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  "Are you sure about this?" Mom asked, looking in the rearview mirror at Gwen.

  Gwen nodded. "I'm sure. It'll be okay."

  I felt suddenly like a child, with grownups spelling to keep the meaning of their conversation hidden. But I was, frankly, beyond caring. Again, I thought longingly of home.

  We got out of the car and moved down the street in the dark There weren't any sidewalks or streetlamps here. The only light came from the windows of houses on either side of the road. The cold autumn wind was laced with the smell of fireplace smoke and the sickly-sweet scent of decay, like rotting apples. Dry leaves swirled along the pavement with a sound that made me think of fingernails raking over a rough surface.

  Gwen led the way up the walk. The front door featured opaque yellow windows in a pebblestone pattern. Shapes moved beyond the glass. I heard the mumble of voices and wondered if they came from inside the house or inside my head.

  The woman who answered the door appeared to be in her seventies, with short silvery hair threaded with darker hues. "Hi, Mrs. Hawkley?" Gwen extended her hand. "I'm Gwen. We spoke over the phone."

  Mrs. Hawkley stared blankly at Gwen's empty hand for a moment before understanding animated her face. "Gwen, of course. Come in, please. This must be Becky."

  "Hello."

  "And I'm Becky's mom, Kathy."

  "Hello and welcome," Mrs. Hawkley said as she ushered us inside. "Please, take a seat wherever you'd like. There's food if you're hungry."

  The living room's fireplace and wood paneling had all been painted a cheerful color of antique white to match the room's Berber carpet. Chairs representing every decade from the past sixty years had been arranged here as if for an amateur theatrical. At the room's far end stood a buffet with a range of serving dishes, potluck fare in a broad variety of salads and casseroles. There were perhaps two dozen men and women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies chatting, eating, and drinking.

  I swallowed deeply. I felt like I'd taken a bite of something too big to chew. Dizzy, I grasped for the nearest wall.

  "Beck, are you okay?"

  "I think I'd better sit down."

  The room was warm but not stuffy, yet it was hard to catch my breath. My knees felt suddenly unable to support my weight, and I slid gratefully into a chair at the side of the room.

  Gwen's face was suddenly large before me. "Are you going to be okay?"

  "Yeah."

  "Maybe you'd feel better if you ate something." Mom's voice, from somewhere to the side. "Something besides your ponytail."

  Gwen gently pulled the strands of wet hair out of my mouth.

  "I'm all right."

  "Are you sure? If you had something in your stomach, it might settle you down."

  "Mom, I'm not hungry." I knew without looking at my reflection that I looked ill. The weight loss that at first made me slender and attractive now made me look sick. Dark patches shadowed my eyes like bruises, and my complexion looked yellow and unwell. I was never hungry. My stomach was always upset.

  After a few minutes I started to feel a little better. I liked having my back against the wall, with Mom and Gwen sitting on either side of me. My vision steadied long enough to check out the crowd.

  As always, information about the people around me filled my head. I knew instantly that the earthy-looking woman with the plate full of potato salad was stealing money from the small veterinary clinic whose books she kept. The distinguished man standing next to his wife near the fireplace, the one holding the glass of white wine, had over the past six months fallen in love with an intern at his law firm, a young college student named Paul, who clerked for one of the senior partners. And Mrs. Hawkley, the woman who had opened the door for us, was very ill — or would be shortly. Pancreatic cancer would claim her in a year's time.

  I picked up this and other snippets, too many and too fast to digest all at once, from every corner of the room. I started to get dizzy again, and put my head between my knees to prevent passing out and making a scene.

  Mom's cool, soft fingers lightly tickled the nape of my neck, gradually drawing me back to reality. After another ten minutes, people began to sit down. Mrs. Hawkley turned off lamps and dimmed overhead lights, and the room quieted to a series of faint murmurs and whispers.

  "Thanks, everyone, for coming tonight," Mrs. Hawkley said in a stage voice as she stood in the pool of track lighting before the fireplace. "Some new faces, I see. Welcome. Tonight we have as our special guest Catalina Romero from Brooklyn. I know some of you have had a chance to have private sessions with her and can attest to her gifts. Please help me welcome her."

  Applause filled the dim space. As we waited for Catalina to appear, I felt the sudden stab of attention fall on me, as if someone was watching. My eyes darted automatically to the back of the room, the source of the feeling, and saw him, an old man sitting in the room's shadowy far corner. He had white hair, a neatly trimmed goatee, and black-rimmed glasses from another generation. When I caught his gaze, he grinned at me, a kindly smile that I liked right away.

  Catalina appeared at the front of the room. Slender and pretty, she had straight, chin-length hair that was so blond as to be almost white. Her large green eyes and triangular face gave her face a cat-like appearance. She immediately climbed on a stool that Mrs. Hawkley had provided and rewarded us with a warm laugh.

  "Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming," she said with a soft-spoken voice that immediately silenced the room. "I know you've had guest speakers here before. I don't know how they worked, but I prefer to let things unfold naturally. I discovered a long time ago that the only time I get befuddled is when I try to direct what happens. It's much easier when I step aside and get out of my own way and just let things take place at their own pace."

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let her arms relax in her lap. I glanced at Mom, who rolled her eyes. Despite everything, I giggled silently, looking back at the old man in the corner. It was too dark to tell for sure, but he seemed to be observing me coolly, the slightest hint of amusement on his whiskery lips. There was something startlingly familiar about him. I felt suddenly sure that I'd seen him before. But where?

  Again, I felt the slightest hint of warmth from him but nothing more. No information, no omens of his future, only a hazy sense of goodness. Unsatisfied, I attempted something I'd never done before: I tried purposefully to read him, casting out my mind in his direction, hoping to pluck something important out of the darkness that might give me a better idea of exactly who he was. Yet an invisible barrier seemed to block me, muddying everything about him but a faint feeling of kindness. Who was this guy?

  "Jorge," Catalina said from the fireplace spotlight. "Do I have a Jorge here?"

  There was a gurgle from the middle of the room, a throat clearing, and then a voice. "I'm Jorge."

  "Okay, good," Catalina answered. "Will you stand up please so I can get a better focus on you?"

  A thick-waisted Latino man with a dense shock of black hair and a bristly walrus mustache rose to his feet. He awkwardly clasped his hands in front of him.

  "That's him." A whisper, disembodied, directionless. "That's my boy." I looked around the room, trying to locate its source. There was a vague Spanish accent to it.

  "You know a Maria?" Catalina asked.

  "Yes," the man answered.

  "Your mother?"

  "Yes."

  "Maria," Mom whispered sarcastically in my ear. "What are the odds?"

  I patted her knee to silence her.

  "Tell him that I love him. Tell him that I miss him. Tell him that I'm sorry." The ghostly voice again, as if the owner sat somewhere out in the darkened audience.

  The Latino man was maybe fifty years old, wearing stylish glasses, a tieless suit and dress shirt. He looked successful enough now, but I felt a toughness about him. I sensed early gang violence. Drugs. Jail time. Despite his sheen of success, he clearly wasn't someone people messed with. This was a guy who could deal out pain if
you crossed him.

  "She passed when you were young, yes?" Catalina asked.

  "Yes," answered the Latino man.

  "You were her only son, her only child. Is that right?"

  "Yes," the Latino man acknowledged.

  "I abandoned him," the bodiless voice cried. "Tell him I'm sorry."

  "Do you hear that?" I murmured to Gwen.

  "Hear what?"

  "That voice? A Spanish lady's voice."

  Gwen shook her head.

  Catalina continued. "You remember your mother but she was sick a lot."

  "Yes."

  "She passed very young, didn't she?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, Jorge, I'm so sorry," Catalina said empathetically. "It looks like you had a terribly tough time."

  "Yes," his voice cracked. And then something happened I was completely unprepared for. This large tough guy, with fists the size of pigeons, broke down in sobs. Not merely a manful tear, the Latino man truly became unhinged, blubbering into his huge hands uncontrollably. Something about seeing the big man's release of emotion made my own eyes fill and overflow.

  One of the Latino man's neighbors handed him a handkerchief. He took it and wiped his face. The session continued. Apparently, Jorge's mother had been sickly, even before he was born. Carrying Jorge had been too much for her fragile little body. She died of bone cancer when Jorge was five. Jorge's father, a heavy drinker even in good times, didn't take Maria's death well. Recognizing his shortcomings, he placed Jorge in the care of his grandmother. Within two years he had drunk himself to death.

  The reading intensified when Jorge's father stepped in and continued his mother's apologies, admitting to everything that he could and should have done for Jorge while he was alive. Like the first phantom female voice, I heard a second male one whispering information just before Catalina interpreted it. Catalina didn't repeat everything word for word. She seemed to be getting information nonverbally — psychically? — as well as the direct communication I was hearing. All the while Jorge stood there, sometimes standing manfully at attention and other times sobbing into the by-now drenched handkerchief.

  Despite the impressive display, Mom was kind of acting like a jerk. Her skeptical mouth-twitches were really getting on my nerves. One by one, Catalina went around the room as more deceased friends and relatives made themselves known, sometimes with very specific information that each of their living counterparts confirmed. A teenage boy came through whose loved ones had suspected of committing suicide, revealing that it had been an accident. He had fallen while climbing the bridge his body was found under. There was the husband who gave detailed information to his widowed wife about where to find his life insurance policy. And there had been a little boy who came to his mom and dad, a couple who by now were old enough to be grandparents. The boy had passed after a fall down some stairs and was appearing now to his parents — who'd never had other children — to tell them that he was okay.

  Each time I heard their ghostly voices from somewhere nearby before Catalina even provided the information. But with each new display, Mom shook her head and fidgeted. I whispered to Gwen that bringing Mom had been a mistake, but Gwen was insistent. "It's important," she'd said when we'd been making plans. "Your mom is supposed to be there. I don't know why."

  "Look who's psychic all of a sudden," I'd replied, but now I knew. Mom was going to humiliate me.

  "Is there a Kathy here?" Catalina asked after a very long pause. "Kathy?"

  I felt Mom stiffen next to me, but she said nothing.

  "Kathy?"

  Gwen and I looked at her. "Mom." I poked her, but she refused to move.

  "Ask for Bunny."

  "I've been told to ask for Bunny?" Catalina repeated after a few beats.

  Finally, Mom stood. Her mascara was already pooling beneath her eyes.

  "Yes. That's me."

  It was my Great Nana Mary, my mom's grandma, who, unbeknownst to anyone in the room — including me — had called Mom "Bunny." Now there could be no denials, as Nana Mary told about the times she and Mom had spent alone together when Mom was a kid, the stories she'd told her at bedtime, the cookies they baked together, the walks they'd taken. Mom acknowledged each bit of information as it came, otherwise mute, the only signs of any emotion the black tears that streaked down her otherwise frozen face.

  I'd been hearing everything Catalina was relating directly from my Nana Mary. At first Nana seemed to stand up at the front of the room, near Catalina, but after a while I felt her get closer, until she seemed to be standing right behind me, off to the side where Mom was sitting.

  "It's all right, Becca, everything is going to be all right." My nana's voice, whispered directly in my ear. Memories of my near-death experience flooded through me, the two of us walking together in that beautiful place, ancient trees and the pretty mansions and that indescribable sense of love. I'd been crying before but now the waterworks were going full blast.

  "Pay attention," she went on. "This is very important. You must listen to the handsome older gentleman in the back of the room. He's safe. You can trust him."

  My Great Nana Mary, who had all my life looked out after me, even if I hadn't known it, was looking out after me still.

  Chapter Nine

  Cali

  Sacramento, California

  December 16

  The kitchen was a flipping disaster.

  Dishes were piled in the sink and on every surface of the chipped tile countertop. Empty milk cartons stood guarding discarded pizza boxes, frozen food wrappers, and dirty glasses fogged with milk. Liquor bottles, drained of their insides, huddled around a trashcan stacked high with garbage. On the kitchen table, between ashtrays full of stubbed-out cigarettes, sat the room's only hint of the holidays — a plate of Christmas cookies delivered by a neighbor, its surface picked clean of everything but thick slices of fruitcake. And, suspended over it all, the stink of food gone bad.

  As I surveyed the damage, I gazed beyond the kitchen counter to the living room, where Dad sat catatonic in the darkness, the ghostly light of the mute television washing over his face in a constantly shifting grey light. He'd been like this for almost two weeks now, ever since his girlfriend, Tammy, had blown him off. He did little now but stare at the TV, drink, and smoke. I didn't even see him go to bed anymore. He just closed his eyes and dozed in his chair.

  With Tammy gone, Dad had gone through some sort of meltdown, refusing to answer questions or even acknowledge me. His indifference and the steadily growing mess in the kitchen was an echo of the entire house, which I'd come to think of as an abandoned ship, drifting out of control and gradually sinking. All this will be at the bottom of the ocean soon, I thought, wondering if Dad was beyond hauling into a lifeboat. I didn't know how much time we had before we were evicted, but it couldn't be more than a few weeks; maybe, if we were lucky, the end of January.

  I bit nervously at my lip ring, trying to figure out where to start on the mess. I chose the garbage, emptying the trashcan, collecting the bottles and taking them out to the recycle bin, gathering the stray rubbish in large black plastic bags and exiling them to the back porch. That made a dent in the carnage, but there were still pans and dishes with petrified crud imprinted on their metallic and porcelain surfaces. I cleared the sink just to have an unsullied zone to start the scrubbing, but when I opened the dishwasher, I was hit with a sickly sweet reek, like rancid tar, that made me retch.

  "Did you want me to fix you some dinner?" I called out when the dishwasher was humming on its first cycle and newly rinsed plates, pans, and flatware sat dripping on the counter, awaiting the next load. "I can make spaghetti and garlic bread."

  Dad continued to stare at the television, unresponsive, marinating in his own filth. I filled a pot with water and reached into the pantry for a jar of spaghetti sauce. Maybe the smell of spaghetti sauce would bring him back to the world of the living. It made me think back to dinners in this very kitchen, with Mom presiding over a large bowl
of pasta, the aroma of basil and rosemary filling the warm space.

  We'd been a family then, Dad sitting at the head of the table, poking at his latest elaborate cell phone; Chris at the far end, cradling a stuffed animal in his lap; Mom asking everyone about our days while our dog, Bruno, circled the table, hoping for stray scraps. It had been so dorky; I'd hated it. Yet sometimes at night when I was lying in bed, I'd pretend I was back there before the iceberg had been struck and the ship started to take on water. But whenever it got too real, the pain stabbing into my heart like jagged shards of ice would force me to drown any lingering notes of sappiness. I was rearranging deck chairs and I knew it.

  "Come on, Dad," I said, forcing cheerfulness into my voice. "Let's sit at the table and have a meal together." The thought of us alone next to those two empty chairs suddenly smacked me with a wave of sadness. Was this as hopeless as it seemed? Maybe I couldn't save him, but I had to try.

  I leaned against the kitchen counter and peered into the family room. "You'd feel better if you ate," I added, realizing how much I sounded like Mom. "Come on, Dad, you might as well join me. I'm going to make dinner whether you eat it or not."

  Dad swallowed and slowly swiveled his head so his eyes met mine, acknowledging me for the first time in weeks. "I really don't care what you do," he said expressionlessly, turning back to stare at the television. Within seconds he was comatose again.

  A molten ball of liquid hate filled me to my core and for just a second I considered grasping the pot full of still-cold spaghetti water and sending it into The Loser’s face. Instead, I banged both fists hard on the countertop and opened and closed the cupboard doors so violently that the drinking glasses inside shattered with a spectacular cascading racket. Sprinting down the hall to my bedroom, I slammed the door with a noticeable sense of finality. Now I understood how Mom felt. This was the last flipping straw! Loser! I was done with him.