The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  I was fumbling with my words. I was giggling, flirting, and then catching myself.

  “Go to New Orleans! Today. This week. Soon,” I announced desperately.

  “What?” Bob looked completely confused. He had a silk pocket handkerchief. Who did that anymore? It was so dapper but appealing. He wiped his brow with it. It smelled of cologne.

  “Yup. New Orleans,” I repeated. “There you will meet the girl for you.” It was a total lie, but at least it would ensure that he would be far away. It was ridiculous, but I wanted to get rid of him and never see him again.

  If I had told him to go to Pluto, I think he would have gone, though. He was a very open, trusting soul beneath the polished exterior.

  I felt terrible, terrible for having lied and terrible for having sent him away.

  After I shut the door behind him, I collapsed on the couch. Why couldn’t I be with a guy like this? Not only was he handsome, but he also was clearly rich.

  What would it be like to have money? I wanted to make a beautiful home for Gavin; I wanted to take him on vacations; I wanted him to have a father who didn’t get dressed up like an Arthurian knight, but would throw a ball with him in the backyard like a regular dad. Our apartment had never seemed so drab and messy. David’s stuff was everywhere.

  My mother was always criticizing David. “Why couldn’t you have found yourself a nice lawyer?” she said to me time and again. I laughed ruefully. I just had.

  With any luck, though, I’d never see him again.

  But a few weeks later Bob dropped by. He was back from New Orleans.

  “The whole city is full of drunks and people pissing in the streets. I didn’t meet a single girl I felt any attraction to at all. Why did you send me there? You sure it was New Orleans?”

  “I guess it wasn’t in the cards.” I shrugged. “But you’re going to meet your soul mate someday. I’m sure of it.” I was trying to figure out another way to get rid of him, but my mind was a blank.

  “Okay.” He smiled, leaning back in his chair. “But in the meantime, why don’t you come out and have lunch with me?”

  And that was that. I surrendered to fate. I’m not a big drinker, but I had a couple of glasses of Sambuca with him at an Italian restaurant and I couldn’t stop flirting. It was so easy between us. He had such vitality. He worked out and had a great body. I knew he’d been the popular boy in high school. The jock. The prom king. I hadn’t even been to my prom. But here he was, pouring me another glass of Sambuca and telling me how pretty I was. He talked about his work and his love of country music and how he played in a band on the weekends. He told me about his family and why he’d moved back in with his parents since his divorce and how much he loved them. He told me he loved to travel. He just seemed so—normal.

  I found myself pretending that I loved country music and that I wanted to go hear him play. I’d never lied like this. It was so upsetting.

  I kept thinking about all the women I’d done readings for over the years who had been married and then met the guy they really were supposed to be with. If they could reach for what they wanted, why couldn’t I? No voice ever came through telling me they were bad women. Everyone got divorced these days, right?

  I found myself telling Bob all about my father. Something about this handsome man reminded me of him, made me miss him more than I had in years. “But he’s kind of insane,” I told Bob. “He used to live under the Verrazano Bridge and hoard newspapers. He used to dress up as Robin Hood. I haven’t had any contact with him since I was seventeen.”

  “Why don’t you find him? You loved him, right?”

  “More than anything,” I said. “He’s down in Florida, I think. Fort Lauderdale maybe. I don’t have an address or even a phone number for him.”

  “I can help you find him. You’ve got to find your father, Suzie.”

  That’s what Bob started calling me right from the very first. Not Sue. Not Suzan. But Suzie. It made me feel like a teenager headed to a sock hop. Psychic Suzie. Malibu Barbie. I should have known from the get-go that anyone who called me Suzie didn’t have a clue who I really was.

  He wanted to see me again, so I invited him to a group reading I was doing at the Westfield Yoga Center later that week. I figured there would be a lot of people there. That would make it safer for me.

  That night, I put on a very pretty floral dress. I didn’t dress like a psychic, but like a woman about to go on a date. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Bob would be there.

  My mother also showed up that night, and I introduced her to Bob when he arrived. “That man would make a great catch for your sister!” she whispered to me before sitting down. “He’s so good-looking.” Then she explained to the person sitting next to her that she was the mother of the fortune-teller, but her other daughter was a schoolteacher.

  I hated it when my mother called me a fortune-teller. She said the word with a certain pride, but it seemed to demean what I did. I’d rather be called a sensitive, or an intuitive, or a plain old psychic. I don’t know how many times over the years I’d told her this. Being called a fortune-teller made me feel like a little girl dressed up for the school carnival.

  I took a seat in the circle. The first thing I saw when the lights were dim was a woman holding a baby. “Does anyone know a baby called Anne? I think she died when she was very young, but she’s with her mother again.”

  I looked around the room. There was the usual mixture of older women in long skirts and a few men with long hair. And then there was Bob, looking out of place in his business suit. There were tears on his cheeks. I told myself that he was soft and sensitive because he believed. It’s amazing how we can turn people into who we want them to be in our imaginations. I wasn’t paying any attention to the amount of effort he put into his personal appearance or how naïve he was about the spiritual world.

  “You know a baby called Anne?” I said, happy that I’d seen something about his life.

  He nodded. “My mother’s sister Anne died in infancy. You’re real, aren’t you? You’re the real thing!”

  “I’m also getting a message from someone’s uncle Pete,” I said.

  “I have an uncle Pete!” exclaimed Bob.

  But before I could find out what Uncle Pete’s message might be, I heard a brusque voice call out from the first floor, “I have to go speak to someone up there. Let me past. I have to speak to Seretta.”

  It was a real person, not a spirit.

  I could hear the owners of the yoga studio talking to a man, a certain amount of arguing, and then heavy treads on the stairs leading up to the room where we were.

  A moment later, Erik Jasper burst through the door.

  I barely recognized him. It had been years since I’d last seen him.

  His long black hair was shorn off into a crew cut. His eyeliner was gone. His tights were gone. His cape was gone. He was dressed like a police officer, and he had a gun in his holster.

  “You’re a cop?” They were the first words out of my mouth.

  How could he be a cop? This was a guy the cops kept an eye on. It was like a reanimated dead body appearing right in front of me. And that repulsive. Was this the man who had so intoxicated me years before? Was this who he had really been? Was this his true self? This swollen, overweight, doughnut-eating cop with a buzz cut? This was scarier than any black magic he’d ever said he could do.

  I wanted to vomit. I wanted to hide. I wanted to evaporate into the ether with the spirits. Most of all, I didn’t want Bob to know that I had ever been involved with this grotesque monster of a man.

  Why had he shown up at the very moment my life was taking a turn for the normal?

  Everyone turned to stare at him. He was a huge guy with a booming voice … and a gun.

  My mother instantly jumped up. “Erik! It’s Erik! Hello, Erik! We’ve missed you so much!” She was glowing. She was thrilled to see him again.

  Bob was sitting there, completely baffled. I felt like I was falling
into pieces, with fragments of my past and my future lying all about me. Could the world really be this small? What did this mean? Why at this very moment had the darkest, strangest person from my past appeared?

  I grabbed Erik and pulled him into the hallway, explaining to my group that I’d be back in a few minutes. I tried to catch my breath while Erik told me that he was remarried, with kids, and that he’d become a cop. A police officer! I was so lucky I’d left him.

  I told myself that the torch was being passed, that I was moving on from this. Phew! I was thinking. Now I can be a real girl; I am done with the craziness. Done. Done. Done. “Erik, you’ve got to go. I don’t have time for this—”

  “But Seretta—”

  “I’m Suzie now.”

  “Suzie?” Erik bellowed with laugher. “Suzie! Suzan, maybe. Seretta, you will never be a Suzie.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I’ve got to go. I’m in the middle of a big reading.”

  Erik pulled me, reluctantly, into a hug, and I felt no trace at all of my former attraction to him. Not one little sizzle. It’s amazing how your desire for a person can disappear. I took one last look at him as he lumbered his huge body down the stairs. A cop. That’s what he’d become? Well, maybe he just wanted to be normal, too.

  “Suzie, Suzie, who was that?” asked Bob when I came back. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. But Erik’s appearance had unsettled me. It felt like some kind of warning, only I didn’t know what the universe was trying to tell me.

  Three months after Bob started coming to me for readings and taking me out for lunch, he took me to the fireworks in Summit, New Jersey, on the Fourth of July. It was the town I’d grown up in without any friends. Bob had brought a picnic blanket, and we spread it out in Memorial Field right near the crypt where I used to hide. I’d come back to my old haunts, and beside me was a movie star of a man who was treating me like a princess.

  An orchestra was playing “The Prayer” with Andrea Bocelli singing. The stars were beginning to come out, and in a moment the fireworks would begin. Bob went down on his knees in front of me.

  “Suzan Ellzer, I love you so much,” he said.

  He called me by my childhood name, and I felt the complete redemption of all the suffering I had ever experienced.

  “If only I had known you when you were a teenager,” said Bob. “Think of all the time we could have had together.”

  Bob had been raised in the next town over, but I knew that if he had known me in high school, he would never have fallen in love with me. He would have passed me in the halls without seeing me. But I didn’t feel like such a freak now with Bob on his knees in front of me. I didn’t have to be weird anymore.

  That was the night I knew I’d fallen in love.

  Still, I felt at that moment like my mother—married to one man and beginning a relationship with another. But I wasn’t going to give Gavin two daddies, one secret and one public. I wasn’t going to sneak around. I wouldn’t make him sit outside a locked bedroom door and keep watch for the return of his father.

  I thought at the time that the important thing was not to lie—to myself, to David, to Gavin. I would be honest and responsible, and that would make everything all right. But you can still make mistakes without acting like your parents.

  Bob had invited me to take a vacation to Florida with him. “We can travel together; we can buy a house together; you won’t have to do readings anymore. I can take care of us. And we can go find your father. Let’s go find your father, Suzie. You’ve got to find your dad.”

  I finally told David that I had met somebody else and that I was in love with him. “I don’t want to sneak around behind your back. I don’t want to make Gavin lie for me like I had to lie when I was a kid.”

  But what I said undid David. He smashed his hand through the wall in the laundry room, then cried for a long time, and then retreated into himself. He didn’t fight to keep me this time, like he had done when I’d become involved with Erik. His friend Richard raged at him for giving up without a fight, but David was finally too defeated. He became even more lost in his medieval world and took to clanking around the condo complex wearing chain mail at night.

  I packed a week’s worth of outfits into a pink suitcase that looked like it belonged to a little-girl princess. I made sure to include a formal dress, all flounces and sparkles, like a teenager would wear to a prom. I actually packed a rhinestone tiara. Bob had told me to bring something fancy.

  I really believed that I was making the best choice not only for myself but also for Gavin. Gavin and I would get to be normal now. We could be tourists at the Renaissance Faire instead of the carnies themselves. I ignored the little voice inside my head that was saying, This isn’t really you. This can’t be you. This isn’t your life.

  At the door, David had one last thing to say to me. “Nobody else can tolerate you, you know. You’re too weird.”

  “David, I’m going to have a normal life. This is a normal guy.”

  But of course that’s not what happened. My adventure into normal life was anything but normal.

  I saw this woman the other day for a reading, and her life was a blank. When I looked at her, I saw absolutely nothing—no past lives, no spirits hovering close, no stories, no secrets, no lost loves, nobody waiting for her around the corner. She had two cats and that was it. This is going to be absolute hell, I thought to myself.

  She sat across from me in the little room where I do readings and we stared at each other. Nothing. There was nothing in her life. I felt like saying to her, “Go, you have got to go.” But how do you say that without hurting a person’s feelings?

  She’d never been married, never even had a boyfriend. She’d been stuck at the same job she hated for twenty years. She was never going to leave it. And yet she comes to me, hoping I’m going to tell her something that will change all that. But what could I possibly do for this woman? I can’t make a life when there’s nothing there. That’s not what I do. I don’t make things happen. All I can do is see what’s there.

  My eyes were glazing over. I felt like I was in a coma. I was just about to tell her, “I can’t do this. I’m not even going to charge you,” when I saw the violin.

  “You play the violin, don’t you?”

  “I used to. How do you know?”

  “Well, I see a violin in your house. It wants to be played. In fact, it’s screaming to be played.”

  “I volunteer at the orchestra sometimes.”

  “Good,” I said. Something else was becoming clear to me. “Oh, and your cat? The striped one? He’s got something growing on his liver.”

  “Aren’t you a ray of sunshine?” she said, clearly rattled. “I wouldn’t want to have your job.”

  Sometimes I don’t want to have my job either.

  Readings aren’t always good for people. Too much information can be unnerving; it can even make some people crazy.

  This elegant, polished woman paid me a visit one day. All of her accessories matched, her hair was expertly styled, and it looked like she had a monogrammed handkerchief in her purse. She was very put together.

  During our reading, I saw her surrounded by stray dogs, and I was struck by the insight that she had the heart of an animal rescuer. I told her so, and at the time she seemed both surprised and delighted by the information. After she left, I imagined her going to one of the local pounds and adopting a mutt and walking him around her neighborhood in a little jacket.

  Months later, however, I was at the grocery store when I heard someone calling out to me. I looked around and saw a big pickup truck, the back of which was stacked with animal crates, each one filled with three or four howling, peeing, miserable dogs. There must have been sixty dogs all crammed together. Emerging from the truck was the woman, barely recognizable. Her hair wasn’t brushed; she was wearing an unwashed shirt. She looked terrible.

  But she was delighted to see me. “I’m doing what you wanted me
to do!” she exclaimed.

  I was horrified. She wasn’t fostering stray dogs; she was hoarding them. It was eye-boggling insanity. I didn’t know what to do.

  “What have you done?” I asked in horror.

  “You’ve changed my life,” she said. “I’ve never been so happy. Come, come pick out a dog for yourself. You have to!”

  I looked at all those poor dogs. I wanted to get them all away from her, but all I could do was rescue one pathetically thin dachshund.

  When I took her to the vet, she had pneumonia and parasites. I wanted the vet’s advice about the other dogs, but he already knew about them. It had been in the news. They’d found the woman’s house packed floor to ceiling with muzzled dogs in crates. She’d been adopting them from kill shelters all over the state. In the end, she was jailed for animal cruelty.

  Was I responsible for what happened? I have no idea, but sometimes good readings go bad.

  17

  Just by Accident (Ha!)

  I knew my father had a real estate office in Fort Lauderdale, and Bob managed to find out the address. “Steve Citta and Associates,” said a small sign near the front door. There were large storefront windows, but they had both been painted black.

  “You ready, Suzie?” asked Bob in the car.

  I nodded and took a breath. I was jittery with fear and excitement. I hadn’t told my mother anything. Bob had become fascinated with my father from the stories I’d told him. He felt it was really important that I reconnect with Steve, and maybe it was time. When I had been with David there hadn’t been room in my life for another costume-wearing wild man, but maybe, now that I was an ordinary girl, there was. Even more than that, when I was with Bob I found myself missing my father more than I had in years and talking about him all the time.