trademark question. Even if Nan had ideas—and she always did—she made me figure things out myself first. She was big into personal accountability. No lesson like one learned the hard way, she often told me.

I didn’t answer. I don’t think she really expected me to.

Through the rest of the day, Nan tried to keep my mind off it—we played Yahtzee and Scrabble, watched
Annie Hall
, and skipped the news. But in the down moments, and especially when I finally climbed into bed after eleven, my body too worn out to keep up with my feverish brain, I couldn’t stop replaying the scene. Watching him climb off the bus, dial the cell phone, look at his watch, step off that curb, over and over. The visions swirled in sequence, then out, linked by a final haunting question. Could I have prevented it?

chapter 3

“Who was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court?”

Mr. Dempsey ignored my raised hand, scanning the room. When no one else volunteered, he pointed to me. “Yes, Cassie?”

“Sandra Day O’Connor.”

Mr. Dempsey nodded and Ally Drewnate marked another chalk stroke for our team.

“What was the Zapruder film?”

No hands went up. Hadn’t anyone seen
JFK
? Nan loved a good conspiracy theory.

“No one?” Mr. Dempsey looked at me. A couple people on my team did too. I shrugged and shook my head. No point in being a show-off.

This was my favorite kind of history class, when Mr. Dempsey ditched the textbook, the
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
propped open on his desk instead.

Across the room, Val Wertz eyed the clock. There was a pep rally instead of fifth period today, and she and the other cheerleaders probably couldn’t wait. I was looking forward to it myself; I had
The Stand
in my backpack. My third time reading it, but Stephen King never gets old.

The bell interrupted Mr. Dempsey’s explanation of the assassination caught on tape.

“Team A wins,” he called while the class filed toward the door. “Thirty-two to seventeen.”

“Cassie does it again,” Jack Petroski said, looking over his shoulder to smile at me as he steered Val through the door.

“Nice going, Cass,” Val agreed. Jack had his arm around her.

I shrugged, trying to ignore the twinge I felt watching them. Watching him. “A team effort.”

Jack snickered.

“Good luck, Val,” I said gamely, waving as I turned down the hallway toward my locker. Val and I weren’t buddies, but there were few people in our class of forty-six who weren’t friendly with each other. Ashville High was too small for battle lines between cheerleaders and nerds, preps and emos. We barely had enough kids to fill the categories.

As I twirled the combination of my lock, Tasha Lusetovich sauntered down the hall, her dark glossy hair pulled away from her face by a blue bandanna. On anyone else, it would have looked like they’d just finished at their uncle’s farm, but on Tasha it was somehow elegant. Like everything she wore. Tasha and I had been fast friends when she’d moved to our small Pennsylvania town from New York two years before. I’d known as soon as I saw her sitting alone on the steps, waiting for the doors of her new school to open, that she’d be interesting. She had ignored all the chattering around her, her nose buried in a thick paperback that turned out to be John Irving. My kind of chick. But Tasha and I weren’t close enough that I’d told her about Robert McKenzie. Only Nan was close enough for that.

Of course I’d looked him up. The dead man. I followed every newspaper article for the week after, until his name, his photos, his life faded from the daily events. Nan neither encouraged nor discouraged me, picking up papers from the supermarket upon request. We didn’t talk about it, but I saw her reading them late at night, her soft white hair fuzzy around the hand that propped her cheek.

He was forty-one years old. One child: a daughter. That part hurt. God knows I knew what she was going through, my own parents killed in a car accident when I was two.

The McKenzies lived in a brick house, ostentatious with white columns and clipped hedges. It was on our side of town, but too far from the apartment to walk. I rode my bike instead, leaning it against a No Parking sign while I pretended to tie my shoe across the street. The curtains were drawn and there was a museum-like quality to the house. Silent. Frozen in time.

I thought about him a lot: about where his life might have gone, where his daughter’s, his wife’s would go now. It was tough to get that day out of my head, even standing in the shiny school hallway two months later.

“Earth to Renfield,” Tasha said, poking my shoulder.

“Hey.” I tossed my history book into the locker. “What’s up?”

She shrugged. “
Nada mucho
. You coming over today?”

“Yeah.” I shut the locker and we started down the hall toward the auditorium. “I’ll definitely need to wear the guard, though.” I held out my arm and pushed back the sleeve. “The inside of my elbow is raw.”

“Wimp.”

We had found Tasha’s dad’s bow and arrows a couple weeks ago, poking around her attic one afternoon. Instead of telling us to stay out of his stuff, her dad had bought a target and some bales of hay and set up a practice range for us in their garage. I liked the feel of the bow in my arms, curving protectively above and below me, like a shield. I was getting pretty good, even better than Tasha, who I was pretty sure was practicing on the sly.

We had almost reached the double steel doors to the auditorium when the PA crackled my name: “Cassandra Renfield to the main office, please.”

Tasha and I exchanged a look. “Want me to come?” she asked.

“Nah. Go on in. Save me a seat.” I kept my voice light, though I doubted I’d make it to the assembly.

I was right. The cement of the school steps was warm on my legs as I sat in the bright sun. Nan was in the hospital again, Principal McCarthy’s assistant had told me. I’d suspected as much.

I could hear the
boom-boom-boom
of the bass drum and crash of cymbals from the auditorium while I waited for my cab. “I already called,” the assistant had said when I asked about getting one. “It should be here any minute.” Which would be accurate if she really meant any minute twenty minutes from now. Taxis in Ashville were notoriously slow. Nan would be in her room by the time I got there, hooked up to the IVs and drips that stabilized her blood sugar, bringing her back to herself.

A school bus turned the corner I’d been watching for my cab, slowly cruising toward me. I looked away. I hadn’t ridden one in years and wouldn’t mind if I never did again. They’d never bothered me before Mrs. Gettis, but now they reminded me of the West Lakes kids, the link between her and Mr. McKenzie that made me nearly certain what I’d see when I followed him two months ago.

When Nan told me about Mrs. Gettis that day at the hospital, I knew almost immediately where I needed to go. She’d wanted me to stay. Rest. Of course, the only other bed was Mrs. G.’s, which wasn’t going to fly.

It was a quick walk to the main branch of the Ashville Library, one I barely remembered, my mind utterly consumed with Mrs. Gettis and a much older memory.

“I’d like to see papers from a while back,” I told the librarian. “Around ten or eleven years ago, I think.”

“Those would still be on microfilm,” the librarian answered. “We’re scanning everything into computers, but it’s going very slowly. All the film is in the basement.”

It took me nearly two hours to find what I was looking for. I knew it was spring or fall, warm outside, but that still left a lot of days. When the front page flashed on the backlit screen, I knew right away that I’d found it. The school looked exactly as I’d remembered. Staring at the headline, I realized that I could have asked the librarian when it had happened. She’d have known in an instant, but I was glad I hadn’t. I didn’t want to hear her memories. I wanted to focus on my own.

SCHOOL BUS CRASH KILLS TWELVE

A school bus carrying 26 West Lakes Elementary School students plunged 40 feet off the side of a highway overpass Monday in Gideon, killing at least 12 children, according to school, police and fire officials.

A witness told police it appeared that a small car struck the bus, which then went over the guardrail of Interstate 565, crashing onto Church Street.