Foreteller

by Anne McAneny

  If only Eva had been able to describe the attacker. Had it been Jake? Cesar? Corbin Black? Zoey now understood that the words from the foretelling—If you kill me, you kill your child—could logically be uttered to Jake or to Corbin Black, because with Black, Zoey herself would be the child.

  She got out of bed. Glancing down at the jagged cuts on her arm, she hoped Eva had kept her nails clean because antibiotic cream wasn’t included with the half bar of soap and hint of toilet paper that had come with the room. She showered, got dressed, and attempted to do something with her hair—the hair similar enough to Grandma Magda’s that it had helped her with Eva. Magda was sure shaping up to be a different person than Zoey had realized. Who else had pulled the wool over Zoey’s eyes? If she hadn’t recognized a psychotic grandmother who’d cared more about neighbors’ opinions than about her two daughters, then what about Jake? Did she truly know him at all? He might be digging her a shallow grave right now. If she really thought about it, she’d also failed to grasp the true essence of her mother, her father, her aunt, and her best friend from freshman year. Pretty pathetic track record. Maybe Jake was right; maybe she was better at sticking her head in the sand and communing with rocks.

  She lashed her hair into a ponytail and tried to stop berating herself. Self-deprecation would not help things this morning when she needed to be at the top of her game.

  The Superman theme song rang out from her purse. Zoey gasped and ran to the phone. “Jake? Hey, how are you?”

  “Hey, Zoey, it’s Jake Medeiros. Do you have any donuts?”

  Zoey pulled the phone from her ear and double-checked the Caller ID to make sure it was her Clark Kent who’d called.

  “Jake? You okay? What’s going on?”

  “Oxycontin, good. Explosions, bad.”

  Zoey tilted her head and tuned into the noises behind Jake: a steady beep at the rate of about sixty pings per minute; a female voice telling someone it was time for a blood donation; and, a female TV news commentator giving a rundown on a hacking scandal. “Jake, are you in the hospital?”

  “Great nurses. Soooo nice. And pretty, too.”

  “Can I talk to one of the nurses, please?”

  “She wants to talk to youuuu!” he yelled.

  A sharp, impatient voice came on the line. “Hello. Who is this?”

  Zoey explained the situation and learned that Jake had suffered minor injuries in a job-related accident. That was all the nurse was at liberty to say without proof of the caller’s identity.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Zoey asked.

  “Yeah, absolutely, but I guess he’s not a hard-core addict. Pain pill hit him hard, and we gave it to him at 3 a.m. last night. Says his boss is picking him up. He’ll be out of here by dinnertime, in case you’re cooking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, get him to take you out, then. He’ll be fine. I gotta go.”

  Zoey wished it were all as easy as Jake picking her up for a dinner date.

  “Hey, Zo, I miss you.” There’d clearly been a phone handoff and loopy Jake was back on the line.

  “Hey, baby,” she said, “can you tell me what happened?”

  “I love you, Zoey. I miss you so much. Are you coming home?”

  Zoey swallowed hard. “I love you, too, Jake. Listen, I’ll be home tonight, okay? I’m sorry I’m not there to take care of you.”

  “People who make meth, they’re bad cooks, huh, Zo? And they smell, too.”

  “They sure do, sweetie.”

  “I wish they made donuts.”

  A hollowness filled Zoey’s ear and she realized that Jake had disconnected the call. She immediately called Tom, one of the newspaper editors who she and Jake sometimes watched football with while downing beer. Tom was all sorts of sympathetic, and told her that Jake had been chasing down a fresh lead on a stale story when he got himself into a bad situation. In typical Jake fashion, there’d been an explosion involved, but Jake had managed to escape with a few cuts and burns. Apparently, he’d been one of the lucky ones.

  More than ever, Zoey knew she needed to get home, but even as she thought it, she knew Jake would be fine. He always was, no matter how many times he tried to off himself by covering high-risk stories. Someday, she hoped to understand his death wish so she could help snuff it out.

  She had just one more stop to make before returning to Philly. She didn’t think Jake would mind, especially given his urgent quest for donuts and hot nurses. After packing her things and downing the requisite omelet that Mackenzie had recommended, she headed out. Twenty minutes of winding roads and undulating hills later, followed by a 55-minute straight shot on Route 64 put her in the long entryway to an older Richmond hospital. The place offered limited curb appeal with its disjointed architecture, as if the hospital had come into a nice chunk of grant money every ten years and added on a wing in that year’s trendy style.

  Passing a construction crew, she followed a temporary sign directing her to the plain, taupe-brick building in the back known as Phelan Health Center, a lovely euphemism for the psychiatric ward. Inside lay a young woman, Elena Baxter, who probably sensed she didn’t belong there, but at the same time, felt life’s foundation crumbling beneath her. Zoey couldn’t imagine what she must be going through. She took a deep breath and headed in to meet with the only other recipient of a foretelling letter from her mother—that she knew of anyway.

  Apparently, Elena Baxter had entered the ward voluntarily and was treated like a regular hospital patient. The receptionist rang her room and asked if she wanted to see a visitor who claimed to be the daughter of the woman who had sent the letter.

  Zoey could hear only one end of the conversation: “Says her name’s Zoey Kincaid… I don’t know, she looks normal enough.” At this, the receptionist winked at Zoey, as if to bond over how amusing the mental patients were. She hung up a moment later and directed Zoey to the third floor.

  Once there, Zoey submitted her purse to a security guard who checked it for drugs and weapons, and then sent her to Elena’s room. She knocked on the heavy door that stood partially open.

  “Come in,” said a tired voice.

  Zoey stuck her head in, spotting a pretty woman in her early twenties dressed in pricy jeans and a pink tank top. Her blond hair fell like silk around her face and landed on broad, athletic shoulders. Her aristocratic features were marred only by a thin upper lip that enhanced her fatigued demeanor. The woman sat on a wide windowsill with her profile to Zoey, staring out at the distant view of the Powhite Parkway.

  “Elena? Elena Baxter?” Zoey said when her hostess did not turn to face her.

  Elena let out a sigh, shifted a few degrees, and took the measure of Zoey with a healthy dose of skepticism. “You’re her daughter?”

  “I’m Susan Collette’s daughter, yes. I go by Zoey.”

  “Well, goody for you. Guess you didn’t get away with much as a kid, huh?”

  Zoey had not expected the hostility that accompanied the words.

  Unprovoked, Elena sneered. “Did she do this a lot? This letter-writing of predictions to strangers?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “It’s bizarre. And to people like my husband, it’s something else entirely. Something evil.”

  “Evil?” Zoey asked. “Don’t you believe my mother’s prediction helped save you from being raped?”

  Elena gazed squarely out the window now. Finally, she turned back around and glanced, paranoid, at the door to her room. “Close the door.”

  Zoey stepped back and closed it with a thud that seemed loud given the silence on the floor.

  Elena spoke quickly now, her eyes darting from Zoey to various spots on the ceiling and walls, as if fearing that interlopers might be lurking in the air vents. “Okay, yes. I do believe your mother helped stop the rape. But she also predicted it—with freaky accuracy. And you know what I think? I think she helped create the whole thing by putting it out there in the first place. And now she’s ruine
d my life.”

  Zoey could almost feel the bitterness spewing from Elena’s heart, and the young woman’s theory was not too far off from what Aunt Eva had once suspected about her own foretellings. But Zoey remembered her mother saving Mr. Schmidt’s sister. She felt sure there had to be more examples like that, where her mother had seen a possible future that stood a chance of being changed.

  “How do you think my mother created the whole thing?”

  “Maybe if I hadn’t spent all the effort avoiding that guy, it wouldn’t have happened at all. I put the vibes out there, too, you know, because of the letter. I thought about the friggin’ rape day and night, for weeks. Do you know what that’s like?”

  Zoey remained mum, imagining it was similar to thinking about her own murder, day and night.

  “I studied some philosophy and alternative reality stuff in college,” Elena said. “It’s possible I brought him into my life by concentrating on it so much, by envisioning all the horrible ways it could happen, hour after hour. That’s what my husband thinks. People bring things on themselves. You know, believe good things will happen and they will. Believe you’ll always fail, and you’ve already lost. All that stuff. If I hadn’t known about the sicko, I might not have brought him into my life.”

  Zoey took offense on her mother’s behalf—a new emotion for her because she’d never had family to defend as an adult. “We’ll never know, will we?” Zoey said. “You say my mother ruined the rest of your life, but you might well be a rape victim right now—possibly a murder victim—if my mother hadn’t warned you.”

  “You don’t know that,” Elena hissed. She arched an eyebrow in Zoey’s direction. “You a psychic or something, too?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know any better than I do. And is the destruction of my marriage, and the mental torture I endured for weeks—isn’t that almost as bad as being raped? Because you know what, I still went through an attempted rape. I still got all the fear and the horrible feelings that come with it. And I endured what a lot of victims don’t—anticipation. You have any idea what that does to a person?”

  Zoey had more than an idea, but she held her tongue.

  “It might have been worse than the actual attack,” Elena said, looking immediately ashamed that she’d said it.

  “Lucky for you, you don’t know.”

  “Well, maybe your mother should have just let things happen.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have had the gun.”

  “And maybe he would never have come after me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that my mother predicted the victim and the precise rapist? Seems a little far-fetched to believe that some negative vibe you emitted just happened to attract that particular rapist into your midst.” She stepped closer to Elena. “It was destined to happen and the only reason you were prepared was because of my mother.”

  Elena stood up, her small physique trim but powerful. “Your mother survived her rape. Maybe I could have survived mine. And then at least I’d have sympathy from my husband. Not hatred!”

  So the truth revealed itself. It wasn’t the letter, or the fact that Susan Collette had saved Elena’s life. The core of Elena’s anger lay in her husband’s reaction.

  Zoey zeroed in on something else first. “My mother told you about her rape? In her letter to you?”

  Elena nodded. “She survived. And so did her relationship with her husband.”

  Zoey let out a disapproving snort through her nose. “No, Elena. Wrong on both counts. My mother didn’t survive. And maybe you wouldn’t have, either. My mother died later from a stroke caused by an injury from the rape, and my father killed himself six weeks after that. Corbin Black took both their lives.”

  Elena tensed at the mention of Black’s name. Now it was her turn to be dismayed and a little heartbroken. Zoey didn’t care. The girl needed to believe in the letter so she could defend it to her jerk of a husband.

  “My mother probably saved your life. Maybe you ought to value that and make her efforts worth the paper she wrote to you on.”

  Elena turned away from her visitor, her animated breathing still evident from the heaves in her back. She directed her words to the window. “Why are you here? There must be something else you want. You certainly didn’t come here to cheer me up.” Sarcasm coated Elena’s words, although Zoey took it as a positive sign of life. The girl had progressed from zombie-like to anger to sarcasm in a matter of minutes. Anything beat the dismal monotone of depression.

  “I need your help,” Zoey said. “Another person’s life may depend on it.” Zoey thought it best not to mention that it was her life.

  “I know, I know,” Elena muttered. “You want me to press charges and testify against that Corbin Black guy. But they screwed up the evidence. And now—well, what can I do when my own husband thinks I brought this on myself?”

  “It’s not about taking Corbin Black to court, although I hope you’ll find the guts to testify. It would show some much-deserved gratitude to my mother. But the kind of help I need is information. I need to know if you changed course. Did you defy my mother’s foretelling by avoiding the place where she told you it would happen, or by not wearing the clothes she may have described? What I’m asking is, how did you win? How did you keep the foretelling from coming true?”

  Elena turned contemplative, all the hard edges of her face softening. Perhaps it was a relief for her to focus on something besides the attack. “I only got the letter a few weeks before it happened, and for all I knew, the attack might happen right away or in a few years. At first, I ignored it and tried everything I could to disprove it. But then weird little things happened.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your mom said she knew my name because she saw in her mind whatever the rapist saw. She saw the rapist look at my name on the apartment buzzer directory just before I came out of the building. But your mom didn’t know my maiden name because it had been crossed out on the directory. She’d told her lawyer to keep searching until a married woman by the name of Elena Baxter appeared in the city.”

  Zoey felt amazed at her mother’s forethought.

  “Because of your mom’s letter, I flipped the label over on the buzzer directory so that my name wouldn’t be on display. But package deliveries kept getting messed up, so my husband, without telling me, flipped it back over. A few days before the attack, he crossed out my old name with a Sharpie, and wrote Baxter on there. Can’t believe I didn’t notice he did that. I’m such an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot. No one would notice a little thing like that.”

  Elena looked straight at Zoey and maintained eye contact. A first. A glimmer of the possible true Elena emerged—a strong, confident, appropriately cynical woman of the working world.

  “Anything else like that happen?” Zoey asked in a calm tone.

  “Yes. The letter said the rapist would strike while I was walking home from work. That was a red flag because unlike most people, I do walk to and from work. No cab. No car. I walk the whole way. She mentioned the shoes I’d be wearing because they made this particular clip-clop sound on the cobblestone. So I started wearing tennis shoes to and from work, like women used to. But then they got stolen from under my desk. I paid like 170 bucks for them, but still, you know, who steals tennis shoes? I thought that was weird. So I went back to the store to get another pair, but the store was closed for remodeling. I didn’t have time to run all over the city because work was kicking my ass, so I ordered a pair off the internet.”

  “And you were forced to wear your pumps for a few days?”

  “Yeah. Another piece of the puzzle that fell into place to make this thing happen.” She crossed her arms and appeared suddenly self-satisfied. “I got one thing right, though.”

  “What?”

  “The gun. Bought that sucker and learned how to use it. I figured even if all the other stuff came true, I would have that gun, and if I could get it in the mix, th
at might be enough to throw off the prediction.”

  “It did. You changed your fate.”

  “Problem is, I’ve never believed in that fate and destiny garbage, okay? I believe in free will. So none of this makes sense, no matter how much I think it through.”

  Elena and Zoey spent another 45 minutes talking. Zoey told Elena about the Golden Chemical plant leak, about her mother’s foretelling ability, and how she’d helped Mr. Schmidt’s sister. She even told her how Aunt Eva’s foretelling as a child could have saved a baby’s life, if people had only known to listen. By the end, Zoey and Elena had reached a mutual acceptance of each other.

  Before leaving, Zoey happened to glance out the window to see hundreds of cars traveling north on the Powhite Parkway toward I-95. The time had come for her to return home and to find out if she was brave enough to change her own fate and destiny garbage.

  #

  Among the cars within Zoey’s view, a white Chevy Cavalier from a local rental car company sped north at a comfortable seven miles above the speed limit. It kept with the flow of traffic so as to remain inconspicuous. Inside the car, a prematurely aged right hand, covered in years’ worth of old scars from grease splatter, hot potato ovens, and grill mishaps, reached down to tune the radio to the alternative rock station, because wasn’t that the right station in life?

  Chapter 33

  Silicon Valley, California

  “That’s it!” Aviva screamed as she shoved Cesar in the chest the moment he opened the hotel room door. “Where is she? You two having a little afternoon delight?”

  Within four seconds, Aviva had tossed two pillows from the bed to the floor and kicked open the bathroom door. Within thirty, she had eliminated the shower, the closet, the dusty area behind the light-blocking curtains, and the cliché spot beneath the bed, as hiding spots for her husband’s mistress. “Where is she? Out getting champagne and caviar for tonight’s tryst?”