The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  “Ha!” shouted the father. “I know who those wise guys are. You can go back to bed now, Suzan. We’ve got this under control.”

  I hungered for acceptance and approval. I was waiting for it. I suppose even if I couldn’t help my mother, I could help everyone else. That’s why I didn’t say no to anyone. I was trying to heal everybody else in the hopes that one day maybe she’d walk into the room and I’d be able to do for her what I did for my clients. I think that’s true of a lot of healers and therapists—they’re people with a lot of pain inside. In any case, it was true of me.

  I was happiest when David and I were working at the Renaissance Faire out in Sterling Forest, New York, where people had a harder time finding me. I didn’t have to pretend to be normal there like I did at the pool at the condo.

  David and I built ourselves a ship and went by the names The Ratlan Pirates. We dressed like pirates and sold crystals and flea market items, and I did readings. But I refused to have a booth on Mystics Way where all the other psychics and Tarot readers hung out. I wanted to be away from them. One of the people running the fair said, “No one will be able to find you.” But I told him, “The people who are supposed to find me always do.”

  The truth is, I was embarrassed to be seen with the other psychics. I had kind of a big head, I suppose, though I don’t know why. After all the readings I’d done, I still wasn’t even sure if I was for real.

  I used to dye my hair bright pink and wear a leather bikini with boots and a pirate hat. In the morning I loved to visit the owners of this enormous orange and white Burmese python. The python was huge, way too big to be a pet, but in the morning I’d take it out for a walk on a leash in the fields. It would slither from side to side with its head up. It was an absolutely gigantic snake, maybe twenty feet long, and I’d always get a little worried if one of the fair’s midgets walked by. But it would mostly be quiet in the early morning with the dew still on the grass, the quiet sounds of people getting up and making coffee, the rustling of the snake.

  One morning, the sun was barely up and there was a low-lying layer of mist over the fields while the snake and I shared our walk. I found myself throwing up beside a bush. The next morning the same thing happened. One of the knights in the jousting show who happened to be walking by asked me if I was pregnant.

  “Can’t be,” I said. “I’ve been on the pill forever. I never miss a day.”

  “Whatever. I’m just saying,” he added noncommittally, adjusting his helmet.

  The next morning I threw up again, and I remembered at last what the angel had said to me. I went back to the pirate ship and took a pregnancy test. It was positive.

  Two teenage girls came for an appointment that I was sure was going to be a breeze. Prom dates, high school gossip, maybe college plans.

  But the moment they sat down in my reading room, I saw a girl between them. Her swollen eye was bashed in, her cheekbone was broken, and her neck was covered in bruises. She’d clearly been murdered.

  “Who’s Janet?” I asked.

  The girls started screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

  The night of the prom Janet had been found strangled in the dirt.

  “But Janet says it’s not the newspaper guy who did it. Not the black man they put in jail. I can see white hands on her throat.”

  The girls were screaming again.

  “Steven killed her. She needs you to know that.”

  Now the girls were clutching each other, crying and shaking.

  It turned out that a deliveryman who was kind of slow and disabled had been coerced into a confession and locked up. But Steven, a boy they all went to school with, had disappeared a month after the murder. He’d been stalking Janet.

  The girls were hysterical, calling their mothers and their friends on their cell phones. But what could they do? A psychic’s testimony wasn’t evidence enough to reopen a murder case.

  13

  It Was Her Time, Whatever That Means

  I didn’t feel like I had ever known this spirit. I knew my baby was an old soul, but not one I had ever known until now. This was our first time together, I was sure of it, and I was really scared. A part of me was worried that my time with Erik had opened me up to some kind of evil that might hurt the baby. After all, I’d seen terrible things in my readings—babies born with deformities, stillbirths, children who died young. I knew there was darkness in the world, and I was scared.

  Most of all I was scared that I wasn’t up to being a good mother. I wasn’t a normal woman, and my own mother certainly didn’t think I could take care of anything despite the fact that my cat, Fiona, was still thriving. I told my mother I was pregnant on the Feast Day of Saint Francis, October 3.

  “I’ve never wanted to be a grandmother. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  It was as if my pregnancy was some way of punishing her. My sister wrote to me that I should think about not having the baby. But I’ve never knowingly killed any being in my life. I save spiders. I don’t swat mosquitoes. I was supposed to have this baby, and despite what my mother and sister had said, I was determined to celebrate my pregnancy.

  I stopped taking the cold medication I was on at once. I stopped taking aspirin. I stopped drinking even a sip of wine. I ate well, better than I’d ever eaten in my whole life. I’m ashamed to admit that I even ate cheeseburgers. For the one and only time in my life, I craved meat, although I ate fast-food burgers so, like everyone else in the world, I could pretend they didn’t come from animals. But they did, of some sort. Whatever those creatures were, I still ask their forgiveness.

  But the biggest thing I changed when I got pregnant was that I stopped doing readings. I didn’t want other people’s entities coming too close to my baby. We needed quiet to get to know each other.

  I’ve always been a little frightened of children, maybe because I was so bullied when I was little. But I also know they’re not innocents. They arrive here with all of their own karma and then it gets mixed up with ours. It’s not so much that babies are born with sin like the nuns used to say, but more that we arrive here with all kinds of past-life experiences and relationships, triumphs and tragedies having brought us to this moment. Everyone’s got such a mix of good and bad karma behind them. You look into a baby’s eyes and you know they’ve seen things, known things. I saw children like the thrift shop items I loved to touch—they have stories behind them and ahead of them. They aren’t tarnished yet by the events of this life, but they are rarely ever brand-new.

  At one point in the pregnancy, a man visited me at night. He was wearing a black cape, and he spoke with a British accent. He said his name was Michael. I don’t know if it was Saint Michael—he certainly didn’t seem like an angel—or just Michael. His energy was serpentine and he moved like a snake. I felt emanating from him the same dragon energy I had felt at Glastonbury and thought almost at once of St. Michael’s Tower, at the top of the hill I had long ago visited.

  His presence was comforting. A few days later I discovered that pregnant women often felt compelled to climb the Tor just before they gave birth. I couldn’t get to Saint Michael, so he came to me. He reassured me that everything was going to be absolutely okay.

  Right before I went into labor, I dreamed that a black bear visited me. I could feel the heat of his enormous body. He reached out his paw and took my hand and his claws were sharp. For a long time the bear and I held hands in my dream, if it was a dream. The bear told me that I was going to have a son and he would be big and strong.

  I was in labor for thirty-three hours. Eventually I had to have an emergency Caesarian because both the baby and I were experiencing heart failure. When the doctor put the newborn in my arms, he was as blue as Krishna and absolutely huge. He was nine and one-half pounds, twenty-two inches long, and the first baby I ever held.

  I named him Gavin, for the character Jack Wild played in The Pied Piper and for Gawain, the knight who served King Arthur, Arturo … “the Bear.”

 
My mother was there when I gave birth, fighting with David over my prone, stapled body.

  “She needs more pillows. She shouldn’t be lying like that.”

  “She’s fine,” said David.

  “She is not,” said my mother, pushing him away.

  Here I was, barely able to move after my surgery, and they were screaming at each other, actually shoving each other, about to fall into some Three Stooges routine with pratfalls and eye poking. But in the midst of my hysteria, I knew that David was protecting me from my mother, like he always did, as ridiculous as it could sometimes look. He wouldn’t let her bully me. Finally, after they nearly came to blows, he got her to leave so we could have a moment of peace with our new baby. But after all that, my mother almost never visited her new grandchild.

  I was on my own. Months would go by without me seeing her, which was fine by me. David’s mother had long ago disowned us, so we didn’t have any kind of guidance, but David helped out a lot; he was very paternal and would get up at night to feed and rock Gavin.

  I just seemed to know what to do. Gavin made me laugh. I looked in his eyes and knew he was one of the oldest souls I’d ever met, so wise, so sweet, so gentle. I knew he was there to teach me, and that if I listened to him he would show me how to be a good mother. He guided me into motherhood. I had a big, fat, fair baby who looked like Henry the Eighth. He giggled and he laughed, and he was happy and as easy as can be. And I had a husband who loved getting up in the night and changing diapers. We would all snuggle together on the bed, including the cat. I thought as a family we could take on the world. It was a very special time. It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t scary, and you forget the pain.

  When Gavin was one and a half, David and I took him to Glastonbury. We’d had him christened in a Catholic church soon after he was born, but I blessed his forehead with water from the Chalice Well and I knew that was his true baptism. We climbed the Tor to St. Michael’s Tower and we prayed to the God and the Goddess for health and happiness for our child. When we came back down to the ruins of the church, Gavin toddled over to King Arthur’s grave, or at least where he’s said to be buried in the Abbey, and sat down and started picking flowers and stuck them in his overall pockets until they were overflowing with blossoms. As we were coming home on the bus, a young man said, “That’s the oldest child I’ve ever seen.” It reminded me of my own first trip to Glastonbury. “He’s been here before. He’s from here,” said the man.

  Eventually I started to feel comfortable about doing readings again. Gavin was a very easygoing baby. When I would do readings in the kitchen, he would be there quietly playing, accepting the presence of a stranger, or he might fall asleep. All my loyal clients came back. The family who owned the pizza chain wanted me to help them with their investments. I always wonder how people coming to my little apartment could ask me about stocks and lottery numbers and horse races. Obviously, if I had that kind of knowledge, I wouldn’t be a kitchen-table psychic. My gift is sacred; it doesn’t seem to help people get rich.

  One night when Gavin was barely two, he crept out of bed and pointed at a picture in a book of a man dressed in an army uniform who reminded me of Napoléon. Gavin announced, “That’s my grandpa. I lived in a castle with him. He died on a horse in the war.”

  I also noticed that Gavin was terrified of train whistles and any kind of locomotive. Unlike other little boys, he hated toy trains, although he was happy enough with trucks and cars. If he heard a train, he would start screaming. I don’t think it was just the noise, because other loud or high-pitched noises didn’t bother him. I asked him what scared him and he said, “All of those people on the train, all of those people, all dead.” My intuition was that he was having memories of the Holocaust, and as he got older I was not surprised that he would instantly turn off any movie or TV show that mentioned it.

  I know most people would dismiss this as imagination, but I think if you believe in reincarnation you see lots of signs of it when kids are young. They still remember things from their past lives. They let you know all kinds of stuff if you listen.

  David and I were still going to the Renaissance Faire, and it was like a great big playground for Gavin. He loved to play with toys of knights and dragons and unicorns. He wore a cape and had a little plastic sword that he carried around, and there were plenty of older girls there to help me watch out for him. It was a magical time. But as Gavin got older, it began to feel like a long way to drive from our condo, and it was harder and harder to keep an eye on him at the fairgrounds.

  Then, out of the blue, I started to get all these calls from policemen to help them find missing children. Gavin came into my life—and all of a sudden there were all these cops wanting me to find lost kids. It was unnerving. There were a slew of them in the midnineties. That was when they first started to put kids’ photos on milk cartons and do AMBER alerts. I’d be at the fair at our pirate ship and a cop would show up and say, “I hear you do missing kids.” What they would do was consult me and a few other psychics and compare information, and if any of it matched they’d follow up on it. On the one hand, it seemed like a sensible way to handle this kind of thing; on the other hand, if you were consulting a psychic in the first place, why bother being scientific about it? What I mean is, I knew a lot of people who said they were psychics and really weren’t.

  The terrible thing was, all of the kids the police asked me to find were already dead by the time they came to me. Every single one. Nobody was ever alive. I’d know where the bodies were a lot of times. But every time I got a missing person? Dead. It was unnerving, especially as a young mother. It got to the point where I dreaded getting a call from the police.

  Gavin was running all over the place, and it started to scare me because of what I was seeing. I got paranoid. I became one of those mothers who put their kids in a harness. Nowadays Gavin accuses me of walking him like a dog on a leash when he was a child, but we were in a huge public space with all kinds of strangers milling around and the police asking me to help them find some kid who’d been killed.

  That was when we stopped going to the Renaissance Faire.

  Meanwhile, back at the condo, I had mothers showing up who wanted to know if their kids were possessed. Something about becoming a mother had shifted my energy, and I was getting requests for different kinds of work.

  Apparently, in the nineties there were a lot of possessed children. Or at least a lot of kids who were misbehaving. A few of them might have been demonic, honestly. They were certainly creepy kids. But I wasn’t an exorcist. I did have some vials of water from Glastonbury, though, and I would give them to these mothers. I reasoned that if the mothers calmed down, maybe the kids would, too.

  When Gavin was around four, I really felt, despite everything, that we should take him to church to learn about spiritual things. We joined this really beautiful Episcopal congregation. We’d get all dressed up and try to look like a normal family, and Gavin would go to Sunday school.

  His best friend was this lovely little girl, Caroline. I remember on Valentine’s Day she arrived at church dressed in red velvet with bows in her hair. She was so pretty. Gavin just adored her, and he loved going to Sunday school because of her.

  The weekend after Valentine’s Day, though, her family wasn’t at church and Gavin was disappointed. After I’d dropped Gavin off in the schoolroom, I asked if anyone knew where they were.

  “Didn’t you hear?” said an older woman who was making coffee.

  “No, no,” I said, instantly concerned. I could hear the tragedy in her voice. “What happened?”

  “Car accident.” The woman shook her head sadly. There were tears in her eyes.

  Caroline’s aunt had wanted to take her to the Crayola crayon factory in Easton, Pennsylvania. It had been snowing the day before, and the roads were slick. The car skidded into a tree and Caroline was killed instantly.

  I took it very hard. I couldn’t stay at the church. David and I gathered up Gavin and went home. I didn’t e
ven know how to tell him yet about his friend; he was still so little. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t do readings for days. I was utterly distraught. Caroline’s death had touched on something very deep in me. Why? Why had this beautiful little girl had to die?

  My mother called and I tried to explain to her what I was feeling. I was a mother with a child. Life was so precarious and death could be so seemingly arbitrary.

  I knew from my past readings that children were never alone or lost on the other side. Often I saw them with grandparents and pets and even long-ago ancestors. The children never wanted people to grieve for them. They were never unhappy. But those were other people’s children, children I hadn’t known when they were alive. Caroline was different. I couldn’t accept her death.

  My mother was annoyed with me, “It’s not like it was your child, Suzan.”

  “Mommy, it’s a child. Every child is someone’s child.”

  I couldn’t look at Gavin’s crayons. I had to put them away. Caroline had never made it to the Crayola Factory. I couldn’t look at all those bright colors for days.

  I made an appointment with the priest at our church to talk to him about how upset I was. For the first time in my life, I was desperate for spiritual guidance. He showed me into his sunny office.

  “Father, why? Why did this happen?”

  He looked at me without any doubt, any concern, any confusion, and said simply, “Because it was her time.”

  “What?”

  “She’s in a better place,” he added confidently. I think he glanced at his watch. He seemed completely unaffected by what had happened. He had this theology that explained everything, and that kept him from feeling anything at all. “What better place?” I wanted to scream. “What’s better than being with her mother and her family? That’s all the dead ever want. I know that. What do you know?” But I didn’t say any of that out loud.

  It was her time. That’s all he could say. Pat phrases. Clichés. Meaningless words. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I wanted was for him to put what had happened into some kind of spiritual context for me. Why was it her time? What did that even mean?