Clarity (2 page)

A groan came out of Mr. Rational. “Good guess. Again, probably eighty percent of the people who come in here wonder that.”

I piped up, “Did you know that ninety-eight percent of statistics are made up on the spot?”

Perry kicked me under the table.

Mom tossed me a look that could freeze fire. “You’re right, Mr. Bingham. That is the most common question we get. The truth is, we’d never tell you you’re going to die because, frankly, we can’t see the future.”

“Bang! So you admit it!” He nearly jumped out of his chair in excitement. You’d think he just figured out how to split the atom.

“You misunderstand, Mr. Bingham,” Perry said in his soothing, deep voice. “We never claimed to see the future. Our readings aren’t like that.”

“Then what do you do?” Mrs. Bingham asked.

“The three of us work in tandem on your reading,” Mom explained. “I’m a telepath, meaning I can hear your thoughts. My daughter is a psychic and receives visions from touching objects you own. My son is a medium and if any spirits wish to speak to you, he can hear and sometimes see them. Our readings are for entertainment purposes.”

Mr. Bingham guffawed. “This ought to be good.”

“May I have an object from each of you?” I asked the couple and put my hands, palms up, on the table.

My gift’s proper name is retrocognitive psychometry. Bursts of energies and memories leave imprints on objects, and I am sometimes able to pick these imprints up and see, hear, or feel them in my mind. What sucks the most about my gift is its unpredictability. There are moments when I clutch an object, begging for anything, and nothing comes. And though I mostly need to concentrate hard, there are the rare times when I don’t want a vision and end up slapped with one. I can’t force the gift to work, and I can’t make it go away. It is what it is.

Mrs. Bingham took one of her pearl earrings out and laid it in my left hand, while her husband put his cell phone in my
right. I closed my hands and eyes, and focused. Flashes came to me immediately, and I had to take some time to make sense of them and put them in order.

“You bought these earrings somewhere special. You were very excited about them.” I paused. “The store was … in something else.”

“The store was
in
something? What does that mean?” the husband asked.

“Give me a second.” I focused harder, then it came to me. “A cruise ship. You bought these earrings in a store on a cruise ship on your honeymoon. They mean a lot to you.”

Mrs. Bingham smiled. “You’re right.” Then she cast a look at her husband. “You didn’t even remember that.”

He shrugged. “What about me? Let me guess, you think I called someone with that phone.”

I tried not to let him rattle me and focused my energy on the cell phone. I saw something immediately, and my eyes snapped up at him. He drew back, looking slightly scared, and rightly so. But I couldn’t say anything. Mom always reminds us, bad news is bad for business. Focus on the positive.

“You were laid off and you’d been using this phone a lot to look for a new job,” I said. “You recently landed a great new position and this vacation is to celebrate that.”

Mrs. Bingham clapped her hands. He gave a tiny nod. I gave them back their belongings.

“Now,” Mom said, “if we could have a moment of silence for my son to gauge if any spirits are with us.”

Perry lost the paranormal gift lottery, if you ask me. His ability was as inconsistent as mine, and depended on a lot of factors. He had to focus much harder than Mom or I did and was often left tired afterward. And there had to be a spirit present, one who was connected to either the place Perry was in or a person he was with. Sometimes we had customers who had no dead entourages with any messages to pass on, leaving the client disappointed. And when Perry’s gift
did
work? Well, then he had to listen to a dead person talk.

Perry closed his eyes and took several deep breaths through his nose. His chest rose and fell, but other than that he was completely still. After a minute, he opened his eyes. “I have a Paula here with us.”

Mrs. Bingham squealed. “Mama? My mother is here?”

“Yes, she says she’s your mom.”

Mr. Bingham rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “Prove it.”

Perry cocked his head to the side. “Um, okay. She says she never liked you and she still doesn’t.”

His face reddened while his wife giggled. “That’s right. Mama never liked you, honey, and you know it.”

Perry continued, “She also says that she likes your hat and it reminds her of the one Grandma wore all the time.”

Tears formed in Mrs. Bingham’s eyes. “That’s why I bought it. When I saw it in the store, I remembered Grandma.” Then her face lit up. “Is Grandma with you?”

Perry listened, then passed on the information. “She said sometimes, but not right now.”

I heard the bell ring as the front door opened and closed, but instead of waiting in the foyer like the sign said to, the person barged up to the living room door and started banging.

“What the hell?” Mom stormed to the door, her long black skirt swirling. She ripped the door open.

“Milly?”

Milly stood in the doorway wearing one of her right-off-the-prairie dresses, her stockings sagging around her skinny ankles. Milly lives next door in a Victorian similar to ours, though not as morbidly decorated. The first floor is an antique shop that does pretty well in the summer months. Milly is one of those old ladies who survives on gossip rather than food. Despite her big mouth, we like her a lot, mostly because she accepts us for who we are and sends a lot of business our way.

“Thank goodness you’re here. Have I got news for you.” Milly pushed her way past Mom and into the room.

“We’re in the middle of a reading, Milly,” I said.

“This can’t wait.”

Mom said, “This better be a matter of life and death.”

Milly grinned. “Oh, it is.” Then she scratched her head. “Actually, not both. Just death.”

I wasn’t too surprised. Every morning, Milly read the paper’s obituary section first.

“Well, go on then,” Mr. Bingham said. “You’re taking up time we paid for. This better be good.”

Milly widened her eyes. “There was a murder at King’s Courtyard!”

My hand flew to my chest. I’d expected Milly to have gossip about some hundred-year-old person passing away in his sleep. Not a murder. So that explained the police and ambulance earlier. My heart beat wildly under my hand.

Perry sank back in his chair. The interruption had torn his medium connection to Mrs. Bingham’s mother, no doubt. “How do you know?”

“Well, Ed Farmington had one of his garden gnomes stolen again so he went down to the police station to file a report. They wouldn’t even talk to him! They told him to come back tomorrow because they were too busy right now. So, naturally he stuck around for a while to get some information.”

“Eavesdrop,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever.” Milly paused for a moment to catch her breath, then continued. “A teenage girl was found murdered in her room at King’s Courtyard. Shot!”

I felt my insides squeeze. Someone around my age. Killed. Here.

Perry nervously rubbed his palm back and forth over his chin. “Do they know who did it or why?”

“Not as far as I know. Rumor has it her wallet was right there on the nightstand with money still in it.”

“Was she a local or a tourist?” Mom asked, worry creasing her forehead.

“A tourist,” Milly said softly.

Perry and I shared a glance. The ramifications were now much bigger. Anxiety burned in my stomach.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Mrs. Bingham said.

Mr. Bingham said, “Hey, you guys are supposedly psychic. Why didn’t you see that coming and warn the girl?”

Mom sighed. “Again, we don’t see the future.”

“Yeah. You’re a bunch of frauds.”

I’d had it. My frustration boiled over. I turned to Mrs. Bingham. “Do you know a Jane Sutherland?”

Confusion swept over her delicate features. “Yes, she used to be my husband’s secretary before he was laid off. What about her?”

“He wasn’t laid off. He was fired. The company has rules against boinking your secretary, even though your husband apparently has no qualms with the matter.”

“Clarity!” Mom screamed.

Mom pulled on my arm while my brother tried to pull her away from me. Mrs. Bingham ran out in tears with Mr. Bingham following and yelling about us being liars and frauds. Milly snuck out on her tiptoes. Our next appointment — a young couple — walked in, gazed openmouthed at the chaos before them, and walked out. It wasn’t even eleven a.m. yet. I hadn’t even had breakfast. But this is my life.

Welcome to the freak show.

THREE

AROUND THE AGE WHEN MOST MOTHERS SIT WITH their kids to talk about how babies are made, my mom sat my brother and me down and warned us about our impending freakdom.

“There’s no guarantee you’ll be blessed,” she’d said, rubbing her hands together in excitement. “But considering your lineage, I figured it’s time to tell you what to look for.”

My mother and father were originally from a small town in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts that calls itself a “spiritualist community.” Everyone in town claims to have some sort of paranormal ability, and the most gifted families are encouraged to interbreed to keep the genes strong. Some marriages are even arranged.

My mother and father came from “good stock” — meaning the freakage went back several generations. There was no way to predict how my twisted DNA would reveal itself. The only constant from our people seemed to be the fact that abilities emerged in puberty.

I’d always known about my mother’s gift. I couldn’t get away with anything, for one. When I was little, Mom would
always know when I was lying. Perry, being two years older and wiser, filled me in on some of his Mom-blocking tricks before I could get myself into too much trouble. So when Mom told Perry and me that we may have special abilities, too, it wasn’t anything kooky to me. It was just a fact, like any other inherited trait.

Mom had explained that our gifts were like any other talent. Some people are born with a great singing voice or athletic ability and they only need to practice and nurture that talent, and it would bloom. Same with us. After our gifts began to emerge, my mother helped us identify, harness, and utilize them, just as her mother did for her. We realized what Perry’s gift was when, at age twelve, he simply told Mom that Grandma said hi. Grandma being dead was the first clue.

When I was eleven, during a parent-teacher conference, my teacher told Mom that I wasn’t concentrating well lately and she feared I wasn’t living up to my potential. Most mothers would be worried. Mine was ecstatic. She came home and questioned me, trying to get to the bottom of the problem. I admitted I’d been having trouble. I kept finding myself pulled into daydreams, most of which made no sense to me. I had no idea that this could be my ability beginning to emerge.

I experienced my first vision in front of my entire sixth-grade class. After Cody Rowe completely messed up an easy math problem on the whiteboard, the teacher dismissed him and asked me to come up and give it a try. I hated being the center of attention, but trudged to the front of the room as told. With trembling fingers, I erased Cody’s wrong answer. I
uncapped the marker and found myself slightly disoriented from the strong smell and the feeling of twenty stares on my back. I closed my eyes, hoping to calm my nerves, then realized I’d forgotten the math problem I was supposed to solve. I tried hard to remember and then the answer came to me. I wrote it on the board, with my eyes still closed, then stepped back to look at my work.

First came the snickers, then full-on laughter when the teacher ordered me back to my seat. I’d rewritten Cody’s wrong answer. I was so confused. Math had always come easily to me. Sitting in the safety of my desk, I knew what the right answer was, and didn’t understand why I’d written something different. I didn’t realize that the “answer” my mind retrieved wasn’t my own, but the one Cody had come up with minutes before while holding the same marker.

Once Mom explained my gift to me, she helped me to control it, and I learned to decipher the real and the now from the visions of the past.

Right now, though, standing in our foyer with the Binghams gone, I wished we were just a normal family, with normal family problems.

Mom was on a rampage. She was angry with me for blurting out Mr. Bingham’s secret and breaking our “no bad news” policy. I was too rattled by Milly’s report of the murder to defend myself. I took my scolding from Mom until she turned to Perry.

“You came stumbling in here after midnight last night. I heard you,” Mom said, pointing her finger at his chest.

“He’s a man now,” I said, standing up for him. “He’s
eighteen, and he graduated. He can stay up past twelve on a summer night if he wants to.”

“Not if he’s so tired the next day he can barely concentrate on work. This may be a family business but it’s still your job!” Mom was raving, arms flailing through the air.

Perry didn’t seem tired to me. Mom probably only knew he was from picking up on his thoughts. But I didn’t want to interrupt her tirade further by pointing this out.

“It’s unprofessional,” she yelled. “Both of you have been totally unprofessional.”

Mom stormed into the kitchen, accidentally crushing the bag of food I’d left on the floor and was counting on for a late-breakfast-slash-early-lunch. Perry followed her, then came back a minute later, texting on his phone. When he was done, he took my elbow and led me to the front door.

“We reached the point of no return with Mom,” he said, opening the door. “She needs some time.”

“We can’t just leave,” I said. “What about the appointments?”

“You mean the appointment you just scared away? We have an hour free now, thanks to you.”

I groaned and buried my face in my hands. Then I grudgingly followed Perry to his car and got into the passenger seat.

Perry pulled out and joined the line of traffic.

“Where are we going?” I asked.