After class, I barely had time to collect my books before he was at my side. “Did you see anything?” he whispered urgently.
I shook my head.
“I’ve got the afternoon free,” he said. “Let’s go look. We can go to the mall or in town to the square …”
“I can’t, Lucas,” I lied. “I promised Doug I’d help him with some stuff at the shop.”
“I thought you were off today.”
I shrugged. “We got some extra orders; he asked if I could help with restocking, inventory, you know.”
“What time will you be finished?”
I had to squeeze past him to get through the door. “Not sure,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
Chapter 23
He wanted to be with me all the time. I was less a girlfriend than a project. Every conversation started with: “Did you see one yet?” He was disappointed when I said no, but he would have been equally disappointed if I’d said yes and failed to call him before the confrontation.
At Lucas’s behest, I’d been spending my free time haunting the most populated places of Bering: the town square, the shopping centers, even the strip of bars near campus at night. Lucas came with me for those excursions. In all our times out, I’d seen nothing, but I developed a persistent stomachache, my gut churning unpleasantly every morning at the thought of another day searching.
Finally I decided to give myself a day off. It was a Tuesday, Lucas’s busiest day on campus, so I knew he’d be less likely to hound me and I had the early shift at Cuppa, with the rest of the day free. It was mid-August, still hot, but breezy, and I was determined to spend it away from the places I’d been visiting in search of the mark. I planned to read by my pond in the park, not for class, but purely for pleasure, something that felt in very short supply lately.
I was walking down the path toward the pond when I saw a woman pushing a stroller. As she came closer, what I first suspected was confirmed: there was a misty glow inside the hooded carriage, a mark on her baby. I slowed down, not wanting the moment to come when our paths would cross and I either would or wouldn’t do as I’d promised.
This was exactly the kind of untimely death that should be prevented, I thought, gritting my teeth. My mind raced, working through the things I could say, but she was nearly upon me and I was so nervous that I knew I wouldn’t be able to stammer anything coherent. She smiled pleasantly. I glanced inside the stroller. The baby was small. An infant, wrapped in a blanket monogrammed JDS, sleeping peacefully amid a pool of light. And then she was past.
“Excuse me,” I said, too loudly.
She turned back. “Yes?”
“I … I …”
She looked concerned. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”
I shook my head. “I … This is going to sound crazy,” I said hoarsely, “but I think something’s going to happen to your baby.”
She drew back sharply, as if I’d threatened her. “What are you talking about?”
I held out my hands, trying to soothe. “I don’t mean to scare you. I … I’m a little bit psychic. I can see things sometimes …” She was backing up, angry and afraid.
“Stay away,” she said shrilly, looking around for help. “Don’t get near me.”
“No, no, I won’t.” This was going terribly. I had done it all wrong. She wasn’t even listening. “I’m just trying to help, to warn you. I think your baby might be in danger. Has …” I looked back at the stroller, trying to get the gender right, but she had turned it fully away and was standing in front, blocking my view. “Has he or she been sick?”
Her voice was low, barely controlled. “If you say one more word to me, I’m going to scream and then call the police. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“There is nothing wrong with my baby, but there’s something seriously wrong with you. Get the hell away from me.” With that, she turned and practically ran out of the park, the stroller jouncing along in front.
I sat on the grass, shaking as I fumbled for my phone.
“Hello?” Lucas whispered.
“It’s me. I saw one.”
“Hold on.” He was back on the line thirty seconds later. “I left my meeting. Tell me about it, Cassandra. Is the person still there?”
“No. She left.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“I tried. It … it was a mess.” I started crying.
“Oh, Cassie, I’m sorry. Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
“No, no, it’s okay.” I wiped at the tears and took a deep breath. “It was a woman. With a baby. The baby had the mark.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I tried, Lucas. I really did, but I guess I didn’t do it right, because she didn’t listen, she got scared and pissed …”
“Tell me what happened.”
So I did. When I was finished, he said, “I’m proud of you for trying, Cassandra. I know it wasn’t easy. Who knows? Maybe she did hear you. Maybe she’ll think about what you said later, when she calms down.”
That made me feel a little better. “Maybe.”
But she didn’t. Or, if she did, she wasn’t able to protect the baby anyway. We found his obituary two days later. Jacob Daniel Stern, four months old. Crib death.
Lucas left for school, but I stayed in his apartment, unable to drag myself through the routines that would get me to work on time. Did she think of me when she found her baby that morning? What had I done but compound her guilt about something she had little, maybe no control over? I wanted to bang my head on the table or scream my guts out. It was so unfair.
Lucas tried to cheer me up that night, but I could tell he felt it too. There is nothing poetic about death. It is ugly and awful, and the more time you spend around it, the uglier and more awful you feel.
“You’ve got to keep at it, Cassandra,” he told me in his “buck up, little camper” speech. “You tried. It’s not like you made anything worse. It was going to happen anyway.”
I was too exhausted and depressed to argue or tell him that I probably had made it worse. I had stayed in bed all day. Lucas brought me soup and tea for dinner and didn’t even try to make me get up.
I skipped class that week, called in to work too. I moped around Drea’s apartment during the times I wasn’t at Lucas’s. Drea had gotten over her brief bout of guilt or responsibility, whatever it had been, and was back to her usual absent self. They’d won a new client, she’d told me, were totally immersed.