Leaving Time: A Novel (6 page)

For all I know, paranormal talent is like riding a bike. For all I know, it comes back, if you just give it a try.

So in spite of the fact that I am pretty sure Serenity Jones does not ever want to see me on her doorstep again, I also know that finding my mother is exactly the sort of training wheels she needs.

We’ve all heard the phrase before:
He’s got a memory like an elephant
. As it turns out, this is not cliché but science.

I once saw an Asian elephant in Thailand who had been trained to do a trick. All the schoolchildren brought to meet him at the reserve where he was kept in captivity were told to sit in a line. Then they were asked to take off their shoes, and these shoes were jumbled into a pile. The mahout who worked with the elephant then instructed her to give the shoes back to the children. The elephant did, carefully weeding through the pile with her trunk and dropping the shoes that belonged to each child in his or her lap.

In Botswana, I saw a female elephant charge a helicopter three times; it held a vet who was going to dart her for a study. At the sanctuary, we had to request a no-fly zone, because medical helicopters passing overhead caused the elephants to bunch, pulling themselves into close proximity. The only helicopters some of these elephants had ever seen were the ones from which park rangers had shot their families with scoline fifty years earlier, during the culling.

There are anecdotes of elephants that have witnessed the death of a herd member at the hands of an ivory poacher, and then charged through a village at night, seeking out the individual who had been wielding the gun.

In the Amboseli ecosystem in Kenya, there are two tribes that
have historically come into contact with the elephants: the Masai, who dress in red garments and use spears to hunt them; and the Kamba, who are farmers and have never hunted elephants. One study suggested elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of clothes worn previously by the Masai rather than the Kamba. They bunched, moved farther from the scent faster, and took longer to relax after identifying the scent of the Masai.

Mind you, in this study, the elephants never saw the cloth. They relied solely on olfactory clues, which could be attributed to each tribe’s diet and pheromonal secretions (the Masai consume more animal products than the Kamba; the Kamba villages are known to have a strong smell of cattle). What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen.

I’d think, given all those examples, the question isn’t whether elephants can remember. Maybe we need to ask:
What won’t they forget?

I was eight years old when I realized the world was full of people no one else could see. There was the boy who crawled beneath the jungle gym at my school, staring up my skirt when I swung on the monkey bars. There was the old black woman who smelled like lilies, who sat on the edge of my bed and sang me to sleep. Sometimes, when my mother and I were walking down a street, I felt like a salmon swimming upstream: It was that hard to keep myself from bumping into the hundreds of people coming at me.

My mama’s great-grandmother was a full-blooded Iroquois shaman, and my father’s mother read tea leaves for her coworkers on cigarette breaks at the cracker factory where she used to work. None of that talent filtered through the blood to my own parents, but my mama has all sorts of stories about me as a toddler, having the Gift. I’d tell her that Aunt Jeannie was on the phone. Five seconds later, the phone would ring. Or I’d insist on wearing my rain boots to preschool, even though it was a perfectly sunny day, and, sure enough, the heavens would open up in an unexpected downpour. My imaginary friends were not always children but also Civil War soldiers and Victorian dowagers and, once, a runaway slave named Spider with rope burns around his neck. Other kids at school found me strange and steered clear of me, so much so that my parents decided to move from New York to New Hampshire. They sat me down before my
first day of second grade and said, “Serenity, if you don’t want to get hurt, you’re going to have to hide your Gift.”

So I did. When I went into class and took a seat beside a girl, I didn’t speak to her unless another student did first, so that I knew I wasn’t the only one who could see her. When my teacher, Ms. De-Camp, picked up a pen that I knew was going to explode with ink all over her white blouse, I bit my lip and watched it happen instead of warning her. When the class gerbil escaped and I had a vision of it running across the principal’s desk, I pushed the thought out of my head until I heard the shrieks coming from the main office.

I made friends, just like my parents said I would. One was a girl named Maureen, who invited me to her house to play with her Polly Pocket collection and who told me secrets, like that her older brother hid
Playboy
s under his mattress and that her mother stored a shoe box full of cash behind a loose panel in her closet. So you can imagine how I felt the day that Maureen and I were on the playground swings and she challenged me to see who could jump off the swings the farthest, and I had a quick flash of her lying on the ground with ambulance lights in the background.

I wanted to tell her we shouldn’t jump, but I also wanted to keep my best friend, who knew nothing about my Gift. So I stayed silent, and when Maureen counted to three and went sailing through the air, I stayed put on my swing and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to see her fall with her leg pinned beneath her, snapping clean in two.

My parents had said that, if I didn’t hide my second sight, I’d get hurt. But it was better that I get hurt than someone else. After that, I promised myself that I’d always speak up if my Gift helped me see something coming, no matter what it cost me.

In this case, it was Maureen, who called me a freak and started hanging with the popular girls.

As I got older I got better at figuring out that not everyone who spoke to me was alive. I’d be talking to someone and would, peripherally, see a spirit cross behind. I got used to not paying attention, the same way most of you register the faces of the hundreds of people who cross your path daily, without actually looking at their features. I
told my mother she needed to get her brakes checked before the light went on in the dashboard signaling something was wrong; I congratulated our neighbor on her pregnancy a week before the doctor told her she was expecting. I reported whatever information came to me without editing it or making a judgment call about whether or not I should speak up.

My Gift, however, was not all-encompassing. When I was twelve, the auto parts dealership my father owned burned to the ground. Two months later, he committed suicide, leaving my mother a rambling apology note, a picture of himself in an evening gown, and a mountain of gambling debts. I hadn’t predicted any of these things, and I cannot tell you how many times since I’ve been asked why not. Let me tell you, no one wants to know the answer to that more than I do. But then again, I can’t guess the Powerball numbers or tell you which stocks to follow. I didn’t know about my father, and years later, I didn’t foresee my mother’s stroke, either. I’m a psychic, not the Wizard of Freaking Oz. I’ve replayed things in my head, wondering if I missed a sign, or if somebody on the other side didn’t get through to me, or if I’d been too distracted by my French homework to notice. But over the years I’ve come to realize that maybe there are things I’m not supposed to know, and besides—I don’t really
want
to see the whole landscape of the future. I mean, if I
could
, what’s the point of living?

My mother and I resettled in Connecticut, where she got a job as a maid at a hotel and I dressed in black and dabbled in Wicca and survived high school. It was not until college that I started to really celebrate my Gift. I taught myself to read tarot and did readings for my sorority sisters. I subscribed to
Fate
magazine. Instead of my schoolbooks, I read about Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. I wore Guatemalan scarves and gauzy skirts and burned incense in my dorm room. I met another student, Shanae, who was interested in the occult. Unlike me, she couldn’t communicate with those who had passed, but she was an empath and would get sympathy stomachaches every time her roommate had her period. Together, we attempted scrying. We would set candles in front of us, sit down before a mirror, and gaze into it long enough to see our past lives. Shanae came from
a long line of psychics, and it was she who told me that I should ask my spirit guides to introduce themselves; that her aunties and her grandma, who were both mediums, had spirit guides on the other side. And so I formally met Lucinda, the elderly black woman who used to sing me to sleep; and Desmond, a sassy gay man. They were with me all the time, pets sleeping at my feet that would wake up, attentive, when I called their names. From then on, I spoke to my spirit guides constantly, relying on them to help me navigate the next world, either by leading me or by leading others to me.

Desmond and Lucinda were the best of babysitters, letting me—a virtual toddler—explore the paranormal plane without getting hurt. They made sure I didn’t encounter demons—spirits that had never been human. They steered me away from asking questions with answers I was not yet meant to know. They taught me to control my Gift, instead of letting it control
me
, by setting boundaries. Imagine what it would be like if the telephone woke you up every five minutes, all night long. That’s what happens with spirits, if you don’t set up parameters. They also explained that it was one thing to want to share my predictions as they came, but another to read someone unbidden. I’ve had it done to me by other psychics, and let me tell you, it’s like having someone go through your underwear drawer when you’re not home, or being in an elevator, unable to get away when someone invades your personal space.

I did readings for five dollars during the summer up at Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Then, after I graduated, I found clients through word of mouth, while supporting myself at various odd jobs. I was twenty-eight, working as a waitress at a local diner, when the Maine gubernatorial candidate came in for a photo op with his family. While the cameras were flashing on him and his wife with plates full of our signature blueberry pancakes, his little girl hopped up on one of the counter stools. “Boring, huh?” I said, and she nodded. She couldn’t have been more than seven. “How about some hot chocolate?” As her hand brushed mine to take the mug, I felt the strongest jolt of
black
I’d ever felt; that’s the only way I can describe it.

Now, this little girl didn’t give permission to be read, and my spirit
guides were broadcasting that loud and clear, telling me I had no right to intervene. But across the diner, her mother was smiling and waving for the cameras, and she didn’t know what I did. When the candidate’s wife ducked into the ladies’ room, I followed. She held out her hand to shake, thinking I was another voter to charm. “This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but you need to get your daughter tested for leukemia.”

The woman’s smile froze. “Did Annie tell you about her growing pains? I’m sorry she bothered you, and I appreciate your concern, but her pediatrician said it’s nothing to worry about.” Then she walked away.

I told you so
, Desmond sneered silently as, moments later, the candidate left with his entourage and his family. For a long moment, I stared down at the half-empty mug the little girl had left behind, before I dumped its contents into a bus tray.
That’s the hard part, honey
, Lucinda told me.
Knowing what you know, and not being able to do a damn thing about it
.

A week later, the candidate’s wife came back to the diner—alone, dressed in jeans instead of a pricey red wool suit. She made a beeline for me, where I was wiping down a table in a booth. “They found cancer,” she whispered. “It wasn’t even in Annie’s blood yet. I made them do a bone marrow test. But because it’s so early”—here she started to sob—“she has a good chance of surviving.” She grabbed my arm. “How did you know?”