Manageable Cases

Content Warning: This story contains themes of grief, parental death, survivor’s guilt, anxiety, childhood trauma, and references to fatal accidents and near-death experiences involving a child.

“Do you remember the first time we came here?” I asked as Rami and I settled into the sand beside one another.

“I think so. We stayed at that hotel with the frog slide, right?”

“No, it was before then. The time with the truck.”

“Oh,” Rami said as he peered out at the hazy horizon. The sun was rising over the Gulf, washing our faces in muted tones of orange and pink.

Daddy threw us in the car at five a.m., and when we protested through groggy groans, he laughed and said, "It must be so hard to sleep while I drive for five hours." I thought that was funny enough to forgive the inconvenience.

I awoke to the feeling of cool, moist air on my face as seagulls squawked around us. Moments later, in front of a grayish bar of sand, we stopped.

“Everyone out!” he said, ushering us with an excitement so intoxicating I didn’t care that I was certain to get sand stuck in the fleece of my pajama pants. I jumped from the car into the sand and stumbled onto my hands and knees. We laughed together as you cautiously climbed out of the other side of the car. He spun around to you, scooping you up in his arms. You were giggling like you had that time you painted the living room wall with your diaper.

“Sure, bring that up right now.”

That scene, looking at you both, I was overcome with love and simultaneously overwhelmed by a sensation like an ice pick plunging into my skull... It was a vision, my first vision: I saw you under the night sky, wandering out of a motel and into the street. A white truck playing shitty country music was barreling down the road. You were too small for the driver to see.

When Daddy turned around, I was doubled over in the sand. He rushed to me, asking what was wrong. The easiest answer was a partial fabrication: I told him my stomach hurt.

He thought I was just hungry. After all, it was sometime in the afternoon, and we hadn’t eaten yet, so we went to get sandwiches. I spent the car ride in my head. Voices clashed against each other, attempting to decipher the meaning of the horrific events that I had imagined. It was imagined. It will not happen. The loudest voice, however, was certain that it was a warning. Daddy’s voice slipped past the chorus, as he promised that we were going to have a great time at the beach. I didn’t know how to tell him. I didn’t want him to hurt like I did, so I just smiled and nodded.

When we were eating, you pulled the provolone from your sandwich and stuck it to your face as a mask.

“Yeah, Dad has shown the photo at every family gathering for the last fifteen years.”

“Well, you know how I’m in the seat next to you, just dying laughing.”

“Yeah.”

I was actually seeing visions of you getting hit by the truck flash before my eyes, but I didn’t know what to do so I just kept laughing. When those subsided I felt so relieved I was able to calm down enough to stop thinking about it. That was, until we pulled up to our motel… It was a chartreuse-and-white monstrosity, almost exactly as in my vision.

I started sobbing and you both were begging me to tell you what the matter was, but I couldn’t say in front of you. I could only cry.

Later, when you were napping, he asked me to come outside with him to get some fresh air.

“Beautiful day to be at the beach with your babies,” he said as he wiped a booger from my nose. I could barely hear what he was saying with the storm of worries swirling around inside my head.

“You know,” he continued, smiling, “I love you and your brother more than anything in this world, so when one of you is hurting, all I want to do is make it better.”

I nodded.

“Do you think you could tell me what’s hurting you, so I can help make it better?”

He let the question float in the air as I tangled and untangled my fingers. When I found the words and began my explanation, he didn’t say anything. After I finished, he knelt down and told me what a good big sister I was, that I should know nothing bad was going to happen because he and I would always be there to protect you, and that he would always protect me.

I wanted him to be right, but I didn’t know if he was.

Later, he and I inspected the flimsy internal lock on the door to our room. I felt like it was too easy for you to access and said I wouldn’t sleep until he did something. So, after we got dinner at that pizza place, we stopped by the grocery store and picked up masking tape to put over the lock.

Before bed, I gave you a lecture on safety precautions that caused a stir in both of us, which prompted Daddy to declare it was story-time.

I didn’t think I would be able to fall asleep, then, snuggled up to the both of you as he transported us into the Five Hundred Acre Woods, I couldn’t help but drift off.

I awoke to the sound of cars rushing by. My vision was blurry after I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, so I started to feel around the bed to make sure everyone was asleep and okay.

You weren’t there.

I jolted from the bed and rushed toward the door, only then noticing that the tape on the lock was on the floor and the door was cracked open.

No... No, this can’t be happening. No, I must be dreaming. No, I won’t let it happen. No. No. No. No.

As I made my way onto the outer landing, I saw you. Just as in the vision, you were wandering toward the street as a truck came barreling down it.

“Rami, no!”

I shrieked louder than I ever had before. My tiny voice strained against my throat as I soared down the stairs.

“Stop!”

I was a few feet from you when you turned around. Inches from the road, the truck sped past you, barely missing you, as the force of the wind created by its travel nudged you toward me. I grabbed the collar of your shirt and yanked you into me so hard we both fell back.

I didn’t take my first breath until I heard Daddy behind me, yelling our names and asking us what we were doing, what had happened, and why we were outside.

“It happened! I told you it was going to happen!”

“It happened!” I repeated through sobs as he held us.

You were in shock. You still haven’t told us why you wandered out that night.

“I still don’t know. I’d barely remember it if it wasn’t for Dad telling the story all the time.”

Yeah, well, there are some details that both of you never knew.

“What do you mean?”

When I finally calmed down enough to speak, I told him the story as I just described it. I told him the truck was white, as it was in my vision, and that the song was the same. In reality, the truck was blue, and the radio was tuned to some talk station.

“Why would you lie about something so insignificant?”

To me, those details meant everything. I was terrified that the vision had, for the most part, come true, and even more scared that we didn’t do enough to prevent it. At the time, it felt like Daddy didn’t listen to me, and I had to be sure he would always listen to me. So I lied.

“I mean, I guess I get that.”

We carried on with the trip after that night, each of us shaken by the event. You bounced back fastest, which was unsurprising.

“Because I’m the normal one.”

Yes, because you’re the normal one. But there was an unspoken curiosity between Daddy and me. A couple of days after that night, he couldn’t help himself. He asked me if I had anything similar happen around the time that Mommy died.

“He asked that?”

I don’t blame him. I couldn’t remember anything of the sort, but I turned my brain over, trying to find any evidence it was in my control. It’s only normal that he wondered as well. Still, I don’t think I slept the rest of that trip.

When we returned home, Daddy, beaming with pride, told everyone what happened. Whether people believed a vision had ensured your safety or not, at the very least, they knew I had saved you. They started calling me your protector.

Those who did believe in my vision had their own answers for why it came to me. Grandma’s pastor was convinced God was speaking through me. This gave me more questions. Why me? People die all the time, and God doesn’t step in to save them. Does he? Are his attempts just failing, or is it too much work and we just don’t hear about the manageable cases?

Aunt Patricia said the ancestors were contacting me that day. That time and space don’t exist after you die, and so the ancestors become aware of all things past and present, and one of them must have figured out how to reach me.

Her friend Michelle said that was silly and I probably just had the right combination of astrological signs. I thought she was silly, but no more so than Grandma’s pastor.

That therapist Daddy made us see, she thought that the vision was a lucky manifestation of my car-related anxiety given Mommy’s accident and tried to give me methods to cope with my worries.

“What if I get rid of my anxiety and then I can’t see the bad things coming?” I asked her.

“Well, that’s a good question. Have you always felt the feeling we described as anxiety?”

“I think so.”

“And the bad things, have they always been preventable?”

“She asked that knowing Mom had died?” Rami sat up.

“Yeah, she was an odd one, but I answered anyway.”

“No.”

“That’s just it. No matter how much we try, we can’t always predict the future. Sometimes we will, and it helps. Sometimes we think something will happen and it doesn’t, and sometimes we think something won’t happen and it does. There’s no way to tell which is which at what time, and that is why allowing yourself to constantly feel anxious does more harm than good.”

We stopped seeing her because Daddy didn’t like that explanation. He agreed with Grandma and her pastor. According to him, God must have given me the power as a way to make up for the suffering we experienced after Mommy, as though I was entrusted with our karmic reparations.

I didn’t care what it was, honestly. Whether this was God, our ancestors, the stars, or anxiety, I was going to use it to protect you all.

So I vowed to tell Daddy about all of my visions.

I told him I saw someone break into the house and shoot us, so he put new locks on the doors. No one broke in.

I told him I saw you get stabbed in a fight at public school, so he scraped together what he could and sent you to private school. You were never stabbed.

I told him I saw him die of a heart attack, so he changed his diet and started working out. He never died of a heart attack.

Bad things that I couldn’t predict happened. Hearts broke. Fights occurred. Things were stolen. Life happened. But at the end of everything, you and he were safe, and that was all I cared about.

Tears welled in my eyes as I struggled to speak.

“When I imagined losing either of you my body ached in a way that made it feel so real… It was my job to protect you both and I needed him to listen.”

“It’s okay. You did everything you could.”

“You both trusted me, so when I came to him and asked him to switch his flight to a different airline––”

“Yeah, because you had a dream that the one he was set to go on crashed.”

“I was sure of the airline. That exact detail made me so confident.”

“Sela... you couldn’t have known.”

“The break-ins weren’t in a vision. I had a migraine after I saw news of home-invasion homicides in the city and was convinced we were going to be murdered.”

Rami looked at me.

“Neither was the stabbing. Or a heart attack.”

“Sela...”

“I saw two boys fighting outside your school. That was it. I made the rest up.”

Sand spilled out of Rami’s fist as he clenched it.

“So the dream?”

“The dream happened. It was the first actual vision since we were here.”

My voice broke.

“Then the plane I dreamed about landed safely, and the one I made him switch–– it’s like I’m being punished for something,” my words began tripping over each other, “like the universe is angry with me for pretending I knew anything at all. I feel like I did this to you. I––”

“Stop.” Rami's brows drew together as his eyes narrowed on the sand between his feet. I let myself fall into sobs.

He was silent for a good while. I fought my urge to look at him. If I forced forgiveness at this moment, I might never get it at all.

“I want to be angry with you,” he said. “Not because you killed him. You didn’t. That’s absurd. But your lie made me believe, for a while, that it could be true. I was wrong. You were wrong. And the universe isn’t sitting around waiting to punish you…”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Sela, Dad could’ve stayed on that first plane and died anyway. Or switched and lived. Or missed both flights and got hit by a bus outside the airport. You didn’t do this to me. I love you, but that’s pretty stupid.”

“Why could I see those things happen, though? If not to prevent them or suffer from them? If not for some reason?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we’re asking too many questions. Why couldn’t I see that he was going to die? I would have blown off my grad trip and stayed with him that week. Why did he have to die? He was young. We should have had more time with him. Why did Mom die before I got to know her? Why did they both die? Why anything, Sela?”

He looked out at the water and continued.

“At some point, what do we get from asking questions no one can answer?”

He looked calm in a way I couldn’t understand.

I wanted to see his point. I wanted it to be that simple. But if it was that simple, why had I spent my whole life bracing for punishment?

“If there’s a reason doesn’t that mean we can figure it out?”

Rami sighed.

“Maybe there’s not a reason.”

I had put my father on the plane that killed him, and Rami was asking me to believe the world had not arranged itself around that fact. That there was no hidden sentence beneath it. No verdict. No hand reaching out of the dark to point at me.

But how could a thing be meaningless when it had ruined me so precisely? How could chance know where to strike? The pain in me didn’t feel accidental. It had weight. It had memory. It had the cruel authority of proof. If I was not guilty, then what was this suffering doing inside me? Was it only grief? Was grief allowed to be this elaborate, this convincing, this full of false law?

I closed my eyes and breathed in. For one moment, I tried to imagine it: a world without design, without punishment, without any great intelligence keeping score. A world where my fear was only fear. I still felt the guilt, but something in me loosened. Barely.

Rami said nothing. He let me sit there at the edge of that impossible mercy.

“I hope there's not,” I said.

Rami smiled.

“Are you happy, Sela? I mean, aside from Dad dying.”

I pictured my life for a moment. My childhood, with a father and brother who loved me no matter what. The love I have in my life today: my partner, my friends, my cat, my art. All of it.

“No. I love my life, but I’m almost never inside it.”

“See, I don't get that. Why even have a life if you’re not going to live it? ”

He plopped back on the sand.

His words echoed in my mind. I imagined him washing out to sea, leaving me as the others had. If the world took him too, would life be worth living?

I plopped back on the sand.

“Are you happy, Rami?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Even now.”

I looked at him then. Really looked. The sun was higher now, bright on his face, and for the first time all morning I could see him. He was lying beside me, squinting at the clouds, cheeks wet with tears. Sad. Happy anyway. Living.

I laid my head back. The tide crept up our backs, and we let it.