by Suzie Carr
“Okay, okay,” he said into the phone. “Just tell them to hurry.”
The smoke continued to pour out of the burners.
Panic surfaced on Anna’s face. She opened the spice cupboard, pulled out the baking soda and started flinging it all over the stove.
“For goodness sake,” my mother yelled. “Stop her,” she begged me.
My family was crazy.
Even Anthony stood back with a look of bewilderment at the scene unfolding in front of him. Something he’d be able to write about in his summer journals for school. Come that fall, my family would be the laughing stock of Lincoln Elementary school as he confessed his greatest summer adventure. Who would’ve known it’d take place right here in the kitchen of Betty and Stan Stone?
My father took the baking soda from Anna and waved it around that stovetop like he fought a three alarm fire with it. He emptied the whole box. The black stovetop turned into a winter scene complete with smoke from a fire nestled safely within the confines of a well-protected oven.
He bent over at his knees, huffing and puffing in defeat of the massive wildfire he must have imagined raged in the fiery inferno of his hearth and home.
“You warned me not to come. Good thing I didn’t listen,” Anna said, rubbing my father’s back like a saint sent to save us from hell.
My father didn’t argue with her fact.
I turned to walk away, and ran right into Willow standing in the kitchen doorway, carrying Charlotte on her hip and taking in the whole scene. Angst sat on her face.
My father shooed her and Charlotte back out to the dining room. Anthony and Anna followed. My mother and I remained planted in the kitchen, amongst white soot and the remnants of whatever still smoldered in that kitchen oven. With her hand still caressing her chest, she whispered, “I hope nobody wanted more garlic bread.”
I grabbed that oven handle and yanked it open. I stared down at seven black circles still smoking. My mother wrapped her arm around my shoulders and together we stared at them. “I’m sure glad you were here tonight,” she said.
I clasped her hands in mine and sighed. I loved my mom so much.
By the time the fire department arrived with their axes over their shoulders, trudging through the living room with their helmets and masks on their faces, the panic simmered and we were left with a tinge of embarrassment for having those brave firefighters gear up only to find burnt garlic bread on the middle rack of my parent’s well-protected oven.
Later on, long after the smoke cleared and Anna and my father’s panic had been packaged back up and returned to its hiding spot, we sat down again, sans the rest of the garlic bread, and tried once again to enjoy a dinner.
About the time we dug our spoons into the cannolis, Charlotte banged her cup against the table. “Mommy, read his mind,” she said pointing to my father.
My father’s eyes grew larger. Anna bowed her head as if in prayer. So, I jumped in to save the moment again, wishing for another harmless fire. I tapped Charlotte’s wrist, shushing her. “That’s enough now.”
“It’s okay,” Willow reassured Charlotte. “Just eat your dinner.”
To that, Charlotte and the rest of us shushed for the rest of the arduous meal, pretending that my father and sister didn’t mind sharing the table with a psychic who identified as a yoga instructor.
Once we finished up, Willow and Dean thanked my mother and father.
On our walk down the path, the three of us watched the kids skip ahead, excited to be going home with playing cards and a new book.
“Well, that was awkward,” Dean said.
I elbowed him.
Willow power-walked to the truck.
The kids kept the conversation going all the way back to Willow’s aunt’s house. Even Dean sat silent in between them.
When we arrived, Dean took off.
“I’m going to tuck the kids into bed,” Willow said. “Wait for me if you can? We need to talk.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll come and help you.”
She put her hand up. “Please don’t.” She backed up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I did as she asked. I stood under the harsh glow of a bright lamppost and respected her wish.
# #
Ten minutes later, Willow stood before me, hugging herself and squinting. “For most of my life, I carried the burden of a cursed life. Seeing my mother look at me with horror when I was a kid pained me like you can’t imagine. My own mother feared me. She always kept a safe distance from me, and never asked about my day the way she did with Mary Rose. In church she saved the seat next to her for my sister, pointing me toward the end of our row. My father and sister, to this day haven’t returned my calls, invited me to a holiday, or even met my kids because they’re afraid of me. The only person who has ever accepted me for who I am is my Aunt Lola because she gets it. She believes in me. She knows I’m not a freak.”
I shivered from the coldness in her eyes.
“Most people who have tried to get close to me, have asked me to suppress my ability. They feared my mind. They never introduced me to their families. They viewed my ability as outrageous, and instead of trying to understand it, they asked me to put it away like old paperwork. Out of sight, out of mind.”
Her voice, covered with sternness, chilled the air between us.
“For the longest time, I thought I had something critically wrong with me. Why else would no one want to get close to me?”
I moved in to touch her.
She backed away. “Do you know how much it hurt me that you couldn’t even look your family in the eye and tell them the truth about me? You were embarrassed for me.”
“My family just doesn’t get it.”
“You don’t either.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I can’t pretend not to be a psychic.” She charged forward in her stance.
How could I tell her that I grew up in a family that ridiculed her ability because we didn’t know how else to deal with it?
“Not everyone is going to understand what you do. It scares people.”
“Does it scare you?” Her voice shelled out an attack.
I bent over at the knees and sighed before looking up at her and trying to figure out how to deal with the uneasiness. “It’s different what you do,” I said, trying to sound rational.
“You’re embarrassed of me. Admit it. You were embarrassed of me at your family’s dinner table, and my kids saw it. You can’t even hide it. It’s engrained in you. Your face says it all. I’ve been running from that exact look all of my life, and I’m tired of running. This is me. And I’ve had plenty of time to come to terms with that.”
“I just wanted to protect you.”
“Here’s the thing, Lia. I don’t need protecting. This is the real me. I help people. I’m not embarrassed of that. In fact, I love it.” She turned from me and walked up her path.
“So that’s it,” I yelled. “You’re just going to walk away from this without trying to figure it out with me?”
She stopped walking and faced me. “We have nothing to figure out. I can’t be anyone else but me. I don’t want to be. You can’t handle that.”
She turned back around and continued to walk up her path, leaving me tangled in the truth of her words.
I ran after her. “Look, I’m sorry.”
She spun and faced me. “I thought you were different. But, you’re still that scared person you always were, worrying about everything you could lose instead of gain – just like your sister. And frankly, I’m not interested in that kind of small-mindedness.”
She marched away, leaving me with a biting sting.
# #
I drove. I just kept driving all night, up and down the interstates that snaked through Lil Rhody. I drove up north to the far reaches of Burriville, and when that didn’t calm me down, I drove south to Newport. I listened to classical music, then reggae, and upgraded to rap, which helped me push out some of the anger p
oisoning me.
Me? Small-minded?
I never should’ve gotten involved with her.
I had predicted correctly, the first fight had marked the end of flutters and the emergence of bitter-tasting regret for putting myself in a position to hurt the way I did in that moment.
As dawn broke, I drove home, took a shower, then headed into the office to get my mind off the bitterness piling up inside.
Work was my go-to friend when all else failed. It patiently waited for me to embrace it each day, and rarely let me down. It let me strike it with harsh blows, yell at it, argue absurdities, and it responded with keeping a consistent presence over my life. It never shoved me out of the way, knocked me down, or refused to yield when times got a little rough. It remained there by my side, encouraging me when the rest of the world turned its back. It offered me good news, joy, and an escape from the harsh realities of life and all its stupid, illogical complexities.
I walked into my office and waited for its comfort to take root. I needed its comfort. I needed its distraction. I needed it to massage out the knot left behind by Willow’s blow.
I sat at my desk and listened to the soft hum of the water cooler right outside of my door. I normally loved the peace. I hated it in that moment. I hated how I could hear every single solitary tick of my clock. Its ticks grew louder and bolder by the second. I hated the way my chair kinked up on the carpet, refusing to roll on my command. I hated that my cups left stains on my desk. I hated that the angle of the building blocked my view of Waterfront Park.
I escaped the anguish by looking at my phone. It blinked red with a new message.
I placed my hand on the receiver and listened to it. “Lia, it’s me. Mr. Allen. I need your brilliance again. I just opened up another company, and this one is going to need some special care. Call me ASAP.” His excited voice did nothing to tame the beast inside of me.
I hung up the receiver, and dropped my head onto a pile of paperwork that I needed to get through that morning.
That kind of call would’ve excited me in the past. Dean and I would’ve camped out at the office and brainstormed while drinking sangria and munching on popcorn. Instead I wanted to throw the phone against the wall.
I stood up and paced my floor, trying to reason with myself.
I was very open-minded. I listened to her explain that silly breathing and herbal oil lesson, and even smiled through it all.
What did Willow expect? That I take out a full page ad in the Providence Journal stating ‘my girlfriend is a psychic’?
And who the hell wasn’t afraid to lose out in life? I hated the breakdown part of anything. I hated that everything always had to be so goddamn temporary.
I paced and argued with myself for well over an hour before landing back in front of the pile of paperwork again.
I couldn’t focus for shit.
Overwhelmed, I pounded my fists against my desk as I sank into a mild breakdown.
# #
I spent three days trying to get my brain rewired around the thing I loved most, my work. My workload increased in pressure, and my mental capacity faded when I needed it to be at its sharpest.
Willow took over my mind and steered it far off the road I needed to be on at that point. I hated that she questioned my outlook. I hated that she viewed me as small-minded. I hated it most of all because, deep down, I feared that maybe she was right.
I continued to circle around that dread. When the phone would ring, I’d answer it on a huff, aggravated to be interrupted. When a new contract surfaced on my desk, I’d buckle under the weight of all the work ahead. When someone on my staff would knock to ask me a question, I’d be short with them.
The more I tried to focus, the more my mind shut down.
On the fourth day, the day before Dean’s surgery, he called me up to check on me again. I reassured him that all was fine. I didn’t want to burden him with my selfish problems.
“Do you remember what you promised me today?” he asked.
Effing pizza. “Of course I remember.”
“I’m outside waiting on you.”
I covered my mouthpiece and sighed. I just wanted to hide under a rock. “I’ll be right down.”
# #
We sat in a booth at Pizza Hut, both contemplating between ordering deep dish or hand tossed. A mother entertained her three young children at an adjacent booth and struggled her way through the tantrum her youngest boy broke into. She propped him on her hip, tapping her foot. Our waitress whizzed past her without taking notice. The tapping of her foot intensified, coupled with a growl at the boy who screamed with the power of a newborn baby entering the world and taking his first real lungful of air.
She yelled out to the waitress, who pummeled through the room, weaving through tables toward the front of the restaurant where perhaps her oasis awaited her behind the waitress stand. She looked about twenty years old, but struggled through the air as if carrying the weight of one hundred tumultuous years.
“I wish I could grab her by the shoulders and reassure her that she knows nothing of real stress,” Dean said.
I shrugged, not able to judge.
She raced back through the restaurant, and past our table, stopping to tell us she’d be with us when she could.
“A foot trip would save her,” Dean said. “It would stop the world for ten valuable seconds and allow her a chance to catch up with herself. She needs a break.”
“She’s obviously too busy for a break,” I said, absently.
“That’s the problem these days. We’re all too busy, aren’t we? We work ourselves to the bone and for what? To find out one day that we may have caused ourselves to get sick with cancer? So then we end up spending the rest of our days fighting for our lives instead of traveling a bit slower through it and enjoying it.”
“Are you talking about you or Pat?”
“All of us. We’re all vulnerable.”
“How is Pat?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “He’s aged ten years from one day to the next. His wife told me he didn’t want to have any more treatments with Yvonne. He doesn’t have the strength.”
“We’re all going to get there one day, my friend. He’s just arriving earlier than us.”
He nodded. “It took a tumor on my neck to see how good I have it. What’s it going to take you?”
I considered his sentence as I played with my straw. “I’m fine.”
“You look frazzled. You’ve got roots that are over an inch long right now, something I’ve never seen on you before. You’re not wearing makeup. Since when do you not wear makeup? Your shirt is all wrinkled. You’re not fine.”
“We’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to enjoy a pizza and beer as we planned.”
The waitress buzzed past us, spilling lemonade all over the floor. “One day that waitress is going to stand back and it’ll dawn on her that when life tossed all sorts of shit in her path, she reacted to every single morsel of it with disgust, and as a result it seeped inside of her and left her with the grit of her stupid meltdowns over botched pizza orders, spilled beer, and forgotten crumbs on the tabletops of a neighborhood Pizza Hut.” He paused. “Thirty minutes from now, no one is going to remember the crumbs, the beer, or the pizza. They’ll be on their way to other ventures, causing someone else the stress of their existence by expecting both reasonable and unreasonable demands on someone outside themselves.”
Just then, the mother stormed up to the waitress stand and yelled at the frazzled girl to get her the check. “Please tell me I’m not like her,” I said.
We watched the frantic scene play out in front of us. The mother grabbed for her takeout box as the waitress punched the cash register keys.
“You kind of are.” He tapped my hands.
The sincerity in his tone caused a small cry to escape.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said.
I fought to stay silent, to keep the night about him, but the genuine concer
n in his eyes reached out and pulled the news right from my heart. “Willow ended it with me the other night.”
He clasped his fingers over mine. “I figured that might be coming.”
“Really?” I pulled my hands away, but he pulled them back.
“Are you really going to argue that with me?”
I could only imagine how the scene played out to him. “So, I’m screwed up.”
“Hmm. Screwed up is rather harsh.” He cupped his hand to his chin. “Sounds more like you’ve got yourself an imbalance.”
“An imbalance.” I scoffed. The word rang sharply, deafening me to everything else but the bitter sting it left behind.
“And you didn’t believe her back then.” He sat back with a smug look on his face.
“It doesn’t take a psychic to predict such a normal thing. Aren’t we all a little imbalanced?”
“She risked coming to your office and dragging herself through a muddy pile of embarrassment to tell you just how imbalanced you were. I highly doubt she was referring to a little imbalance, just like I highly doubt you’re suffering from just a little imbalance.”
I let out an exhaustive exhale. “You always have to be right.”
“Newsflash, my dear. I always am.”
I pulled my hands back and tossed a straw at him. “You’re lucky you’re having surgery tomorrow.”
“On your tongue right now are a few sarcastic choice words just dying to leap out at me.” He blew his straw wrapping at me. “They’re burning a hole on that tongue, aren’t they?”
I kicked him.
He kicked me back.
“I hate when you’re right,” I said.
“I always am.”
Chapter Sixteen
Dean’s surgery was scheduled for eight o’clock in the morning. I drove him to the hospital, and arrived an hour earlier than necessary. Yvonne met us there. The intake nurses prepped him with an IV, as Yvonne massaged his shoulders to help relax him. “Easy in, easy out. And you better not think that once you come out of this with nothing more than a tiny scar on your neck that you’re going to stop coming in for proactive treatments. Because if you do think that way, I’m going to drag you in by your skinny little ankles.”