“If you are anything like me, and I know you are, you’re probably dealing with this period of…adjustment by isolating yourself from everyone around you. Am I right?”
I nodded glumly. “I don’t want to cause people to get hurt.”
My grandmother reached out across the sofa and patted my leg. “I understand. I do. But there’s several things you need to understand.”
“First, you don’t control this thing and you can’t let it control you. Whatever this is, it doesn’t decide who gets hurt based on what you want or don’t want, and it doesn’t limit itself to people that you make physical contact with or even people you have ever met. Distance is a part of it, yes, but its unreliable. Back in my forties I spent about five years obsessing over what kind of pattern there must be underneath all of this.”
“We didn’t have fancy things like the internet back then, of course, but I started getting every newspaper in a hundred mile radius. Then five hundred. Then a thousand. By then I was good at spotting the bad ones, the times when I felt like I was likely thing that turned a fender bender into a funeral or bad wiring into a school fire. Some of that was me guessing or feeling guilty—that’s why I was obsessed in the first place, of course. But you do develop a feel for it I think, almost as if you can see a thin, invisible cord stretching back to you or whatever lurks over your shoulder.” Her gaze had begun to drift into some unseen distance, but she pulled herself back with a quick smile to me. “But I’m getting sidetracked. I’m 86, so cut me some slack.”
“So I would keep track of these bad events from newspapers, people I knew, any source of information, all this bad luck, and over time I figured it out. There is no pattern. Sometimes weeks would pass with nothing out of the ordinary happening. Then there would be five things in one day. Sometimes they happened to people I knew, sometimes they happened to people two states away. No rhyme or reason, they just happened.”
She paused a moment and I spoke up. “So how do you know it was tied to you really? I mean, I know you said you felt it was, but how do you know for sure?”
The woman shrugged and gave a sad smile. “I guess I don’t know for sure, though if I’m wrong, it means I have less bad things on my conscience, so that’s a good thing in the end. But believe me, I feel pretty certain, in part because of my traveling.”
“You know I’ve always traveled a lot. Well, like I said, you only have the negative parts of this thing for thirty years, and in my case it started when I was 17, so by 47 I was done with everything but the good fortune. But by then I had already been searching for a pattern for years, and like you I doubted if I could rely on my sense of what was and was not connected. Plus, my information was so limited. Its not like people’s smaller problems and illnesses are going in the newspaper. I was only seeing the most sensational examples from articles and the handful of more personal accounts I got from people I knew. There was a lot of gaps. So that’s when I started traveling.”
“I naturally had plenty of money, so I was in a unique position to expand my investigation further. I planned out a schedule of travel for two years that followed the same routine in each place. I started off by going to Rome, Italy. I got newspapers from the area for a month beforehand, the month I stayed there, and a month after I left. It was harder while traveling to get everything delivered, even with the amounts I was paying, but I developed a clear picture over time. Bad luck was following at my heel like a hungry dog. When I came, misfortune followed. When I left, the dog went with me.”
I suppressed a shiver and swallowed, my tongue dry in my mouth. Not seeming to notice, my grandmother continued. “I kept track of things until I was 56, but of course it had all stopped long before then. By then your mother had it, and not that long after you were born.” She sighed. “And I hoped it would skip her, that it would skip you. But it was a silly hope.”
She paused, sipping from her glass, her dark eyes studying me over it. “And I think I’ve made you more scared, not less. I’m sorry, sweetie. I got the bad part out of the way first. Now the…well, if not good, at least better part.”
“One,” she held up a single finger as she spoke, “the bad luck will never affect your daughter. They won’t have our special luck until it comes to them, but they should never have abnormal bad luck either. I guess whatever it is protects the line in that way.”
“Two, you can find love and it be okay. Something my mother told me about, and I’ve found it to be true, is that your bad luck will never touch the person you love the most. So if you find that special someone, that truly special someone, they are kind of tucked under your umbrella with you. I don’t know if it can change from person to person over time, or what all the rules are, but I do believe that it works.”
“Third,” she held up a third finger with a warm smile, “you’re not alone in this. I’ll help you through it best I can, and while I don’t have all the answers, having someone to talk to can help.”
I suddenly felt my vision blurring with tears and I leaned over,
hugging the older woman tightly. She hugged me back and stroked my
hair, and it wasn’t long before I fell asleep.
When I woke up I was laying on my sofa with a blanket covering me. I rolled over and saw a note from my grandmother. She said she decided to leave me sleeping, but to call her in the next couple of days and we’d get together again. Still blinking blearily, I went to the kitchen and saw by the clock and the light coming in from outside that it was the next morning after our dinner. I stood for a moment looking glumly into my refrigerator, debating cereal versus no breakfast, when my stomach gave a sudden lurch. I ran to the bathroom, making a last second decision to throw up in the sink because I wouldn’t have reached the toilet.
The smell of the vomit hit me and I retched again, then a third
time. I practically never threw up, and now I had thrown up twice in a
few days. My first thought was that I was getting a stomach bug, but
then a terrible thought struck me.
Twenty minutes to the drug store, and then on impulse, into their bathroom to do the test. I peed on the stick, my hand shaking so bad I felt sure it wouldn’t even register. But before the allotted time was even up I had an answer. Positive.
The stick couldn’t tell me, but I knew it would be twins.
The rest of the day was a blur of sadness and anxiety. I had left the drugstore with the grim thought that I should either go to an abortion clinic or buy a lottery ticket, and I felt disgusted with myself for thinking it. Still, part of me couldn’t help but feel like I was murdering at least one child by having either of them, at least if there was truly two like I suspected. Ultimately, I settled on calling and getting a doctor’s appointment for the following week before settling into a depressed stupor in my bed. I didn’t call my mother or grandmother, but later that night it struck me that I should call Brad.
Back when I found out that Brad had lost his job, I felt guilty. Maybe it was because of me or maybe not, but I had visited him, we had talked, and ultimately we had sex. I knew immediately it was a mistake, and Brad, who clearly saw this as a sign that we were getting back together, took it hard when I let him know that it was an isolated thing, not the first step towards us getting back together. Since then I hadn’t talked to him, but I needed to now, because even though that had been over two months ago, I hadn’t been with anyone else before or since.
I didn’t tell him any details over the phone, just that I needed to talk to him if he could meet me the next day. He agreed reluctantly, his tone guarded. He wanted to know what it was about, but I remained vague and told him I’d see him the next day.
We met at the food court of the mall he was working at now, having gotten a job at a clothing store a week before. He didn’t have a long break, but it wound up not being a long conversation.
I told him I was pregnant, that I wasn’t expecting anything from him, but I thought he had the right to know. He asked why I was telling him this now, and I explained I had just found out myself. He said it was bullshit, that I had probably fucked ten guys since I gave him a pity screw, but that he was the only one with a job, so I thought I’d hang it around his neck. Well fuck that, and fuck me. He stood up then, his neck straining and red, his eyes bulging. I had never seen him so angry. I wondered for a second if he was going to hit me, but instead he spat at me and stormed off.
The spit had been aimed at my face but had gone short and wide to land on my arm. I grimaced, wiping it away with a napkin from the dispenser on the rickety food court table we had been sitting at. A few people nearby were dimly looking in my direction for the source of the commotion, but I didn’t care. I felt shellshocked and tired, but I also felt angry. None of this was my fault, and I was trying. I didn’t deserve any of this bullshit, and I didn’t deserve being talked to like I was some kind of fucking dog, being called a whore, being fucking spit on.
I felt myself raging more and more as I drove home, and even when I went to bed that night, I kept replaying that scene of him yelling and spitting on me as I fell into a fitful, restless sleep.
It was two days later that I heard that the day after I had met him, Brad had been on a ladder at work hanging up a bracket when he had fallen. Somehow his mouth had gotten hooked on a metal coat rod on the way down, shoving the large metallic disc at the end of the rod up through the roof of his mouth and snapping his neck. He had died later, on the way to the hospital.
I’ve called my grandmother, but I haven’t heard back. I may try talking to my mother again, but I don’t know if she’ll even talk to me. I don’t know what to do, or who will ever even read this, but I feel like I’m being crushed down, squeezed and pressurized more every day, becoming a black hole that just eats light and life. It needs to get better or I don’t know how long I can make it.
Final addition to this entry. I’ve just gone through my mail from the last few days and I’ve won two different cruises. So unless I change my mind or get in touch with my grandmother or mother, I’m going to leave for a few days and go. I wouldn’t think the ship would sink with me on it, and I could at least inflict myself on a different part of the world for awhile. I will write another update soon, if I can.
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Credits
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