Waiting For Ethan (2 page)

1987

T
he news vans were parked up and down both sides of Towering Heights Lane. Television cameras pointed toward the top of the stairs leading to the Patels' front door. A mob of reporters holding microphones stood on the lawn at the bottom of the steps calling Ajee's name. From the bushes where Neesha and I crouched, I saw the Patels' front door swing open and watched Ajee step outside and wave. She was wearing a purple and gold silk sari and a matching headband to keep her salt-and-pepper hair off her well-lined face. The clothes were a stark contrast to the Levi's, Izod shirt, and tennis sneakers she had been wearing an hour earlier. I was pretty sure my mother was watching the commotion from our living room window, and I could imagine her snickering when she saw Ajee's outfit. “That woman is such a fraud,” she would say to my father. Since the day Ajee arrived in Westham and predicted Neesha and Sanjit's mother would not return from the hospital, my mother had no tolerance for Ajee and her so-called gift. It didn't matter that Ajee had been right and Mrs. Patel died in the hospital. In fact, that only seemed to make my mother's resentment worse.

The media had been stationed in our neighborhood all week. Before today, though, their attention was focused on the Colbys, my next-door neighbors. On Tuesday afternoon, six-year-old Matthew was playing in the sprinkler with his mother and three-year-old sister, Lisa. Mrs. Colby took Lisa inside to use the bathroom, and when she returned five minutes later, Matthew was gone.

The police investigated around the clock for five days and had no leads. On the sixth day, the Patels returned from their vacation. Within minutes of finding out what had happened to Matthew, Ajee was sitting on the Colbys' front lawn cradling the sprinkler. My mother and I watched fascinated from our driveway. Dr. Patel came racing out of the Patels' house. “What are you doing?” he shouted at his mother. “Get up now.”

The Colbys' front door opened, and a police officer stepped outside. Ajee stood. “The boy was taken by a woman in a gray Oldsmobile. She lives in Rhode Island and is a friend of the father.”

Dr. Patel buried his head in his hands. “She thinks she has psychic abilities.”

Mr. Colby appeared at the door. “Tell him about your friend in Rhode Island,” Ajee hissed.

Dr. Patel grabbed Ajee's arm. “I sincerely apologize,” he said as he led his mother back to their house.

Later that day, though, Matthew was found unharmed at the home of a woman who lived in Rhode Island and drove a gray Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Until three months before the abduction, she worked with Matthew's father.

The police credited Ajee with the tip that brought Matthew home safely, and the media that had been staking out the Colbys' house turned their attention to the Patels. Ajee basked in it. She stood at the top of the Patels' landing with her hands clasped together in front of her stomach, explaining the origins of her gift. “I began experiencing visionary images at a very young age. I can't explain why or how it happens; it just does.” She paused. “When I touched the sprinkler, I saw the woman and the car. Who knows why these things are so?” She shrugged.

A redheaded reporter whom I had seen on Channel 5 for years raised her hand. I struggled to recall her name. Cindy maybe? “So you need to touch something for your power to work?”

Ajee nodded. “Usually.” She descended to the bottom of the stairs and extended her arm to the reporter. “Give me your pen.”

Shelly Lange? No, that wasn't her name.

The reporter handed her the pen. Ajee closed her eyes and rolled the writing instrument between her hands. The only sound was the clanking the pen made as it crossed over her rings.

Terri Vance. That was the reporter's name.

After what seemed like several minutes, Ajee opened her eyes and gave the pen back to Terri. “You will quite enjoy the West Coast.”

Terri's expression was blank. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Ajee smiled, turned her back to the reporter, and climbed to the top of the landing. She spun to face the crowd again and looked directly at Terri. “Soon. You will understand soon.” She scanned the crowd with her eyes. “If the rest of you want readings, you will need to make appointments.”

A few weeks later, the redheaded reporter, Terri Vance, announced on the air that she had been offered and accepted a job with the ABC affiliate in San Francisco. “You may remember,” she said. “The psychic of Westham predicted I would enjoy the West Coast. At the time I had no idea what she was talking about.” The name stuck. Ajee became known as the psychic of Westham, and her business took off.

Before all the media attention, she gave one or two readings a week. Now she was conducting four or five a day. One afternoon Neesha and I decided we wanted to see what went on during these readings. Before Ajee's two o'clock appointment, we snuck downstairs to the Patels' basement and hid in the large closet directly across from Ajee's “reading parlor.” That's what Ajee called the area. In reality, it was a section of the cellar partitioned off with a curtain.

When we first entered the closet, Neesha froze, noticing her mother's clothes still hanging from the racks. She reached for a green wool sweater that I remembered Mrs. Patel wearing often and put it on even though beads of sweat were running down her forehead. We were thirteen. Neesha's mother had been dead for six years, and I still hadn't figured out what I could do or say to make her feel better at times like this, so I said nothing.

As we took our positions on the floor, we heard footsteps on the stairs and a voice we didn't recognize followed by Ajee's. Soon Ajee was sitting at her reading table with a client, a blond woman named Mary who was the teller at my parents' bank. Mary sat erect in the chair with her arms folded across her chest. Ajee, dressed in the sari she wore at her press conference and the only sari she owned as far as I knew, leaned forward with both elbows on the table and her chin resting on the backs of her clasped hands watching Mary.

The smell of cedar in the closet was overpowering, so I pushed the door open a crack more to bring in fresh air. The sound of the squeaking hinges reverberated throughout the basement. Ajee's head turned toward the closet. Neesha and I both leaned away from the door. After several seconds, Ajee refocused her attention on Mary.

“Let me have your watch,” Ajee instructed.

I watched Mary unclasp the watch and hand it to Ajee. She cradled it in her hands and held it in front of her heart. She closed her eyes and didn't move for several seconds. Behind me, I heard Neesha take a deep breath. When I turned to look, I saw she was holding her breath. She looked so ridiculous with her puffed-out cheeks trying not to laugh, that I laughed, causing Neesha to snort.

“What was that?” Mary asked.

I pulled the closet door shut. Neesha and I slid back into the row of clothing. A moment later we heard the
flip-flop
sound of Ajee's sandals slapping the cement floor approaching the closet. The door flew open, and Ajee jerked her head inside. She looked at us with a half smile and then suddenly yelled, “Scram!” Giggling, Neesha and I ran upstairs. Later, when Ajee emerged from the basement, she fanned three ten-dollar bills in front of us. “Laugh all you want, girls, but that woman paid thirty dollars for my information.”

The next day, when she caught us spying again, she wasn't as amused. “What I do is a business. It is serious. There is no room for little girls spying. How can I get you to stop?”

Neesha and I looked at each other and grinned. “Tell us our fortunes,” we said in unison. Until that day, Ajee had always refused, saying we had to wait until we were older.

Neesha went first. Ajee instructed her to hand over her bracelet. It was made of thick white rope, and I had one that matched on my wrist. We had bought them the previous summer on Cape Cod. With some effort, Neesha removed the bracelet and handed it to Ajee.

Ajee immediately dropped it. “Sometimes it is better not to know the future.”

“You promised,” Neesha said.

Ajee cleared her throat. “Very well.” She picked up the bracelet and closed her eyes. “You will like this,” she said, opening her eyes. “The handsome boy will kiss you before summer ends.”

The handsome boy was Josh Levine, the neighborhood cutie. I had to admit, I hoped Ajee was wrong. I didn't want Josh kissing Neesha. I wanted him to kiss me.

Ajee closed her eyes again. She opened them a few moments later, and she looked as serious as I had ever seen her. “You will move away before the start of high school, and you will not return again until you are an adult with children of your own. Yes, you and your family will own this very house.”

I felt my heart racing. High school was just a year away. Neesha couldn't move. She was my best friend.

Neesha looked at me and shook her head. “She's just trying to scare us.”

Ajee reached for Neesha's hand and held it for several seconds. “I am sorry, dear one, but it is what I see.”

Neesha popped up from the seat. “Your turn, Gina.” She looked pointedly at her grandmother. “Be truthful.”

I sat, and Ajee instructed me to give her my bracelet. I pulled it from my wrist and handed it to her. She spun it around her index finger and closed her eyes. “You will visit Italy before high school starts.” She was quiet for a second and then frowned. “You will break your arm before school starts again.”

“Ajee!” Neesha screamed.

“I am only telling you what I see.” Ajee opened her eyes. I must have looked scared because she reached for my hand. “Bella,” because of my dark hair and eyes and olive complexion, she thought I looked more Italian than American and often addressed me by the Italian word for “beautiful.” “Do not worry. I will tell you the name of your husband. You will like that, yes?”

I nodded enthusiastically, sure she was going to say Josh Levine. Who cared if Neesha got to kiss him? I was going to marry him. Mrs. Josh Levine. Gina Levine.

Ajee looked right into my eyes. “Ethan.”

Ethan? Confused, I pulled my hand from hers. “I don't know anyone named Ethan.”

“You will not meet him for many years. You will get tired of waiting. You will doubt that he will come, but he will. You must wait. You must wait for Ethan.”

Within days of Ajee making those predictions, Josh Levine kissed Neesha, and I fell off my bicycle and broke my arm. Still, I might have ignored her instructions to wait for Ethan if not for what happened Labor Day weekend. To celebrate getting my cast off, I went to the beach with the Patels. Neesha, her brother Sanjit, and I were playing in the waves most of the day while Ajee and Dr. Patel were rooted in beach chairs reading. In the late afternoon, Ajee walked down to the water and called for us. “I want you to get out of the water now,” she said. “I have a very bad feeling.”

Sanjit splashed her and swam away. Neesha followed. I stood on the shoreline with her. “Come, Bella. It is not safe.” At the same time, Neesha and Sanjit called for me to come back in the water.

“Sorry, Ajee,” I said. I turned and started walking to them. In front of me a father lifted his small daughter onto his shoulders and she dove off. I took several steps to the right to avoid them. The water I was walking through became eerily still. I took another step, but this time when I tried to put my foot down, I could no longer touch the bottom. I turned back to look at the shore and realized I was out much deeper than I thought, much deeper than I was comfortable with. I had somehow been carried out beyond Neesha and Sanjit. I tried to swim toward the shore, but felt myself getting pulled farther and farther away. I moved my arms as fast as possible. I kicked my legs as hard as I could. It made no difference. Instead of going forward I was being pulled backward. The people on the beach got smaller. My arms and legs became heavy. I no longer had the strength to move them. I gasped to catch my breath and could taste salt water filling my mouth. My heart, which had been beating frantically, seemed to stop as I felt myself sinking beneath the surface. Everything got black and quiet.

I came to lying on the beach while the lifeguard pumped my chest. A crowd with worried expressions peered over her shoulder down at me. Someone nearby was crying. I coughed, and water spurted out of my mouth. The lifeguard stopped pounding. She sank from her knees to her butt and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The crowd clapped.

“You got caught in a riptide. I pulled you out,” the lifeguard said.

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“Swim out of a rip current. Parallel to the shore. Never against it.” She seemed to be addressing the entire crowd.

“You're okay now,” Dr. Patel said. I hadn't noticed he was kneeling to my right. “But you scared us.” Behind him, Sanjit, with tears streaming down his face, held Neesha's hand. Her usually dark face was white. Next to them, Ajee repeatedly tapped her bare foot on the sand. “I warned you. Why didn't you listen?” she mumbled. She came and sat next to me, taking my hand into hers. “You girls have to listen. I know things.”

“We will. From now on,” I promised, knowing I would never speak truer words.

N
eesha and I spent most of eighth grade trying to figure out how Ajee knew the things she did. We'd sit at the kitchen table pretending to do our homework while we studied her cooking at the stove. She hummed a lot. We'd follow her into the living room and watch her while she watched television. She'd scream at the characters on
General Hospital
, telling them they were stupid. We volunteered to go to the grocery store with her. She ate a bag of Doritos as she shopped and always discarded the empty bag before getting to the cash register. Her breath would smell like nacho cheese, and her fingers would be covered with orange powder that would inevitably get smeared on the money she gave to the cashier, but she never got caught. As closely as we scrutinized her, we found nothing that explained how she could see the things she did. When we asked her, she would only shrug.

While we believed in her powers wholeheartedly, as each day of eighth grade passed with no word that the Patels would be moving or I would visit Italy, we let ourselves believe that Ajee could sometimes get it wrong. On the last day of the school year we believed we were in the clear and that Neesha would be attending Westham High with me that fall. We planned to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation with a trip to the Westham Creamery. Ajee promised she would take us there after dinner, and Neesha and I were planning to split the Gut Wrencher, a monstrous six-scoop ice cream sundae with three different kinds of toppings. I had just finished dinner and was in the backyard playing badminton with my mother. I was camped under the birdie, waiting for it to come down, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw Neesha racing into our backyard. I figured she was there to collect me for our trip to the creamery. I hit the birdie back at my mother, but she didn't return it because she was looking at Neesha. “What's wrong?” she asked. That's when I noticed Neesha's bloodshot eyes and the tears streaming down her face.

Neesha tried to speak, but she couldn't catch her breath. My mother put her arm around Neesha and walked her to the picnic table to sit down. “Calm down, honey,” she said.

The only other time I had seen Neesha cry was when her mother died, so I was certain something horrible had happened to Ajee, Dr. Patel, or maybe even Sanjit. I stayed glued to my spot by the badminton net because I didn't want my suspicions confirmed. Like by staying where I was, I could somehow change what had happened.

“Gina, run inside and get Neesha a drink of water and some tissues,” my mom instructed.

I took my time inside the house. When I returned several minutes later, my mother was hugging Neesha, who was no longer crying. “Here,” I said, handing Neesha the glass and tissues.

She looked up at me. “Ajee was right,” she said. “We're moving to Texas. My dad is going to be the chief neurologist at a hospital there.”

I looked at my mother, who nodded with a somber expression.

“When?”

Neesha blew her nose before answering. “The end of July.”

I could taste the hot dog I had for dinner bubbling back up in my mouth. “But what about high school? We're supposed to be in the same classes.”

“I know,” Neesha said. She was crying again, and I could feel my eyes watering up, as well.

“I'm sorry, girls.” My mom gave us each a small smile. No one said anything else. The only sound in our backyard was the crickets chirping.

A few minutes later, the jingling of keys broke up the silence as Ajee burst around the corner. When she saw us at the picnic table with our tear-streaked faces, she came to a screeching halt and smacked the palm of her hand against her forehead. “You are still crying,” she shouted, looking at Neesha. “If you do not stop soon, the tracks of your tears will carve deep grooves into your face. You will be fourteen years old, and you will be as wrinkled as me.”

I could feel my mother stiffen next to me. “This is hard on the girls.”

Ajee waved her hand in the air to dismiss my mother's comment. “Nonsense. Leaving everyone and everything I knew in India. That was hard.”

My mother exhaled loudly. I imagined she was counting silently. Usually when she lost patience with me, she counted out loud.

Ajee turned to me. “Are you ready for some ice cream?”

My stomach hurt. “I'm not really hungry.”

Ajee sat down on the picnic bench next to me. “I tried to prepare you girls for this last summer.” She patted my knee. “People come into your life. People leave your life. It is the way it is, Bella. By the time you are my age, you will be used to it.”

My mother stood. “You girls can write each other and talk on the phone, and Neesha, you're welcome to come back and visit us anytime.”

“I will,” Neesha said. She sounded like she meant it, but I knew it wouldn't happen because Ajee's last prediction for Neesha was that she wouldn't return until she was an adult with children of her own.

I looked at Ajee. She stood. “I am getting ice cream. Who is coming with?”

 

The Patels left for Texas on July 30, the hottest day of the summer. My parents and I stood at the end of our driveway and waved good-bye as their blue Cadillac rolled down Towering Heights Lane. Ajee was riding shotgun, and she gave a thumbs-up as the car passed. Behind her, Neesha extended her arm out the open back window like she was reaching for me. Sanjit stuck out his tongue and then gave a quick wave in the back windshield. Dr. Patel tapped the horn two times, and seconds later the car was out of sight.

The next few days I moped around the house. My mother volunteered to take me shopping, to the beach, or to the movies, but I refused, content to stay in my room in my pajamas all day. Finally, one August evening, my parents burst into my room with big smiles on their faces. My father fanned three envelopes in front of me. “Guess what these are?”

“Tickets to Italy,” I answered.

He looked accusingly at my mother. “I didn't say a thing, Dominick,” she said.

“Ajee told me I'd be visiting Italy before high school,” I responded.

“Well, get packing,” my father said. “We leave in three days.”

 

When we returned from Italy, five letters from Neesha were waiting for me. Through the first three years of high school we corresponded regularly and talked on the phone at least once a month. Senior year we promised each other we'd both go to Boston College and be roommates. We mailed our applications on the same exact day, and for the next few months our letters to each other were mostly about how we would be reunited soon. In March when I received my acceptance letter, I called Neesha.

“I got in,” I shouted.

My enthusiasm was met by silence and then a clearing of the throat. “Me, too, Gina, but I've decided I want to go to school in Texas to be near my high school friends.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don't want to move away from my friends again. It was hard enough the first time.”

“You'd rather be with your Texas friends than me?” Even as I asked the question, I knew there was no way it could be true.

“Yeah, I guess that's what I've decided,” she said.

It felt as if she had swung a wrecking ball through my heart. We were both silent. “Sorry, Gina,” Neesha finally said. “But I'm a Texas girl now.”

After that, our letters and phone calls became fewer and farther between, and then one day they just stopped. Through the years, I often thought about picking up the phone and calling her. A few times I'd even start to dial, but then I'd remember how she chose her Texas friends over me and I'd put down the phone.