by Page Turner
Penny felt like an untrained carnival barker taking a stab at a mark. It was an awful feeling, so she changed course.
“I mean, you look the same as when I first saw you on television,” Penny replied.
Withers brightened. “And when was that, dear?”
“When I was a girl,” Penny said. “In the 90s.”
Withers’s face fell. “Oh dear, you are young. Do you even remember when the first precogs were announced?”
Penny shook her head vigorously. “And I remember your coverage, your interviews. You were phenomenal.”
The host beamed. “Thank you. That seems like a lifetime ago. In some ways, it was.”
“What do you mean by that?” Viv asked.
“When you get to be my age, you’ll understand,” Withers replied. “When you start to feel like you’re going off. Overripe. Like a fruit left for too many days on the counter and getting all sunken in and spotty.”
“Oh stop that,” Penny said. “You look fantastic.”
“That’s the thing,” Withers replied. “It’s all find-and-replace. You substitute new parts of you for the bits that are falling apart. After a while, you stop and take stock and wonder if there’s any of the old you left, or if all rotted off somewhere along the way.”
“I know what you mean actually,” Viv replied. “My mother’s gone through the same thing. She’s heavily refurbished.”
“Thank you,” Withers said. “It’s rare that young people understand. But it would seem that you’re very observant. I bet you make a lot of people nervous.”
Viv nodded. “I think that’s half of why I have my job. The photographic memory is nice, sure, but that’s nothing a good video camera couldn’t do.”
“Well, video cameras make people nervous, too,” Withers replied. “You should see how people act when you turn up with a camera crew. They’re ready to change their entire lives, completely remodel themselves, for a second on the air.”
“Or completely remodel themselves for an entire career on the air,” Viv countered pointedly.
“Viv,” Penny said. “That was uncalled for.”
Withers chuckled in a stunned, wounded way. “No, it’s alright,” she said. “Anyone afraid of the truth has no business being in journalism.”
Viv smiled. Maybe she’d misjudged this woman. Lumped her in unfairly with all the vain fame-obsessed talking heads that seemed to clog up the celebrity world. Maybe there was some substance after all under the layers of shiny veneer. Withers was doing a good job at least of offering up real talk to her. Whether or not that was an act, Viv reflected, remained to be seen.
But she could talk a different talk than Viv had expected going in. And that alone was something.
“Anyway,” Withers continued. “I’m tired of the find-and-replace game. Everyone constantly scrutinizing my face, my weight, my clothes. It’d be great to eat what I want and wear what I want. I’d like to age gracefully, fade into off-screen obscurity but still be involved somehow. That’s where producing comes in. True, I have to break in with reality TV tripe, but everyone has to start somewhere, right? And the ratings on this program are great. It’ll be easy to leverage into another show after a few seasons.”
“Even if it’s garbage?” Viv asked.
“People like what they like,” Withers replied. “Who am I to tell them what they should like? Who died and made me the keeper of taste?”
“Well, I’m glad you’re still on the air,” Penny said, desperate to change the topic, to steer the conversation away from potential conflict, “After all, we’re here to ask for your help publicizing a case of ours.”
“Yes,” Withers said. “Mr. Ryan told me about your situation. I’d be happy to help.”
“How do you know Roscoe anyway?” Viv asked.
“Does it matter?” Withers asked.
Viv didn’t have a good answer for that. It mattered to her, sure, but not for professional reasons. Not for reasons she was eager to admit. “Honestly, I’m just curious,” Viv admitted, feeling a bit small.
“I’d be careful with that curiosity of yours,” Withers answered. “You’re smart women. How do you think Roscoe affords those suits of his on a psychic detective’s salary? He has powerful friends. We have some of the same. That’s about all I’m willing to say about that.”
“Is that a threat?” Viv asked.
Regina Withers ignored the question and pulled out a notebook. “Okay, so I think we could add your case to the episode we’re filming three days from now as an Unsolved segment. There’s a yawner of a child abduction case that’s been played to death that would be fine to bump. I’ll check with the director, but he owes me several favors, so I think we’ll be fine.”
Withers snapped the notebook shut with unnecessary force. She smiled sweetly as if to punctuate the act.
“Now then,” Withers said, swiveling her body towards Penny and removing Viv from her line of sight. “Why don’t you tell me all about the case?”
Penny sprung to life, narrating what they had learned so far. Withers made copious notes. Viv tried to interject a few times to add in details, but it was though neither of them heard her.
Karen sat mutely and watched, only speaking up a few times to echo the corrections Viv introduced. When Karen spoke, Regina recorded it dutifully.
Great, Viv thought, are we in middle school?
“Perfect,” Withers said. “I think we have it.”
“When will the episode air?” Karen asked.
“Next Thursday,” Withers replied. “Unless it gets tied up in editing and we have to air a rerun. But the editor owes me several favors.”
“Who doesn’t owe you a favor?” Viv asked.
“Thank you for coming,” Regina Withers said. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return a phone call.”
“What a loon,” Viv said, after they were safely in the car.
“I’ve always really liked loons,” Penny said.
“They had them out at the lakes in Maine where I grew up. You could hear them at night all the time when I was a kid,” Karen replied.
“That had to be a trip,” Penny said. “Like the dead having a yodeling concert.”
“I don’t think it’d bother you much,” Karen replied. “Aren’t you used to that by now? Don’t the dead sing?”
“You’d be surprised,” Penny replied.
“Anyway, when you grow up hearing loons, you aren’t bothered by them. There’s something reassuring about them then. They sound less haunted and more sad. I understood that sadness. Made me feel less alone to have it reflected back at me,” Karen said.
Viv frowned. They had erected one of their conversational walls again. One that she didn’t really feel like she could be part of. Her temples began to pulse. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the car window. It was a long drive home from the studio and too sunny today. Better to try to nap than risk a migraine, especially with it having rained the day before.
Sunlight and rain had a way of conspiring, blinding her first, and then chucking needles into her brain. No thank you.
Penny drove while she and Karen talked, with Karen leaning forward over the center console so Penny could hear her better from the backseat.
Karen sometimes wondered why Viv didn’t just sit in the back on long car rides, especially when she didn’t feel well, but the one time Karen had dared to ask Viv had given her a glare that could fry ants so she had let the matter drop.
Karen knew that Viv worried more about being surpassed or replaced by her – or by anyone – than she let on. Like a lot of people who beamed out easy confidence, at the core Viv was rather insecure and unconvinced of her own value.
Karen had sensed this in the times when she and Viv were alone together but still hadn’t come up with a meaningful way to put that knowledge into p
ractice.
When others found out that she was in a relationship with not one but two other intuitives, they’d often say things like, “Boy, I wish my boyfriend and I were both psychic. That’d fix a lot of problems in our relationship.”
Karen would nod politely, knowing they meant well, and preferring this harmless comment to other common ones she liked a lot less. But she knew the truth of it: Knowing how your partner felt was only the start of knowing how to approach them. Or what to do for them.
There were many times when someone you cared about felt something they weren’t ready to admit to themselves. And while she could theoretically pull the empath card, it never went well when she did. People didn’t like to be told they were feeling a way that they didn’t want to feel and didn’t want to admit to anyone else.
She’d heard a million times that honesty was always the best policy and that nothing couldn’t be fixed by open honest communication. Solid advice in some scenarios, but in others it just wasn’t helpful. Sometimes things were imbalanced, precarious, fragile. Sometimes you needed a little strategy to navigate it all.
And while having a good view of what was actually going on was helpful, it was far from everything she needed to set things right.
Sometimes she wondered if her empathic powers hadn’t been a hindrance, a barrier to naturally developing those skills. Maybe if she didn’t have such a clear view of what everyone was feeling, she would have been forced to learn more complicated interpersonal strategies. Methods that would be a Hell of a lot more effective than sitting paralyzed by the complexity of the feelings of everyone around her.
Besides, there was another large downside to dating another intuitive that would never occur to normals. The shame.
Karen had spent a lot of time wondering if she was a broken doll. Sometimes she wondered if all three of them were broken dolls. Or bits and pieces of broken dolls, more like. Each of them were strong in the ways others were not, but all of these strengths came with weaknesses.
Were they snapped all together, those bits and pieces, to make a powerful whole?
And if so, how strong were those connections?
The hardest part of being with another intuitive, another psychic, was sharing your lover with their own self-loathing. It didn’t matter if you accepted it within yourself; if they hadn’t gone there in their own mind, then all bets were off.
It was a lot like dating a person who hated themselves because they were overweight. All was fine and good so long as they hadn’t internalized those societal messages about unworthiness. But if they had, good luck. You’d spend years being pushed to the edge of their psyche. They’d spend lots of energy fighting what they were and feeling like they didn’t deserve to fully enjoy their life until they became something else entirely.
Always postponing their life until they could get a better handle on it.
Viv kept on postponing vacations until she could better control her powers, like someone else might say they wouldn’t go to Hawaii until they fit into their old bikini. She’d say something about wanting to save up a little more money, just in case the roof on the house needed repairs. Or the furnace broke.
But Karen knew what was really going on, could sense it when it was just the two of them. Viv worried about getting swallowed up in her visions and never emerging.
Until the day that fear went away, Viv wouldn’t relax. Couldn’t enjoy herself.
Sometimes Karen felt like someday was never going to come.
It had been a great relief to Viv when they first got together that Penny was an orphan. Not that Viv was exactly eager to admit that aloud.
It sounded callous. After all, who would wish upon their lover a life without parents?
And yet… Viv had found dating quite difficult before she met Penny. It wasn’t anything she’d been warned about, but people who were close to their parents often had a hard time accepting other people who weren't. Viv had thought it was a fluke the first time a promising romantic prospect had abruptly cut things off when Viv had admitted she wasn’t terribly close to her mother.
“Family’s important to me,” her lover had said.
“I can respect that,” Viv said, “even if my life’s a little different.”
“Well I can’t respect that,” her lover had replied.
It was weird enough when it happened that first time.
And then it happened again.
Viv had begun to wonder if she should start lying about it. She could start by lying by omission and then if push ever came to shove, maybe she could hire an actress to play her mother.
Hell, she could hire someone to play her father, too. That would be something, wouldn’t it? Viv wasn’t even sure who her father was, but she could pick someone else to play him in front of prospective suitors.
But then she’d met Penny and fallen in love with an orphan. While Viv couldn’t begin to understand what that was like – let alone what it must have been like to grow up in foster care – Penny didn’t need her to. Penny looked to Viv primarily for what Viv looked for in her: Basic acceptance of the fact that neither of them fit into the Hallmark trope of smiling mother-daughter pair. That neither of them could earnestly exclaim, “My mother is my best friend in the world!”
And when Karen had shown up with a mother who’d abandoned their family and a tense relationship with her own father (or “the cult leader,” as Karen usually called him), she’d fit right into their Judgement-Free Zone.
All three of them understood how easy it was for people to mistake the rejection found in dysfunctional parental dynamics with the normal ebb and flow of adolescent disembedding, the fount of most teen rebellion, a developmental stage in which adolescents create emotional distance from their parents in order to better understand their emerging self.
It was easy for some to confuse a teen’s “ew, Mom, I’m not anything like my mom,” with Viv’s need to create distance from someone who had repeatedly harmed her and others around her.
As a result, people often mistook her state of semi-estrangement as a sign that Viv was immature. That she’d never developed beyond a teenage level of understanding her mother. Because of this, they were quick to suggest that she repair that connection. That she throw herself into a full-fledged mother-daughter bonding.
They didn’t realize how strenuous and difficult the little contact Viv had with her mother was.
It was a sore spot, even now.
That’s why when Penny and Karen came to Viv asking about interviewing her mother that Viv nearly tore their heads off.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?!” Viv said.
Penny blinked. She’d asked as gently as she could. Had taken great pains to frame the question as delicately as she could, because they had to make a decision on how they were going to conduct the interview, and yet Viv had still exploded at her.
Viv caught herself. “Oh geez, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Viv,” Karen said. “We all have something we’re a little crazy about.”
Penny nodded. “I know I do. More than one thing, actually, if I’m being completely honest.”
“At least yours makes sense,” Karen said.
It was meant as a comfort, but Viv found herself mentally asking, Does it though?
“It does,” Penny said.
Viv noted mentally that Penny would probably be pleased to know she’d answered her unspoken doubt. Penny was always saying she wished she were a telepath, after all.
“Are you sure you’re not a telepath?” Viv said aloud.
Penny blushed.
Viv sighed. “So the options again are that we can do it as a team. Or I can let you two do it without me. Or we can outsource it to another team, right?”
Penny nodded. “Right.”
“Or anything else you can think of,” Karen added.
Viv frowned. She brought up the image mentally of her mother’s face, largely unchanged since childhood. Her mother’s voice. She visualized the bodies of the victims they’d found. A series of other faces flashed before her eyes, witnesses they’d interviewed.
It was only a few moments, but to Viv, caught in the barrage of mental images, it felt like an eternity.
“You two do it,” Viv said.
“Okay,” Penny said. “You can count on us.”
“Are you sure?” Karen asked.
“Completely sure,” Viv said. “Now shut up before I change my mind.”
Viv gathered her things. “I’m going for a long drive,” she told them. “Make sure it’s done before I get back.”
Karen could feel the nerves raying off Penny with an intensity she was not at all used to feeling.
Not in her own emotional life and certainly not from Penny.
“I can make the call you know,” Karen offered. “If you need me to.”
A jolt of irritation from Penny. Aloud, Penny said, “It’s fine. I’m fine.” She frowned. “Oh why bother. You see right through me.”
“It’s not exactly seeing, but yes,” Karen replied.
“Not exactly seeing? Didn’t you say once that reading people’s emotions was like watching a card game? One where you were positioned to see the entire table,” Penny said.
Karen nodded. “A bit. And yes, I did say it.” She paused and thought. “That’s more how I explain it to other people. It really depends on the emotions and feelings. And how close I am to people. Sometimes, feeling is less like watching cards being played and more like I’m in the cards as they’re being dealt.”
“Really?” Penny asked.
Karen frowned. “Well, sort of. Not really.”
Penny frowned back.
“I really wish I could explain it better,” Karen said.
“Me too,” Penny replied.
Karen thought for a second. “Have you ever been so choked up you couldn’t speak?” Karen asked.
Penny nodded. “Of course. Happened all the time when I was young.” She smiled, remembering. “I was a little crybaby until middle school.”