The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  A quartet of musicians was playing in the hallway and more and more people crowded around me, lavishly dressed in costumes that must have cost them hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I could feel something shifting that night. This wasn’t a weekend game anymore.

  “I need help with my job. Should I leave it? Should I quit?”

  “Is my husband cheating on me?”

  “What’s the matter with my daughter? Why does she hate me?”

  I had been paid ahead of time and no one had to give me anything. They had no reverence for what I did.

  I could hardly stand up when the evening was over. Still, I had a hundred dollars in my hand and I was proud of myself. When I came home, however, my mother was shooting daggers at me. She was furious.

  “Is this what you are going to do with your life? Really?”

  “I worked all night and now you’re yelling at me?”

  “What? Is my daughter going to be a fortune-teller?” There was nothing but disdain in her voice. She had reduced me to nothing.

  I had found a way of understanding myself and she was ready to take it away from me and turn me into a boardwalk Gypsy. She couldn’t let me feel any pride in anything. All the long-suppressed rage in me finally exploded.

  “Why do you have to do this to me?” I screamed. “How can you do this to me?”

  She shook her head. “You’re never home anymore. You’ve always done what you want to do. You don’t care about me at all. I’m just your mother. You just want me to die, don’t you? Well, maybe I will. And what will you care? You’re just like your father, prancing around the world, without a care for anyone.”

  “It’s not my fault that I look like him. You’re the one who made that happen. Why do you have to find fault with everything I do, with everything I am?”

  I had to get out of that house. It was a house of madness.

  My mother was seething with fury. “You only care about yourself. You don’t care anything about other people. They don’t exist for you. You will never know how to love. You are not capable of love. There’s no love in you anywhere at all. There’s something the matter with you.”

  “I do know how to love! I do!” I was weeping now.

  “Those boys, they say they like you, but they don’t. David’s just using you. No one likes you. No one.”

  I’d been the belle of the Dumas ball, but now I was just a little girl sobbing on the floor again. She could turn me into nothing and no one. I hadn’t won, even though I’d tried to express myself. If I had truly won, I would have lifted my head and walked away from her proudly. I would have claimed my power. I might have hopped on a plane back to England. But I was too helpless, too defeated. I couldn’t escape her on my own.

  We screamed at each other for hours, and when finally we had nothing left, I called David. “Come and get me,” I pleaded. “I’ve got to get out of this house. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  So we got married. David wore his cape.

  The Ratalin Pirates, me and David, at the Renaissance Faire

  Once people get me on the phone, I’ve already begun their reading. I can’t help it. That’s why I don’t answer the phone anymore. I just can’t. It’s why I hide sometimes, too. I get reclusive. I don’t want to have to know everything.

  A woman stopped into my store the other day, hoping there was a chance I might have a cancellation and I could give her a reading. But there wasn’t.

  She was a nice middle-aged woman, and she looked very disappointed.

  “I’ve just done three readings in a row,” I explained. “I’m shot. But I can probably fit you in next August. Just leave your number with me and I’ll see what I can do.”

  As she was writing down her number for me on a slip of paper, words flew out of my mouth, “Don’t go to Florida.”

  She looked up at me, startled. “What?”

  “Don’t go to Florida,” I repeated.

  “But that’s what I was coming to ask you about! I just got offered this job down there.”

  She was a very respectful, patient person, and that’s probably why she got what she needed from the spirits. If she’d been bitchy or demanding about not being able to see me, my irritation would have gotten in the way of the message. But she was relaxed and open and got what she needed. In a way, we both did. When I can do a reading for someone like that, I feel like I get their positive energy in return. I don’t feel so drained.

  A woman dropped by my shop in a terrible state. She’d finally found an apartment she could afford, but they wouldn’t let her have any pets. “I’ve always wanted a dog,” she told me. “I really need a dog.”

  “But you have a dog,” I told her.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “A little Chihuahua? I can see him right beside you.”

  “A Chihuahua? Pepe?”

  “That’s him,” I said. “He started jumping up and down when you said his name.”

  “But Pepe’s dead,” said the woman, looking taken aback. “He was my dog when I was a little girl.”

  “But there is no death.” The words shot out of my mouth, as they often do. “He’s still with you. I think he still wants to be your dog. Why don’t you try calling to him when you get home to your apartment? Don’t talk to him in your head. Say his name out loud. The dead like to hear the vibrations of their names.”

  The woman looked at me like I was crazy and quickly left the shop.

  A few days later, however, she dropped in again.

  “I tried what you said,” she admitted, a little embarrassed. “And I think I can kind of feel Pepe near me now.”

  “He’s there,” I told her. “He wants you to know that.”

  A week later she returned and told me that now when she came home she could smell him. Sometimes she even felt him jump up on the bed at night. A few weeks later I saw her in town and she was happier than I had ever seen her.

  “Pepe’s with me!” she told me. “I don’t need a dog anymore. I’ve got Pepe. Thank you for bringing him back to me.”

  “You brought him back,” I explained. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. You loved him and he came back.”

  9

  Getting to Know the Dead

  Something that’s always been hard for me is that I can’t see things about my own life or David’s. Almost nothing. I can’t do readings for myself or those close to me. I can’t help myself to make decisions. Sometimes I get an intuition about something that’s about to happen, but then, most people get those. I get no names, no addresses, no guidance from the dead about my own life. I can’t get what I give to other people and I often feel lost because of it.

  My mother did nothing to hide her embarrassment that I was marrying David, and David’s mother actually tried to stop the wedding. She called the monsignor and told him not to marry David and me. She told the priest I was a witch. He wouldn’t listen to her, thank goodness, and she did show up at the church for the ceremony, even though she scowled the whole time. I wore a twenty-dollar dress and my sister was my bridesmaid. It was really a fiasco. David’s brother refused to even come. He told David, “There is no escape for the wicked.” Everyone in his family thought I was some kind of evil entity. They didn’t like that I was a psychic. At all.

  There was a lot of bad blood, in any case, about David’s child from his ex-girlfriend. The poor girl was not up to taking care of the baby. David’s family blamed him for not marrying her, but she had gotten pregnant by accident and he had never thought she was up to caring for a child. Nor did he think he was.

  David’s mother officially adopted the baby, a little boy named Josh, but when David and I moved to Boston soon after our wedding, his mother disappeared with his son. She didn’t tell us she was leaving, and she left no forwarding address. We tried all kinds of ways to find her and the baby, but we couldn’t. David’s brother refused to tell us where she was. She and the boy seemed to have changed their names. This was in the days before the Inte
rnet, and David and I didn’t have any financial resources for locating her and the child. I had no idea where the baby was, and it was incredibly frustrating.

  At the time, I was actually finding kids for people who had disappeared in divorces. A man or a woman would show up and I’d see a map of a state in my head; sometimes I’d even see the names of towns and streets. “Your daughter is in North Carolina, a little town in the west of the state.” I’ve discovered over the years that the children I can locate always want to be found. It’s as if they are calling to their lost parents through me. But I’ve also had parents come in desperate to find their kids and I’ve seen nothing. If the kids don’t want to be found, I get nothing.

  I’m not sure if that was true of Josh, David’s son, because I didn’t get any information of any kind about David. In any case, I couldn’t find Josh. Or not right away. David was, understandably, very upset.

  It was also a hard way to start our married life together.

  I don’t know how we survived in Boston. We were ridiculously poor. David was a wedding photographer at Sears and worked as a janitor at a movie theater in the evenings. I was doing readings at the SCA fairs. We fought a lot. I don’t think I was an easy wife, and David had been my first real boyfriend. I was so young and so on my own. My mother had practically cut me off and didn’t call. If I called, she’d say coldly, “You’re married now. You have your own life.”

  I was enraged and lonely. My mother refused to be in contact with me. David’s family had rejected me. I wanted so badly to have in-laws and relatives who loved me. I wanted holiday get-togethers and cozy family reunions, but none of that was going to happen. David and I were adrift, orphaned.

  I wanted my mother’s approval. I couldn’t let go of wanting it. I’d thought she would have at least been happy I got married in the Church.

  What bothers me in retrospect is that David and I were such good kids. We didn’t drink or do drugs. We didn’t even smoke. Everyone around us was getting high on cocaine and hitting the discos and we were prancing through the woods singing show tunes. What was so terrible about us? What was so disappointing?

  Was it simply that we weren’t conventional? Maybe it’s because we didn’t really want regular jobs and suits and ties and some kind of nine-to-five respectability. But just because we dressed like fairy-tale characters didn’t mean we were Satanists.

  We were living in an apartment in an old ramshackle house just outside of Boston, and at night the stray cats would gather to howl underneath the fire escape. One of them was very thin, with rickety legs, and the other cats were always beating her up, so I adopted her. I brought her inside and fed her. She reminded me of myself. I named her Fiona.

  Fiona was a black and white cat with a very unusual face with a black goatee. Every night she slept on my head, and whenever I was home she was in my arms. “You can’t take care of a cat,” said my mother when I told her about Fiona. But I did. For eighteen years she was a gorgeous, loving, healthy cat. I adored her.

  I also began taking better care of myself. All of my OCD symptoms disappeared outside of my mother’s house, and I even went out and got my first pair of contact lenses. My mother had always said I couldn’t manage them, but for goodness’ sakes, they are not that hard to wear. At first I was worried that having 20/20 vision might affect my ability to do readings, but it didn’t. Not at all. I was seeing everything. Everything.

  The dead were coming through and they were teaching me.

  “Who are you looking at?” people would ask me.

  “No one you can see,” I would often answer.

  My real education has always been from the dead. What I really know about the world has come from the other side of the veil. My college, my graduate school, my advanced degrees, my honorary degrees—they all come from the other side. That’s what I know about.

  But I don’t really know how to define myself. “What do you do? Do you talk to the dead? Do you see the future? Are you a past-lives therapist?” I did it all. I saw dead people, I saw visions, I saw the future, and I saw the past. Was I a psychic, a clairvoyant, or a medium? I still don’t know. I’m whatever you need me to be. I’m an open channel; that’s what I am. Whatever you need to know from the other side, that’s what comes through me.

  I was most surprised to find that the dead didn’t seem to be much different from the living. They complained; they worried about money and lawsuits; they fretted about who was going to get their sapphire necklace. They wanted to make sure the tombstone was just right. You’d think that when you’re dead you no longer have to worry about earthly things, but they did. Nothing changes when people die. They don’t suddenly get enlightened. They don’t suddenly turn into angels. I began to realize that you’ve got to do that work while you’re alive. The things that matter to you in this life don’t magically go away just because you’re dead. You’ve got to figure your stuff out while you’re right here.

  I’ve noticed that suicides are always quick to tell me that they didn’t mean to kill themselves. All the time, I hear this. “It was just a big mistake!” I don’t know if they’re telling the truth. Maybe they just want to comfort themselves because they’re embarrassed about what they’ve done. They come through and say, “Oh, shit, shit, shit, what did I do?” They regret it. I’ve never met a suicide pleased with what they’ve done. And here’s the crazy thing. All that unhappiness and rage they thought they were going to get rid of by dying? They’re still stuck with it. The work you’ve got to do is the work you’ve got to do.

  You’ve got to figure out what really matters while you are alive. There are these golden glowing spirits that come through who’ve let go of all earthly problems and are just filled with joy. The thing is, I’m pretty sure this is what they were like when they were alive. They are able to let go of all their worries and expectations and return to their best, happiest selves.

  Animals are always like this. They don’t hold on to any bad feelings. They’re not worried about their stuff or their money. They just want to let their human friends know how much they love them. And children, too. I’ve never met a child who died young in an awful car accident or from leukemia who was in any way regretful about the experience. They are always radiant and more concerned that their parents don’t despair but know that their children are all right. They are connected to that basic joy that gets so easily lost when the affairs of the world are thrust upon us—money, mortgages, politics, ambition, status.

  David’s mother and my mother wanted us to be obsessed with that trivia, with the color of the living room furniture and with what everyone else thought about us. But what I was seeing every day in my readings was that those preoccupations got in the way of living and dying. Unhappy lives lead to unhappy deaths.

  I also began to see flashes of what I knew were people’s past lives. They’d stream across my eyes like fast-moving scenes in a movie, one after the other. I’d get these glimpses of different historical periods, some of which I recognized and many of which I did not. One guy who came to me was in the army, and the moment he sat down I saw battlefield after battlefield. He’d always been a soldier, life after life; he always would be. I never once saw any famous past lives, though—no Cleopatras or Napoléons. Just glimpses of other times. One woman came to me convinced she was Anastasia, the Russian princess who’d supposedly been killed. She wasn’t.

  Interestingly, I became obsessed with Jack the Ripper when David and I were living in Boston, and I went to the library to read about him. I had this feeling that maybe I had been connected to him. Probably if I’d been a prostitute in London during the end of the last century I’d have known about him and been frightened of him. But that was just a hunch. My friend Richard was convinced he’d saved me from Jack the Ripper, who, he thought, was really the physical incarnation of the man in the black hat. Perhaps. I couldn’t do readings for myself, so I didn’t really understand what I was experiencing about my own incarnations. Still, I had this feeling that s
o many other past experiences were influencing who I was.

  In the beginning I was very excited by the responsibility I had. Here I was, only in my twenties, and people came to me to help decide if they should keep their babies or not. Now, I’m basically pro-choice, but it seems like the people who came to me were led by their babies. Those souls wanted to come into the world; that’s what I always felt. Maybe babies who didn’t want to be born made sure their mothers didn’t think about it too much and never went near a psychic. I do know that often aborted babies come back to their mothers to be reborn at a better time. I’ve often seen this. Or the babies go to other families. They are never angry at their mothers. They have so much more wisdom and understanding and compassion than the angry protestors. The movement between life and death felt very fluid to me, back and forth, back and forth. Nothing’s ever final. I wish people knew that life and death and rebirth are so much more complicated than one single lifetime, one single decision.

  Sometimes I saw terrible medical problems. One woman who came to me seemed to have this thick braid wrapped around her organs, and when I sent her to the doctor they found twenty-eight tumors inside of her. She always said I saved her life.

  All of this made me very full of myself. I was discovering my powers, and it was all very exhilarating. But I didn’t have any guidance—not from an individual and not from the culture itself. I was on my own, and I started to lose my humility. I didn’t know how I did what I did, but I was doing it and it was impressive.

  I don’t think that was easy on David. He took care of the practical aspects of our life together, the cooking and the driving. But I felt like my work was more important. I was making more money than he was, and I was dealing with life-and-death issues. For the girl who’d spent years under the stairs, I suddenly was the queen of the hill, the star, the popular kid. The only thing that kept me in check was my mother. She certainly made sure that any confidence I had was short-lived.