Clarity

by Myanne Shelley

Chapter 5

  Despite my good intentions, I might have let the whole thing drop. As the week went by, then another, my well worn path of daily routines steered me comfortably complacent. Yvette was gone, and my dream from that night was just a fuzzy memory, or more the memory of a memory. With work and home life, and the need to rest my middle aged eyes and ears and tired shoulders from any added strain, it was easy enough to let those troubling recollections of inner awareness and dream voices slide away.

  But my new acquaintances, the dynamic duo of Kylie and Daniel, propelled me onward. They, plus my old school inability to just ignore a polite and personalized email message. Plus Della, who mostly kept her thoughts to herself when I visited with her and Mags. But whose eyes lingered on me, intelligent and probing. As I wrapped up my Jane Austen reading that next week, it felt almost as if she was tugging on me, even from several feet away.

  So in fact there were multiple forces at work, as I made my way onto the street car toward Church Street and our eventual little psychic follow up meeting. Kylie had determined this a good middle ground between my job at the university campus and her office downtown. Daniel turned out to live not far from there, which worked out well, as he freelanced from home and preferred not to drive. (Although he did offer to go wherever it would work; he did seem determined to quiz each of us further.)

  She had picked the café too, a pleasant little breakfasty sort of place with lots of tables and a casual attitude about people camping out there for awhile. Stepping inside, I wondered if I would remember what she looked like. But I saw her in a glance from the doorway – that heart shaped face and delicate features framed with all the dark hair were instantly recognizable.

  Kylie greeted me warmly. Again, I had the comfortable sense from her of someone who knew, or understood me. Who wouldn’t judge. Despite her years, she seemed grounded. As we placed our orders, I noticed how she focussed just on what was in front of her – the menu, the young man behind the counter, the array of condiments available. Unlike so many people, she was not fiddling with a phone or an ipod, not leaping rapidly from topic to topic in a flurry of needless conversation.

  Daniel joined us, arriving breathless as though he had run all the way. He thanked us profusely for agreeing to see him. Him, I knew I’d recognize. He wasn’t conventionally good looking – too rough maybe, his expression a bit weary, deep lines around his mouth drawing it downward – but he had an intelligence about him that I liked. He looked fit, as though maybe he did manual labor aside from his writing.

  We sat. Daniel took his netbook out of his worn canvas bag and set it carefully on the table. “I hope it’s okay with you if I jot down some notes,” he said, acknowledging both of us but mostly looking at me. “You probably don’t want to be recorded.”

  “Some notes are fine,” I answered, “as long as you’re not naming names. I’m just some anonymous person you met at a psychic lecture.”

  Both of them grinned at that, though I hadn’t meant it to be funny.

  “I don’t particularly want my name used either,” Kylie said. “But I’m happy to answer your questions.”

  Daniel nodded, fiddling for a moment with his device. “Makes me think you’re both genuine right there. A lot of people can’t wait to see their name in print. Or to push their talent upon me, ready or not.”

  “I’ve met some people like that,” Kylie said. “At other meetings I’ve been to, like back when I was in college. It kind of made me back off the whole thing.”

  “You’ve looked into this before?” Daniel asked quietly. “Explored your special abilities?”

  “To be honest, it didn’t occur to me I was different when I was growing up,” she said. “I just thought other people were awfully rude sometimes. Because I figured it wasn’t that hard to read people, or whatever it is I was doing, getting what they were feeling. I figured everybody did it, pretty much.”

  “So when did you start to think you were different?” Daniel wasn’t taking notes, just sitting, pleasantly interested but casual.

  He had a skill himself, I thought. He knew where he was going with his questioning, but was very calm and reassuring about it. It wasn’t like an interview, but like the sort of chat you’d have in a dorm room or over coffee with friends.

  I tuned back into Kylie, who was explaining how she had been teased in middle school, and how she had grown to just keep her mouth shut a lot, and not risk further ridicule. But then she had confided in a couple friends, and started to get that her easy sense of people was a unusual. As she had gotten older, she had loosened up more, and just accepted herself as she was; people around her could choose to be amused or offended or spooked by things she perceived.

  She used that word a lot, perceived. She emphasized it, making it pretty clear that she wasn’t claiming so much a special ability, but just enumerating her own perceptions. It did sound a bit like what that lecturer had said, I thought. About some people having a talent for reading expressions and minor shifts in peoples’ pulses or coloration and so on.

  “What does it feel like, I guess I’d want to know,” Daniel said, after a pause. “How much are you aware of those nuances that might tip you off to other people’s emotions?”

  Kylie didn’t answer right away, but tilted her head thoughtfully. Watching her, I had a sense that she had an answer all right, but felt hesitant to share it. And then I wondered, was I having some sort of hyper perception too?

  “I’ve learned to pay attention,” she finally said. “Sometimes I do just blend whatever I’m perceiving into the conversation. But if it’s like a good friend, or somebody at work and I don’t want to annoy them, I try to notice – and then differentiate – what’s actually been spoken versus what’s just in my head.”

  Daniel nodded. He kept his eyes on her, but tapped hastily on his keyboard.

  “You know day to day, it’s no big deal, not something I think much about,” Kylie continued. “But when I’m in a strange place, or around a crowd, I start feeling a little, I don’t know, bombarded. I hate airports – it’s like I can feel everybody’s tension all around me. And when I’m talking to somebody who’s really in pain, I mean going through something that’s emotionally painful, I feel myself taking it on. I get headaches sometimes. I can’t tell if they’re from other people’s pain or from trying to block it out.”

  “A lot of people I’ve talked to mentioned headaches,” Daniel murmured.

  “Yeah, well, a lot of people get headaches, whatever. But I get a particular kind… It’s part of the whole thing of being called sensitive, and that’s not always meant in a good way. But even a simple thing, like a disagreement between a couple that I’m out with where one of them gets upset – the kind of thing where most people might be a little annoyed with the other person or something – well, I’ll get this bad feeling, this pressure in my head,” she rubbed her temples lightly, “and it’ll stay with me, like I’m the one who’s emotionally hurt. When I’m not, when anyone else will have forgotten the whole thing.”

  The fellow from the counter brought over our food, setting it down discretely but looking a bit interested. We were the most animated group in the place, I realized. Other people were sitting alone or in quiet pairs.

  Kylie smiled uncomfortably. “Sorry,” she said, voice lowered. “Then I get inappropriately emotionally invested. Then I have to spend time alone to get my equilibrium back.”

  “That sounds tough,” Daniel said. There was sympathy in his voice, but I could see he was also just filling in, he was trying to jot down the essence of her words.

  Even a voice recording wouldn’t really capture it, I thought. The expressions on her face as her gentle voice went from cheerful to laced with anguish and back in a few seconds.

  “I’ve been doing Yoga,” Kylie continued, her eyes gentle again and her smooth skin looking formless, unlined. “And I kind of make a point to avoid places whe
re I’m going to encounter a lot of major tension.”

  I wondered if part of her problem was just being young. Not to deny that she had an unusual degree of sensitivity or perception or what have you – but it partly sounded like she just lacked some life experience. I could remember being more affected by other people’s dramas. After awhile, you get to a point where you’ve seen it all and then some. A lover’s argument becomes mere trivia in the face of seeing a loved one ill and dying.

  Daniel ate his sandwich sporadically, as if eating were just a prop in our own little drama. I’d ordered a salad, thinking about cholesterol, but it was awkward to eat. Kylie hardly touched her egg dish while she talked, so focused on making herself clear and understandable. But she firmly picked up her fork, as if hunger had suddenly reared, and Daniel turned comfortably to me.

  I told them both my what I thought of as my summary story. How I had heard the dream voice and then known my mom would tell me about Grandma. The strange dream of having radiation sickness then hearing about Chernobyl. Knowing why my mom was calling when she phoned about my dad’s death. And that certain quality, as Della had phrased it, that distinctive and recognizable thing that made me take notice of certain images and sounds in my dreams. The bell clear voice that had spoken more than once, seeming so close to my ear, so calm and reassuring, loving almost, yet always bearing somber news.

  The pair of them hung on my words in a flattering way. I found myself actually wanting to tell them more, where I generally tended to frown upon such sharing.

  “It’s really not the same thing at all,” Daniel said, as I paused, regrouping the thoughts that were spinning out in several directions.

  Kylie laughed. “If you’re researching the paranormal, you must know there’s not like only one phenomenon.”

  “Oh yeah, I got that,” he nodded. “I just meant you two, what you might have in common. I mean, have you had precognicent dreams?” he asked Kylie.

  “I don’t remember a lot of my dreams,” she answered slowly. “That’s one of those weird things from childhood too though. I mean when I was really little, dream images really freaked me out, and I think I got in the habit of comforting myself by blocking them.”

  “You can consciously block recalling your dreams?” he asked, his surprised tone indicating this was not one of the standard queries.

  I was interested in this as well. Not a skill I necessarily wanted to pick up – but it might have saved me some frightening mornings now and then.

  But Kylie wasn’t able to articulate very well how she managed this. It seemed like explaining how you see or hear, I thought, or even walk. Things you just do, not stopping to think about them. And if you did start thinking about it, each little step and what series of body parts were used, you’d surely stumble.

  I was not able to explain the workings of my mind, conscious or unconscious, either. I didn’t see how Daniel would be able to get much out of our telling him about our experiences. His article would end up either a sensationalist series of disconnected oddities experienced by random people, or a dense description of the inner workings of the human brain. It was hard to see how he’d work it all in.

  But he was undeterred when I said as much. “This is all background,” he said, a hand cupped possessively around his netbook. “I’ll end up with hundreds of pages of just these notes. It’ll be awhile before I sit down and sort it all out. Eventually patterns do emerge.” His eyes were lit up, his somewhat dour expression transformed by a smile. “I’ve done this before. Different subject matter, I mean. But thorough research. It’s kind of a dying art, you know?”

  We both nodded, although I wondered if Kylie could really remember the newspapers of old, when it was normal for a news entity to assign someone to spend months writing an in-depth piece, when multi-part, many page articles were normal. When people would read them all the way through and not get distracted by photos and hyperlinks and snarky comments.

  We chatted for a bit more. Kylie and I each recalled a few more instances of our supposed special abilities, but these were less dramatic. Things you’d write off, if not for the prior experiences.

  Both of us needed to get back to work. She was polite about it, but I could see tension creep into her posture as she glanced at her phone for the time. I had more leeway, being part time. A long lunch could easily be covered with an extra hour elsewhere, and my work wasn’t terribly interdependent on my co-workers. Or where it was, it was in the ether of email and shared documents, not being together in a room.

  Daniel thanked us both again. He was funny. His words didn’t seem like his, as if he had taken a Managing Gen Y class about the need for praise and recognition, or perhaps been trained by a needy woman in his life. Yet the repressed enthusiasm behind his words was utterly sincere.

  He offered to email us a summary of what he had gleaned, and hoped we would find time to review it and let him know where he was at all off base. I handed him my card, which he accepted with a nod and half hidden smile. His little victory, I thought – he had proven himself trustworthy.

  Kylie and I both headed to the Church Street station. I told her that I had found her experiences interesting. She said so too, and thanked me for being willing to talk about the whole thing.

  We turned toward the escalator and descended into the station. I could hear a train rumbling in the distance. We were headed opposite directions, so one of us would need to dash down to catch it. I wondered if I would see her again, or maybe just catch a glimpse of her one day on the streetcar.

  As if reading my mind, she said she had to hurry, but asked if we could maybe have lunch again sometime soon. Her eyes met mine for a moment, appealing in that play of shyness and eagerness and emerging self-confidence.

  I told her I would like that very much. She said she would call, and then ran along ahead, through the gate and down to the inbound side as a car pulled into the station. I could hear mine coming too, and I made my way downstairs. I meant it, I thought. I would like to talk to her again. She was a person who didn’t like small talk any more than I did, who was bright and open minded, with whom I could talk about a world of things different than most all of my other friends and family members

  That night at home, I told Doug about the lunch. I waited until midway through dinner, after the distractions of cooking and flipping through bills and before he might hurry away to get involved in one of his elaborate online sports games. I watched him sitting there determinedly spinning his pasta around his fork, as though on hidden camera for a show about eating and appreciating Italian food.

  It was tasty; he had made lots of this complicated marina sauce when the farmer’s market tomatoes were at their best, and we’d frozen batches of it. So far, food was all we had talked about since he got home, I realized. What he’d had for lunch, had the cat been fed, and the delicious dinner.

  “About my lunch,” I said, my tone carefully neutral. “I met up with a couple people I met at that lecture a few weeks ago. A sweet young woman, her name is Kylie, and a man who’s a freelance reporter. Daniel. He’s doing an article on paranormal phenomena.”

  Doug’s expression altered a couple of times, from puzzled to annoyed, before settling on skeptical. “I must not have caught all this,” he said. “You met with a reporter? About what, exactly?”

  “I think I told you about this,” I replied. “When Yvette died, the dream I had. And others before that. I went to that lecture to learn more, and also to see if other people have had these things happen. I’ve been trying to find a reasonable explanation.” I realized I had not even mentioned the whole thing about Della, but that didn’t seem so relevant. I mean, my experiences were enough to warrant investigation.

  He waved the hand not holding his fork, a dismissive and belittling gesture. “I thought we established that the explanation is that you had some dreams,” he said. “Not sure why the media was alerted. Seri
ously, you found a reporter?”

  “He found me. I’m trying to understand why these things happened. They were not normal dreams. Doug, there was a room full of people who think there’s more going on that random neurons. I’m as cynical as the next person about this sort of thing, but no one could give a simple scientific explanation.”

  “Well, of course not, at a lecture on the subject. Come on, Clarissa, don’t you think you’re carrying this a bit far? Who is this reporter?”

  He was fixated on the reporter part. I told him what I knew about Daniel; I’d googled him and found his by-line in several smaller papers and journals. Supposedly he had regular columns too, that paid the rent, but his main interest were the in-depth articles he had mentioned to Kylie and me. Doug seemed not to care at all about her. Was this just about the news thing, it occurred to me, or was he somehow jealous?

  I watched him carefully as he reacted to my explanation. He was impatient with me, the same way he could be with anyone he disagreed with. And he didn’t want for us to argue – it was almost time for the game to start, the one on TV, and he was looking forward to losing himself in watching that, thinking about the stats of the players and recalling games from years gone by. My mention of Daniel had raised flags not from jealously, but from potential embarrassment. I’d kept my name when we married, but even so, people could link us. That was his angle.

  We finished eating amicably. I told him I’d clean up since he’d gotten everything ready, and he settled contentedly in the living room in front of the TV. I moved slowly in the kitchen, still recalling the conversation from lunch as well as Doug’s reactions about it. Well, I’d wanted to let him know about this thing that was important to me, and I had. It’s not like I had expected him to suddenly see the world anew, or turn into one of those super sensitive guys who want to hear all about your feelings.

  Warm water washed over my hands as I stood there rinsing out our wine glasses, the delicate fluted ones that he liked to use for red wine. Something struck me, as I reviewed in my head what Doug had said out loud. Or more, what he had not said, what I had simply concluded. I could tell the concern about Daniel was nothing personal by the way his shoulders had lowered when I said I insisted on being anonymous. I knew he didn’t want to argue by the way his mouth had moved, how his lips had gone from a tight line to a slightly more pursed, neutral setting. His impatience had been standard, normal for him, and I knew it was a game on TV with a starting time rather than an online thing by – now I couldn’t even remember what, but something had made that clear. The point was, all those things were unspoken but crystal clear.

  Was I doing that “perceiving” interpreting that Kylie spoke of myself? But didn’t everyone draw conclusions like this? I quelled the impulse to march into the living room and quiz Doug, see if he in fact owned the feelings that I had just assigned to him. Because I already knew – and this just had to do with us being married, I was sure, anyone would know this about a spouse – that he hated that sort of thing. It had happened now and then before. He did not like me discussing what either of us felt, and in fact was just as likely to clam up and disclaim any feelings at all if pressed about it.

  Now a little highlights reel of our relationship spun in my head. The funny way we had met, both of us at a fundraiser in a downtown hotel and in a group chatting superficially about nothing, and then again both of us trying to sneak out, momentarily fearful we had been locked in a back corridor. That first comical whispered conversation, followed by a play acting casual walk to the proper exit and downstairs to for a drink together at the fancy bar across the street. How much I had learned from him during that first, what, hour together.

  I had known that he was attracted to me, of course, though I hoped it was not based on the false premise of the goofiness and adventurousness I might have demonstrated that night. And later I could tell when it quote got serious. Really pinpoint it to the particular night, though we hadn’t been doing anything unusual. I just knew, and I knew I had to make a decision too, how deeply to pursue it. When he invited me to meet his daughters the next time we spoke, I was expecting it, and had already chosen to commit myself to him. To us.

  Sure, there had been disagreements, and yes, these sometimes had to do with me answering for him, or making assumptions, as he called it. Aside from their being accurate. Over the years, as I’ve said, I had come to keep more of my thoughts to myself. But certainly I could predict Doug’s behavior to the point of not necessarily having to bother to check in with him.

  These were normal things to understand about your partner. Years back, Keith used to accuse me of meddling or snooping, and I told him his ego was running away with him. We might have had a few arguments where he basically asked me to back off, saying he needed his space. Meaning he didn’t like it when I guessed what he thought or predicted how he would behave. He was just so predictable, though.

  Sam hadn’t liked it either, but of course I understood him so clearly when he was a boy. What woman doesn’t know her son, it goes with the territory. I had been more careful with him – he was just a child and he needed to be independent. I had deliberately turned away, I realized, to give him that independence. I had frequently closed my eyes to the signals he gave so easily sometimes, just to give him that privacy.

  And Keith? It occurred to me now that I had indeed backed off, just as he had asked, probably around the time Sam entered grade school. I had gotten tired of knowing. I’d tuned him out on purpose, and focussed on other things in our busy lives. And thus, his attraction, his affair, had floored me. Maybe it had been a cautionary tale – with Doug, I had first of all made a point not to watch him too carefully from the start, but secondly kept a small radar up for the big items.

  Though now I asked myself, was this something positive for our relationship, to prevent him from needing, as Keith had, to push me away? Or was I just scared to analyze, scared of what I would find in Doug if I did pay better attention.

  It struck me too, just how much I was taking for granted about being able to read him if I so chose. I imagined having this conversation with Daniel, describing my relationships with the two men and the degree to which I understood their motivations. He had been so curious, asking Kylie about her perceptions, and she so inarticulate in describing it. But he had asked how it felt, as though this kind of basic ability was so strange. She spoke about being teased, damping it down and focussing on words rather than actions.

  I had not been teased. But I was so different from her – as a child, I didn’t have close friendships of the sort where my blurting out my friend’s feelings would be an issue. I had lost myself in books, I had been shy and quiet, one of those kids who sits in back and turns in her assignments but gets docked for lack of participation.

  The kitchen was clean, I realized, and I was just idly scrubbing the same discolored spots in the sink and staring out the window towards my own reflection in the dark glass. I joined Doug in the living room, ready to relax with the paper then a book.

  “We’re ahead,” he announced, smiling openly, the whole conversation about Kylie and Daniel clearly gone from his conscious mind.

  I nodded enthusiastically, as though this was the welcome news I had come in looking for. I purposely did not let my eyes linger on his face or his posture, and picked up the paper. This was normal for me, what I had trained myself to do, knowing he didn’t like being watched and I wouldn’t always like what I saw in watching him.

  But my mind drifted again. I thought of my mother, the way she would peer at me and Dad sometimes, and wondered how she had perceived the world. Of course this was nothing we had ever talked about, though now how I wished we could. I missed her sharply for a moment, almost as if I had been shoved in the upper chest.

  I tried to imagine the conversation we would have if she were still alive, but couldn’t get very far. Here’s the thing – she was pretty much a minimalist
as far as discussing things related to bodies, minds or souls. Much of that sort of thing, pop psychology and so on, she deemed religious, and thus not to be spoken of. Nor should one in polite company mention health or bodily matters, beyond an exchange of how are yous (answered by fine or fair to middling, not honestly).

  Probably I got my own shyness and need for quiet directly from her. She would likely be even more horrified than Doug that I had discussed anything as intimate as my dreams with two virtual strangers. But Mags had known her awfully well. They had talked practically daily for years on end – surely they had covered more than menu ideas and comparing my and Liza’s test scores.

  Mags, at least, would welcome any such conversation, and I would make it a point to have one. I would be sure to follow up with Kylie as well. Something about her receptiveness just invited these sort of memories back in.

  I turned my attention back to the news of the day, depressing but soothing in its repetitiveness. Satisfied that I had charted out a small path forward.