The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  On the way back to my own store after a walk one day, I noticed a small shop across the street with a sign covered in familiar Wiccan symbols. It was a tiny little place, selling sage and candles and the usual witch gear. I talked to the owner, an attractive young woman with a mass of long red hair who, predictably, had grown up in a repressive family of Baptists down south and come to Woodstock to find her freedom. I knew exactly what she was talking about. She invited me up to a full-moon circle on the top of the mountain in a place called Magic Meadow.

  “It’s a beautiful hidden bowl surrounded by peaks and filled with apple trees and mountain laurel,” she told me. “When they’re in bloom, it’s like being inside of a cloud. You’ll have to come up with us. We drum and sing under the stars and make wreaths for our hair. It’s a very holy place.”

  She began reciting an old chant in praise of the goddess I knew from days at the Church of the Mystic Light, “Isis, Astarte, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Lianna.”

  I’d dabbled in Wicca long ago when I was with Erik and hadn’t really been taken with it because it felt like it was too skewed to the feminine, but this woman was so gentle and so genuinely friendly I found myself wanting to get to know her. “That sounds really nice,” I said, surprised that it did.

  An older woman with crooked teeth and gnarled hands came into the shop. She was wearing an odd assortment of tattered skirts and scarves that somehow worked together to give her an oddly stylish look. She reeked of patchouli oil, which I was beginning to discover was the official scent of Woodstock.

  “Angel Nicole, meet Fiona; she’s just arrived in Woodstock,” said the red-haired witch. “You should show her some of your drawings.”

  Out of her pocket Angel Nicole produced a wad of postcard-sized copies of what were clearly larger paintings—all of angels. They were some of the most beautiful and truest portraits I had ever seen.

  “You see angels, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” she said casually, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

  “I saw an angel once,” I said. “In England. The feathers of her wings were covered in eyes.”

  Angel Nicole beamed. “I know her! Sometimes I see her with Jesus.”

  “You know Jesus?”

  “He comes and talks to me sometimes,” she admitted shyly. “Here’s a picture of him I did.” She pulled out another small painting.

  When I saw it, I realized that she was probably telling the truth.

  Angel Nicole lived in a van with her dogs, and I started letting her come to my apartment to take showers or to stay there when it was too cold.

  When Bob came up and met her, he nearly keeled over.

  “This is your new friend?” He was appalled. He couldn’t understand how I could even talk to such a person. In New Jersey, she would’ve been hauled out of the condo complex by the police. What Bob couldn’t get through his head was that I had a lot more in common with Angel Nicole than I did with some overstuffed suburbanite on a cruise ship.

  I put her full-sized paintings of angels up in the store.

  One day she brought me a special painting she’d created just for me. It showed a giant eye rising like the sun over the ocean. There was something Egyptian about it. I put it up in my bedroom and felt it keeping watch over me.

  The day after I put up that painting, though, while I was cleaning out the birds’ cage like I did every morning, somehow a perch dislodged, stuck out through the bars, and pierced my eye. I heard the hollow plonk as the dowel went right into my eyeball. The pain was so immediate and intense that I passed out.

  I came to on the floor, and I was sure that I was blind in that eye. I couldn’t see anything. I was in excruciating pain. Somehow I managed to get out my cell phone and call David. “Call 911!” he yelled at me.

  I dialed 911, and then I called Bob. I was terrified. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I’d never had an accident before.

  “You called an ambulance?” said Bob. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

  But the police and the EMTs were already at the shop by then, and they put me on a stretcher and raced me to the hospital. Which was a good thing, it turned out.

  The nurses and doctors were mostly concerned about the bacteria on the perch from the birds.

  I told them that Bob seemed to think I was overreacting.

  “Let him put a stick through his fucking eye and see how he feels,” said one of the nurses.

  It turned out my cornea was badly scratched, and I needed antibiotics for a possible infection. Worst of all, I had to wear an eye patch over the eye, and I couldn’t wear my contact in the other eye for six weeks. I was blind again, like I had been as a little girl.

  Some people say that Woodstock makes you more of what you really are. If that’s so, then this was the first step in the heightening of my psychic powers. Once again I couldn’t see the outside world, but the spiritual world was clearer to me than it had ever been. I was basically walking around blind, but I was sensing all kinds of spirits. I was feeling like I was on the edge of experiencing all kinds of new realities.

  In Woodstock I’m not really that special. There are astrologers and mystics, monks and shamans, Buddhists, Wiccans, Christians, Jews, Sufis, and pagans. It’s as if the whole town is the Church of the Mystic Light. I began to feel more confident in my abilities, and my sight seemed to grow more powerful because of that.

  My intention had been to retire, but it was strange not doing readings anymore. Still, no one in Woodstock knew I was a psychic. I felt restless. My shop, which Gavin had named the White Gryphon after our cockatoos, wasn’t doing much business yet, and a lot of the locals explained to me that things would be slow until the summer tourists started coming into town. Because I needed a little extra money, I decided to put up a sign in the window for Psychic Animal Readings.

  I was thinking that now and then someone might show up with their dog, and I’d pat its head and tell its owner if it was sick or if it missed its littermates. That kind of thing. Nothing too heavy or serious or intense. I was imagining the occasional old lady with a mutt she’d picked up at the pound, wondering where he’d come from.

  I had no idea what totally insane animal lovers Woodstockers were.

  There was a special pet parade every fall where people dressed their animals up in costumes. There were two different sanctuaries for liberated farm animals. Every other person was a vegan. Almost at once, people began pouring into my shop with their dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and even hedgehogs. I was suddenly Saint Francis.

  But the really big problem was what the animals were telling me. They weren’t just talking about dog food or needing to go to the vet. They were talking about the spirits of the dead, and they were inviting those spirits to speak through me to their owners.

  A couple showed up with a depressed dog who turned out to be in mourning for a young girl who’d died. It was the couple’s daughter and she had a lot to say to them. Now other parents who had lost children started coming to the store.

  The dark underside of Woodstock was drug abuse, and so many people came in who had lost loved ones to overdoses.

  I was seeing all kinds of people—shop owners, teenagers, cops, hairstylists, lawyers, businesspeople, old people, the devout, the atheists … everybody was coming to me for readings. People began driving up from New Jersey; weekenders from the city told their friends about me. Canadians were arriving. I couldn’t even answer my phone anymore. Sometimes I had to hide upstairs because there were so many people in the shop wanting to meet with me. I had taken down the sign about being an Animal Psychic within days, but it didn’t matter. Word had gotten out.

  I had never been so busy.

  A lot of people don’t need to see me. Either they’re not going to listen to what the spirits are going to tell them or they know it already, like the characters in The Wizard of Oz. Of course when the dead come through, that’s different. When people are dealing with issues of life and death, o
f grieving and loss, that feels important. But if you want to know if your boyfriend is cheating on you, don’t come to me. You know he is. You’re just hoping I’m going to tell you that he’s not. I get so bored with those kinds of petty concerns.

  When I got overwhelmed by the visitors, I would often go hide in the Artists Cemetery. Woodstock has a bunch of cemeteries, but the most beautiful one is hidden on a soft slope behind a grove of hemlocks minutes from the center of town. All kinds of musicians and painters and writers are buried there, as well as the ordinary people who have known and loved them. Long before the sixties rock concert made it famous, artistic types had been flocking to the town to put on performances and set up utopian communities. No one super famous is buried in the Artists Cemetery, but it’s a special place filled with misfits and seekers. It’s dark and quiet there, and a lot of the old tombstones are covered in thick, green moss.

  I had always thought that when I died I’d be buried somewhere near Glastonbury, but after I came to Woodstock, I knew at last that I had found a place where I could truly rest. Only it sure looked like it wasn’t going to happen until after I was dead.

  The moment this woman walked into my room, I wanted to vomit. Sometimes I’ll feel the twinge of someone’s arthritis or the dull pounding of a headache, but this was an overwhelming sensation. I was going to throw up.

  I put my hand over my mouth and tried to keep it together. “How are you feeling?” I asked her as waves of nausea rolled over me.

  “Terrific!” she said. But I could see a black, hideous energy permeating her entire body. Was it AIDS? Was it cancer? Was it catching?

  “I think you need to go to a doctor,” I told her.

  “I take supplements,” she said. “I’m in great health.”

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I managed to mutter before I had to rush out of the reading room. I barely made it to the bathroom before I vomited.

  “Please,” I said when I returned. “Go get a checkup. You need a checkup.”

  “I’ll be fine. Really.”

  “No. You won’t. You need a doctor. This is something very serious.”

  I tried and tried, but she wouldn’t listen to me. That happens sometimes. A few months later I saw her obituary in the paper.

  22

  I’m Not Going Anywhere!

  Gavin was impressed by the Dalai Lama, who spoke on the local baseball field to everyone in town about kindness, but other than that he didn’t love Woodstock. Our home was smaller; his school was meaner. None of the warm hippie vibes had seeped into the regional middle school where he started going in September. It was a cold place lit by green fluorescent lights, and each day that Gavin got off the bus he looked sadder and sadder.

  I asked him what he thought about the place, but he’d just shrug. Another mother, though, told me what was really going on. The new kid, Gavin, was being bullied by some of the local rednecks for his long hair, his big words, and his quiet ways. It made me feel insane and brought back all my own rage at the cruelties I had endured in school. I was trying to figure out what to do when I got a call from the school nurse asking me and David to come in at once. Gavin had been beaten up in the woodshop.

  David and I drove as fast as we could to the middle school. Gavin had actual finger marks on his throat. He had been picked up by the neck and slapped across the face by a group of eighth-grade hoodlums. I flipped. I totally flipped. I felt insane. How could something this horrible happen in a school? I stormed into the middle school office demanding to know what was going to be done about this. Were the bullies going to be expelled? How was Gavin going to be helped to feel safe from this day onward?

  An administrator listened to me from behind his desk, nodding as if he understood me. “Well,” he finally said. “The real issue is how Gavin is going to learn how to stand up for himself and fight.”

  I was stunned. “My son does not come to school to learn to fight!”

  David and I took Gavin home and withdrew him from the public school. There was no way we were sending him back to such an emotionally clueless place. In the following months and years I cannot tell you how many parents have come to me about the bullying their children have experienced at that school. Gavin loved his public school in New Jersey, but this place had a terrible, dead energy.

  David and I started talking to everybody in town about what we should do and kept hearing about a private school that was very gentle and sweet. One day, I was buying a bottle of wine in the liquor store, and I saw a man I instantly recognized as Donovan’s son. I remembered him from the concerts in England. But now he was grown-up. He looked just like his father and was standing at the checkout counter.

  “Donovan?” I asked, because that was his name also.

  “Yeah?” He turned to look at me, clearly wondering how I knew him.

  “I knew your dad in the eighties,” I explained. “I was friends with Pat and Margaret.”

  Coincidentally, both he and his father lived locally. I asked where his kids went to school, and he also mentioned the private school everyone else had. I figured if the grandchild of the man who’d written the score for a movie about Saint Francis went there, it was good enough for Gavin. That was the sign I needed. With my sister’s financial help, we enrolled him in the Woodstock Day School the following week.

  Gavin was just beginning to settle in when it was time for us to go and have our first parent-teacher conference night. David and I were impressed by how thoughtful and warm Gavin’s teachers were and were talking about it on the ride home. But as we drove through town, we began to hear sirens. Fire trucks whizzed past us, followed by a police car and an ambulance. People were running down the sidewalks ahead of our car. We came around the curve of the main street through town and saw flames shooting up from the roof of the White Gryphon. The windows were bursting from the heat, and the entire top of the building was on fire.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” I was screaming. “Gavin! Gavin!”

  David and I abandoned the car in the middle of the road and leapt out.

  “I’m going in!” I screamed, running towards the building. But firemen held me back. “My son’s in there! My animals are in there!”

  The whole top floor of the building caved in. And suddenly it was gone. There were firemen everywhere with their axes and hoses. People were coming up to me, but I didn’t know what was happening. I had to get in there to find Gavin.

  More windows popped. People in the street were screaming and crying. It was like some scene from a horror movie, only it wasn’t a movie. It was really happening. It was a parent’s worst nightmare, to go out for a simple evening and to come back and find your child in a house on fire.

  The policeman wouldn’t let go of me, but a moment later a neighbor was beside me, letting me know that Gavin was in her house. He was okay. Not only that, he’d called 911, shut the fire door to the shop below, and heroically managed to rescue all of the animals on his own.

  “Do you have any enemies, ma’am?” asked a burly fireman coming over to me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, too distraught to understand the question.

  “This is no ordinary fire. It’s like a bomb went off up there.”

  “Really?”

  “Three-alarm fire that fast? Awfully strange.”

  “I don’t even know anyone here! We just moved to town!”

  By the time they got the fire out on the top floor, the attic of the building was a charred, smoking catastrophe.

  We lost everything we owned. Our clothes, our furniture, our books, our records, our artwork, everything. Luckily, I had most of my photo albums downstairs in my reading room, so they were all right, and except for some smoke damage the store itself was unharmed. Still, it was a devastating, heart-wrenching experience.

  I walked around the black, empty remains of our apartment in a daze an hour later. I sat down on the floor. It was still hot. There were no walls anymore, just blackened beams.

  “I’m just
going to sleep here tonight,” I said to David.

  “You can’t sleep here, honey,” said one of the firemen.

  “I’m okay. I’m staying here.” My bed was gone; my fairies were gone; my pink room was gone. Still, I could see the mountain out of the window frame.

  Eventually David and one of the firemen had to carry me out of the building.

  A woman who owned a motel around the corner let us stay in one of her cabins with all of our animals. The families and teachers at Gavin’s school were amazing, taking up a collection for clothing, bedding, and kitchenware. Shops around town put out cans so people could donate to help us out. We became the Cratchits, the local charity case. “Oh, you’re the family who lost everything in that fire,” is what people said now when they met us.

  One of the parents at the Day School had a small cottage on the Hudson River that he let us live in for the next six months. I was strangely disoriented. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t think. I certainly couldn’t do readings. It felt like I had been personally attacked and had barely survived. But by what, and for what reason, I had no idea.

  The insurance investigators discovered that there had been some problem in the internal wiring of the refrigerator, which had literally exploded like a bomb. It was a total fluke; it was amazing that anyone had survived.

  Even though I had lost everything I owned, I became oddly fixated on a single Betsey Johnson coat I had just bought and never worn. It was the one loss I truly mourned. It’s just stuff, I kept saying to myself, just stuff. Still, I wished I’d worn the coat at least once. Why save anything? You never know what’s going to happen next.

  The cottage was in the middle of nowhere. David drove Gavin to school and then met up with Bob at the building. The two of them were renovating it together.