Off Track

Tameka Jones shifted in her chair, dropped her head onto her desk, and promptly dozed off in the middle of Miss Bockman’s lecture on the uncelebrated elements of the periodic table, or something-or-other. She awoke sixty seconds later to a nap-ending AHEM, lifting her head to the glare of her teacher and twenty-nine pairs of eyeballs fixed on her. Sporadic snickers escaped from the other students.

“Sleepy, Miss Jones?” snapped Bockman, arms crossed.

Tameka stretched, arching her back against her hard plastic seat. “Not so much sleepy,” she said, “as bored out of my ever-loving mind.”

There were not enough shades of red in the crayon box to describe the hues Miss Bockman’s face turned, but Tameka thought she saw a hint of Razzmatazz. Half of the students slunk down in their chairs—an instinctual defensive maneuver—and the other half whooped and guffawed at Tameka’s insolence.

Miss Bockman stuck out her lower lip in indignation and exhaled, fogging up her thick glasses. “Why don’t you just take your ever-loving mind to Principal Monroe’s office, then!” She smacked a pink slip down on Tameka’s desk so hard her chemistry textbook slid onto the floor.

Tameka meandered down the checkered linoleum hallway, the pink slip curled in her fist, backpack slung over one shoulder. She wondered if she’d been too brazen with Miss Bockman, but decided there were worse things she could have done to get kicked out of class. At the door to Principal Monroe’s office, Tameka momentarily gripped the knob, then pivoted on her heel and headed in the opposite direction. She reached the end of the hall, chucked the pink slip into a waste bin, flung open the heavy door, and stepped out into the late spring air.

She passed the soccer field with its freshly mowed grass, the bus stop shelter with its faded, outdated movie poster, paused as a pair of squirrels bounded across her path. The beige brick walls of her high school now safely behind her, she turned and walked along the train tracks that ran all the way through town, finally stopping under the shade of the tallest oak tree and lowering herself to the ground.

Sitting crosslegged, Tameka rifled around in her backpack, found the Capri-Sun she’d neglected at lunch, and punctured the pouch with its straw. She sipped, gazing at the tracks running off into the distance. She glanced at her watch. It was 1:33, yet there was no sign of the 1:30 train that was supposed to pass by.

Sucking out the last drop of fruit punch until the pouch shriveled, Tameka reached into her backpack and withdrew a fat, tattered spiral notebook with a badly worn cover that was barely hanging on to the coil. Its pages were yellowing and made thin from years of repeated handling. She flipped through the wide-ruled pages, which had been completely filled with her great-aunt Lucille’s handwriting in blue ballpoint pen, until she found the paragraph she was looking for, the paragraph she must have read fifty times by now: “You will find a burlap bag filled with cash that falls from the 1:30 train,” Lucille had written, and Tameka recited it aloud to be certain she was reading the words correctly. “It will be lying near the biggest oak tree along the tracks just north of Fillmore High School. You will turn this money in to the police and collect a lovely reward for your honesty.”

Tameka let out a sigh that turned into a groan. She had sat in that spot or walked by that spot every single day for the past month and a half. This, she decided, would be the absolute last day she would wait for the bag of cash. No more wasting weekends by the tracks, no more sneaking away or getting kicked out of class for the fleeting hope of a lovely reward that might not even be worth the trouble. She had told herself that before, of course. She had already considered every scenario: That she was late, and somebody else had stumbled upon the bag days before Tameka even read that page in her notebook; that she was weeks or even months early; that the very next day after giving up once and for all, the bag would fall from the train; that Great-Aunt Lucille was just plain wrong about this one.

Finding the bag was the next successive life event that was supposed to happen to her, the next in a long list that was foretold in her notebook. But there was a very good chance this was one more thing Great-Aunt Lucille had gotten wrong. Almost everything she had predicted about Tameka’s life for the past two years was either slightly off or completely wrong. It was hard to believe Lucille had been so precise and accurate about Tameka’s first fifteen years.

It was an oddity, to be sure, to have prior knowledge of nearly every major event—and even many mundane things—that would happen to her as she grew up. Great-Aunt Lucille shared the story with Tameka’s mother only once, at a family barbecue one summer when Tameka was little. The night Tameka was born, Lucille had been in a deep sleep when she had a vivid dream, a dream so real it both amazed and terrified her. In that dream, newborn Tameka’s whole life played out before Lucille. She saw every event, everything happening as if it were a sped-up recorded video. Bolting out of bed, Lucille grabbed the black notebook and a pen and spent the next several hours, until the sun rose, jotting down every detail she could remember, filling it up with the sequential events of her great-niece’s life.

Tameka’s mother didn’t believe a word of the story. She had scoffed at her aunt and refused to even peek at the notebook. Lucille, she knew, was a modest old woman. She was not clairvoyant, psychic, or prophetic. She often bet on losing baseball teams and never once chose winning lottery numbers. The fact that she’d had this vision, Tameka’s mother said, was utterly preposterous.

But it wasn’t. The notebook had been a secret birthday gift to Tameka when she turned eight years old. She remembered Lucille’s damp eyes and how her hands had trembled when she handed it to her. “Don’t read too far ahead,” she had warned Tameka. “It’s probably a good idea that you don’t read too far ahead.”

The older Tameka got, the more she tended to agree with her great-aunt. But she was bested by curiosity. Tameka’s typical suburban life had been relatively uneventful, but the things Lucille had seen and written down…the knowledge she carried about Tameka’s life…the good and the bad, private things people never share… What a burden that must have been for her. The thought of it overwhelmed Tameka sometimes.

She could barely contain her emotions in the weeks leading up to her father’s death. Nobody had seen the accident coming. Nobody, of course, except Tameka and Lucille. The big things like that were always surprising, no matter how long Tameka had anticipated them.

She had gotten used to being unsurprised by simple things, like which boy would ask her to Homecoming, what her grade point average would be in a given school year, where her first job would be and how much she would make per hour. She often wondered whether some of her decisions and accomplishments were guided by the notebook, finding comfort in the idea that perhaps they were, and finding power in the idea that maybe they weren’t.

On her thirteenth birthday, with her heart racing, Tameka finally gave in and flipped ahead to see what awaited her in the years to come: Second place in the 400-meter relay, graduating high school with honors, college at Michigan State with a degree in Biology, marrying a white guy named Carson at the age of twenty-six. She would have two kids—a boy and a girl born one year apart. Though it was a constant temptation, she still had not turned to the last page. Her death, she maintained, would remain a mystery. Nevertheless, it seemed more and more likely that these future events were not going to happen. At least, not the way Great-Aunt Lucille described them.

Tameka waited until it was nearly two, and when there was still no sign of a train at the distant end of the tracks, she stood and strapped on her backpack. She walked beside the tracks for a while, scanning the gravel, kicking the occasional rock.

As she often did, she again pondered the last event that the notebook had predicted correctly. It was the summer after her freshman year, and she had been eating a bowl of pea soup, her favorite. She was being especially careful, because the notebook foretold that she would spill soup on her lap. As she brought the spoon to her lips, her mother put down the phone and broke the news that Great-Aunt Lucille had just passed away. Tameka was so shaken that her knees smacked the underside of the table, tipping the bowl and spilling lukewarm soup all over her lap.

Tameka was more disturbed by Lucille’s death than she was her father’s. Although she wasn’t particularly close to Lucille, her death left Tameka cold and lonely, as if a part of her had died, too. She curled up on her bed for five days, until it was time for the funeral. Only after her great-aunt was in the ground and prayers had been said and something resembling closure had taken place did Tameka allow herself to carry on. The notebook didn’t predict that particular life event. Lucille hadn’t foreseen her own death, or at least she hadn’t written it down.

Everything after that was messed up. Things that were supposed to happen didn’t. Opportunities the notebook forecast were missed. People she was supposed to meet didn’t show up. She took fifth place in a track meet in which she was supposed to get first. The notebook almost always got the event right, but the outcome wrong.

Tameka decided her great-aunt’s dream must have been accurate, but only up to a certain point. Maybe she had been writing for so long during that night that the events she saw in the vision started to become blurry, or meld together in some big mish-mash of ideas. How could one dream possibly show someone’s entire life, without error, down to the last detail? Certainly, mistakes had been made.

She had stuffed the notebook under her bed, where it lay for nearly a year, forgotten.

Tameka finally came across the notebook while cleaning her room during spring break. Rereading the first third of it was like living her life all over again. She was reading her own diary penned in someone else’s handwriting. Memories rose to the surface of her mind like unceasing bubbles, and she laughed, cried, grew angry, felt shame and embarrassment and experienced triumph and loss—all over again.

Lost in thought, Tameka didn’t realize how far she had walked, only that she had subconsciously followed the train tracks to the place where they ran by the cemetery, which was stretched out in rolling hills on her left. The cemetery grass was more brown than green, the grounds poorly maintained. Grave markers and tombstones stuck out of the earth as far as she could see.

The place was eerie even in the light of midday. Tameka clutched the straps of her backpack and wound her way to her great-aunt’s grave, set back only fifty yards or so from the tracks.

LUCILLE BROWN 1936-2018 was etched beneath a cross on a small tombstone. Tameka stood there for a while, a gentle breeze teasing her hair and stirring the unkempt tufts of grass that hugged the stone.

“Hi, Great-Aunt,” she said softly. “It’s me, Tameka.” After a minute, she took a deep breath. “I think I just wanted to believe that we had all the answers. You and me. But we don’t, do we? We never really do.” She lifted her head, scanned the vastness of the cemetery, the hillside dotted with stones that represented hundreds of lived lives, thousands of memories, a multitude of futures that had become pasts. Her eyes fell back on Lucille’s grave. “I think I was testing myself with this bag of money thing, you know? To see if my life was on the right track. Because if it’s not…” She felt a lump in her throat. “…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore.” A tear welled up in her eye and trickled down her cheek.

The slight breeze became a gust of wind that blew her hair back and dried the tear.

The time had come. There was an overturned metal bucket beside a nearby tombstone that probably once held an arrangement of flowers. Tameka grabbed it and turned it upright on top of Lucille’s grave. Then she pulled the tattered notebook from her backpack along with a lighter she had in there from the one time she tried smoking under the bleachers with her friend Nina.

She held the lighter up to the corner of the notebook and ignited it. She did it quickly, ignoring the nagging doubt, pushing past her uncertainty so she wouldn’t change her mind. When the flames slowly began to eat away at the notebook, she dropped it into the bucket.

Tameka stared as every record of her past and every prediction about her future went up in smoke and turned to ash, the fire turning the pages black and dissolving them, tiny orange embers floating up and disappearing.

As she watched, frozen in place with her head bowed, the ground beneath her began to rumble. The 1:30 train, now a full hour behind schedule, zoomed by the cemetery, click-clacking down the tracks with a fury, the trailing cars squeaking and groaning. In a few seconds it had passed, and the only sound was the final crackle of the flames as they swallowed what was left of the notebook.

Tameka lifted her head toward the sky, felt the sun warm her cheeks, and for the first time, relished the thought of not knowing what was next.

She turned, stuffed her hands into her pockets, and headed for the tracks. She walked back the way she came, studying the gravel and kicking rocks, keeping her eyes peeled for a stray burlap bag filled with cash that might have just fallen off that train.

If she found it, she decided, she would turn it in to the police and collect that lovely reward.