Leaving Time(16)

Does this make me a con man? I guess that’s one way to look at it. I prefer to think of myself as Darwinian: I’m adapting, so that I can survive.

Today, however, has been an absolute disaster. I lost a good client, my grandmother’s scrying bowl, and my composure—all within the past hour—thanks to a scrawny kid and her rusty bicycle. Jenna Metcalf was not, as she said, older than she looked—Christ, she probably still believed in the tooth fairy—but she was as powerful as a giant black hole, sucking me back into the nightmare of the McCoy scandal. I don’t do missing people, I told her, and I meant it. It’s one thing to fake a message from a deceased husband; it’s another thing entirely to give false hope to someone who needs closure. You know where that kind of behavior gets you? Living above a bar in Crapville, NH, and spending every Thursday collecting unemployment benefits.

I like being a fraud. It’s safer to make up what clients want to hear. That way they don’t get hurt, and neither do I, when I find myself reaching into the next world and getting no response, just crushing frustration. In a way, I think it would have been easier if I’d never had a Gift. That way, I wouldn’t know what I am missing.

And then along came someone who couldn’t remember what she’d lost.

I don’t know what it was about Jenna Metcalf that rattled me so badly. Maybe her eyes, which were a pale sea green under the shaggy red fringe of her hair—supernatural, arresting. Maybe the way her cuticles had been bitten down to the quick. Or maybe how she seemed to shrink, like Alice in Wonderland, when I told her I wouldn’t help her. That’s the only explanation I can offer as to why I answered when she asked if her mother was dead.

I wanted my psychic abilities back so badly in that moment that I tried; I tried in a way I’d given up trying years ago, because disappointment feels like slamming into a brick wall.

I closed my eyes and attempted to rebuild the bridge between me and my spirit guides, to hear anything—a whisper, a sneer, a hitch of breath.

Instead, there was utter silence.

And so, for Jenna Metcalf, I did exactly what I swore never to do again: I opened up that door of possibility, knowing damn well she’d step into the slice of sunshine it provided. I told her that her mother wasn’t dead.

When what I really meant was: I have no idea.


When Jenna Metcalf leaves, I take a Xanax. If anything qualifies as a reason to break out the antianxiety medication, it’s this—a girl who hasn’t just made me think of the past but has cracked it over my head like a two-by-four. By three o’clock, I am blissfully unconscious on the couch.

I should tell you that I haven’t dreamed in years. Dreaming is the closest the average human gets to the paranormal plane; it’s the time when the mind lets down its guard and the walls get thin enough for there to be glimpses to the other side. That’s why, after sleeping, so many people report a visit from someone who’s passed. But not me, not since Desmond and Lucinda left.

Today, though, when I fall asleep, my mind is a kaleidoscope of color. I see a flag, whipping across my field of vision, but then realize it’s not a flag—it’s a blue scarf, wound around the neck of a woman whose face I can’t see. She is lying on her back near a sugar maple, immobile, being trampled by an elephant. At second glance I realize maybe she isn’t being trampled; the elephant is going out of its way to not step on her, lifting one of its back feet and moving it over the woman’s body without touching it. As the elephant reaches out its trunk and tugs at the scarf, the woman doesn’t move. The elephant’s trunk strokes her cheek, her throat, her forehead, before slipping the scarf free and lifting it, so that the wind carries it off like a rumor.

The elephant reaches down for something leather-bound I cannot quite make out, which is tucked beneath the woman’s hip—a book? An ID badge holder? I’m amazed at the dexterity the animal has, flipping it open. Then it places its trunk on the woman’s chest again, almost like a stethoscope, before slipping silently into the forest.

I wake up with a start, disoriented and surprised to be thinking of elephants, wondering at the storm that still seems to be filling my head. But it’s not thunder, it’s someone banging on the front door.

I already know who it’s going to be as I get up to open it.

“Before you freak out, I’m not here to try to convince you to find my mother,” Jenna Metcalf announces, pushing past me into my apartment. “It’s just that I left something behind. Something really important …”

I close the front door, rolling my eyes when I see that ridiculous bicycle parked in my foyer again. Jenna starts looking around the space where we had been sitting a few hours ago, ducking beneath the coffee table and poking around under the chairs.

“If I’d found something I would have contacted you—”

“I doubt it,” she says. She starts opening up drawers where I keep my stamps, my secret stash of Oreos, and my take-out menus.

“Do you mind?” I say.

But Jenna is ignoring me, her hand stuck between the cushions of the couch. “I knew it was here,” she says with obvious relief, and like floss, she pulls out the blue scarf from my dream and winds it around her neck.

Seeing it, three-dimensional and close enough to touch, makes me feel a little less crazy—I had only been incorporating a scarf this kid had been wearing into my subconscious. But there’s other information in that dream that makes no sense: the onion-skin wrinkles of an elephant’s hide, the ballet of its trunk. Plus something else that I had not realized until this moment: The elephant had been checking to see if the woman was inhaling and exhaling. The animal had left—not because the woman had stopped breathing but because she still was.