I’m not, but I’m having trouble breathing.
Janice is like, “It’s really sad stuff.”
Bracing myself, I say, “I need to know.”
“It will change everything.”
“Tell me.”
“You will never forget again.”
I nod. I need to know this, but as soon as Janice starts speaking, I want to plug my ears. I need to know what she’s going to tell me, but I don’t want to hear it. Not from her and not like this.
Janice says, “You’re here because Jimi wants you here. All of this, it’s his little game. You’re the pawn, Ade. He’s been planning it, well, I can’t even begin to imagine how long. And the thing is, you’re just so messed up that he’s made it work. Whatever I tell you it’s already too late. Vauxhall is his. I’ve looked into his head. Jimi’s been to Grandpa Razor, he’s gotten the future. His future and, not surprisingly, you’re not in it. Vauxhall and Jimi have a great little family. A nice home. Jimi one, Ade zero.”
I’m biting my lower lip so hard it’s ballooning out.
“Doesn’t make any sense-”
Janice chuckles to herself. “That’s just the thing, Ade. You have no idea what you’ve actually seen. You’ve forgotten us getting, well, cuddly, just a few weeks ago. Can you imagine the other stuff you’ve forgotten? Can you imagine the visions that maybe you’ve forgotten?”
“Everything I’ve seen I’ve remembered.”
She laughs loud. “Not at all,” Janice says. “Remember, I’ve been in there.” And she taps my forehead with a cold finger. “The time you went to the ER, got hospitalized, surgery, you had a vision. You remember what you saw?”
I try. “Jimi’s dad.”
“And after?”
“Something really far out. Me looking in a mirror. And, I couldn’t see-”
“You could see, though, Ade. You could see just fine. Only you forgot. Want me to show you what you saw?”
I’m in a daze, biting back my tongue. I nod.
Janice, stroking the back of my neck with her sharp nails, she says, “Your past catches up with you, Ade. All those concussions, all the damage, it has to go somewhere. To say you change is putting it lightly. The anger, the violence. You go a little nuts, frankly.”
She touches my face, runs her fingers with both hands through my hair just the same as her sister did and my skin tingles. My eyes roll back. Janice’s digging into my memory, cutting through the cloud of damage and mental scar tissue. It feels like she’s swimming inside my skull.
The vision comes up quickly. Me again in front of the mirror. I’m focused in and older and I’m sitting in a wheelchair. The reason I had trouble seeing this, the reason it was so fuzzy, is easily explained by the look in my eyes. It’s dull. It’s the look of a fish in an aquarium. The dead-eye stare of an insect. This future, it’s me as I’ve always worried I’d become. Me trapped in a failing brain. What’s worse, I’m clearly in a hospital. The walls are white and the floors are white and the ceiling tiles in this place are white. The reek of ammonia is strong. At first I’m sure I’m just watching myself in this mirror, but it quickly becomes clear it’s not actually a mirror, it’s a window. Not watching myself, I’m staring through me to the parking lot below where a man and a woman are leaning against a car kissing. The man is an older Jimi. The woman, gorgeous and bright, is an older Vauxhall. I scream so slowly that it hurts my jaw.
Janice takes her fingers from my head. The vision evaporates and I’m back in the car with my ears buzzing, my fingers bloodless from tension.
And Janice says, “Jimi’s under the impression that they do that, sit out in front of your special person’s home and make out, on a monthly basis. It’s cruel, but from what I hear Jimi’s kind of a vindictive person, so-”
“Impossible,” I interrupt. “What I see, it happens. Either Jimi dies or I change the future and I save him. But if I save him it won’t end up like that. It can’t end up like that.”
“Can’t win all the time, can we?”
I think I fly into a rage, but I’m not sure exactly how it happens or exactly what even takes place. I know that I kick my way out of the car. I don’t open the door first. I don’t roll down the window. I just kick and kick and kick until I somehow hit the lock and get out. In the street, I know that I swear up into the sky. What’s last is that I kick my car and then I tell Janice she needs to leave.
She asks me to drop her off back at the Lair. “Not my fault,” she says.
“You climbed in my car to ruin my life,” I say. “You can walk.”
She calls Katrina to pick her up and I leave her waiting on the side of the road. This little trail of rhinestones tinkling in the dark around her.
I drive to nowhere.
And as I move, the houses flashing past, the anger slowly subsides.
By the time I get to a park with picnic benches and a pond, I’m no longer churning. The rage has subsided. In its place, the sickening feeling of inevitability. I keep repeating to myself that old saying about how it’s better to have loved and lost rather than never loved in the first place, and I realize how much I hate the expression.
But this part of me, its defeatist and I hate it. I refuse to give in to it. Refuse to listen to it anymore.
I’m not going to let Jimi drown.
I will not kill him.
I will be fine.
SEVEN
The morning sun is just starting to spray the sky orange.
I park across the street from the park and I go for a walk over to an empty drainage ditch and sit on top of one of the dirt mounds nearby and watch the sun come up. I watch the sun bleach the dirt and gravel and weeds inch by inch by inch. When it hits my feet I call Vauxhall.
She answers on the third ring, her voice all warped from sleep.
“Hey, Vaux. Sorry to call so early.”
“Ade?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on? You okay?”
“I am.”
I listen to Vaux breathe in the static. The houses across from me are now hit by the sunlight. Their windows not see-through any longer, just blankets of yellow.
“Vaux, what if you fall in love with someone?”
“What do you mean?”
I can hear her rubbing her eyes. I can see her propping herself up on her bed.
“I mean what if you love someone, you’d stop, then-”
I don’t need to finish. Vaux, jumping in to fill any silence, says, “Yes.”
“Really?”
“I don’t… I haven’t ever been in love, Ade. Not like what you mean.”
“But if you were. If it was love like that, could you stop? Replace it with me.”
Vaux is only a whisper on the other end. Just her breathing in electronic haze. The sun has fully risen and the shadows are so long. My shadow from the top of the dirt hill soars over the construction site to the houses so far away. My stretched-out head almost touching them.
“I think so,” Vaux says.
She says, “For you, I will.”
I sigh into the phone and all the way back to Denver I hear Vauxhall sigh as well.
“Are you happy?” I ask her.
