The Sight
Authors: Judy Blundell
2 Novels: Premonitions and Disappearance
Judy Blundell
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
WRITING AS JUDE WATSON
In a vision, I saw blood explode over my uncle’s heart.
Two days later, he nearly died.
I knew something would happen to my mother.
It did.
People talk, and I hear what they’re saying.
But I also know what they wish they could say.
I see flashes of Emily somewhere else.
And then she disappears.
What if you saw what was going to happen, and you couldn’t stop it?
I think I was a nice person before my mom died. I have a hard time connecting that person to the person I am now.
It’s going on a year and a half since the accident, and I think I’m running out of leeway. People, like teachers, aren’t giving me slack anymore.
One of these days, I’m going to have to decide on a personality.
I am mean to my best friend, Emily Carbonel, that day. And no, it isn’t the first time. But I’m not the first person in her life to let her down.
So that’s not why she disappears.
In Washington State it doesn’t usually get hot in June, but today, the temperature is smack on ninety and the heat is making the air bounce. I just moved here from Maryland five months ago, so I’m used to humidity. I don’t get why everyone is suddenly fainting from heat exhaustion. It just feels like summer to me. No school, and a bunch of people in shorts who really shouldn’t be wearing them.
The only trouble is, my aunt Shay doesn’t have air-conditioning. Most people don’t on Beewick
Island. So I try to cool off the old-fashioned way—with a hose on my feet, in a shady spot in the backyard. When Emily drifts in and starts talking to me, it’s too hot to make an excuse and go back inside, but it’s too hot to listen to her, either.
It’s one of the first days of summer vacation. Shay had suggested all sorts of fun summer programs to organize me, but I said no to all of them. She must have put in a secret call to my grandparents, because she targeted what used to be my interests before the accident. Photography camp? Swim club? Writing workshop? Summer job teaching art to kids?
No. No. No. No.
She gave up.
Emily doesn’t have summer plans, either. Her parents haven’t been able to get it together to do much for her this summer. They recently separated, and the whole thing is still pretty ugly. Emily had been accepted to a highly competitive computer camp in Seattle, but her parents fought over who would pay for it and if she’d live at her dad’s full-time for the summer. They were so busy fighting that the deadline passed. So Emily’s stuck with nothing to do all summer but pretend not to hear them fight on the phone and blame each other for the fact that Emily has nothing to do.
Emily must have some sort of built-in misery meter, because she attached herself to me the very
first week I arrived on Beewick Island. I could tell she thought we were soul mates, since our parents had abandoned us. I wanted to scream at her that she was lucky her parents are still around and in her face. I wanted to point out that considering what had happened to me,
I
should have been the needy one. Instead, I just let her sit down at my table at lunch and unwrap her sprout sandwiches. I let us become friends.
I never would have picked Emily for a friend. First of all, we look stupid together. Emily is your standard tall blond, partial to tiny T-shirts and low-slung pants. I’m short, with acorn-color hair, and whatever interest in clothes I used to have has funneled down to finding jeans that are clean. Emily is practically plugged into her computer, and I don’t even go online anymore because she’s always messaging me when I just want to hang out and download some music. Her mode is permanently set on mope, and I don’t need more depression in my life. She has a habit of not listening to you when you’re talking, and this really pisses me off. I don’t talk very much, and you’d think she’d make an effort to listen when I do.
Even though I have some sympathy for her, being with her sometimes just makes my brain scream for mercy. I consider myself in default mode, and she just happens to pop up in the friend department.
Like today. We sit on Shay’s pink Adirondack chairs in the backyard, and I wait for her to get bored and go home.
“It is
so
hot,” Emily says for about the thirty-sixth time. “Why don’t we go into town? We could get ice cream and go to the library.”
“I don’t think I can handle the excitement,” I reply.
Emily takes a swig of her Orangina. The smell of it makes my stomach turn. It is so hot. I lower my head and rest my cheek on my knees. I turn on the hose nozzle again and let the water wash over my bare toes. If we were really friends, I’d turn it on Emily, too. She’s kicked off her sandals and even her little frosted toenails look sweaty.
“So will you come?” she asks.
I’m smelling orange soda and I feel woozy. “No. It’s too hot.”
“Maybe Diego would drive us.”
I don’t ask Diego for favors. “He’s busy.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
I think Emily has a secret crush on my cousin. There’s probably some little old lady somewhere on Beewick Island who’s the only one who doesn’t, but I haven’t met her yet.
Maybe Emily is trolling for a new boyfriend. One of the reasons she attached herself to me is because her old friends put her in cold storage. She’d dated Will Stein almost all of last year and dropped
her friends like hot fries to spend every minute with him. Not that Emily told me this version, but the truth was pretty obvious. Then when Will broke up with her, they wanted to teach her a lesson, so they didn’t take her back. They would have eventually, but Emily has a thing about rejection and just got frosty instead of wooing them back. Instead, she hung around me to show them she didn’t care. Somehow, our friendship stuck, despite the fact that there was basically no reason for it to exist.
“Gracie?”
“What?”
“Are you my friend?”
It’s the kind of question I hate. I look up at her, and that’s when something happens. At first, I think it’s just the heat playing tricks on me. It starts with something in the corner of my eye, a shadow that grows on the lawn. My heart starts to speed up, to patter in my chest like a hard rain. Because I know what’s coming.
Suddenly, Emily looks different. Her short blond hair isn’t swept back with clips anymore. It’s matted to her forehead with sweat. The trees and lawn fade behind her, all the greens and blues, and I see her against a white background. I feel fear shimmer off her body in ripples. Then I can hear the sound of breathing in my ears. Only it’s not mine, and it’s not Emily’s. It’s someone else’s.
Someone is looking at Emily.
She hears the breathing, but she doesn’t look.
She is afraid…
I close my eyes and tell the image to go away.
Go away. Go away.
“All right.”
Emily sounds hurt. I must have said the words out loud. When I open my eyes, she is clutching the Orangina bottle between her fingers and biting her lip. The sky is the same whitish blue, and the pine branches still look like they’re drooping in the heat. The clips in her hair are yellow and pink. Shay’s small house hunkers down on the hill, white clapboard and the windows with twelve tiny frames painted green. Everything is exactly the way it was.
Before I can say anything, Emily is walking away. She’s really hurt and angry, but she keeps the empty Orangina bottle in her hand. She doesn’t drop it on the lawn, like I would have done. Emily is a nice person.
I watch her cross the lawn. I should call her back, but I don’t. She vanishes around the corner of the house and I put on my headphones. Within thirty seconds, I’ve forgotten about her.
I’m the last one to see her before she disappears.
You can drive from one tip of Beewick Island to the other in about an hour and across it in fifteen minutes. It’s long and skinny, like the finger of a witch in a fairy tale. On a map, one skinny end is close to the mainland, and the other looks like it’s making a break for Canada. The Olympic Mountains loom in the distance, blue and purple, their peaks snowcapped even in summer. The water in the bays is the color of blueberries, and there are fields of lavender that perfume the air if the wind is right. Seattle is about an hour away with no traffic, but there’s always traffic.
It’s not a bad place to live. Unless it’s completely different from everything you’ve known, and you were never looking for a change.
So how did I end up here?
I don’t think most impulses when you’re fifteen are necessarily stupid, but sometimes it feels that way. Back in Maryland, I offered Jake Buscemi, who got the nickname “Scarface” in the sixth grade, twenty dollars to punch me. I really didn’t expect him to take it. And I didn’t expect the whole school to find out.
Oh, and another thing I didn’t expect?
How much the punch would hurt.
The school called my grandparents, and they were a tad upset at the situation. I expected to be slammed right back into therapy, where I’d spent almost a year being coaxed by Dr. “Call Me Julie” Politsky to hug a stuffed panda. This was supposed to allow me to express my grief in a healthy, non-threatening, accepting atmosphere. The fact that I refused to make out with a stuffed animal indicated that I hadn’t “fully processed my grief.”
Oh, excuse me, Dr. Politsky. The next time your mom gets swiped by a jackknifing semi that turns her car into an accordion, I’ll just toss a coot widdle stuffed panda in your lap.
So all my friends were really nice at first, and they were afraid to even mention my mom’s name. In the beginning, that was a big relief. Then they started blushing whenever they mentioned their
own
moms, and they’d change the subject really fast. And soon I guess I was just too big of a drag to be around, because I started spending a lot of time in my room.
I could tell that everyone was waiting for me to
get on with it
and
process and find closure.
I tuned them out. I plugged into my headphones and filled up the empty space in my head with music. I didn’t bother to listen to anyone anymore. I listened
to songs instead, the same ones, over and over, until they made a groove in my mind that I could depend on.
But I guess I spooked my grandparents. Instead of more therapy, Mimi and Pop-Pop had a family conference and decided to follow through on my mom’s original intention in her will, which was to have Aunt Shay be my guardian. The next thing I knew, I was yanked out of school during the midterm February break. The situation was deemed too serious to wait until June. I blinked, and suddenly I was on a plane to Seattle, clutching a roll of Tums and a noisy box of Tic Tacs, my grandmother’s remedy for motion sickness.
My grandparents cried a bucket of tears at the airport, but I knew they were secretly happy that they could now return to playing golf all day instead of nagging me about my math homework. They’d raised three kids. They were done. It was apparent within weeks of their moving in with me—because the family agreed that after the tragedy I shouldn’t be uprooted—that they realized they’d made a big mistake. There was even some attempt to find my father, which shows how seriously weird everything was at the time. My dad was a perfectly respectable D.C. lawyer before he went on a solo vacation to Santa Fe when I was three years old and never came back. He told my
mom that he needed to “get clear.” He promised to send child support. He sent one check. Then we never heard from him again.
Oh, sorry to interfere with your life crisis, Dad. Have a good one until you’re dead.
So my dad was as gone as it gets, and my grandparents weren’t equipped to handle me. They deserved to focus on nine-irons at this stage of their life, I guess. Uncle Owen lives half the time in D.C. and half the time in London. So that left Shay.
I’d only met Shay maybe a half-dozen times in my life, usually at some big, corny family reunion. She had a son, Diego, who was two years older than I was and completely uninterested in developing a cousinly relationship. It wasn’t like we bonded over burgers on my mom’s back porch, or kept up with each other on e-mail.
Once I moved to Beewick Island and into Shay’s house, I was positive that if Mom had really known her sister instead of relying on telephone sisterly bonding and some hazy childhood memories, she would have changed her mind.
Shay is the complete opposite of Mom. For a scientist, she’s an incredible dimwit. She’s some kind of expert on wild grasses.
Very
exciting. She makes lists on Post-its that constantly fly off counters and flutter around the house like little fluorescent pink and yellow birds. They always
get stuck on the bottom of your shoe. You peel them off and read things like
Buy oranges!
or
Learn Italian!
She eats muffins the size of hats for breakfast. She cooks with butter. I can’t count how many times she’s yelled at dinner, “Oh, I forgot to make salad!”
Shay is round and curly-haired. She is a big fan of the drawstring-pants look. Her legs are strong from all the hiking she does, but she has a belly and flabby upper arms. She’s always saying, “Oh, those extra ten pounds just turned into fifteen when I wasn’t looking,” or, “Help! I’m out of my fat pants and into my gross pants!” You’d think she’d stop baking muffins and cookies on Saturday mornings, wouldn’t you?
Mom was a fresh-vegetable person. She was extremely healthy. She never embarrassed me. She never complained about something if she didn’t plan to fix it.
I know that if this were a TV movie, I would fall into Shay’s flabby upper arms and eat her blueberry muffins slathered with butter. I would take comfort from Shay’s nurturing personality, her large breasts concealed in a series of Gap denim shirts, her insistence on calling me “sweetie” no matter how much I wince. I would tumble for her warmth, and slowly, painstakingly, find myself beginning
to come alive again. Can’t you see the misty reconciliation scene? Sob.
But this is real life, and I just feel pissed off.
I’m just about to go to sleep when the phone rings. I can hear Shay pick it up in the hallway.
I’m too tired at first to listen to what Shay’s saying, but something about her voice wakes me up.
“I’ll ask her. Hold on, sweetie,” Shay says. Her voice has a gentleness to it, like she’d be holding the person’s hand if she could.
A quick knock and she opens my door and stands in the doorway, the phone pressed against her chest. “Gracie, it’s Emily’s mom. Did you see Emily today?”
I know it immediately. It’s like being hit in the chest with a baseball.
I know this question is not an opening into good news.
“We hung out for a while in the backyard,” I say.
The answer sounds empty.
I feel empty. Everything has drained out of me.
Because I know what’s coming.
“Do you remember what time it was?” Shay asks.
I think back. “After lunch. About two o’clock, I guess.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
Remember. You have to remember.
But I remember stupid details, like the smell of oranges, and Emily’s toenail polish, and her finger tapping against the glass of the bottle. I hear that tap in my head, and it grows, and it drowns everything out.
“I think she wanted to get ice cream, but I didn’t want to go to town.”
Shay looks more concerned, if that’s possible. “Did Emily walk to town?”
“I don’t know. She just left.”
I know that’s not the answer anyone wants to hear.
It’s not the one I want to say.
But it’s all I have.
I know Emily’s mother isn’t panicking for nothing. It isn’t like Emily to stay out late. I know why her mother is worried. She should be worried. We should all be worried.
Shay listens on the phone, then says, “Of course, right away.” She hangs up but doesn’t put down the phone. She grips it and takes a breath.
“The Carbonels want us to come over. They want to talk to you about Emily. They think you’re the last person to talk to her. She hasn’t come home.”
The night is warm. The windows are open. I’m shivering, and trying to hide it from Shay.
Emily’s eyes shut tight.
The sound of someone breathing.
Shay is waiting for me to move, and I’m not moving, because I know with cold certainty that everything I saw was true.
It’s happening again, and I can’t stop it.
I don’t want this. I never wanted this. I just want it to go away.
I didn’t want to see a red bloom of a stain spreading on my Uncle Owen’s chest, on his white shirt. Two days later, he had a tear in his aorta and almost died. In eighth grade, I didn’t want to see that Hannah Bascomb was afraid of her own father, or the reasons she was. I didn’t want to know the results of our neighbor Mrs. Shale’s biopsy before she did.
It’s like people are bleeding in front of me, and I can’t move to help them.
I have too much sorrow crowding my heart as it is.
The worst possible thing has happened to me. I don’t have room inside me to care about it happening to anybody else.
But I get up and get dressed.