It was a dark and stormy night — no, really, it was — when I passed the psychic on my way to the subway. It's the same route I take every day, only this time instead of a mysterious storefront with its purple cursive neon sign, the subject herself was sitting outside on a fold-out chair, smoking a cigarette, bored. She wore a bulky gray sweatshirt and a long batik skirt. A sign beside her read: "Psychic readings — $2."
Now, there are some things I would not spend two dollars on. I would not spend two dollars, for instance, to take heroin, or to be injected with some strange and shuddering exotic ailment. (I don't care how many book deals are in it.) But here is what I will spend two dollars on: pretty much anything else.
"Two dollars? Really?" I asked. I glanced at my cell phone; I was a tad early for my dinner date. "How long will it take?"
"Not long," she said, opening the door to a cramped, colorful room with two chairs. A little boy — scrawny, black-haired, laughing — burst into the room, saw me and scuttled back into the room from which he'd come.
"Not now," she snapped at him and then scolded him in an exotic language I could not place. "Ready?" she asked.
I shrugged and walked inside. Seriously, now: Wouldn't you?
I had been to a psychic exactly once before, at thirteen. The psychic told me I would marry someone with the same characteristics of the guy I was crushing on. The most cunning part about that experience was what she told me before she left: "If you tell anyone about this, it might not come true."
Since then, I've never had the urge to go again. I have friends who go as regularly as Nancy Reagan, and I suspect they'd rather I not identify them. Still, it had been a terrible day. And come on: two dollars?!
"Okay, can you turn your palm over for me?" she asked. I opened my right hand. It looked small, tender, pinkish.
"Your life line is long," she said, and I was embarrassed to find myself relieved. I'd been thinking recently about people taken too soon, people taking themselves too soon, thinking about the things I'd yet to accomplish: family, kids, books, a trip to Africa.
"Well, that's a good start," I said with a sigh.
She smiled. She had crooked teeth. She looked to be about twenty-six, twenty-seven. She spoke with a nasal New York accent and the efficiency of someone who had done this many times before. "You're going to have children. Two children, in three to five years. Closer to three now that I look at it."
So far, my future life was awesome. I did, in fact, want kids in three years, at thirty-eight, far enough away to fall in love with someone, travel with him to ridiculous locales and have enormous amounts of sex before our lives went the way of spit-up bibs and messy diapers.
"I see that you're a leader, not a follower," she said. "You find it easier to give advice than take it. You put on a front that you're happy all the time, but you have sadness" — which is true. Suddenly I became painfully curious what script she was following, what type I had been ascribed. Me, with my hot pink iPod and my cheap leather purse from Target, my cute knit cap and streaked blonde hair and my eyes swollen from crying. It's a kind of litmus test for how strangers view you, isn't it? What was I to her? Alpha female with a side of crazy?
"You have a soulmate," she said. "He's come back into your life recently."
I had, in fact, been talking to Nick that afternoon, a sweet and wonderful and tough conversation, like every conversation we have since he broke up with me eight months ago.
"He cares deeply about you still," she continued.
I nodded. I found myself wishing she wouldn't call Nick my "soulmate," and then I realized, darkly, that she had not.
I cannot tell you how exhausted I was that night. I had not gone to sleep the night before, had spent the entirety of the evening drowning my heartache in booze and casual sex. By that afternoon, when I spoke to Nick on the phone, I was a bit delirious. I had taken a Tylenol PM four hours prior. It had not worked out as planned.
"We have to get off the phone," Nick finally told me after I finished a monologue about polar bears, which was fascinating in my mind. "You have to go lie down," he said.
"Five more minutes!" I begged, petulant, a clingy child, never wanting to let him go.
"No," he said, much to my surprise. "I'm being stern with you now. You have to go lie down. I'll talk to you in a couple days. Okay?"
I hung up, languished in bed for two hours — weeping, feeling bored and frustrated — before I finally drifted off. My nap lasted forty-five minutes.
The psychic continued, "I see here that you will always be loved enormously, but it will be hard for you to hold onto that love." Her voice became gentle. "You blame yourself for this. You think you push people away. But this soulmate, he disappeared fast, and it was nothing you did."
A tear slipped off my cheek and splattered onto the table. She looked up at me, startled. "Don't cry," she said, kindly. That's what nearly everyone says in this moment. Don't cry. It's rare that I don't hear that, and when people don't say it, you know they truly understand you. My mom does not say it. My best friends don't say it. Nick never said it. That afternoon, as I garbled out a tear-choked explanation about something or other, he just said: "Slow down, sweetie. I'm having trouble understanding you."
I nodded to the woman, wiped a knuckle underneath my eye and tried to suck it up. I didn't want to talk about Nick anymore. I didn't want to screw up my makeup.
"You're not sleeping much," she told me.
And that was the moment — for better or worse — when my skepticism crumbled. Maybe my resistance had been worn down by the talk about a soulmate, a soulmate who still cared deeply about me, a soulmate I lost but it was not my fault. I don't know; I was so tired. I actually let out a little laugh. "I'm an insomniac," I said.
"It's a decision tree," said my colleague at work, a born skeptic, when I told him the story. "She tells you answers based on your responses and reactions. It's all show. It's entertainment."
I know, I know, but then she said something I couldn't figure out.
"You recently received something. It's dark, there's a shadow around it. I'm not sure why, but this object has a great deal of negative energy. Someone else may have had it for a while."
I pulled away from her, almost snapped back my hand. "That kind of creeps me out."
The day before, I had received the last of the evidence from my mugging more than two years ago. I'd been hit over the head with a pistol and robbed in the French Quarter. The dude took my Dolly Parton tote bag, but I got something in exchange: I fell in love with the detective on the case. That's Nick. Six months after the hearing, I visited him in New Orleans, and soon after, I decided to move there to be with him, rent a ramshackle shotgun in the Bywater, paint the walls an extravagant color, plant an overgrown garden in back. Nick and I talked about marriage, not if, but when.
Six months later, just a few months before I planned to uproot myself from my life in New York, he ended our relationship. "I can't do this right now," he told me over the phone one night, no warning but a couple days of ominous silence. "I met you at the wrong time." Although he didn't mention it, his divorce had been final that week.
Nick and I went months without speaking. My life felt calamitous. Not just emotional crises, but financial ones as well. I owed boatloads to the federal government in back taxes, to credit-card companies. I had to move. I struggled not to check myself into a hospital, not to bolt to my parents' house in Dallas, not to collapse at work, where I sometimes sat on the tiled bathroom floor and rocked myself back and forth.
But life is a funny thing, isn't it? Two years after my mugging, after the man who hit me over the head with a pistol received fifteen years of jail time, after I fell madly in love with the detective on my case and then watched, helplessly, as he ripped himself away, and after I pulled myself out of a black hole of depression and panic whose details are even foggy to me now — after all that, the New Orleans Police Department sent an official letter announcing that they had found my tote bag and driver's license. And let me tell you something hilarious and ludicrous about that letter: The contact number they gave me was wrong. "This number has been disconnected," the voice on the machine said when I called it.
"The evidence room relocated," Nick explained when I finally got ahold of him. He, too, had relocated — moved to homicide from robbery before we even started dating, and the job had started to gnaw at him. He was investigating the murder of a woman who'd been brutalized in her own apartment; he obsessed about it in the all-consuming way I obsessed about him, running his hands along every little piece of evidence, wondering what questions had not yet been asked, what little sliver of information would bring the whole story screaming into focus.
Anyway, that's why I was on the phone with Nick that afternoon — to talk about how the evidence had arrived, to thank him for making sure it was sent back to me, since he'd had to take time out of this open case to track it down. I wanted to cry about the finality of it. I wanted to talk to him for a million billion hours because, in some symbolic way, it felt as though this case — twenty-eight long months after it had begun — was finally closed.
The psychic continued a little longer. I'd had "a financial calamity" (true), and a rupture with an important friend that had hurt me deeply (I had, and it did). Then she said, "You should come back," and I realized, with not a small amount of disappointment, that my reading had come to an end. It was as though she had snapped her fingers in front of my face, and there I was, yanked back to that colorful and cramped Brooklyn storefront. The reading had taken maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe fewer, maybe more.
"I don't know that I can help you," she said. "But I know that things are a mystery to you right now." The tone of her voice, the calculated clip, suggested she had slipped back into her script. She took a card and wrote her number and name on the back: Ashley.
"For you, I would suggest a candle reading," she said. "Candle readings are forty dollars, but they are guaranteed. I cannot guarantee you will get an answer. But if you don't get an answer, you'll receive your money back. It's really just up to the candle."
Hmmm. I wondered how often the candle "gave an answer."
"You should come back," Ashley said. "We're running a lot of specials."
Even now, as I write this, I am trying to remember the things she said that stood out as phony or too vague. (Financial calamity? Who hasn't had a financial calamity these days? My soulmate still loves me? Shouldn't any soulmate love you, by definition?) I am trying to figure out my role in embroidering detail onto the information she gave me. And I am trying to figure out how she could pluck out just the right details to offer me that opportunity, what hints I dropped unknowingly, what little sliver of information made the whole story of me come screaming into focus.
Ashley opened the door to the street, and I wrapped a cardigan around me to protect myself from the fall chill. I walked back out into the dark and stormy night, some things forever a mystery to me. n°