“People don’t realize how hard it is,” she says. “When my clients used to come to me, asking to talk to Uncle Sol or their beloved grandma, all they were focusing on was the hello, the chance to say what they didn’t say when the person was alive. But when you open a door, you have to close it behind you. You might say hello, but you also wind up saying good-bye.”
I face her. “I wasn’t asleep. When you and Virgil were talking, in the car? I heard everything you said.”
Serenity freezes. “Well, then,” she says. “I guess you know I’m a fraud.”
“You aren’t, though. You found that necklace. And the wallet.”
She shakes her head. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
I think about this for a moment. “But isn’t that what being psychic is?”
I can tell that she never thought about it that way. One man’s coincidence is another’s connection. Does it matter if it’s gut feeling, like Virgil says, or psychic intuition, if you still get what you’re searching for?
She pulls a blanket up from the floor to cover her feet, and casts it wide so it will cover me, too. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Still, it’s nothing like what it used to be. Other people’s thoughts—they just were suddenly there in my head. Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word. But it was more than stumbling over something shiny in the grass.”
We are cuddled under a blanket that smells like Tide and Indian food, and rain is striking the windows from outside. I realize this is very close to the image I’d conjured earlier, of what my life would have been like if my mother had survived.
I glance at Serenity. “Do you miss it? Hearing from people who are gone?”
“Yes,” she admits.
I lean my head on her shoulder. “Me, too,” I say.
ALICE
Gideon’s arms were the safest place in the world. When I was with him, I forgot: how Thomas’s highs and his lows scared the hell out of me; how every morning started with an argument and every night ended with my husband locked in his office with his secrets and the shadows of his mind. When I was with Gideon I could pretend that the three of us were the family I had hoped to be.
Then I found out we would be four.
“It’s going to be okay,” he’d promised when I told him the news, although I did not believe him. He couldn’t tell the future. He could just, I hoped, be mine.
“Don’t you see?” Gideon had said, lit from within. “We were meant to be together.”
Maybe we were, but what a price to pay. His marriage. Mine. Grace’s life.
Still, we dreamed out loud in Technicolor. I wanted to take Gideon back to Africa with me, so he could see these incredible animals before they had been broken by humans. Gideon wanted to move south, where he’d come from. I resurrected my dream of running away with Jenna, but this time, I imagined that he would come with us. We pretended to be racing forward, but we didn’t move an inch, because of the trapdoors that threatened to swallow us: He had to tell his mother-in-law; I had to tell my husband.
But we had a deadline, because it was getting very hard to hide the changes to my body.
One day, Gideon found me working at the Asian barn. “I told Nevvie about the baby,” he said.
I froze. “What did she say?”
“She told me I should have everything I deserve. Then she walked away from me.”
Just like that, this wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It was real, and it meant that if he had been brave enough to confront Nevvie, I had to be brave enough to confront Thomas.
I did not see Nevvie all day, or Gideon, either, for that matter. I tracked Thomas’s whereabouts and followed him around from enclosure to enclosure; I cooked him dinner. I asked him to help me do a foot soak on Lilly, when normally I would have asked Gideon or Nevvie for assistance. Instead of avoiding him, as I’d been doing for months, I talked to him about the applications he’d received for a new caregiver and asked him if he’d made a decision yet to hire anyone. I lay down with Jenna until she fell asleep and then went to his office and started to read an abstract, as if it was normal for us to share the space.
I thought he might tell me to get lost, but Thomas smiled at me, an olive branch. “I forgot how nice it used to be,” he said. “You and me working side by side.”
Resolve is like porcelain, isn’t it? You can have the best intentions, but the moment there’s a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces. Thomas poured himself a tumbler of scotch, and another one for me. I left mine sitting on the desk.