I’d worked it out, foregoing my summer haircut (there’s $50 right there), eating more chicken and less salmon, that kind of thing. We do all right, but it’s not like we have an extra $450 every month that either of us can spend without the other noticing.
I’m carrying a burden heavier than my thirty-pound toddler. I shift Toby from one hip to the other. He starts to squirm, so Lakshmi—who made good on her earlier promise to go with me—takes him by the hand and walks to the gift shop while we hold our place in the line.
Pa tells me he went to the casino with Dottie again, and I nod and ask if he had a good time. He starts to tell me about their winnings. The conversation seems freakishly normal. Like people who end up laughing in the church foyer after a funeral. Is that disrespectful to the person they are supposed to be grieving?
I look around and realize the woman directly behind us is holding a square box of tissues. She came prepared. All I have in my purse is baby wipes.
When we get nearer to the registration table, I wave Lakshmi over, and Toby runs ahead of her with a squeal. The grandmothers in the line all smile at him and whisper to each other, nodding. The two young women behind the registration table are not amused. The one with dull shoe-polish hair and a pierced eyebrow notices my nose piercing and smiles at me, but her companion, the heavy one in a black concert T-shirt, is formal and stiff. I give her our tickets, and she pulls a paper out of an accordion file and explains that, of course, she expects the child to be removed from the room if he becomes disruptive. I nod.
She hands me the paper and tells me I have to sign a release. To ensure I understand this is for entertainment purposes only. To make sure I understand that if anything Toby is exposed to during the show is upsetting to him—if there are any psychological problems later, any kind of disturbance—we can’t sue Vaughn Redford. That I will take responsibility for bringing him here.
My legs feel heavy and thick. What am I doing? Pa doesn’t want to be here. Toby would rather be on a playground. I should’ve come alone, or with Lakshmi. I pull her aside.
Lakshmi asks, “Everything okay?”
“I have to sign a release.”
“It’ll be okay. I’m willing to walk around the back with Toby. That way, he’s in the room in case John Robberson shows up. And you can sit up closer with your father in case your mother shows up.”
Like a suspicious smell coming from inside a wall, the idea seeps into my consciousness: she is completely confident there are going to be spirits “showing up” today. Her only concern is which ones.
The shoe-polish-hair girl calls out, “Doors close in three minutes.”
The hotel conference room smells like moldy carpet and manufactured air and reminds me of the large training sessions I attended for my old job. Same beige walls, same cheap plastic contemporary chandeliers, same green hotel banquet chairs, lined up in rows, facing a platform stage with one lonely chair and two faded ficus trees at either side. It’s the seminar equivalent of a traveling carnival. The room crackles with anticipatory static. I can almost feel my hair standing on end as if someone has rubbed a balloon on my scalp.
We have to settle in the middle of a row, which worries me because if Toby gets loud, I’ll have to climb over people to get him out of the room. I get him settled and he ends up sitting on the floor on his knees, facing the chair, which he converts to a table. He begins to draw on the sketchpad I brought, with colored pencils he selects from my hand when he’s ready for new ones. He’ll be okay here for a while.
This is the part of motherhood that makes women forget themselves. I embarrassed myself in my striving to attend, and now that I’m here, I’m disconnected from the very experience I sought out. All I can do is focus on the same things I’d have focused on if we were home. So why am I here?
Vaughn Redford comes out to a standing ovation that he quickly dismisses. He makes a few comments and fields the first questions, mostly the verbal equivalent of fan mail. A woman in a black-and-white geometric-print blouse, mid-thirties, with a good haircut and manicured nails, asks, “If a person dies before he can speak, before he learns to talk, then how does he communicate with you? How would he come through?”
My heart sinks.
Pa leans over and says, “Ain’t too hard to figure out why she’s here.”
I slap him on the leg. “Hush.”
Vaughn Redford says, with admirable empathy, “They’re all spirits, so it doesn’t matter what they can do with their bodies here.” He goes on to tell a story about a different woman, at an earlier reading, whose child died in surgery. That’s all she said. He explains that he had made a point of asking her not to reveal the child’s age at death. He predicted age seven. When he started her reading, the child referenced many things that were current for the mother—things like the type of vacation the mother had recently taken, a picture hanging on a wall. So the child’s spirit was still watching the mother, closely.
According to Vaughn Redford, the main reason the child came through was to tell the mother not to feel guilty, that she was okay. The mother said, “She?”
Vaughn Redford is quiet in both voice and posture when he delivers the punch. The mother said she hadn’t even known she was pregnant but had an emergency appendectomy, with no time for a pregnancy test before, and the seven-week-old fetus died in surgery, before she even knew about it. So she was thrilled to discover it would have been a girl.
The crowd gasps.
I swallow the clot of sorrow that has crawled up from my heart to my throat.
“So,” Vaughn Redford says, “the spirit is present, even if the body never even makes it to this world.”
“Damn. He’s good.”
“If you don’t stop talking, I will choke you with my bare hands.”
Pa snickers.
I turn my head away from him and can feel hot, prickly tears seeping out. All I can think about are the three miscarriages I’ve endured, and I can’t help wondering if I’m going to get a message today. Can it be true that my unborn children are spirits around me? I viscerally want to believe it. I reach over to Lakshmi, who squeezes my hand. She’s so short, she can barely see, so she’s sitting with one leg curled beneath her as a booster seat.
Pa whispers, “Hey, squirt.”
Toby looks up from his coloring book.
“You let me know if you spot your grandma, all right?”
I swallow hard, knowing that Toby has never seen his grandma.
Then the session actually begins. The air in the room feels crowded and crackly, much different than it did when we first walked in. I smell mold, but I feel something else … that I can’t quite articulate.
Vaughn Redford indicates he’s feeling some energy from the left side of the room, near the middle section, with someone with an M-G name, like Maggie, Margo, Marguerite … He points to the middle seats and says, “See that lady with the pink shirt? Raise your hand, ma’am. Her. It’s coming from right behind her.”
I twist in my seat as the two women sitting behind me, one older and the other who looks like she could be the daughter, whisper with their heads together. The black-T-shirt girl is making her way over with the microphone. The younger woman says, “Marge?”
He says, “That’s an M-G name, all right. Stand up, please.”
Marge is the older woman’s sister, the younger woman’s aunt, and she died over a year ago—and evidently, according to Vaughn, wants to come back and tell everyone she loves them.
It means nothing to anyone except those two women. I am somewhat intrigued to realize what a bystander I am to the whole process. All I can think about are those miscarriages, and in spite of myself, I find myself praying that my babies will show up.
I’ve always thought they were all boys, all three of them. I’d love to know if I was right. We agreed not to name them. So for me, they’re First Baby, Second Baby, Third.
Vaughn Redford is already on to someone else, and this goes on for a while. Each time he swings his
arm around, walks over to one side of the room, and calls out a letter or number or other cryptic clue until someone responds.
This is exactly what makes people skeptical. While I was researching him, I found that most critics believe this process is the most objectionable part of Vaughn Redford’s alleged psychic skills. Some describe it as “fishing” for details, proposing that in a room of three hundred people, the odds are that someone will know someone who died and who had a name starting, for example, with the letter D. Other critics charge that he uses the Q&A period to gather information about people. Then, conveniently, those folks are the ones who get readings. I can see the logic in this, and it was persuasive to me at first. In fact, I’d convinced myself not to go, when I ran across a study by the University of Arizona. Vaughn Redford volunteered to be tested by a psychological research group, which confirmed that on blind readings, where he didn’t see the person being read, he was 80 percent accurate about the information he provided. Details like who died, how they died, even specific little things like pictures or jewelry keepsakes the dead people referenced in their communications; the research team concluded that he was actually seeing something. I didn’t doubt the study, and it was one of the things that made me feel better about coming here today.
But now that I’m here, all that logical proof stuff—it doesn’t matter at all to me. I’m not thinking about Kay or John Robberson or any of that. All I want is to see my babies.
I put my hand on Pa’s knee and wonder if he feels the same pull in his heart, if he is sitting there praying that Mom will show up. His fuzzy eyebrows are moving up and down as he follows the psychic bouncing ball of Vaughn Redford’s focus. I think he’s paying closer attention than I am.
Toby has been almost miraculously quiet. He stopped drawing a few minutes ago and climbed up into the chair. Lakshmi is playing a little hand game with him to keep him occupied, all the while keeping her eye on the front of the room. I wonder if he can feel the energy, or emotion, or whatever it is in the room. Maybe he sees it, and all I can do is feel it.
The next thing I know, the black-and-white geometric-print lady is standing up and saying, yes, we have a P name. Patrick.
Pa gets a cynical smirk on his face, which I catch. He squeezes my knee and says, “Here we go.” Vaughn Redford provides some mundane detail, which triggers the grieving mother. She chokes out the story of her eighteen-month-old who fell down, hit his head, and lapsed into a coma for eight months until he died. They celebrated his second birthday in a hospital room with nurses who dutifully ate cupcakes on his behalf. He never regained consciousness. I can picture that hospital room—all clinical and white, with pathetic balloons tied to the metal bedrails—and a teeny-tiny boy on the bed, asleep and asleep and asleep. I hope to God nobody stuck a damn pointy hat on his head.
My throat feels thick again, and my nerves are going crazy, sending out hyperjittery messages to the rest of my muscles. My leg starts twitching. The woman’s husband is sitting next to her, still as a stone, while she stands up and sobs out her story. Vaughn Redford assures her that Patrick is happy and running around, with none of the limitations he had on earth. I can see Eric in that husband, and I can’t help wondering if the boy was hurt on his watch. It would make a difference. Eric blames himself for Thud’s death.
I take a deep breath to settle my shakiness. Vaughn Redford shifts to someone else, which I don’t quite follow, so I startle when the woman one row in front of us drops her purse as she turns in her chair to look at me.
Toby looks up at the commotion as Vaughn Redford describes the husband who passed. They do their thing, and I am feeling ridiculous that I thought this would solve anything.
Then, out of the blue, Toby looks up from his book and says, “Thud!”
The people around us titter with laughter. I shush him quickly.
Almost as an answer to Toby, Vaughn Redford says, “Yes, that’s right, that’s what I’m getting. Thud? Is that a name, or a noise, or what? Does that mean anything to you?”
He points at me. “You. The kid’s mom. Can you stand up?”
Lakshmi pushes me to my feet, and someone hands me the microphone.
“Me?”
“Does Thud mean anything to you?”
“Um, Thud was our dog?”
The crowd laughs.
“You named your dog Thud? What kind of name is that?” He looks to the audience and shrugs as he walks toward the front of the stage.
“He kept running into the couch when he was little.” I smile, playing to the crowd.
“Okay. Has Thud passed?”
“Yes.”
Vaughn Redford explains he’s getting a feeling of tightness, thickness in his throat. He tells me (well, the whole room) that Thud suffocated. “He loved to run, and he’s in no pain now.”
The crowd murmurs, but I’m left standing there like a fence post. I still can’t believe he’s talking about Thud like he knows him.
Then the weirdest thing happens: I smell the dog. I smell Thud’s doggy breath, the dirty hot scent of him as he barged into my kitchen every morning after his run with Eric, to slop water all over my tile floor. I smell it, exactly as if he were rubbing up against my leg as I stand here with 350 people I don’t know, including poor Patrick’s mom, in a moldy beige conference room with a microphone in my hand. I look at Vaughn Redford. It’s as if he’s at the end of a long tunnel. I have the sensation that he and I are the only ones in the room.
I sneeze.
The black-T-shirt girl reaches out for the microphone, obviously annoyed now that she has to wipe it down. I didn’t actually want the microphone in the first place, but now I’m not ready to give it up. I turn away from her.
Frantic, I ask, “What about the fire? Is there a fire?”
“No, it’s a throat thing.” Vaughn Redford pauses and cocks his head as if he were listening. “Now I’m getting a double J name. JJ?”
“John?” My heart does a flip-flop.
“I’m not getting that. It’s a double.” He looks at me. “JJ.”
“No. There’s a John.”
“Am I stuttering?” The audience laughs. “This one’s not ambiguous. It’s not John. It’s JJ. You don’t know what that means?”
“No,” I say, not bothering to hold the microphone to my mouth.
“Maybe this part isn’t for you.” He waves his arm in my direction. “Are you here with your dad?”
“Yes.”
“Sir, does JJ mean anything to you?”
“No.” Pa reaches for the microphone. “Excuse me. I want to make sure you got that. That’s a hell no.”
Everyone laughs.
“Okay, fine. But somebody back in that section needs to hear this,” Vaughn Redford says. “JJ is very insistent. He’s telling me to say ‘let go.’ ”
Pa snorts.
Vaughn Redford looks at me. “Maybe he’ll listen to you, then. Tell him to let go.”
I want to shake him, to get him off this JJ thing. “What else does he say? Anything about Kay? Do you know about Kay?”
“That’s not how it works.” He launches into a long discussion about why he can’t take questions; it’s not like placing an order. You can’t just summon spirits from the other side. They have to want to come, whether we want to acknowledge the connection or not, blah, blah, blah.
I hand the microphone off and sit down.
Pa says, “Can we go now?”
“I’m sorry about that.”
I can’t make sense of any of this. The whole Thud thing is weird enough, but then this Redford guy pulls a J name out of his hat? And then argues with me?
Lakshmi asks, “What the hell is up with JJ?”
“I have no idea,” I whisper to her, “unless John Robberson stutters now.”
I pull Toby into my lap and breathe in the smell of his hair to clear my nose. What about the smell? I smelled the dog. Not any dog. Thud.
Toby squirms in my lap, and I’m more than happy to
be the one who steps outside with him. Pa follows me, but Lakshmi stays for the rest. We wait at the registration desk outside the conference room, and Toby draws pictures of Thud.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
*
DEFINE OPEN-MINDED
On the drive home, Lakshmi wants to recap our Vaughn Redford experience, but we can’t make any sense out of the JJ thing. There’s so much I want to tell her, but not in front of Toby. The most lingering emotional effect of the experience, for me, comes from the unexpected longing I felt about the miscarriages. I can’t quite carry my end of the conversation. Soon, she asks if I’m disappointed that I didn’t hear from my mom. I can’t answer that one, either. I guess it depends on what she would’ve said.
After my mom died, I heard her voice in my head for months. At the grocery store, every time I’d say hello to the checker, her thoughts echoed in my head, even though I didn’t share her opinion. Dreadful tattoo. On such a lovely girl. Walking around the neighborhood. Look at those flowerpots. Now, someone there cares about her home. Often, when I looked in the mirror. You have such beautiful eyes. Now why would you let your hair cover them up like that?
To be fair, my mom was wonderful when I was a little girl. I have sweet memories of her playing and pretending with me. Maybe each mother has a sweet spot, an age range that suits her best. Some moms are great with teenagers. Others are great with babies. Mine wasn’t great with anything past puberty, so we fought until I left for college. By the time I came back, neither of us knew the other very well. I blamed her for that.
But really, I had no idea who she was, either. That’s what I miss: the chance to be friends with my mom. So I settle for hearing her voice, and sometimes—right before I wake up, or when I’m daydreaming, in that lucid but inattentive state of mind—I feel it. My mother nudges me, a slight physical sensation. A little push on my shoulder. A knowing, supportive nudge.
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