All Hallows' Eve (11 page)

Still, she supposed the psychic already considered himself generous for not automatically answering and charging her for that dumb "Can you do that?" question and would not give any unpaid-for hints.

"So"—the psychic held the foul cigarette pinched between his fingers and inhaled as though his lungs were in his toes—"I will tell you when and how you will die."

Marissa took a steadying breath.

"It will be just over fifty-six years from now, four months short of your seventy-fourth birthday."

Marissa stored those figures in her head to work out when she had a couple moments to herself—to see if he'd guessed her age correctly, since he had not asked. It would be easier to trust a psychic who had not only the ability to zero in on a person's age but also demonstrated good math skills. In any case, fifty-six years from now was a much better number than, say, next week.

"You will die," the psychic continued, "in a plane crash, while traveling from Rochester, New York, to Buffalo."

"Okay," Marissa said, slowly. She had never been on a plane, her grandparents all living within driving distance, and her parents believing in local vacationing. She figured if she hadn't flown anywhere in her seventeen years so far, she shouldn't miss skipping it later on. Besides that, she couldn't think of any reason she'd want to go to Buffalo. If this changed later in her life, Buffalo was only about an hour's drive away from Rochester. What kind of idiot would pay for a plane and spend more time going through airport security than it would take to drive where she wanted to go? She could readily arrange her life to exclude planes—and, in fact, Buffalo.

The psychic said, "I am not finished." He paused to take another toe-curling inhalation of his cigarette. "Your plane will crash in a sod farm in Batavia, New York, due to mechanical failure, sometime between 8:15 and 8:25
A.M.
, killing all aboard."

JoLyn poked Marissa and observed, "I can't imagine you being up early enough to catch an eight o'clock plane."

Easy for her to scoff: Marissa fully intended to add Batavia to her list of things to avoid once she hit her seventies, just in case the psychic meant that the plane would crash
on
her rather than with her
in
it.

"So," Rodney said, "all Marissa has to do is avoid getting on a plane when she's seventy-three, and she'll miss her appointment with death and live forever. Sweet deal."

That was pretty close to Marissa's reasoning, but the psychic was wearing a self-satisfied smirk.

Daphne told Rodney, "Living till you're seventy-three
is
living forever."

"I wish I'd asked when
I
was going to die," Cara grumbled. She'd asked if she'd marry Bailey Leonard, and the psychic had simply said no—which was what Marissa would have guessed in any case, Cara's boyfriend being very obviously not as much in love with Cara as Cara was with him. Obvious to everyone but Cara, for whom the negative had come as a surprise. She had asked, "Well, who, then?" but the psychic had said that was another question, and if she really wanted an answer, the group would have to buy another round of questions—for (of course) fifty dollars.

While Cara had still been considering, Rodney had asked, "Who will
I
marry?"

Marissa had always suspected that Rodney had a bit of a crush on Cara—though Daphne maintained Marissa was a hopeless romantic and that
none
of the girls was or could ever be Rodney's type. Still, Marissa thought maybe he'd asked in the hope that the psychic would tell him he'd marry Cara.

But the psychic had told him he would not marry at all—which had caused Daphne to arch her eyebrows at Marissa.

Daphne, who was
not
a romantic, asked whether she would be accepted at Stanford, and the psychic had said yes, and that her acceptance would be in her mailbox Monday.

Marissa liked that this prediction would either come true or not in three days, which would give the rest of them a hint as to the psychic's accuracy, but JoLyn called it a waste of a good prediction. She asked, "Will I lead a happy life?"

"Happiness is subjective," the psychic had said, which had caused a howl of protest from all of them. It was hard to say whether the man had planned to leave the prediction at that, but after their outburst of catcalls and, "Not fair," and "Come
on
," he asked JoLyn, "Are you happy now?"

"Yeah," JoLyn had said. "Sure."

"You will never," the psychic told her, "be less happy than you are now."

So that had been the one unequivocally good fortune. Though Daphne at Stanford wasn't bad.

Now the psychic asked Cara, or maybe them all, "Do you have any further questions?"

Cara shook her head, and so did the others.

The psychic stood, which apparently meant they weren't going to be offered a Halloween candy bar or a glass of water or an opportunity to use the bathroom, or even a "Good-bye, it's been fun."

This—or the fact that it had gotten cold and started raining—put Rodney in a bad mood, and as he stepped out the front door he muttered, "I can tell fortunes, too: Smoking'll kill you."

Hard to tell if Rodney meant the comment for them or for the psychic, but the psychic
did
hear. He said, quietly and without emotion, "Yes," then closed the door firmly behind them.

They lingered under the overhang that someone with more ambition than this particular psychic might have tried to make into a patio. At seven o'clock, the night was dark, and the rain was pouring. Their breaths condensed in the cold.

"I hate driving in the rain at night," Daphne said. "It makes me nervous."

"Hey, I'm relaxed," Marissa said. "I don't know about the rest of you—but I know I'm safe."

"You're also not legal," JoLyn said, lording it over them just because she and Daphne had already had their birthdays and could drive at night. She took the car keys from Daphne. "And you all know you're safe with me, because I would not be happy if I had an accident. And you have all heard it..."—she shouted for the entire Lily Dale community to hear—"
I am destined to be happy.
"

Cara muttered, loud enough for JoLyn to hear, which meant she wasn't serious, "If you're destined to drive, then I'm destined to be scared."

Rodney said, "If we don't get out of here soon, we'll be destined to need an ark instead of a car."

So, screaming as though they were melting, they ran to the car, JoLyn and Marissa in the front seats, Rodney sitting between Daphne and Cara in the back.

The rain came down so hard, the windshield wipers—even on at maximum—had a difficult time keeping the windshield clear. The raindrops were fat and verging on being sleet. The fact that the streetlights reflected and glared on the wet pavement made Marissa glad she wasn't driving.

But JoLyn was confident and was doing a fine job. She had gotten them singing Christmas carols—since they couldn't find any decent radio stations, being still too far from Rochester, and since they didn't know any Halloween songs.

Rodney had started, "Up on the Housetop," but he didn't really know the lyrics beyond that, and he was floundering. After checking that the road ahead of them was clear, JoLyn, still gripping the steering wheel, glanced over her shoulder into the backseat as she energetically sang the refrain, "Ho! Ho! Ho! Who wouldn't go?"

In the front seat, Marissa saw the eighteen-wheeler ahead of them lose control on the slick road and begin to veer, then twist till it was sliding forward sideways, with their car aimed right at it.

There seemed to be all the time in the world for her to tell JoLyn to look out, to step on the brake—but carefully so that they wouldn't skid, too. There seemed all the time in the world to slow down safely. But it must have been only a moment, for JoLyn, all unaware, was still preoccupied with Rodney, was still belting out the second, "Ho! Ho! Ho!"

And then they hit the truck.

Just over fifty-six years later, four months short of Marissa's seventy-fourth birthday, the staff at Hillcrest Home were discussing what to do with the old woman who had been in a coma ever since the car accident that had scrambled her brain and killed her four friends.

As far as they could tell, she had no family, or at least no one had come to visit in the two decades the most senior of them had been working there. For some reason, Hillcrest in Rochester was overcrowded, while their sister facility had several empty beds.

Since no one ever came to look in on her, and since she didn't know where she was, everyone agreed there could be no harm in sending her by air ambulance to Buffalo. A nice, short, safe trip.

"When your parents get here, Matt," Nona tells me, "try to relax. Try not to let them get to you."

"You, too," I say by way of encouragement.

Yeah, right. Easier said than done. We both know that each of us will be ready to run from the room, screaming, before the night is done.

Not that running from the room, screaming, will help.

Which each of us knows so well that we both jump when the doorbell rings. Even though my parents never ring the bell. They just walk into my grandmother's house and start to spread cheer—spread it like an oil spill or a fungal infection.

I glance at the wall clock on my way to the door. Eight fifty-five. This is early for my parents—my father, VP of Marketing for a big insurance firm, and my mother, the attorney, who announced when she was still in high school that she was going to become the youngest female judge in the city. But it's kind of late for trick-or-treaters—especially since I turned off the light by the front door about half an hour earlier.

My parents always arrive promptly at nine o'clock. My father likes to say they're punctual. I like to say they're anal-retentive.

I open the door and find a group of four kids: two guys and two girls. They look about my age, which is fifteen, which is way too old to be going door to door, extorting goodies from the neighbors, even if you like Halloween.

I, personally, hate Halloween.

Although they are dressed in just regular clothes—jeans and sweatshirts—one of the girls wears a set of wings, which I guess she figures qualifies as an angel, butterfly, or bumblebee costume, and the other girl has a witch hat with a sparse fringe of fluorescent green hair overlaying her own blond hair. One of the guys wears a football jersey, which may or may not be a costume, and the other has a T-shirt with
I BELIEVE MICHAEL JACKSON IS INNOCENT
on it, which
has
to be a costume, because nobody really believes Michael Jackson is innocent.

They may well be classmates of mine, but my grandmother and I have just moved into this house in August and I don't yet know very many people in the neighborhood or in the school.

I am reaching into the bowl of Halloween-sized candy to give them each a handful—you don't want to tick off the kind of teenagers who're too old for trick-or-treating but who go trick-or-treating, anyway—when the angel/butterfly/bumblebee rattles a canister at me and announces, "Trick or treat for Unicef."

I keep to myself my doubts whether my donation will ever make it to Unicef, and I give them the money my grandmother gave me this morning to buy lunch in the school cafeteria. I had been so roiled up, knowing my parents were coming this evening, that I'd been unable to eat.

I give the four of them suckers, too, just in case they
are
from my school, even though none of them seem to recognize me any better than I recognize them.

When I close the door on the teenagers, Nona has come up behind me and she says, "You're a good boy, Matt," and she tousles my hair like I'm not a full head taller than she is.

"And you're a good Nona, Nona," I tell her.

"So where did Barry and Linda come from?" she asks with a sigh. Barry is my dad, Nona's son, and Linda, of course, is my mom.

We haven't even made it back into the living room when we hear them coming in. I'm about to glance at the clock, when I hear it start to chime. Nine o'clock, of course. Punctual, as always. And bickering and complaining as they come in, also as always.

"Ugly green," Dad comments to Mom about the color in the entryway. "It's reminiscent of that awful dress you wore at Seth and Nina's wedding, the shapeless one that made you look like a gigantic breath mint."

He is impeccably dressed in a charcoal-gray suit.

Mom has an ivory-colored skirt and jacket—business chic.

Apparently for this visit they have cast themselves in the role of style police.

"That was a lovely shade of green," Mom says, "and it couldn't have been
that
shapeless, because your so-called buddy, Leonard, spent the entire meal trying to look down my neckline while you were busy being tacky trying to sell life insurance to the other people at our table." She waves her arm to indicate the front hall. "But you're right:
This
is ugly mint green. Totally different from my daiquiri-ice-colored dress."

Fifteen seconds into the visit, and Nona is holding the bridge of her nose as though she has a headache already. "Hello, Barry. Hello, Linda. Are we going to try to make it through this visit without killing each other?"

Dad gives his mother an air kiss in the vicinity of her cheek. Mom acts as though Nona isn't even there. I suspect her agreeing with Dad that the front hall is an ugly color will be her only concession to him tonight. "Hello, my little sweetums," she coos as though she hasn't noticed that I'm no longer six years old. She takes my hands, and her touch is cold and sends a shiver up my spine as she leans in to kiss my cheek. "Were those your friends, just leaving?" she asks. "Those girls looked hard and cheap. You could do better, handsome boy like you."

"They were just trick-or-treaters," I say. Maybe I mumble a bit, because my parents intimidate me.

My father says, "Stop mumbling. Stand up straight."

"He's not mumbling," Mom says. "Obviously there's something wrong with your hearing. Just like there's something wrong with your eyes: shapeless mint-green dress. Stop criticizing all the time. Do you want him to grow up mean, like your cousin Donald?"