“It’s all a child’s wonderful imaginative powers,” my mother concluded. “Nothing more or less.”
“She reads a lot, too,” my father quickly added. “And she often talks and acts like a character in a book. She’s good at pretending. She’s always had imaginary friends.” He looked at me and nodded. “You can leave her alone for hours and hours, and she won’t complain. Maybe she’ll be an actress.”
“Or a politician,” Mr. Black said. “If she’s good at pretending.”
Everyone laughed.
“What about her name?” Mrs. Black asked, sweetening her smile. “It’s so unusual. But so beautiful,” she quickly added.
My parents looked at each other as if to see if either one objected to the explanation. Neither ever did when anyone asked about it, but they were always careful about hurting each other’s feelings, so they checked first to see who would begin. If they ever had an argument, often about me, they would quickly find a way to smooth it over and seal their apologies to each other with a sharp kiss that sounded like the snap of a rubber band and seemed more like a stamp of approval than the soft brush of something loving and romantic.
“That was the only request her birth mother left with the orphanage, that the name she gave her be kept. We promised to do so. Actually, Felicia and I liked her name right from the get-go,” Dad replied.
Sometimes my mother gave the whole answer, but it was usually almost the exact same words. She even said “get-go.”
“Do you still have those shoes with the rounded toes?” Mrs. Black asked me. “I’d like to see them.”
“No.”
“What do you think happened to them?” Mrs. Hummel asked. She was smiling, but I could tell that my casualness about one of my stories intrigued her. It was easy to see that some of my parents’ guests weren’t just amused. They were fascinated with me. Usually at that point, my parents would find a way to end it and send me off to my room. My mother would hug me too tightly, her arms crushing my ribs, and she’d whisper, “You’ll get no breakfast for doing this again and embarrassing us, Sage. Stay in your bed until I come for you.”
No matter how many times my parents punished me, I didn’t stop talking about my dreams and visions. I was more than happy to be doing it this time, too, at Dad’s birthday dinner.
“My shoes got worn out,” I said. “They were buried with everything else of mine that got worn out.”
“What?” Mrs. Black said, her right hand fluttering up to her mouth like a small bird. “Heavens, why would your things have to be buried?”
The faces of all the guests were framed in half smiles. My parents held theirs that way, too, but their eyes were stained with disappointment and anger. My mother’s were full of fiery warning, afraid of what I might say next. Sometimes my mother would tell me afterward that they were seriously thinking of giving me back to the orphanage. She’d say there was no guarantee for me, but there was one for them. I could be turned back in like so much broken merchandise, “stored in a cage in a warehouse for damaged children no one really wanted. They are fed through bars and kept in the dark most of the time, without any television or books or any toys, the way some exotic birds are kept.”
“Yes, why did they have to be buried?” Mrs. Hummel asked now. She leaned toward me, her dark mint-green eyes wider, the corners of her mouth tucked back. Her face was full of anticipation.
I didn’t look at my mother. “Because they were mine,” I said. “If someone else put them on, they would go up in flames.”
Usually, there would be gasps when I said something like that, at least from the women. The men might just stare at me and shake their heads. This time, both Mrs. Hummel and Mrs. Black just stared at me, too. Mr. Hummel finally laughed, but it sounded more like he was clearing his throat. Mr. Black was the only one who shook his head and cast a look of sympathy at my father.
“Why don’t you go to your room now, Sage?” my father said. “You have that new video game you asked for. We know you want to play with it. You can be excused.”
Since we had already had his birthday cake, I thought that was all right.
“Very well,” I said, and I slipped off my chair, said good night to everyone, curtsied, and walked out.
I heard the soft laughter. “What a polite little girl!” Mrs. Hummel exclaimed. “I love the way she curtsied like a little princess. How did you get her to do that?”
“We didn’t teach her to do that,” my mother said, and then she realized she had said it too quickly. “I mean, she surprises us every day.”
“Like I said, she picks up a lot from reading,” my father added.
“What a delight,” Mrs. Black said. “You’re very lucky.”
“That’s what we think,” my mother said, but there was something about the way she said it, some underlying note in her voice, that only I could hear. It was getting sharper and sharper every passing day, every passing year.
I carried her words up to my room, twisting and turning them over in my mind like a jeweler inspecting a gem for some imperfection. I was sure there was something there, something I didn’t see or understand, and it was all because of who I was. No one was more of a mystery to me than I was to myself.
However, I imagined all adopted children had that problem, because they didn’t have their biological parents to measure themselves against by comparing their height, their facial features, and, most important, their personalities. I looked constantly for clues in the way my parents spoke about me and the way they looked at me to see if they knew much more than they were saying, especially when they thought I didn’t notice or couldn’t hear them. If I asked, they would always remind me that they had never met my mother, much less my father. They were just as much in the dark about who my biological parents were and what they were like. Naturally, I wanted to know why my real mother had given me away. Didn’t real mothers love their children with all their hearts the moment they were born?
“What we do know is that she wasn’t married and her parents were too old to help raise you,” my mother had eventually told me, and left it for me to make the right conclusions. Of course, I knew other girls and boys who lived only with their mothers after a divorce, but children of divorced mothers were different from orphans like me. At least the children of divorced parents could see themselves in their fathers and mothers.
This was constantly on my mind. I spent a great deal of time studying myself in a mirror, but not like someone looking for flaws in her beauty. It was more like I was looking for a sign revealing who was inside me, who I really was. Using my own features, I tried to imagine what my real mother must have looked like.
One day, I drew a picture of her and showed it to my parents. After they looked at it, they looked at each other, their eyes wide and full of surprise. Neither said anything. They didn’t tell me it was awful or that it was wrong to have drawn it, but they wouldn’t let me pin it on the wall or show it to anyone else. I finally did hear my father whisper, “Remarkable,” more to himself than to my mother. My mother took the picture, telling me to forget it, and I imagined that she hid it somewhere or maybe destroyed it, as if she was afraid I might see someone who resembled this woman on the streets of our city. I supposed that was possible. I didn’t know where she came from or where she lived.
We lived just outside of Dorey, Massachusetts, a town of about twenty thousand residents, only fifty miles from Cape Cod, a place they had yet to take me to visit. Our house was a Tudor, with half-timbering. The space between the timbers was filled with white stucco, so my parents referred to their home as a black-and-white house. It had decorative woodwork, which my father explained was really false half-timbering, diamond-pane windows, and a steeply pitched roof with arches and bay windows. My room was upstairs, two doors down from my parents’ room, and it looked out at the section of woods between our property and a small lake that was only a half mile long and wide. It was on an empty plot of land tied up in some family feud regarding its deed.
For me, it was like having our own private lake and park next door. We had barely more than one acre, so I was eager to step off our property and spend time next door exploring, especially around the lake. I wasn’t permitted to go there by myself until I was ten and always with a warning to be careful around the lake, as if something in it, some lake monster, might jump out and pull me under the water. Often I did sense something shadowy moving in the woods nearby. I would pause and search among the trees. Sometimes I would hear the rustling of leaves and branches, even the sound of footsteps, but I never saw anything or anyone.
I did hear the breeze whisper, “Be careful. Always be careful.”
My father made sure that I learned to swim when I was five. He took me to his sports club in Dorey on Saturdays, when children of members could have lessons with a certified swimming instructor. My instructor was amazed, because I was swimming well after only a half hour of instruction.
“You sure she never swam before?” he asked my father.
“Never.”
“All my students should be like her,” the instructor said.
Dad nodded and looked at me as if he had expected no less. He stood back and, without any surprise, watched me swim across the pool, unafraid, unhesitant, and confident. Later, at dinner, he reported how I had done. I watched for my mother’s reaction. She seemed more disappointed than proud. Both of them did, in fact. I didn’t understand it. It was as if I was confirming some evil suspicion they had of me.
But swimming seemed natural, something I remembered having done.
“I swam in the ocean, which is more difficult than a pool,” I blurted.
They shook their heads, but I could sense the seeds of concern were planted again, this time even deeper.
“We never took you to swim in the ocean, Sage,” my mother snapped back at me with her teeth clenched. “Don’t dare tell anyone that. Are you listening?”
As usual back then when I was so young, I just shrugged. I never argued with anyone about what I knew and what I saw. It was as if I understood that they wouldn’t understand. However, I think my self-confidence when I spoke was eventually even more of a concern for my parents than the things I said. They could see I wasn’t ever going to admit that I was making something up.
“I’m afraid she really believes what she says,” I heard my mother tell my father once when I was nearly eleven. “You can’t blame it on a wild imagination anymore or talk her out of it or stop her from saying these things.”
“Maybe she’ll grow out of it,” he replied. “She’s still quite young. The older she gets, the further away she might get from these visions and imaginings. Some of it is simply what all kids do. It’s still too soon to tell.”
“No sense in fooling yourself. I’m afraid she won’t stop, Mark. I’ll admit, it’s more difficult to predict what will happen with her, what the end result of this will be. She’s not like the others.”
“That’s why we have to be patient. Let’s wait and see,” my father told her. “We promised.”
“We promised to try.”
“And we will,” he said firmly. “We have to, for her sake.”
I wanted to ask what he meant by “the others” and “for her sake,” but I was afraid to start them talking about me again, warning me, practically begging me to shut myself up tightly and bury my thoughts and dreams so deeply that they would be smothered and die. I thought I might die, too. If I kept everything locked up, I wouldn’t be able to breathe because of the weight of it all on my chest.
Finally, when I was twelve and still telling them and other people about things I remembered, things they knew I hadn’t done while I was with them, which was basically forever, I heard them discussing me very intently one night in the kitchen after dinner. Both of them raised their voices at times. They decided that maybe it would help for me to speak with a child psychologist. After all, besides others my age in school, I was also telling my teachers things that my parents couldn’t validate when they were asked about them.
“We can’t ignore her, ignore the things she is telling people, anymore, Mark. Everyone will wonder why we’re not trying to do something about it, especially her teachers. I hate doing this. It’s basically admitting failure, but it’s getting out of hand,” my mother said. “This is another one that might very well be beyond us.”
What did she mean by “another one” and “beyond us”? I wondered. That was the same as saying “the others,” but, just like before, I was afraid to ask.
“I agree,” Dad said. I heard him sigh deeply. “But who knows? Professional help might slow it down and give us a real chance to evaluate her properly.”
“I have no illusions about this, Mark. It won’t stop her if it’s in her to be what she is. We can only hope it’s the right sort. I hate to think of what it means if she’s not.”
Now I was full of new questions. “Be what she is”? “The right sort”? The right sort of what? What would I be? Something she hated to even think about? Perhaps I did have serious mental issues. No one was more eager to get the answers than I was, and if seeing a therapist would lead me to them, then I was all for it.
Shortly afterward, I met with the child psychologist, Irma Loman, a forty-two-year-old woman with graying dark brown hair and hazel eyes with tiny black spots in them. She didn’t sit behind a desk or have me lie on a couch or anything. She said we were going to be just like two friends talking.
“You can even call me Irma,” she said. “I’m not worried about protocol or formalities. Honesty, honesty. That’s the only important thing.”
She settled on her chair across from me like a hen sitting over newly laid eggs. Her thighs seemed to inflate beneath her knee-length dark gray skirt. She wore a white blouse with a frilly collar and frilly cuffs. Her straight hair was trimmed just below her cheekbones, which made her eyes and lips look bigger. She was only five foot four, with thick ankles and shiny rounded knees that looked like large Mason jar caps for homemade jelly, something I had never seen in our house but could easily envision.
“People who have spots in their eyes were touched by the devil’s tears when they were born,” I told her before she could ask me a single question.
She smiled, her cheeks bubbling and her small nose sinking. “What? Where did you learn such a thing?”
“A fortune-teller told me. She was blind and had a dog who led her around. He had silver fur and silvery gray eyes that glowed in the dark.”
“Blind?”
“She wasn’t always blind. She had been cursed,” I explained.
“Why was she cursed?”
“Not everyone likes to hear about his or her future, especially when it’s bad. Gypsies don’t make the future; they just see it faster than anyone else, and in this case, she tampered with the wrong person.”
“Tampered with the wrong person? What do you mean?”
“She annoyed someone with more power, someone who could put a curse on her.”
“If she could see the future, why didn’t she know that would happen to her?”
“Fortune-tellers can’t tell their own fortunes, only the fortunes of others,” I said, making it sound like something very obvious, something everyone should know.
She stared for a moment and then smiled again, this time with a slight nod, as if I had just confirmed something she had thought about me from the first moment she set eyes on me. “That doesn’t make sense from the start, Sage. Think about what you’re saying. How could she see if she was blind?”
“She had eyes behind her eyes,” I said.
Irma tightened her pale thick lips and scrunched her nose even more, like someone who had just smelled something horrible. She glanced at her notebook, sighed deeply, and began to ask me questions about my dreams. I tried to answer everything as truthfully as possible, because she had emphasized honesty.
“What’s wrong with me?” I blurted before my session was over. “I know my parents are growing more and more upset
about it.”
“Now, stop your worrying,” she ordered. She told me that some people don’t stop dreaming just because they wake up, and maybe I was one of those people. “It’s not bad,” she said quickly. “But maybe we should work on helping you leave your dreams behind when you wake up in the morning.”
She asked me more questions about my daily life, what I liked, what I thought of this or that, even colors and shapes. I saw her fill pages and pages of her notebook.
In the end, after two more sessions, she told my parents that I had a delusional disorder, a mixed type, but she felt I might outgrow it. She thought regular therapy sessions with her over time would quicken my recovery.
My mother wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as my father was, but I told them I didn’t mind seeing Irma now and then.
“I might even be able to help her more than she can help me,” I said.
My mother gasped and brought her right hand to the base of her throat, something she always did when she was a little shocked or surprised. “Why do you say that?” she asked. She looked at my father, and they both waited for my response.
“She has tiny black dots in her eyes,” I explained. “She’s going to do something very bad someday if no one helps her.”
“How would she know something like that?” my father asked my mother. “You can see.”
She shook her head. “No. Obviously, she’s not going to do Sage any good,” she concluded. “This is going nowhere, and it might even take her in the wrong direction altogether.”
Eventually, things settled down enough for them to stop sending me to Irma anyway, but I felt bad for her. A year later, she drank too much at a party and, driving home, hit a woman and a man crossing the street at night. The woman died, and Irma was charged with vehicular manslaughter. My father was the one who read about it and remembered what I had predicted.
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