You, my beloved daughter, hold in the palm of your hand the gift and curse of granting another day, another year, another lifetime. This responsibility troubles my mind ceaselessly. I continue to try to fulfill our duties, though I worry it will be the very death of me.
Though you are but ten, I commit these words, our story, to these pages so that should I not be here to hold your hand and look into your dark eyes on your sixteenth birthday as my mother did, you will still know what you have inherited, gift and responsibility.
Your loving mother,
Helene Diodinis
I let the pages—not a book at all, but a letter written in a journal, century-old advice that could have been from my own doomed mother to me—lay in my lap. I stared across the room at the spot where Nan used to sit, where I had told her about the mark and she’d let me believe I was the only one with this awful ability.
Later, I’m not sure how long after, I walked to the foyer, skirting the stacks of boxes, to reach the door. There was one more visit to pay.
Chapter 29
My cab turned into the long drive of the cemetery past the church where Nan’s funeral had been held.
“Which way?” the driver asked.
“Up the hill.”
It was raining. Not an ugly, pelting downpour, but a light summer shower. Tears of the gods, Nan’s mother had called it. I remember her telling me that as we sheltered under an old oak in the preserve, caught by surprise during a walk. It must have been three or four years ago. Had she been sharing a memory or trying to say something more?
“Stop here.” I recognized the gentle slope of the hill and the dark obelisk that stood just behind Nan’s grave. The driver had agreed to wait despite the ready fares the weather would bring. I got out, rain sprinkling my face, and trudged up the incline to the hard block of stone bearing her name, NANETTE DINAKIS, and the dates of her life in the unremarkable font of a newspaper or novel.
There were fresh flowers by some of the graves, but Nan’s was bare. Just me and her. I didn’t want to sit. Not because the ground was wet or I knew I’d get dirty, but because I didn’t want to be close to her. She hadn’t trusted me. She’d told me she did, but her actions said otherwise.
“I’m here, Nan,” I said, my voice loud and angry in the quiet of the graveyard. “I’ve been gone for a while. Three months. I moved to Kansas. Bering, of all places.” I looked around the deserted cemetery, trying to rein in the emotions that felt ready to boil over. “Of course, you know that already. You sent me there.”
I took a deep breath and ran a hand across my face, wiping away the rain. “I went to their graves. That’s what you wanted me to do, right? Find out the things you were too chicken to tell me yourself?”
It was the only explanation for her sending me to live with Drea. I shook my head, feeling my fingernails digging angrily into clenched hands.
“I can’t believe you never told me, Nan. About what really happened to my mother. But mostly about the mark. How could you listen to me after I watched Mr. McKenzie die and pretend you knew nothing about it?” My bangs were clinging to my forehead, dripping rain into my eyes just as they had that day. She’d given me a warm towel. So much easier than the truth.
“And those West Lakes kids …” All these years later, I could still remember them so clearly, kids playing ball, laughing, running. By nighttime, they were dead. “I was only four, Nan. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but you did.” I shook my head again. “That’s not who I thought you were.
“Of course, I knew that girl in New York was going to die.” I admitted softly, “And I let her. So maybe I’m no better.”
I sat finally, tired of standing, my anger seeping out, like the rain running silky trails down my neck. I didn’t even bother spreading my jacket on the wet ground.
“Was it Roberta Bikakis that changed you? Was it your idea to keep her in the apartment that day? My mother’s? Or did you decide together like you and I used to? Of course, our decisions were about trivial things like what color to paint the living room. Hardly life and death. You couldn’t trust me with that.”
I remembered thinking, fleetingly, after I’d saved Lucas how devastated I’d have been if I’d convinced him to stay where the greatest harm waited. Exactly what had happened with Roberta. No wonder my mom ran away.
“I can imagine why you didn’t want to use the mark after that,” I said. “But maybe there’s a reason it happened that way. Or maybe you just messed up, but could have saved others if you hadn’t quit, ones who should have been saved.
“If you’d told me, we could have figured it out together. Am I fate? Were you? Or was the woman who wrote that letter just crazy? My mom too. And what am I supposed to do with this … this gift?” The word felt sour on my lips. It’s what Lucas had called it. I thought the woman who wrote the letter had said it better with curse. What must it have been like for her, worried that she wouldn’t live to share her secrets with her daughter? The mark too much of a burden, overtaking her life, just as it had my mother’s.
“Maybe,” I said softly, trying out an idea that hit me as I spoke to Nan’s silent headstone just like I’d spoken to my mother’s twelve hundred miles away, “maybe you were just too afraid. Worried that you’d lose me like you’d lost your daughter.”
As soon as I said it, of course, I knew it was true. I remembered the boxes in her room where I’d looked for clues—letters or a journal—anything that would explain her mind, why she’d withheld the truth. I’d been looking right at it, I realized, holding the pictures and mementos of our life. It wasn’t that Nan had thought the mark shouldn’t be used or that she hadn’t trusted me—she hadn’t trusted herself, having already failed once.
“I would never have left you,” I told her, staring at my hands clenched in my lap. “Nothing you told me could have made me go. I’ve missed you every day since you’ve been gone. Even today.” I saw a tear drop onto my thumb, disappearing immediately on the slick of my rain-drenched skin.
Sitting by Nan’s grave, I could remember a hundred things about her. The way her brow knit while she helped me with homework, how she taught me to make tea, working in the kitchen so fluidly without a motion wasted, the pride on her face at my grade school graduation. I knew what Nan had done, the things she’d withheld, was because she had loved me.