Calypso(55)

Every now and then I’ll be right, and the person will be shocked. “How did you know my sign?” they’ll ask.

“The same way I know you have a sister.”

If I’m right about the sister as well, the person I’m talking to will become like a cat released into a new setting, very low to the ground and suspicious. “Who were you talking to? Did one of my friends put you up to this?”

I met a young woman a few years back, and after being right about both her sign and her sister, I said, as if I were trying to recall something I had dreamed, “You were in a…hospital earlier this week, not for yourself but for someone else. You were…visiting someone very close to you.”

The woman fell apart before my eyes. “My mother has cancer. They operated but…How do you…I don’t…What are you doing?”

“I can’t help it,” I told her. “I know things. I see them.”

I don’t, of course. Those were just guesses, pulled out of my ass in order to get a rise out of someone.

Hugh said the psychic Amy went to did the same thing, but I’m not sure. “How would she know what Tiffany sounded like?”

“Looked her up on YouTube,” he said. “Read one of your stories. These people tell you what you want to hear. It’s their way of getting you to come back.”

There’s something about picking the psychic apart that I don’t like. It’s cynical and uninteresting. That said, I knew I didn’t want to book a session. My mother and I were very close, and though I miss her terribly, I’m not sure I need to talk to her again. Since her death I’d thought of it as an impossibility. Now it felt like a decision, like Mom wants to speak to me and I’m saying no. But what if she’s angry at me for some reason? What would I do with that?

As for Tiffany, a few months after she died, a Dutch film crew came to Sussex and followed me around for three days. Our conversation was all over the place—we talked about England, writing, life with Hugh. The last hour was shot on a hilltop overlooking my house. The interviewer, a man named Wim, sat beside me. Off camera he’d mentioned that my sister had recently taken her life. Now he brought it up again. “What if you could ask her one question?”

It seemed like such a television moment, the intimacy unearned—grotesque, almost. And so I paused and blinked hard. Then I said, “I’d ask…‘Can I have back that money I loaned you?’”



What troubled me most about Amy’s talk with the psychic was the notion that the dead are unsettled. That they linger. I said to Lisa at the beach that Thanksgiving, “If they can see us from wherever they are, what’s to stop them from watching us on the toilet?”

Lisa took a moment to consider this. “I’m guessing that certain places are just…off-limits.”

“And who would make them off-limits?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “God, maybe. I mean…beats me.”

We were returning from a walk and came upon our father in the middle of the street a quarter mile from the house. He was dressed in jeans and had a flat-topped cap on his head. His flannel shirt was untucked, and the tail of it drooped from beneath the hem of his Windbreaker. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Looking for someone,” he said.

Lisa asked who, and he said he didn’t know. “I was just hoping somebody might come along and invite me to his house to watch the game. The Panthers are playing this afternoon, and you don’t have a goddamn TV.”

“You thought someone was just going to say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come to my place and watch some football?’” Lisa asked.

“I was going to build up to it,” my father said. “You know, drop hints and so forth.”



The day after Thanksgiving was bright and unseasonably warm. Hugh made ham sandwiches for lunch and we ate on the deck. “We need to have a code word so when the next one of us dies, we’ll know if the psychic is for real,” Amy said. She turned to Dad, the most likely candidate for ceasing to live. “What’ll yours be?”

He gave it no thought. “Ecstasy.”

“Like the drug?” I asked.

He picked up his sandwich. “What drug?”

“It should be something you say a lot,” I told him. “Something that would let us know it’s really you. Maybe…‘You’ve gained weight’ or ‘Obama’s from Kenya.’”

“Those are both three words,” Lisa noted.

“What about ‘Broderson’?” I said, referring to a North Carolina painter whose work my father collected in the 1970s.

“Oh, that’s perfect,” Amy said.

I went into the kitchen to get another napkin, and by the time I returned, the topic had changed and Dad was discussing someone who goes to his gym. The guy is in his forties and apparently stands too close in the locker room. “He undresses me with his eyes, and it makes me uncomfortable,” my father said.

“How does someone undress you with his eyes when you’re already undressed?” I asked. “By that point what’s he looking at, your soul?”



On our final evening at the beach over the Thanksgiving weekend, Amy and my niece, Madelyn, usually host a spa night. They dress in uniforms and let it be known beforehand that clients are expected to tip, and generously. Facials are given, and Kathy offers foot massages. The treatments feel great, but the best part is listening to Amy, who plays the role of the supervisor. This year, while massaging clay onto my father’s face, she asked him if he was alone this evening or with his gay lover.