The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

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  For

  Gavin Albion,

  for putting up with a mother who lives between the worlds

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Photographs of Suzan and Erik Jasper

  Reading 1

  Chapter 1: This Is What a Psychic’s Invisible Friends Look Like

  Reading 2

  Chapter 2: Tales from the Crypt

  Photograph of Suzan and her father, Steve

  Reading 3

  Chapter 3: Quick! Call an Exorcist!

  Reading 4

  Chapter 4: All They Can Do Is Bite Ya!

  Reading 5

  Chapter 5: The Artful Dodger Steals My Heart

  Reading 6

  Chapter 6: There Goes the Neighborhood

  Reading 7

  Chapter 7: Night School for X-Men (and Misfit Girls)

  Reading 8

  Chapter 8: Men in Tights

  Photograph of Suzan and David Saxman as The Ratalin Pirates

  Reading 9

  Reading 10

  Chapter 9: Getting to Know the Dead

  Reading 11

  Chapter 10: The Sword in the Horse

  Photographs of Suzan and Erik Jasper

  Reading 12

  Chapter 11: Hobbits, Beggars, and Angels … or Why I Love Going to England

  Reading 13

  Chapter 12: Walking an Anaconda Is Easier than Thanksgiving with My Mother

  Reading 14

  Chapter 13: It Was Her Time, Whatever That Means

  Reading 15

  Chapter 14: Burn Me, Drown Me, Kill Me … I Just Keep Coming Back

  Reading 16

  Chapter 15: Has-Beens on Parade

  Photograph of Suzan and Jack Wild

  Reading 17

  Chapter 16: The Prom King Takes Me to the Ball

  Reading 18

  Reading 19

  Chapter 17: Just by Accident (Ha!)

  Reading 20

  Chapter 18: Cruise Ship Suzie

  Photograph of Suzan and Bob on a cruise ship

  Reading 21

  Chapter 19: The Land of the Freak and the Home of the Vague

  Reading 22

  Chapter 20: How Not to Die

  Reading 23

  Chapter 21: By the Time I Got to Woodstock

  Reading 24

  Chapter 22: I’m Not Going Anywhere!

  Reading 25

  Reading 26

  Chapter 23: My Reading Room

  Reading 27

  Chapter 24: After the Apocalypse

  Photograph of Suzan’s mother

  Reading 28

  Photograph of Suzan at age twenty-four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Pretending to be a child

  No matter where I move or how many times I change my name or what color I dye my hair, people find me. I don’t advertise. I don’t have a Web site. I don’t even answer the phone. And still when I arrive at my used-clothing store in town, there are people lurking in the parking lot hoping to get a reading with me. “It’s urgent,” they tell me. “I’m desperate,” they plead. “I’ve heard what you can do.”

  They show up with photographs, locks of hair, bloody shirts ripped apart by bullets, and so many questions, hundreds of questions, about the other side.

  And it’s not just the living who are insistent. The dead pursue me, too. They always have. Even before the living knew what I could do, the dead were getting in line, crowding close, and demanding that I carry their messages across the veil. “I’m sorry.” “I love you.” “Why did you buy that car?” “Tell Bobby he’s a piece of shit.” “Don’t throw away my stuff!”

  The other day a couple came to me because they were worried about their kid who had been sick for months with some mysterious illness. I ushered them into my reading room, a little alcove near the Victorian dresses I sell to the steampunk crowd. I sat them down on stools opposite a table with Tarot cards and crystals.

  I don’t need anything special to communicate with the other side. But it calms people down to have something to touch or do when I’m giving them a reading, sort of like teddy bears to hold in a therapist’s office. But before I could even ask these people to pick a card, the spirit of a tall, thin man with a scraggly beard had staggered into the room. He looked incredibly uncomfortable, embarrassed even.

  “Who’s Paul?” I asked.

  “Paul?”

  “Paul?”

  The couple exchanged glances, confused. The name didn’t ring a bell.

  But now I was seeing more about this man. “Paul tells me he lives in a cardboard box in your living room.”

  The woman gasped and clutched her husband’s hand. The man’s face had gone white.

  “Why does he live in a cardboard box in your living room?” I asked. It’s often hard to make sense of what I see. “Oh,” I realized all at once. “He’s dead.”

  It turned out that almost a year earlier the woman had agreed to hold on to the ashes of her sister’s ex-husband, a terrible drunk who had died indigent and utterly alone. “I didn’t really know what to do with him,” she said. “I put the urn, it’s in a cardboard box, behind the bookcase and I guess we kind of forgot about it.”

  “Well, Paul wants to be out of your house, that’s for sure,” I told them. “He hates it. He knows you always disapproved of him. He feels very ashamed. He doesn’t care where you bury his ashes, though; just get rid of them. He needs to move on. He really does.”

  “Is that why our daughter’s sick?” asked the man, concerned.

  “Oh no,” I said, remembering why they’d come in the first place. “That’s something else. Something small. A tick.” I could see it crawling up a young girl’s leg. “Lyme disease?”

  “I knew it!” said the woman. “I told the doctor that’s what it was, but he wouldn’t believe me.”

  “There’s a test,” I told the woman. “Not the one the doctor gave her, but another one. Ask him for the other test.”

  “How do you know that?” asked the man. “What are you anyway? An intuitive? A medium? A clairvoyant? A psychic?”

  I shrugged. I don’t really know what I am. I never have. But I’ve always been like this. I see the things no one else seems to see—bits and pieces of the future, past lives, forgotten stories, hidden secrets, an angel or two, some demons, and the dead. The dead are everywhere. Now and then I can hide from the living, but I can never hide from the dead. What am I? I don’t know. But in between cleaning up after my pets and selling jewelry in my shop, I talk to the living, I talk to the dying, I talk to the dead.

  1

  This Is What a Psychic’s Invisible Friends Look Like

  As soon as I began speaking, I knew I couldn’t let anyone hear my real voice. How old was I? A little older than one? Maybe two? But I knew that I was not a child.

  I felt like I was awakening from a dream and didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what life I was in. I didn’t even know who I was. Suzan? Was that my name? Really? I was an old woman, older than anyone in my family. What was I doing on Staten Island when I should be living in a cottage somewhere in England or walking the streets of London? I was an old British woman. That’s what I sounded like to myself—the voice I heard in my own head. I certainly wasn’t a child.

  Instinc
tively, I knew that if anyone discovered who and what I really was, I would be in danger. Even as a toddler I was on my guard. I knew I could not trust anyone, not even my parents, especially my parents. Especially my mother.

  What would happen if she found me out? Would she put me up for adoption? Would she leave me in a basket on someone’s doorstep? Would she report me to the authorities? Would she bring in the priests and the exorcists? Would she burn me at the stake?

  All of these were barely understood possibilities, left over, I suppose, from lives I had lived where all of these things had happened. I was an old, melancholy baby right from the beginning. Who would possibly want me?

  In my earliest memory, my mother walked into the living room and said, “Who left the radio on?”

  I was clutching my favorite doll, a Casper the Friendly Ghost toy, and I had been talking to it. In my real voice. My old-lady English voice. I started babbling when my mother came into the room, because I knew I had to pretend to talk like a baby.

  The radio wasn’t on. I pulled the string on my toy and made Casper talk. That seemed to get me off the hook. This time.

  But I could not always hide the things I knew and saw. They slipped out and they got me in trouble.

  I was very young when I began telling my mother the things I knew about her. I saw her, in my mind, as a little girl pulling my aunt Mary, disabled from polio, in a child’s red wagon. They were down by the train tracks with a group of other children, and my mother was wearing a red dress. They were putting pennies on the tracks and waiting for a train to come and crush them flat.

  I told my mother what I had seen.

  “I never told you that,” she said. “How did you know I was wearing a red dress?”

  “I saw it,” I said innocently. “In my head.”

  “What do you mean, in your head?”

  “You were mean to Aunt Mary. I saw that, too.”

  “I was not. How can you say that? I had to help her go everywhere because she couldn’t walk because of the polio. I’ve told you that. I did everything for my sister.”

  I was beginning to feel anxious and frightened. My mother was angry at me and I didn’t understand why. I started to cry, but I couldn’t hold back from describing what I was seeing. It was too powerful. And I knew that it was true. “But you threw that big shell at her,” I said. “You made that scar on her forehead.”

  My mother stared at me in astonishment. “How do you know that?”

  “I saw it,” I said, which was the truth.

  I had been in the room with my mother, and while my eyes had focused on a single object, on a chair, the eye inside my head had witnessed a scene unscrolling across my brain. The world around me had blurred, while the movie inside my head appeared before my inner eye with absolute clarity.

  The children by the tracks, the blue of the sky, my mother’s red dress, the conch shell in her hand—I had seen them as if they were right before my eyes. The little girl scarcely resembled my forty-three-year-old mother, but I could feel that she was the same person. Every being has a unique vibration, whatever its current physical appearance, and I can sense it in that place that opens up just below my heart.

  My mother’s bossiness, her restlessness, and her rage—I’d recognized her essence at once. But I couldn’t articulate any of that as a child. “I saw it in my head,” was all that I could say.

  I knew at once that I had said something wrong, that I wasn’t supposed to see these things. What I’d said terrified my mother in some way that I couldn’t understand. It made her angry at me. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  My mother wanted our family to look as normal as possible. This was the 1960s, and we lived in a colonial suburban house on Staten Island. Daddy went to work every day to the hospital in New Jersey where he was the director of environmental services. My mother plucked her eyebrows and put on makeup and a camel-hair coat to walk the dog. We didn’t have plastic covering on the furniture, but we might as well have. No one lived in the living room. No one ever came over.

  My mother slept in my parents’ bedroom by herself. Daddy slept in the TV room on a pull-out bed. My sister, ten years older than me, slept in a blue room, and I was supposed to sleep in a room decorated all in pink. But I couldn’t.

  Every night I would sleep for a few minutes—at the most an hour—and then startle awake. Looming over me was the giant dark shadow of a man. He had long white hair, a wide-brimmed black hat, and beneath it eye sockets that sometimes were empty and sometimes blazed with fire. Other than his eyes, he looked like the Quaker Oats man from the cereal box, which really isn’t that frightening when he’s on a cereal box, but when he’s at the end of your bed in the middle of the night and he has holes where his eyes should be, it’s scary as hell.

  My blood turned to ice in my veins when he appeared. That’s how frightening he was.

  All my life, very little has frightened me. Most horror movies amuse me. I find Stephen King’s novels fascinating, but they don’t give me goose bumps. But even the thought of the man in the black hat made me shudder for years. And as a child to actually see him? It was beyond terrifying.

  I don’t remember the first time I saw him, because I was always seeing him. I never had one night’s sleep when he wasn’t in the room. I’d clutch Casper the Ghost close and shut my eyes, immobilized with terror, but I knew I was being watched. I’d open my eyes, and there the man would be. He wanted something from me. I didn’t know what. He was no ephemeral, translucent being—he was as real as my mother and father. Still, I knew he was a spirit, that he came from somewhere else, that he was an intruder in our house.

  How do I know someone is a spirit when they look as solid as a real person to me? It’s like those pictures where you have to spot the thing that does not belong. A spirit always has a tell, a way I know they don’t quite fit into the picture of reality. Something is off-kilter. It could be very subtle, but the man in the black hat was not subtle at all. He had no eyes. He came from the world of death; his entire essence was of death.

  “The man in the hat! The man in the hat!” I would finally scream, finding my voice. My mother, annoyed, would run into my room, sure I was being murdered. But no one was ever there. He was always gone by the time my parents arrived. My father would look for an intruder and check the doors. “It’s nothing,” they’d say. “Go back to bed.”

  But I couldn’t. Because he’d come back as soon as they were gone.

  Once I was alone again and the house was quiet, he would reappear like a vision from hell. Finally, when I couldn’t endure my terror any longer, I would crawl out of bed and run to my mother’s room.

  She endured my arrival. She didn’t hold me or touch me or soothe me with caresses. She lay on one side of the bed, and I lay on the other. My mother had long blond hair that she wore down at night, which made her look wraithlike and terrifying. She, too, scared me, but where else could I go? I couldn’t be alone, or the man with the black hat would appear. I chose my mother’s coldness over the cold terror he awoke in me.

  Children are alert to the spiritual world in a way that grown-ups have learned not to be. A woman whose daughter had an invisible friend came to see me for a reading. The child demanded the invisible boy be given a plate of food at dinner and room beside her in the car. Naturally, the boy wasn’t visible to the mother and the whole thing had become exasperating. But he wasn’t invisible to me. He was the spirit of a boy from the girl’s neighborhood who’d died many years before and was lonely for a friend.

  There are spirits all around us, and children can see them. Children’s parents tell them the sprits aren’t real, that they don’t matter, and so slowly the kids learn to ignore them and finally they forget how to see them altogether.

  Are there monsters under the bed? Sometimes there really are.

  Surprisingly, I didn’t have an invisible friend who was another child, just my demonic Quaker Oats man. It figures.

  My mother never tried to ex
plain away his appearance as other mothers might have, nor did she acknowledge him and try to explore who he might be. Still, she would whisper to my aunts when she thought I wasn’t listening, “Suzan saw the man with the hat again.”

  I knew my older sister wasn’t having these experiences. I knew my parents weren’t. I knew instinctively that if I tried to talk about what I saw, they would roll their eyes and shake their heads as if it were all silliness. But I could feel their fear each night when I called to them. My first lesson as a child was not to speak about what I was experiencing because it made my mother frightened, too.

  One night I was feverish and I threw up in my mother’s bed. “You puked in the bed!” she screamed at me in disgust. “I was trying to sleep. What’s the matter with you anyway? You puked!”

  I was ashamed and humiliated. I did everything wrong. But there was nowhere else I could go.

  Perhaps it would have helped if my dog had been allowed to sleep in my room. But Muffet was permanently exiled to the basement. I used to go down there and sit beside her on the cement floor. I could feel her thoughts. She was furious and confused. She couldn’t understand why she’d been rescued from the pound just to end up living in the cellar. I knew how she felt.

  I also was a different species. If my mother could have, she would have locked me away as well. I used to wrap my arm around my face and suck on my skin. I had mouth-shaped sores in the crook of each arm. I never had a bottle, a pacifier, or even my thumb. My mother didn’t believe in thumb sucking. I never remember anyone holding me. I held myself like a bat. I was an upset animal worrying a hot spot, trying desperately to comfort myself.

  My heart raced all the time. I had so many secrets inside of me that wanted to come out. Sometimes I would just burst into tears with the frustration of it all.

  “Oh, Suzan, just stop it,” my mother would say. “Stop it right now.”

  My mother imagined herself pious, but she never prayed with me or even took me to church or offered me any of the solaces of religion. She’d been raised Catholic and in her room was a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was always going on and on about the Blessed Mother, how perfect she was, how chaste.