Being Neighborly, Part 5

Elle was subdued for the next few days, despite the holiday excitement, although she refused to tell Mom or Dad what was bothering her. They thought she was getting sick, and she provided some support for that theory by developing sniffles and a sore throat on Christmas morning, and spent the next few days enjoying her Christmas presents while lying in bed.

December 30^th (New Year’s Eve Eve, as Mom liked to call it) fell on a Friday this year. Elle was still in bed, and neither of us had mentioned knocking on Cassandra’s door again since she had shooed us out of it a week before. It was warmish, and I tried to take advantage of it (and get out of a house made small by too much family time) by taking my bike around Central Park.

The cold felt like a sheath around my legs and arms as I pedaled home and the dusk made the city around me blur. Mom hated the idea of my riding on the streets but there was no way I was going to wheel it all the way from the Park in this weather. Besides, I liked the idea of slipping between taxis as recklessly as a bicycle courier downtown.

Sadly, my vision of myself was a little more agile and self-aware than my reality. My heart was pounding from volleys of honking and the sounds of brake screeching too many times when I reached my building. “Wotcherself, kid!” one last and particularly irate taxi driver called after me. “You think you know when your number’s up?”

As I wheeled my bike down the hall, I felt tugged by another set of worries altogether. I couldn’t help thinking about Cass, and the tension in her form visible even when she stood at the sink with her back towards me. Mother would worry if I didn’t appear very soon after dark — but I leaned my bike against the wall by our door anyway, and went past it.

I stood in front of the next door for a few, shaky breaths, before raising my fist to knock. I waited, wondering how long I could bear it, and finally reached forward to knock again.

As I did, the latch clicked, and Cassandra looked out, to find me awkwardly pulling my arm back and clasping both hands in front of me. I suddenly realized what a terrible idea this was. What could I say? — Hi Cass, I know you basically kicked me and my sister out of your place last time, but here I am again, in my grody exercise sweats, and I really want to know what’s up with you? — I could feel myself blushing. I wanted to say something apologetic about bothering her again, to look down and away, but, as usually, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was as beautiful as ever, although her eyes looked tired.

After a while she said, “Hello, Noe.” Then, after another pause, “Where’s Scout?”

Relieved to have something to talk about that had nothing to do with me, I blurted out quickly, “Oh, she’s sick—”

Cassandra’s reaction was astonishing. She blanched, pulled away from me into the shadows of her apartment. I broke off in surprise, and interrupted myself: “God, Cass, don’t freak out! She just has a cold; she usually gets them over the holidays. Mom says that germs are Elle’s way of spreading holiday cheer…. Honestly,” I continued as Cass kept her face averted, “she’s really fine! She’s still asking me for new things to read.”

“I’m sorry, Noe.” Cass’s voice sounded thick. “I must seem unhinged to you.” She reached up and scrubbed her face, a gesture that reminded me of Elle, and looked back at me.

I tried to laugh it off. “Don’t worry Cass; everybody gets stressed out at this time of year — and actually, I really knocked because I wanted to apologize for anything Elle or I might have said last time to upset you.” I gulped, thinking about what I had just said, and hurried on, “Elle, she’s just so young…”

“Please, don’t worry about it. I was out of line.” She shook her head, trying to recover her composure. “Would you like to come in for chocolate? It’s Friday, after all.”

I nodded. Part of me felt as if I was betraying Elle, by enjoying what had become our shared secret without her, but another part of me was agog at the idea of having time with Cassandra all to myself — even if I knew I was just a kid to her. I followed her inside.

At the table, there were a few minutes of quiet while Cassandra made the cocoa, and brought it over. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any cookies this week,” she said, surprisingly sheepish.

“Oh, it’s alright.” I took a breath, and girded up my courage. “Cass — Cassandra; I have to ask you — is everything alright? I mean, it sounded as if you were actually pretty upset about something last time, and — I don’t know — I’ve had the sense that you had something bothering you before. I don’t want to pry into your privacy, but I just needed to let you know that if you want anyone to talk to, or if there’s anything I can do to help — well, I just thought you should know that you have friends.” I tried not to wince, listening to myself. If I’d been older, if I’d been a man, I would have put my hand out to cover hers, but instead I just sat there, knowing that I was blushing up to my hair again and looking at her out of the corner of my eye.

Cass was silent some more. Silence was something she was good at. I wondered anxiously if she was going to blow up again. Instead, after a long while, she smiled a watery smile, and reached up to wipe her eyes. “Oh Noe, you are so sweet.” I experienced an internal squirm that was a mix of embarrassment and elation. “I wish you were right, but I can’t really have friends. I see too much of them.” I looked at her full on, puzzled out of my self-consciousness.

“Let me try to explain. Then you can try to believe me.

“I wasn’t born Cassandra Jones; it’s an epithet I gave myself after I realized I couldn’t live with people, especially not any I cared about, and came here to this city of anonymous crowds.

“I chose my name in a fit of black humor, or possibly hubris — but it felt right, to take the name of a woman whose visions were to no one’s advantage, least of all her own.”

My confusion must have been written on my face, because she caught herself with an almost-laugh. “I’m sorry; I’m not making any sense, am I?” She took a deep breath, and began to speak quickly. “When I was a little younger than you are now, just at the age when things seem to get really complicated and emotional for everybody, life threw a true complication in my direction. I started seeing things — things that other people said weren’t there. Everyone I saw seemed to be followed by a dark silhouette, a shadow that tailed them whether they were standing in sunlight at noon, or sitting in a darkened room. I felt as if I was living in a world of chiaroscuro, where normal shapes and patterns were obscured by clouds — but the worst was when I looked into the shadows that trailed behind people. I saw — I see — violence, illness, ill-chance, the failure of the body and the triumph of age. I thought I was going mad, and that I needed treatment, anti-hallucinogens or tranks, but I was too terrified of the consequences to tell anybody.

“Then, after months of this fear and confusion, I realized the truth — or rather was shown proof of what, I think, I had always been afraid was true. I was walking home from school — I was still in school at that point, although my life was more or less a shambles and everyone thought I was on drugs — when I witnessed a car accident. It was a hit and run, although the victim was probably more to blame than the driver. She was running, with headphones on, not looking where she was going. I know, because she bumped into me a block before she crossed the street. I had shied away from her, from the vision of impact and hemorrhage that I glimpsed in her shadow, but then when I heard the squeal of breaks, the sound of impact and the screams of the bystanders, I turned to look and froze. I was seeing the exact same violence, the same tragedy, again. I stood still while the driver jammed his car into reverse and fled, while people ran forward to see if the victim had a chance (I already knew that she didn’t), but when I heard the sirens approaching, bringing with them the promise of consequences and reactions, I found my legs and ran. It took a long time for me to stop running. I don’t like to think much about that period.” She shivered, and looked up at me.

I felt as if I was gasping like a fish. “B-but, that was just one time, maybe it was a coincidence?”

Cass shook her head. “Of course, that’s what I wanted to believe, too. So I kept testing it — visiting hospitals, or old-folks’ homes. I never saw anything to convince me otherwise, though.”

“But what if you said something?” I asked, “Surely people’s fate isn’t set? If you had stopped the girl, and she hadn’t run out in the street, then she wouldn’t have died just then. Can’t you warn people?”

Her smile was bitter. “You are just like me — although maybe anyone would have this reaction. I haven’t told enough people to know.” I would have marveled, even now, at this sign of my special status, but she was going on. “You would think that this would be a great gift. I could use it to save people, like a super hero — but few of the fates I see are the product of one mistake, or one decision. How can you convince a lifelong junk-food junkie to change his ways, without telling him you can see his massive cardiac arrest in a year? Sometimes you don’t know what the causes are — what would you tell to a woman who will get breast cancer? There are so many possible catalysts.”

“What about the accidents, though?” I persisted.

“Yes,” she agreed, “there are the deaths that I could avert, but that is perhaps the bitterest part of all. If I see a death that is avoidable, and if I take steps to prevent it, warning the person, or changing their life, then they disappear from mine.

“It’s as if I can only exist in the reality of the deaths I see. If the person I warn is able to change their fate, so their future has a different shape, then it’s as if they never existed for me. I remember them, but all evidence of their presence disappears. They live a life with a new future and new choices, but my future is set. I am stuck in this strand of reality whose future I can see.”

I was not sure I understood this. “Hunh?”

“Let me put it this way: if you flip a coin, there is a possibility that it will come down heads or tails. In the moment, both futures exist for you. It comes down tails, and the other possibility collapses; it ceases to exist, outside of the potential of an alternate reality. Suppose I was tied to a world in which the coin could only come down heads. Because it came down tails for you, though, we could no longer inhabit the same reality.”

I looked at her blankly. “How do you know this?”

She shrugged. “It’s my best theory. I tried to help people for a while, to get them to change so that they wouldn’t die in the ways I saw. Either my vision stayed the same, whatever I did, or I never saw them again. It happened over and over. Strangers I met in bars, my friends from home. My mother.”

I stayed silent, digesting this. Cassandra got up and put the cups in the sink. Looking at her back again, I finally said,

“Why are you telling me?”

She turned around, and came back to stand in front of me. “Your sister will get cancer before she is the age you are now.”