by Jodi Picoult
“Like who?”
“I have no idea. It’s not like we all hang out at the Paranormal Café on Wednesday nights.” She moves to the door, holding it wide open, my cue to leave. “If I hear of anyone who does that sort of thing, I’ll be in touch.”
I suspect this is a flat-out lie, spoken to get me the hell out of her living room. I step into the foyer and wrangle my bike upright. “If you won’t find her for me,” I say, “can you at least tell me if she’s dead?”
I can’t believe I’ve asked that until the words are hanging between us, like curtains that keep us from seeing each other clearly. For a second I think about grabbing my bike and running out the door before I have to hear the answer.
Serenity shudders as if I’ve hit her with a Taser. “She’s not.”
As she closes the door in my face, I wonder if this is a flat-out lie, too.
Instead of going back home, I bike past the outskirts of Boone, three miles down a dirt road, to the entrance of the Stark Nature Preserve, named after the Revolutionary War general who coined the state motto, “Live Free or Die.” But ten years ago, before it was the Stark Nature Preserve, it was the New England Elephant Sanctuary, which had been founded by my father, Thomas Metcalf. Back then, it sprawled over two thousand acres, with a two-hundred-acre perimeter between the sanctuary and the nearest residential home. Now, more than half the acreage has become a strip mall, a Costco, and a housing development. The rest is kept in conservation by the state.
I park my bike and walk for twenty minutes, passing the birch forest and the lake, overgrown and weedy now, where the elephants would come daily for water. Finally, I reach my favorite spot, under a massive oak with arms twisted like a witch. Although most of the woodlands are blanketed with moss and ferns this time of the year, the ground under this tree has always been carpeted with bright purple mushrooms. It looks like the kind of place fairies would live, if they were real.
They’re called Laccaria amethystina. I looked them up online. It seemed like something my mother would have done, if she’d seen them.
I sit down in the middle of the mushrooms. You’d think I’d crush the heads, but they give way to my weight. I stroke the underside of one, with its ridged accordion pleats. It feels like velvet and muscle at the same time, just like the tip of an elephant’s trunk.
This was the spot where Maura had buried her calf, the only elephant ever born at the sanctuary. I was too young to remember it, but I’ve read about it in my mother’s journals. Maura arrived at the sanctuary already pregnant, although the zoo that had shipped her off didn’t know it at the time. She delivered nearly fifteen months after her arrival, and the calf was stillborn. Maura carried him to the spot beneath the oak and covered him with pine needles and branches. The next spring, the most beautiful violet mushrooms exploded there, where the calf’s remains had eventually been formally buried by the sanctuary staff.
I take my cell phone out of my pocket. The only good thing about selling off half the sanctuary property is that now there is a huge cellular tower not too far away, and service is probably better here than in all the rest of New Hampshire. I open a browser and type: “Serenity Jones Psychic.”
The first thing I read is her Wikipedia entry. Serenity Jones (b. November 1, 1966) is an American psychic and medium. She appeared multiple times on Good Morning America, and had her own television show, Serenity!, where she did cold readings of the audience and also one-on-one readings with individuals, but specialized in missing persons cases.
Missing persons cases? Are you kidding me?
She worked with various police departments and the FBI and claimed a success rate of 88 percent. However, her failed prediction about the kidnapped son of Senator John McCoy was widely reported in the media and led the family to press charges. Jones has not been in the public eye since 2007.
Is it possible that a famous medium—even a disgraced one—had dropped off the face of the earth and resurfaced a decade later near Boone, New Hampshire? Absolutely. If anyone was ever looking for a place to keep a low profile, it was in my hometown, where the most exciting thing to happen all year is the July Fourth Cow Plop Bingo tournament.
I scan a list of her public predictions.
In 1999, Jones told Thea Katanopoulis that her son Adam, who had been missing for seven years, was alive. In 2001 Adam was located, working on a merchant marine ship off the coast of Africa.
Jones accurately predicted the acquittal of O. J. Simpson and the great quake of 1989.
In 1998, Jones said the next presidential election would be postponed. Although the election itself in 2000 was not delayed, the official results were not reported for 36 days.
In 1998, Jones told the mother of missing college student Kerry Rashid that her daughter had been stabbed and DNA evidence would exonerate the man eventually convicted of the crime. In 2004, Orlando Ickes was freed as a result of the Innocence Project and his former roommate indicted for the crime instead.
In 2001, Jones told police that Chandra Levy’s body would be found in a heavily wooded area on a slope. It was located the following year in Rock Creek Park, Maryland, on a steep incline. She also predicted that Thomas Quintanos IV, a NYC firefighter presumed dead after 9/11, was alive, and he was indeed pulled from the rubble five days after the attack on the World Trade Center.
On her television show in 2001, Jones led police on camera to the Pensacola, Florida, home of mail carrier Earlen O’Doule, locating a secret locked room in his basement and the presumed-dead Justine Fawker, who had been abducted eight years earlier at age 11.
On her television show in November 2003, Jones told Senator John McCoy and his wife that their abducted son was still alive and could be found at a bus terminal in Ocala, Florida. The boy’s remains were located there, decomposing.
From there on, things had gone downhill for Serenity Jones.
In December 2003, Jones told the widow of a Navy SEAL she would give birth to a healthy boy. The woman miscarried fourteen days later.
In January 2004, Jones told Yolanda Rawls of Orem, Utah, that her missing five-year-old daughter, Velvet, had been brainwashed and was being raised by a Mormon family, touching off a wave of protests in Salt Lake City. Six months later Yolanda’s boyfriend confessed to the girl’s murder and led police to a shallow grave near the local dump.
In February 2004, Jones predicted that Jimmy Hoffa’s remains would be discovered in the cement walls of a bomb cellar built by the Rockefeller family in Woodstock, Vermont. This proved incorrect.
In March 2004, Jones stated that Audrey Seiler, a University of Wisconsin–Madison student who went missing, was the victim of a serial killer and that a knife would be found with evidence on it. Seiler was found to have staged her own kidnapping in an attempt to get her boyfriend’s attention.
In May 2007, she predicted that Madeleine McCann, who had disappeared while on vacation with her parents in Portugal, would be found by August. The case remains unsolved.
She hasn’t made any public psychic predictions since that. From what I can see, she went missing.
No wonder she doesn’t do kids.
Okay, she made one colossal public mistake in the McCoy case, but in her defense, she had been half right: They did find the missing boy. He just wasn’t alive. It was bad luck that, after having a string of successes, her first failure involved a superfamous politician.
There are pictures of Serenity at the Grammys with Snoop Dogg and at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with George W. Bush. There’s another photo of her in US Weekly’s Fashion Police section wearing a dress with two giant silk rosettes sewn over her boobs.
I click on my YouTube app and type in Serenity’s name and the senator’s. A video loads, showing Serenity on a television show set, with her ice cream swirl of hair, wearing a pink pantsuit just a few shades darker. Across from her on a purple couch is Senator McCoy, a guy with a jaw that could be used to measure right angles and a perfect glint of silver at his temple
s. His wife sits beside him, clutching his hand.
I’m not really into politics, but we studied Senator McCoy in school as an example of political failure. He’d been groomed for a presidential run, hanging out with the Kennedys in Hyannisport and giving a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. But then his seven-year-old son was abducted from his private school’s playground.
In the clip, Serenity leans toward the politician. “Senator McCoy,” she says, “I have had a vision.”
Cut to a gospel choir on the set. “A vision!” they sing out, like musical punctuation.
“A vision of your little boy …” Serenity pauses. “Alive and well.”
The senator’s wife collapses into her husband’s arms and sobs.
I wonder if she picked Senator McCoy on purpose; if she really had a vision of the kid, or just wanted the media hype to surround her, too.
The video jumps to the bus terminal in Ocala. There is Serenity, accompanying the McCoys into the building, heading in a zombie trance to a bunch of lockers near the men’s room. There’s Senator McCoy’s wife, crying, “Henry?” as Serenity tells a policeman to open locker number 341. There’s the stained suitcase, which is hauled out by the cop, as everyone else reels backward from the stench of the body inside.
For a moment, the camera tumbles and the video goes sideways. Then the cameraman pulls his shit together, in time to catch Serenity throwing up, Ginny McCoy fainting dead away, and Senator McCoy, the Democratic Party golden boy, yelling at him to stop filming, and punching him when he doesn’t.
Serenity Jones hadn’t just fallen from grace—she’d crashed and burned. The McCoys sued Serenity, who eventually settled. Senator McCoy was subsequently arrested twice on DUI convictions, resigned from the Senate, and went somewhere to treat his “exhaustion.” His wife died a year later from an overdose of sleeping pills. And Serenity quietly, quickly, became invisible.
The woman who’d royally screwed up with the McCoys was the same woman who’d also found dozens of kids who had disappeared. She was also the Serenity Jones who now resided in the seediest part of town and who was starved for cash. But had she lost her ability to find missing people … or had she always been faking it? Was she once actually psychic—or just lucky?
For all I know, paranormal talent is like riding a bike. For all I know, it comes back, if you just give it a try.
So in spite of the fact that I am pretty sure Serenity Jones does not ever want to see me on her doorstep again, I also know that finding my mother is exactly the sort of training wheels she needs.
ALICE
We’ve all heard the phrase before: He’s got a memory like an elephant. As it turns out, this is not cliché but science.
I once saw an Asian elephant in Thailand who had been trained to do a trick. All the schoolchildren brought to meet him at the reserve where he was kept in captivity were told to sit in a line. Then they were asked to take off their shoes, and these shoes were jumbled into a pile. The mahout who worked with the elephant then instructed her to give the shoes back to the children. The elephant did, carefully weeding through the pile with her trunk and dropping the shoes that belonged to each child in his or her lap.
In Botswana, I saw a female elephant charge a helicopter three times; it held a vet who was going to dart her for a study. At the sanctuary, we had to request a no-fly zone, because medical helicopters passing overhead caused the elephants to bunch, pulling themselves into close proximity. The only helicopters some of these elephants had ever seen were the ones from which park rangers had shot their families with scoline fifty years earlier, during the culling.
There are anecdotes of elephants that have witnessed the death of a herd member at the hands of an ivory poacher, and then charged through a village at night, seeking out the individual who had been wielding the gun.
In the Amboseli ecosystem in Kenya, there are two tribes that have historically come into contact with the elephants: the Masai, who dress in red garments and use spears to hunt them; and the Kamba, who are farmers and have never hunted elephants. One study suggested elephants showed greater fear when they detected the scent of clothes worn previously by the Masai rather than the Kamba. They bunched, moved farther from the scent faster, and took longer to relax after identifying the scent of the Masai.
Mind you, in this study, the elephants never saw the cloth. They relied solely on olfactory clues, which could be attributed to each tribe’s diet and pheromonal secretions (the Masai consume more animal products than the Kamba; the Kamba villages are known to have a strong smell of cattle). What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen.
I’d think, given all those examples, the question isn’t whether elephants can remember. Maybe we need to ask: What won’t they forget?
SERENITY
I was eight years old when I realized the world was full of people no one else could see. There was the boy who crawled beneath the jungle gym at my school, staring up my skirt when I swung on the monkey bars. There was the old black woman who smelled like lilies, who sat on the edge of my bed and sang me to sleep. Sometimes, when my mother and I were walking down a street, I felt like a salmon swimming upstream: It was that hard to keep myself from bumping into the hundreds of people coming at me.
My mama’s great-grandmother was a full-blooded Iroquois shaman, and my father’s mother read tea leaves for her coworkers on cigarette breaks at the cracker factory where she used to work. None of that talent filtered through the blood to my own parents, but my mama has all sorts of stories about me as a toddler, having the Gift. I’d tell her that Aunt Jeannie was on the phone. Five seconds later, the phone would ring. Or I’d insist on wearing my rain boots to preschool, even though it was a perfectly sunny day, and, sure enough, the heavens would open up in an unexpected downpour. My imaginary friends were not always children but also Civil War soldiers and Victorian dowagers and, once, a runaway slave named Spider with rope burns around his neck. Other kids at school found me strange and steered clear of me, so much so that my parents decided to move from New York to New Hampshire. They sat me down before my first day of second grade and said, “Serenity, if you don’t want to get hurt, you’re going to have to hide your Gift.”
So I did. When I went into class and took a seat beside a girl, I didn’t speak to her unless another student did first, so that I knew I wasn’t the only one who could see her. When my teacher, Ms. De-Camp, picked up a pen that I knew was going to explode with ink all over her white blouse, I bit my lip and watched it happen instead of warning her. When the class gerbil escaped and I had a vision of it running across the principal’s desk, I pushed the thought out of my head until I heard the shrieks coming from the main office.
I made friends, just like my parents said I would. One was a girl named Maureen, who invited me to her house to play with her Polly Pocket collection and who told me secrets, like that her older brother hid Playboys under his mattress and that her mother stored a shoe box full of cash behind a loose panel in her closet. So you can imagine how I felt the day that Maureen and I were on the playground swings and she challenged me to see who could jump off the swings the farthest, and I had a quick flash of her lying on the ground with ambulance lights in the background.
I wanted to tell her we shouldn’t jump, but I also wanted to keep my best friend, who knew nothing about my Gift. So I stayed silent, and when Maureen counted to three and went sailing through the air, I stayed put on my swing and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to see her fall with her leg pinned beneath her, snapping clean in two.
My parents had said that, if I didn’t hide my second sight, I’d get hurt. But it was better that I get hurt than someone else. After that, I promised myself that I’d always speak up if my Gift helped me see something coming, no matter what it cost me.
; In this case, it was Maureen, who called me a freak and started hanging with the popular girls.
As I got older I got better at figuring out that not everyone who spoke to me was alive. I’d be talking to someone and would, peripherally, see a spirit cross behind. I got used to not paying attention, the same way most of you register the faces of the hundreds of people who cross your path daily, without actually looking at their features. I told my mother she needed to get her brakes checked before the light went on in the dashboard signaling something was wrong; I congratulated our neighbor on her pregnancy a week before the doctor told her she was expecting. I reported whatever information came to me without editing it or making a judgment call about whether or not I should speak up.
My Gift, however, was not all-encompassing. When I was twelve, the auto parts dealership my father owned burned to the ground. Two months later, he committed suicide, leaving my mother a rambling apology note, a picture of himself in an evening gown, and a mountain of gambling debts. I hadn’t predicted any of these things, and I cannot tell you how many times since I’ve been asked why not. Let me tell you, no one wants to know the answer to that more than I do. But then again, I can’t guess the Powerball numbers or tell you which stocks to follow. I didn’t know about my father, and years later, I didn’t foresee my mother’s stroke, either. I’m a psychic, not the Wizard of Freaking Oz. I’ve replayed things in my head, wondering if I missed a sign, or if somebody on the other side didn’t get through to me, or if I’d been too distracted by my French homework to notice. But over the years I’ve come to realize that maybe there are things I’m not supposed to know, and besides—I don’t really want to see the whole landscape of the future. I mean, if I could, what’s the point of living?
My mother and I resettled in Connecticut, where she got a job as a maid at a hotel and I dressed in black and dabbled in Wicca and survived high school. It was not until college that I started to really celebrate my Gift. I taught myself to read tarot and did readings for my sorority sisters. I subscribed to Fate magazine. Instead of my schoolbooks, I read about Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. I wore Guatemalan scarves and gauzy skirts and burned incense in my dorm room. I met another student, Shanae, who was interested in the occult. Unlike me, she couldn’t communicate with those who had passed, but she was an empath and would get sympathy stomachaches every time her roommate had her period. Together, we attempted scrying. We would set candles in front of us, sit down before a mirror, and gaze into it long enough to see our past lives. Shanae came from a long line of psychics, and it was she who told me that I should ask my spirit guides to introduce themselves; that her aunties and her grandma, who were both mediums, had spirit guides on the other side. And so I formally met Lucinda, the elderly black woman who used to sing me to sleep; and Desmond, a sassy gay man. They were with me all the time, pets sleeping at my feet that would wake up, attentive, when I called their names. From then on, I spoke to my spirit guides constantly, relying on them to help me navigate the next world, either by leading me or by leading others to me.