The Grownup (2 page)

Then I tousled my hair to look more intuitive, straightened my peasant blouse, tucked the book under my arm, and ran out to the main room. Not quite clockwork: I was thirty-seven seconds late. Susan Burke was waiting; she shook my hand with a nervous, birdy up and down, and the repetitive motion made me wince. I dropped my book and we banged heads picking it up. Definitely not what you want from your psychic: a Three Stooges bit.

I motioned her to a seat. I put on my wise voice and asked her why she was here. That’s the easiest way to tell people what they want: Ask them what they want.

Susan Burke was silent for a few beats. Then: “My life is falling apart,” she murmured. She was extremely pretty but so wary and nervous you didn’t realize she was pretty until you looked hard at her. Looked past the glasses to the bright blue eyes. Imagined the dull blond hair de-stringed. She was clearly rich. Her handbag was too plain to be anything but incredibly expensive. Her dress was mousy but well made. In fact, it could be the dress wasn’t mousy—she just wore it that way.
Smart but not creative,
I thought.
Conformist. Lives in fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Lacks confidence. Probably browbeaten by her parents, and now browbeaten by her husband. Husband has temper—her whole goal each day is to get to the end without a blowup
.
Sad.
She’ll be one of the sad ones.

Susan Burke began sobbing then. She sobbed for a minute and a half. I was going to give her two minutes before I interrupted, but she stopped on her own.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said. She pulled a pastel handkerchief from her bag but didn’t use it. “This is crazy. It just keeps getting worse.”

I gave her my best
there, there
without touching her. “What’s going on in your life?”

She wiped her eyes and stared at me a beat. Blinked. “Don’t you know?”

Then she gave me a smile. Sense of humor. Unexpected.

“So how do we do this?” she asked, tucking herself in again. She massaged a spot near the nape of her neck. “How does this work?”

“I’m a psychological intuitive,” I began. “Do you know what that means?”

“You can read people well.”

“Yes, to a degree, but my powers are much stronger than just a hunch. All my senses play a part. I can feel vibrations coming off people. I can see auras. I can smell despair, or dishonesty, or depression. It’s a gift I’ve had since I was a small child. My mother was a deeply depressed, unbalanced woman. A dark blue haze followed her. When she was near me, my skin plinked—like someone was playing a piano—and she smelled of despair, which presents itself to me as the scent of bread.”

“Bread?”
she said.

“That was just her scent, of a desperate soul.” I needed to pick a new
eau de sad girl.
Not dying leaves, too obvious, but something earthy. Mushrooms? No, inelegant.

“Bread, that is so strange,” she said.

People usually asked what their scent or aura was. It was their first step to committing to the game. Susan shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. “But…I think this isn’t for me.”

I waited her out. Empathetic silence is one of the most underused weapons in the world.

“OK,” Susan said. She tucked her hair behind both ears—thick diamond-scattered wedding bands flashing like the Milky Way—and looked ten years younger. I could picture her as a kid, a bookworm maybe, pretty but shy. Demanding parents. Straight As, always. “So what do you read off me?”

“There’s something going on in your house.”

“I already told you that.” I could feel the desperation coming off her: to believe in me.

“No, you told me your life was falling apart. I’m saying it’s something to do with your house. You have a husband, I sense a lot of discord: I see you surrounded by a sick green, like an egg yolk gone bad. Swirls of a healthy vibrant turquoise on the outer edges. That tells me you had something good and it went very bad. Yes?”

Obviously this was an easy guess, but I liked my color arrangement; it felt right.

She glared at me. I was hitting on something close to the bone.

“I feel the same vibrations off you as my mother: those sharp, high piano plinks. You’re desperate, you’re in exquisite pain. You’re not sleeping.”

The mention of insomnia was always risky but usually paid off. People in pain don’t generally sleep well. Insomniacs are exquisitely grateful for people to recognize their weariness.

“No, no, I sleep eight hours,” Susan said.

“It’s not a genuine sleep. You have unsettling dreams. Maybe not nightmares, maybe you don’t even remember them, but you wake up feeling worn, achy.”

See, you can rescue most bad guesses. This woman was in her forties; people in their forties usually wake up feeling achy. I know that from commercials.

“You store the anxiety in your neck,” I continued. “Also, you smell of peonies. A child. You have a child?”

If she didn’t have a child, then I just say, “But you
want
one.” And she can deny it—
I’ve never, ever even thought about having kids
—and I can insist, and pretty soon she leaves thinking it because very few women decide not to procreate without some doubts. It’s an easy thought to seed. Except this one’s smart.

“Yes. Well, two. A son and a stepson.”

Stepson, go with the stepson.

“Something is wrong in your house. Is it your stepson?”

She stood up, fumbled through her well-constructed bag.

“How much do I owe you?”

I got one thing wrong. I thought I’d never see her again. But four days later Susan Burke was back. (“Can
things
have auras?” she asked. “Like, objects. Or a house?”) And then three days later (“Do you believe in evil spirits? Is there such a thing, do you think?”) and then the next day.

I was right about her, mostly. Overbearing, demanding parents, straight As, Ivy League, a degree that had something to do with business. I asked her the question: What do you do? She explained and explained about downsizing and restructuring and client intersects, and when I frowned, she got impatient and said, “I define and eliminate problems.” Things with her husband were OK except when it came to the stepson. The Burkes had moved into the city the year before, and that’s when the kid went from troubled to troubling.

“Miles was never a sweet boy,” she said. “I’m the only mom he’s known—I’ve been with his dad since he was four. But he’s always been cold. Introverted. He’s just empty. I hate myself for saying that. I mean, introverted is fine. But in the past year, since the move…he’s changed. Become more aggressive. He’s so angry. So dark. Threatening. He scares me.”

The kid was fifteen, and had just been forcibly relocated from the suburbs into the city where he didn’t know anyone, and he was already an awkward, nerdy kid. Of course he was angry. That would have been helpful, my saying that, but I didn’t. I seized an opportunity.

I’d been trying to move into the domestic aura-cleansing business. Basically when someone moves into a new home, they call you. You wander around the house burning sage and sprinkling salt and murmuring a lot. Fresh start, wipe away any lingering bad energy from previous owners. Now that people were moving back into the heart of the city, into all the old historic houses, it seemed like a boom industry waiting to happen. A hundred-year-old house, that’s a lot of leftover vibes.

“Susan, have you considered that the house is affecting your son’s behavior?”

Susan leaned in, her eyes wide. “Yes! Yes, I do. Is that crazy? That’s why…why I came back. Because…there was blood on my wall.”

“Blood?”

She leaned in and I could smell the mint masking sour breath. “Last week. I didn’t want to say anything…I thought you’d think I was crazy. But it was there. One long trickle from the floor to the ceiling. Am I…am I crazy?”

I met her at the house the next week. Driving up her street in my trusty hatchback, I thought,
rust.
Not blood. Something from the walls, the roof. Who knew what old houses were built of? Who knew what could leak out after a hundred years? The question was how to play it. I really wasn’t interested in getting into exorcism, demonology church shit. I don’t think that’s what Susan wanted either. But she did invite me to her house, and women like that don’t invite over women like me unless they want something. Comfort. I would breeze over the “blood trickle,” find an explanation for it, and yet still insist the house could use a cleansing.

Repeated cleansings. We had yet to discuss money. Twelve visits for $2,000 seemed like a good price point. Spread them out, one a month, over a year, and give the stepson time to sort himself out, get adjusted to the new school, the new kids. Then he’s cured and I’m the hero, and pretty soon Susan is referring all her rich, nervous friends to me. I could go into business for myself, and when people asked me, “What do you do?” I’d say,
I’m an entrepreneur
in that haughty way entrepreneurs had. Maybe Susan and I would become friends. Maybe she’d invite me to a book club. I’d sit by a fire and nibble on Brie and say,
I’m a small business owner, an entrepreneur, if you will.
I parked, got out of the car, and took a big breath of optimistic spring air.

But then I spotted Susan’s house. I actually stopped and stared. Then I shivered.

It was different from the rest.

It lurked. It was the only remaining Victorian house in a long row of boxy new construction, and maybe that’s why it seemed alive, calculating. The mansion’s front was all elaborate, carved stonework, dizzying in its detail: flowers and filigrees, dainty rods and swooping ribbons. Two life-sized angels framed the doorway, their arms reaching upward, their faces fascinated by something I couldn’t see.

I watched the house. It watched me back through long, baleful windows so tall a child could stand in the sill. And one was. I could see the length of his thin body: gray trousers, black sweater, a maroon tie perfectly knotted at the neck. A thicket of dark hair covering his eyes. Then, a sudden blur, and he’d hopped down and disappeared behind the heavy brocade drapes.

The steps to the mansion were steep and long. My heart was thumping by the time I reached the top, passed the awestruck angels, reached the door, and rang the bell. As I waited I read the inscription carved in the stone near my feet.

The carving was in a severe Victorian cursive, the two juicy o’s dissected by a feathery curlicue. It made me want to protect my belly.

Susan opened the door with red eyes.

“Welcome to Carterhook Manor,” she said, fake grandeur. She caught me staring—Susan never looked good when I saw her, but she hadn’t even pretended to brush her hair, and a foul, acrid odor came off her. (Not “despair” or “depression,” just bad breath and body odor.) She shrugged limply. “I’ve finally stopped sleeping.”

The inside of the house was nothing like the outside. The interior had been gutted and now looked like every other rich person’s house. It made me feel immediately more cheerful. I could cleanse
this
place: the tasteful recessed lights, the granite counters and stainless-steel appliances, the new, freakishly smooth wood paneling, wall upon wall of Botoxed oak.

“Let’s start with the blood trickle,” I suggested.

We climbed to the second floor. There were two more above it. The stairwell was open, and I peered up through the banisters to see a face peering down at me from the top floor. Black hair and eyes, set against the porcelain skin of an antique doll. Miles. He stared at me for a solemn moment, then disappeared again. That kid matched the original house perfectly.

Susan pulled down a tasteful print on the landing, so I could see the full wall.

“Here. It was right here.” She pointed from the ceiling to the floor.

I pretended to examine it closely, but there was nothing really to see. She’d scrubbed it down completely; I could still smell the bleach.

“I can help you,” I said. “There is a tremendous feeling of pain, right here. Throughout the whole house, but definitely here. I can help you.”

“The house creaks all night long,” she said. “I mean, it almost moans. It shouldn’t. Everything inside is new. Miles’s door slams at strange times. And he…he’s getting worse. It’s like something has settled on him. A darkness he carries on his back. Like an insect shell. He scuttles. Like a beetle. I’d move, that’s how scared I am, I’d move, but we don’t have the money. Anymore. We spent so much on this house, and then almost that much renovating, and…my husband won’t let me anyway. He says Miles is just going through growing pains. And that I’m a nervous, silly woman.”