The Knowing: Awake in the Dark

by Nita Lapinski

  She snatched the album from my hands and slammed it shut.

  “Put this goddamn thing away before you ruin it,” she snapped.

  Years later I would discover that the fat girl in the album was my mother at age fourteen. In her youth, she struggled mightily with her weight, reaching what we label today as “morbid obesity.” My mother struggled with that image of herself. It was a reminder of a sad, dysfunctional, childhood that held no joy.

  She grew up in a wealthy suburb with both money and opportunity. She was a debutant and had a “coming out party,” something that was from fairytales for me. Her family had domestic staff who cooked, cleaned and tended the grounds working daily at her large, whitewashed home sitting quiet on a stately street.

  We would never know our grandparents as our mother never spoke to them. Our grandmother would commit suicide two decades later. Three years would pass after her death before my mother would even know. My mother had a sister who was one year older than herself. I knew her only from photos. She had a half-brother too with Down syndrome who lived in an institution. She rarely spoke of her family at all.

  My mother would tell me years later why she married our father. “I never loved him,” she said. “When I got pregnant with Karina, my father forced me to marry her father, who was abusive. I divorced him in less than a year and moved back home. It was like a living in hell.

  Both of my parents were alcoholics and I hated them. There was no love in that house. I married Dell, to get away from them and to make them angry. They disowned me and cut me out of their wills for marrying beneath my status, but I didn’t care, they could keep their filthy money. He was my ticket out. When we met, your father was uneducated and poor with no future. I drug him through flight school. If not for me, he would never have gone anywhere in life.”

  I was shocked to hear my mother’s story and she never elaborated or shared more about their past.

  My father, Dell came from extreme poverty—a fact that was often whispered in conversation. My mother would say, “That poor bastard was dirt poor and lucky he had shoes on his feet.”

  This background defined my father and he had a lifelong fear of never having enough.

  “That poor bastard,” my mother said into the phone receiver one night while she stood at the sink rinsing dishes. “He never got over his piece-of-shit father who left him standing by the gate from morning till night waiting with a fishing pole and bucket for a fishing trip he would never go on. He didn’t give a shit about Dell and everyone knew it.”

  Gifted with a high IQ, my father would fly planes and captain boats for a living. I thought my father was handsome and charismatic, with deep blue eyes and blond hair. When I was told that I looked just like him, I swelled with pride. He wasn’t home much and I yearned for his attention and affection.

  A few weeks before my mother left my father for good, he sat alone in our living room. The song, “Tiny Bubbles,” rang out from the stereo speakers. The album cover, propped in front of one speaker, featured a smiling, brown-skinned man sporting a flowered necklace. My father sat on the couch and sang along to his favorite song. I climbed into his lap, breathing in the smell of cigarettes and Old Spice, so I could feel the humming his chest made while he sang. I sang too, having memorized all the words.

  My father held me close, bumping his knee to the song’s beat so I bounced up and down. I could feel his love in the warmth and squeeze of his hands. I don’t ever remember sitting in my mother’s lap or hearing whispers of love. He was perfect in my eyes and I wished I could stay that way forever.

  I left for school one morning and everything was completely normal, but as I neared my house that day walking home, I saw the giant orange moving van in our driveway. I walked through the door, arms filled with books, and everyone was busy running in different directions. Boxes were scattered throughout the house, and upon seeing me, my mother barked, “Nita, go to your room and pack your things.”

  “But why? Where are we going?” I asked, puzzled. “Do as you’re told, goddammit. Now get going!”

  Panic seized me.

  When I got to the room I shared with Maggie, she was filling a box with clothes.

  “Why are we leaving?” I asked, tears threatening.

  Before she could answer, our eldest sister Karina stood in the doorway and said, “You better stop sniveling and hurry up.”

  “But where’s Daddy?” I asked, now openly crying.

  “He’s not coming,” she said. “Mom’s leaving him.” And with that Karina turned and was gone.

  When my mother left my father, he was working as a flight engineer for a commercial airline. He also had a secret family living in another state. As it happened, he wasn’t due home for a couple of days, but my mother had “a feeling” and called the flight desk to inquire as to his whereabouts. The response, “Oh Dell, well he left yesterday. His wife and son picked him up.”

  My mother promptly left him, never forgiving or looking back. It happened abruptly and none of us saw it coming.

  We drove for two days, arriving in California on the afternoon of the third day. Mother was giddy as we crested a hill with a large sign at the side of the road that read, “Welcome to California: The Sunshine State.” For me, the move marked a surge in my intuitive ability—an ability that I didn’t yet understand.

  The Boy Abandoned

  When the boy woke up, he was alone in a strange room where the wet heat suffocated him. The distant bellow of a cow mooing and the squawks of chickens brought him fully awake and he remembered that his parents had discarded him. Threw him away like trash. They had shipped him off.

  The boy had been angry and had broken the rules which had landed him in trouble. Although he was only nine years old, he snuck out at night defying his parent’s rules and stole from stores on a regular basis, not caring if he got caught, which he frequently did. Now, as a result he was miles away on a desolate farm living with an aunt and uncle he did not know.

  His father had spent most of his time drinking and his mother would scamper after him like a pet. It sickened the boy.

  The bedroom door opened and his uncle poked his head in, “It’s time ya git up buddy and git a start on chores now. This is how we do it ‘round here. Ain’t no trouble for ya ta git up to. Let’s git a move on.”

  It took several months for the boy to accept his new life, which was hard at first. He cried at night and felt isolated and alone. His aunt and uncle didn’t have children of their own and seemed happy to have the boy with them. They were patient and kind. He grew to love them and he found comfort in the working of the farm. He stayed out of trouble and worked hard and began to forget the stinking, rot of his father. After two years had passed, the boy was happy and felt loved.

  One morning before the sun rose, the boy hurried to the barn to check on the cat that kept the barn clear of rodents. She’d just had kittens a couple of days before and the boy wanted to check on them. Kneeling in the soft dirt he scooped up the tiny mewing babies and nuzzled his face in their silky fur. “it’s gonna be a good day,” he said to the purring mother cat. “Don’t look like it’ll be too hot.” Putting the kittens down he said, “I’ll be back later.”

  The boy worked steadily, sweating in the sun when his uncle called to him from across the field, “Git in the truck will ya and move it back from them barn doors. We got hay comin. Keys is in it.”

  The boy jumped in the cab and twisted backwards so he could see behind him and backed up the old truck when he felt his tire roll over something. As he turned and looked through the windshield he shaded his eyes from the glare of the sun. There squirming in the dirt was the mother cat.

  “Nooo! Oh, buddy! I didn’t see ya.”

  The boy bolted from the cab and ran to the spot where she now lay still.
He lifted up the cat and held her close. Tiny rivulets of blood seeped from her nose. Tears coursed down his cheeks, “I’m so sorry” he cried into the animal’s fur. The boy gripped her neck and twisted, releasing her from suffering. His sense of loss was enormous and the boy was sick with it for days, unable to leave his bed. It was just a week later when his mother called and said, “Send the youngn home.”

  The boy didn’t want to go home. He’d adjusted to the way things were at the farm. He was sad to leave his aunt and uncle but he had no power in the matter. The boy went home bitter with the powerlessness that he felt. He would never forget how his parents threw him away so easily just two years ago, no sir, he would never forget.

  Chapter 3

  I gave my first psychic reading at the age of eight. I had no idea what I was doing. It was spontaneous and I hadn’t known I could do it until the moment it occurred.

  It happened while spending time with a new acquaintance, an adult. Her name was Angie and she lived in the neighborhood where we’d just moved, she lived with her husband and toddler son.

  We sat together at her kitchen table. An oscillating fan on the floor blew the bangs from my sticky forehead. My elbows were planted firmly atop the round table covered with dominoes. My chin rested nicely in sweaty palms while my fingertips played my bottom lip like a base drum as I listened intently to Angie explain the rules of the game again.

  “Sammy, stop that now” Angie yelled interrupting her instruction to me.

  The toddler sat spread eagle on the floor just a few feet away in a circle of toys. Sam spit the matchbox car from his slobbering mouth and smiled a single toothed grin at his mother.

  How we met is vague in my memory but in my loneliness after our hurried move, I ended up at her house every day. I would forever feel like she was my first real friend because I bonded with her in such a unique way. Our iced tea glasses sweated wet rings onto the multicolored coasters beneath them and Angie continued to review the rules.

  “Now remember,” she said, “you can only pick seven the first time and if you get one with the same amount of dots on each end, it’s a double and those are good.”

  She smiled and I admired her dewy skin and hazel eyes. Her hair was blade-straight and fell like a thick, black shade to her shoulders.

  “Why don’t you go first this time,” she said as she winked at me.

  “Okay,” I eagerly agreed.

  My thumb caressed the smooth back of the ebony domino and I placed each one carefully on the tray in front of me. We played for a while when out of the blue Angie said,

  “I don’t know why I got married. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  She exhaled her pent up breath and gazed at her son playing on the floor.

  I heard a voice in my head that said, Yes you do. You wanted him to love you so you felt worthy even though you didn’t love him. He supports what you believe about yourself.

  Without thinking I repeated the information although it was well beyond my understanding. Angie said nothing as she stared at me, her lips parted as if she were going to speak. I felt her astonishment float like an invisible secret in the air between us and I regretted what I had said even as the words slipped from my memory. I knew without understanding that, what the voice said was a hidden truth that only she knew.

  I sat immobile at her kitchen table and I knew she didn’t love her husband and I knew he had hurt her in ways, I could feel, but not understand. I felt the essence that was him. I saw in my mind’s eye his curly, hair and boyish smile. I felt his stern and unbending, demeanor although I had never met him.

  “My god,” she breathed, “you are only a child. How can you know this stuff?”

  Angie then asked me questions. The answers channeled through me, in the form of the voice, accompanied with the knowing. She fixed me with her hazel eyes and said, “No one will believe me. I can’t tell anyone what you say. They’ll think I’m crazy.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. In that moment I felt so worthy and loved.

  I didn’t know how I knew what I did, but I wanted her to like me and be my friend. I felt special providing her with what seemed like valuable information. It was the first time I felt important. That was how it started and when I visited, that was what we did, we played dominoes and Angie talked to the voice.

  It was simple really, I heard a voice in my mind and when I repeated what I heard, the listener found remarkable insight into issues or events I couldn’t possibly know. The information I received was well beyond my understanding and I had no clear recall of what I said even moments after I spoke the words. That fact is still true today.

  After about a month went by, when I arrived home one afternoon my mother asked, “What are you doing at that woman’s house every day?”

  “She’s my friend” I replied. “We play dominoes and drink iced tea and stuff. She’s my friend” I repeated defensively.

  My mother stared at me, her eyes fleecing me, searching for the truth.

  “It is not normal for a grown woman to make friends with an eight’year’old,” she said.

  But why not? I thought. “She likes me,” I said, “and we’re friends.”

  “She must be terribly lonely,” my mother commented.

  “No” I said, “We’re friends. I help her with Sam and we talk about stuff.”

  My mother’s energy shifted and she stiffened, “What stuff?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, just stuff,” I said as I shrugged. “Her husband is probably having an affair,” I blurted out, though we’d never talked about that and I didn’t understand where it came from or what it meant.

  “Did she tell you this?” my mother questioned.

  “No. I just know,” I responded and immediately I realized that I shouldn’t have said that because what came next was devastating for me.

  “You are not to go to that woman’s house again. I mean it, young lady. That relationship is inappropriate,” my mother said.

  Tears welled up and my throat felt like I swallowed a Popsicle. “But she’s my friend,” I croaked. “We play dominoes. Mom, pleeease.”

  But my pleading got me nowhere, and that was the end of it. No further discussion. I ran down the hall and hurled myself on the bed and cried. I hate you, I just hate you, I screamed in my mind.

  A month later we moved across town to a small apartment complex and I never had the chance to say goodbye to my only friend.

  I couldn’t have known that my mother was trying to protect me from information she felt I shouldn’t have. Years later, she would tell me that she didn’t acknowledge how strong the Clairs were within me because my knowing and comments made her uncomfortable.

  Around this same time, I began to see pictures or visions behind my eyes—or at least that was the best way I knew how to describe them. Receiving pictures was like participating in and observing a 3-dimensional movie simultaneously. My pictures brought insight and ambiguity, puzzles and explanation and, ultimately, they molded who I would become.

  When the pictures came, I was held captive, like a genie in a bottle. Pictures happened spontaneously and could show anything. Seconds before they began, everything stopped. Sight, sound, and senses were suspended in the present moment and a channel opened through which the images entered. The experience was not like a seizure that paralyzes but rather it was a shift in attention. While observing the pictures, I experienced fully the feelings, thoughts, smells, sounds, and senses of the people I saw, creating an inner knowing although I was a mere observer.

  I called this “pictures” behind my eyes, but others might say “prophetic visions” or “psychic visions” to describe the same thing. I didn’t know why I received pictures about some things and not others.

  After we moved from Angi
e’s neighborhood, I was still angry at my mother. It was Saturday morning and the sun was beginning to warm the chilly morning air. I sat perched on the cold cement steps that led to the second floor where we lived. Bent nearly in half, my cheeks planted firmly between my scabby kneecaps, I peered down between the steps and let a long tendril of spit slowly drip onto a delicate spider web that hung there. The vision began.

  Two women were sitting at a kitchen table talking and smoking cigarettes.

  Their cigarettes dangled with ash, their breath hot with coffee, and their hearts were heavy with judgment. As this scene became clear to me, it was like I was an invisible ghost floating in the room and I knew what they felt and thought—like we were all connected—like we were one.

  “Can you believe it!?” exclaimed the first woman. “She is barely twenty one, not married, and on her second baby!”

  Somehow, I knew this woman’s name was Tanya. She wore cutoff jeans whose fuzzy trimmed threads circled her perfectly smooth and lightly tanned thighs. She had a longish face that reminded me of a horse.

  “My god,” Tanya snorted, “My brothers would kill me!” she leaned her slender body forward and widened her pale brown eyes to exaggerate her point. “I mean they would kill me after they killed him of course.”

  Unfolding her long legs, she pushed back from the table. She then made her way to the sink, and poured the coffee down the drain. The small, dingy kitchen had sticky counters stacked with dirty dishes.

  Holly, the other woman at the round table, lifted a cigarette to her lips, pulled hard, and blew smoke towards the ceiling as she considered her response. “She has always been trash,” Holly commented. “Always will be, I guess.”

  Holly was petite with delicate features and had the exotic look of a beauty queen. She wore a homemade halter-top in the shape of a kerchief that was tied so tightly at her neck and back that it burrowed into her soft skin, leaving deep marks from the weight of her surprisingly large bosoms.