Calypso(54)

Lisa’s not open to the things that Paul and Amy are, but she has her equivalents. If you told her, for instance, that she was holding her car keys the wrong way and that there were meetings for people like her, she’d likely attend them for at least three months. One of the groups she was going to lately was for mindful eating. “It’s not about dieting—we don’t believe in that,” she said. “You’re supposed to carry on as usual: three meals a day, plus snacks and desserts or whatever. The difference is that now you think about it.” She then confessed that the doughnut she’d just finished had been her sixth of the day. “Who brought these?” she asked.

I looked at the box and whimpered a little. “Kathy, I think.”

“Goddamn her,” Lisa whispered.



A few weeks before we came to the beach, Amy paid a great deal of money to visit a well-known psychic. The woman has a long waiting list, but somebody pulled a few strings, and, not long after getting the idea, Amy had her session, which took place over the phone and lasted for an hour. She sent me a brief email after it was over and went into greater detail as we rode with Gretchen from the Raleigh airport to Emerald Isle the day before Thanksgiving. “So start again from the top,” I said. “Was it scary?”

“It was maybe like calling someone in prison and having one person after another get on the line,” she said from the backseat. “First I talked to Mom for a while, who’s doing well, by the way, and takes credit for setting up you and Hugh. Then Tiffany appeared.”

I ripped open a bag of almonds. “Yeah, right.”

“Ordinarily I’d be like that too,” Amy said, “but the psychic’s voice changed after Mom went away. She sounded tough all of a sudden and started by saying, ‘I really don’t feel like talking to you right now. This is a favor, OK?’”

Tiffany thanked Amy for cleaning up the mess she’d left after she’d committed suicide.

“That’s strange,” I said. “I mean, how would the psychic have known anything about that?”

Amy sat up and moved closer, so that her head was between my seat and Gretchen’s. “I know! She said that Tiffany had tried to kill herself before—also true—and that she always knew that she was going to do this, the only question was when. It was crazy how much she got right. ‘Your sister was mentally ill,’ she said. ‘Possibly bipolar, and stopped taking her medication because she didn’t want to dull herself.’ She said Tiffany felt like everyone was taking from her, using her.”

“That was certainly true,” I said.

“Most of what Tiffany had to say was directed at you,” Amy told me. “She wants you to know that the two of you are OK now, that she’s not mad anymore.”

“She’s not mad!” I said. “Her? I’m the one who had reason to be mad.”

“She said she’d misunderstood you and that lately she’s been working on herself.”

“You have to work on yourself after you’re dead?” I asked. It seemed a bit much, like having to continue a diet or your participation in AA. I thought that death let you off the hook when it came to certain things, that it somehow purified you.

“Tiffany’s been hanging out a lot with Mom’s dad, Grandpa Leonard,” Amy told me.

This made me furious for some reason. “But she didn’t even know him.”

“I guess they met there,” Amy said.

“And where is that?”

Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like you can ask a thousand questions and get them answered. They tell you what they want to tell you and you just listen.”

I tried to let that sink in.

“She and Mom are finally getting along,” Amy continued. “She mainly wanted to let you know that she has no hard feelings. The psychic said Tiffany’s been trying to tell you this herself and asked if you’ve had a lot of problems with your phone lately.”

“No.”

“Power outages?”

Again I said no.

“What about butterflies?”

“Are you serious?” I asked. “Our house last winter was loaded with them. I’ve never seen anything like it. In the summer, fine, but this was crazy. Hugh and I talked about it every day.”

Amy crossed her arms. “It was Tiffany. She was trying to contact you.”

The appointment with the psychic had unnerved the whole family. “Tiffany was calmer than normal, but still it was like an actual conversation with her,” Amy said. “You remember how those were, right? We’d be shaking while they were going on. Then we’d think about them for weeks afterward.”

“I remember,” Gretchen and I said at the same time.

After Tiffany signed off, Amy spoke to an actor she’d known who died of a heroin overdose a few years back, and to her first serious boyfriend, John Tsokantis, who had a brain aneurysm when he was twenty-five.

Because she’d had a session so recently, I was welcome to cut to the front of the line and have one of my own the following week. “Do you want me to give you the psychic’s number?”

I said nothing.

“Is that a no?” Amy asked.



Often, when signing books, I’ll pretend to have powers. “Well, look at the Scorpio,” I’ll say when someone approaches my table. I’m just guessing—I wouldn’t know a Scorpio from a double Sagittarius. The key, I learned, is to speak with authority. It’s never “Are you a Libra?” but, rather, “It’s about time I had a Libra up in here.”