The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  He told me I was weird and strange, but he was happy to take my virginity. I used to go visit him at his house where he lived with his parents, sneaking in and out of his bedroom window.

  How could I hook up with a guy like that? All I can say was that I was used to having someone be embarrassed by me. My mother had prepared me for someone who would want to keep me hidden.

  “I don’t know how to love him,” sang Mary Magdalene in our play and I felt deeply connected to her, more deeply than ever.

  It was an exciting time. The people in Summit were in an uproar over the production, even picketing the theater where we were performing, primarily because of these love songs between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Was the musical blasphemous or wonderful? After refusing to speak to me about my participation in it, my own parents ended up coming to see it twice, which made me happy. Backstage, all the kids were reading the Bible, and I certainly learned more about the Gospels from that show than I did in ten years of Catholic school.

  At the cast party for Jesus Christ Superstar, however, I walked in on the music director kissing another girl from the show and was devastated. I was heartbroken and somehow, despite everything, surprised. I think I’d been telling myself that it was because of the play that we had to keep our relationship a secret and that as soon as it was over we could be a real couple.

  Apparently not.

  He was supposed to give me a ride home, but I left on my own, ready to walk the many miles back to my house. It was late at night, almost dawn, and I was crying as I stumbled along, as sad as I had ever been.

  I had nothing—no real job, no boyfriend, no nothing—just a crazy mother waiting for me at home. The only reason I’d probably gotten a part in the play was because the music director wanted to sleep with me. I was just a piece of trash. An invisible piece of trash.

  Just then a garbage truck roared up behind me and slowed down.

  “You okay?” asked the driver.

  I looked up at him with my tearstained face. I shook my head. “My boyfriend just dumped me.”

  “Then get in the dump truck.” He laughed. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

  He dropped me off in front of my house and picked up the garbage at the same time.

  I was feeling pretty low on myself.

  The next day another boy from the show, Max, called me.

  Unlike all the other boys in the cast, Max had not wanted to be an apostle. In fact, he refused the part of Peter when offered it. Instead, Max insisted on being a Roman soldier at the crucifixion. There was something feral and out of control about Max, and all during rehearsals he wouldn’t stop staring at me. Soon after he met me, he started insisting that I meet his foster father, the priest at the local Episcopal church. “Bob says I’m a wolf, because I like to howl at the moon,” Max told me. “He’ll love you.”

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to meet anyone associated with Max, but when he called after my heartbreak, I was down enough that I was ready for anything. A few days later, I found myself following him to the rectory behind Calvary Church.

  An older woman, heavyset and with long hair, was sitting in the kitchen and offered us a cup of chamomile tea when we came in. She introduced herself to me as Susan, Bob’s wife. A moment later, Bob himself appeared, long black robes flapping around him, eyes sparkling, as if he were Fagin about to meet a new young pickpocket.

  He extended his hand formally. “I’m Father Bob Morris. Max has told me so much about you.” He was a small man, balding, with glasses and a soft, high-pitched, almost feminine voice. He peered at me without letting go of my hand. “You’re an intuitive, aren’t you?”

  I was taken aback. “What has Max told you about me?” I could just imagine the kinds of things he’d say.

  Father Bob shook his head. “Oh, Max didn’t tell me that you were psychic. I can tell just from looking at you.”

  “You can?”

  “It’s in your aura. Other people have recognized you before this, haven’t they?”

  My experiences in England had begun to feel like a half-imagined dream until this moment. Maybe I wasn’t crazy. Maybe I wasn’t useless. I felt an immediate release of tension inside of me. Everything was going to be okay from now on. This was what was supposed to happen. It was a psychic recognition that I was destined to meet this man, that I had been waiting for him.

  Father Bob’s face was open and curious. He wanted to hear what I had to say. Almost instantly I trusted him.

  I found myself telling him everything about my trip to England. We sat at his kitchen table and he listened to me with genuine warmth and attention. He was the first person I told about my strange experiences as a child. I confided in him about falling into mirrors and reading cards and seeing the man in the black hat. Nothing I said seemed to alarm Father Bob. He asked a few questions from time to time, but mostly he listened and encouraged me to speak. Max eventually left, but Father Bob and I kept talking. Our tea grew cold.

  I told him about waking up before my trip to England and seeing that spiral of gray smoke above my abdomen.

  “Have you ever seen a dead body?” he asked me, to my surprise.

  “My grandmother’s,” I answered, remembering her wake.

  “Did you have the experience, by any chance, of looking at her body and thinking you could still see it breathing?”

  “Yes!” In fact, I had.

  “It’s very common. What you are seeing is the etheric body still attached to the physical corpse. It can take up to three days for it to let go, that’s what you see still breathing, and that’s why we don’t bury people right away. We want to let them make that transition. The etheric body is what you saw emanating from your chakra that night. It’s what ghosts are, astral beings disconnected from the physical world.”

  “Would I have become a ghost if my astral body had left my real one?”

  “But it didn’t,” said Father Bob. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Before I knew it, I was going over to his house every Wednesday night to study with him. In addition to Max, Father Bob invited a motley collection of local teenagers—a very religious boy who looked a lot more like Jesus Christ than the kid playing him in the musical, a wild girl with far too many boyfriends, and Keith, a hippie artist and dreamer. We were like the young X-Men, misfits one and all until we met our Professor Xavier.

  We’d all been bullied, and it dawned on me as I got to know these kids that there was no reason for them to be shunned and teased. They weren’t normal, that’s for sure, but they were smart and funny and talented. A lot of times it’s the kid walking down the hall with their head down, the kid who doesn’t fit in, who’s really the most interesting. For the first time in my life, I began to realize how hard it was for people to be spiritually open.

  I see a lot of kids who try to ignore their spiritual selves and end up doing drugs or drinking instead, and they freak out when what they really need to be doing is exploring their souls the way we did with Father Bob. Kids really want spiritual adventures, but they don’t know how to have them.

  A lot of the exercises we did weren’t that dissimilar from games I’d played in my high school theater class, but Father Bob was always explaining to us how it was related to the paranormal. We would massage each other without touching, feeling the energy that surrounds the physical body. We fell backwards into each other’s arms in a complete state of trust.

  Father Bob taught me how to fall. “Do you ever have dreams at night that you are falling from a great height and then you startle awake?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Often.”

  “Don’t wake up,” he told me. “Dare to keep falling. See what happens. That’s what you have to do to develop your sight. Fall and keep falling.”

  For the first time in my life, I was not only part of a group of kids, I was also popular, I was cool. I started writing folk songs, and Keith would play them on his guitar and we would all sing together. We auditioned for the same community theater p
lays, and every Wednesday night we would go over to Father Bob’s. He called me the Black Opal. He said that if I were a jewel, I would be a black opal, rare and precious. It was the first nickname anyone had ever given me, and it made me feel beautiful and loved.

  That’s probably what Father Bob really taught me, that there was something wonderful about who, and what, I was. When I think back on those days, I don’t remember any special techniques or magic tricks or any particularly esoteric information that Bob taught us. He was an odd little guy without a very strong personal presence, but he really believed in a spiritual world and he wanted to create a safe place for us to explore it together.

  Just after I started studying with Father Bob, my old dog, Muffet, who’d spent most of her life in the basement, finally died. I came home one day to find out my mother had put Muffet to sleep and already disposed of the body. I had no idea this was going to happen.

  “Did you stay with her while they did it?” I wanted to know.

  “We left her there,” said my mother as if she were describing a shopping trip. “The vet took care of everything.”

  Nobody had been with Muffet as she passed. Nobody had kissed her or held her. Nobody had said a prayer as she left this life. I ran out of the house and went to Father Bob’s. Some of the other kids were there, and they gathered around me and held me. I cried and cried, and they understood why I was upset. It didn’t matter that Muffet was a dog; she needed the same love and respect as any other being.

  “You need to remember, though,” said Father Bob when I was calmer, “that there isn’t really any difference between the living and the dead. Muffet’s still there. Let yourself be quiet and commune with her.”

  Muffet began visiting me regularly in my dreams, and I told Father Bob that he was right, that I could feel her close.

  One night, Father Bob invited me up to his library. On the shelves were books about the occult and exorcisms and demonic possession.

  “Evil’s real,” he told me. “No matter what anyone says. There is a dark side to all of this and we have to fight it.”

  I thought of the creature I had seen crawling across the floor in my mother’s room and I knew he was right. Some psychics will tell you that evil doesn’t exist, but not me. I believe in demons because I have seen them—in the spiritual world, in the everyday world.

  Evil, wherever it comes from, and I’m not sure where it does, is finally an absence of empathy. We can see that in serial killers and warmongers and priests who abuse kids, but sometimes it’s harder to recognize that complete lack of compassion in people when it’s directed at the natural world. I’m appalled by people who kill animals for sport and who destroy the trees in the forest in the hopes of making one more buck. That’s evil to me, pure evil.

  But Father Bob didn’t explain any of that to me. It’s taken a long time for me to understand it. Still, I appreciated his acknowledgment of evil. A lot of people, the white-light lovers, I call them, want to pretend evil doesn’t exist, that it all comes from bad thoughts, and if we all just smile more it will disappear. That has always seemed naïve to me. That sort of attitude just allows people to ignore a lot of the real suffering in the world.

  At a party one night at Father Bob’s, one of the kids came over and told me that there was a woman who wanted to talk to me privately. My eyes had met hers at one point in the evening. She was a heavy woman, very beautiful, with a mane of dark hair.

  The girl led me upstairs to Father Bob’s study and told me that the lady’s name was Anna Rawlis and that she was half-Hawaiian and half-English. I walked into the room and shut the door behind me.

  Anna Rawlis was sprawled on an old settee like some ancient giant fertility goddess. She radiated an intense spiritual energy. She didn’t say anything for almost a minute and neither did I. Slowly, a wide smile spread across her large face.

  “Don’t you know who you are?” she said at last.

  I knew she didn’t want me to give her my name. I shook my head. I felt disoriented, woozy almost.

  “I can see a few of your past lives, you know.”

  I felt chills prickling up my body. My arms were covered in goose bumps.

  “Your birthday is December 23, isn’t it?”

  It was.

  “You have a strong connection to England, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “You were a little girl once in the Blitz. I don’t think you survived. You were killed when you were very young by a bomb. You hear the bombs, don’t you?” she asked. “And I can see another life. Have you ever seen the movie Oliver!?”

  I nearly laughed out loud to relieve the tension. “Yes,” I said. “Only about a thousand times.”

  Anna Rawlis nodded. “Do you remember Nancy?”

  “Yes.” I already knew what she was going to say next.

  “You were like her. You were a prostitute once, in England. I can see that.”

  Maybe I should have been insulted by what Anna said, but I wasn’t. Because I knew it was true. And I knew it wasn’t something to be ashamed of.

  “Women like us often find ourselves on the fringes of society,” said Anna as if she could read what I was thinking. “You’ve always been a medium, lifetime after lifetime. You’ve always had the sight. I think you were burned for it many times long ago.”

  No one had ever spoken to me about reincarnation before, not even Father Bob. But I’d always believed in it. And I knew that everything that Anna Rawlis was telling me was true.

  When I’m doing readings, I often see people’s past lives. I’m always struck that they’re never surprised by what I say. A part of them has always known who they are.

  I could remember being in an attic with other girls. I knew I’d walked the streets of Victorian London.

  Anna Rawlis called my mother the day after she met me. “You have a very special daughter,” I heard her saying on the phone. “She has a gift. She’s a treasure.”

  “Yes, yes,” my mother chatted politely. “We’ll have to get together someday and talk about it all.”

  I was eavesdropping. I wanted to meet Anna Rawlis again myself.

  “Well, thank you so much,” I heard my mother continuing. “We’ll be in touch with you. I’ll give you a call one day. In the spring, when I’ve got a little more time.”

  I wanted my mother to know that there was something special about me, that I wasn’t a loser. I wanted Anna Rawlis or Father Bob to explain to her who and what I was. I thought that would change everything. But my mother avoided them both. She never called Anna Rawlis.

  My mother was especially resentful of the time I spent with Father Bob. She never asked me about what we did, and even though she often drove me over to the church, she’d mutter in the car the whole time that he wasn’t a real priest.

  “He’s in charge of the church, Mommy,” I’d say.

  But she’d shake her head darkly. “No. He’s not a priest.”

  Still, she never once got out of the car and came in to actually meet him. I think mostly she was resentful of anyone I cared about. Or maybe she was frightened, too. She was a very frightened person.

  “You, you care so much about having friends,” she said to me around that time, as if that were a bad thing. She didn’t have any friends herself, but at last I did. I felt more and more disconnected from her. I suppose she was right in keeping me from having friends all those years, because as I began to make them, I began to realize just how twisted she was. They gave me the courage to break free from her.

  I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew that eventually, unlike my sister, I was going to move away from my mother. I was going to have my own life. But I also felt like a fairy-tale character locked in a tower waiting for someone, anyone, to finally rescue me.

  About two years after I started meeting with Father Bob, he arranged for us to go on a retreat with another group of kids from the Unitarian church called the Liberal Religious Youth. We were all going to travel up to N
ew Hampshire and stay on an island where there was an old hotel, now owned by the Unitarians and used as a conference center but rumored to be haunted. Bob was going to bring an infrared camera to see if we could catch any spirits on film. What I didn’t know, because I can never see anything about my own life, was that not only would I see ghosts, but I would also meet my rescuer and my future husband.

  I was getting ready for a reading when an unexpected woman showed up in my shop, eager for advice. She didn’t have an appointment. She was in a terrible hurry and didn’t have time to come into my room. “I just want to know if I should take this job or not. Surely you can do that without me sitting down.”

  “Do you know someone called Howard?” I asked.

  The woman shook her head.

  “All I can see is Howard. He’s right beside you. He’s not happy at all.”

  “Howard?” She looked completely lost.

  “An old man in a green cardigan? He just died—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anyone called Howard. I’ve never known anyone by that name.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe you should make an appointment and come in when you’re not so rushed. All I can see is Howard.”

  A few minutes later, when my scheduled client showed up, Howard returned. “Do you know a Howard? In a button-down sweater?”

  “That’s my father!” the woman exclaimed. “Really? Really? He’s wearing the green cardigan. He never took it off. We buried him in it.”

  Howard knew my schedule. He knew this other woman was trying to take his daughter’s spot, and he wasn’t happy about it. Sometimes I think the dead are more eager for my readings than the living.

  8

  Men in Tights

  David Saxman arrived at Star Island wearing a red velvet cape. He had long wavy blond hair and strode around the old hotel like a medieval Robert Plant. David was only a few years older than the rest of us, and I thought he was completely arrogant—and devastatingly attractive. Even worse, he seemed to be ignoring me. That hadn’t happened in a long time. All the other girls were getting his attention and I wasn’t.