know, Jake, I read your future last night. I saw you married to an absolute bitch. She didn’t have red hair. So choose your next words carefully.”
***
Okay, back to my peek at the afterlife, because I know you’ve been drooling over that little tease I dropped and you’ve actually put aside your personal questions because you want to know what’s on the other side.
Fine, I’ll share what happened, because I’ve been holding it in all day and am about to tell my mother in the hopes she’ll be able to explain it.
I was doing a reading for a very nervous, thirty year old woman named Donna and things were going along as usual. I saw her meeting a man named Jefferson, dating for several months, falling in love. I’m telling her this and she’s all smiles. Then, and this puzzled me since I supposedly can only read romance, I saw him murder her. Perhaps it was because she was in love with the killer, I don’t know. Anyway I know she was dead because I saw him shoot her in the head, then her lifeless eyes as she hit the ground. The shock left me speechless for a few seconds, the color drained from my face. Donna’s face tightened as she noticed the change. “What’s wrong?” she asked, obviously concerned that I’d seen something really bad.
Before I could answer the image dissolved into something I could not explain. Donna walking barefoot in sunlight, surrounded by the brightest primary colors you can imagine, wearing a smile, just before the image disappeared as it always did at the five year marker.
What happened next was even more amazing. I told her to forget what I’d told her about finding love with a man named Jefferson, that he was a bad man, a dangerous man. Her face went pale, matching mine. Since she’s been a client for a while and I’ve always been right, she nodded, assuring me that she would avoid this man. I took her hands, begged her to promise me, and she did.
And just when I began to relax a bit, to breathe normally for the first time in two minutes, I saw it.
Donna’s life on a different path. The images started again, rushing forward at a speed I’d never experienced, going forward five years.
This time she was still alive.
I had not only seen the afterlife, but had apparently changed her future.
My mom, who now wants me to call her Zelda when we’re open for business, is right out of central casting when it comes to her mystic seer persona. She dresses in the Stevie Nicks 1980s fall collection, with wispy capes, translucent scarves, and willowy mid-calf dresses that (in her opinion) make her look as though she’s floating through a room. Since she’s carrying about fifty extra pounds on her five-two frame, the floating part doesn’t exactly work. But she’s got those dark gypsy eyes peering out through bangs that cover her eyebrows, long straight black hair down to what passes for a waist, and enough bling on her fingers and around her neck to set off the TSA alarm at LaGuardia ten feet from the metal detector. Or at least make Dennis Rodman jealous.
But it’s the faux accent she saves for customers that cracks me up. If a pastrami sandwich could talk, it would sound like mom. She tries to take her Noo Yawk fuhgeddaboudit twang and combine it with a stereotypical vampire, resulting in a husky, sleeps-in-a-smoky-bar concoction that doesn’t exactly blend. “Gooood evening, youse vant to look into da future, or vhat?” Luckily she’s usually spot-on in her predictions, so people put up with a voice that sounds like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny meets Dracula.
Right now, however, she’s not Zelda or a Brooklyn Transylvestite, but mom. And what I’m telling her is making the color drain from her face.
She bites her lower lip as she reaches out and takes my hands. “This is highly unusual, Jillian.”
“So what does it mean? Do I have some special power, or was this just some sort of crystal ball hiccup?”
She shakes her head. “I dunno. Hard to say.”
“Has this ever happened to you, or anyone you know?”
“Uh-uh. But…”
“But…what?”
“There is a very old legend. Of a seer who can see beyond this world.”
“Isn’t that basically a medium?”
She shakes her head. “Nah. They don’t see the afterlife, they contact spirits who have moved on. Big difference.”
“So what’s the legend?”
“It’s easier if…well…I think this is a matter for…The Council.”
I gulp and my pulse shoots through the roof. The Council. So cloaked in secrecy, so high up, so legendary that few in our neighborhood have ever been granted an audience. People refer to it as The Council in hushed tones, as though you could speak in italics. As far as I know, no one my age has ever appeared before The Council.
Except for my own mother.
***
“You okay, Sparks?”
Ryan’s soothing voice makes me turn around as I’m heading into homeroom. “You have to turn it off today,” I say, knowing he must be picking up my anxiety.
He furrows his brow and looks at me with genuine concern. “You’re extremely worried. Anything I can do to help?”
“Yeah, stop reading my thoughts today. I know you’re just trying to be helpful, but please, Ryan, I’m going through something that is very private.”
He nods, closes his eyes for a moment. It’s what he does when he disconnects, or whatever you want to call it, his mind reading ability. He opens his eyes and offers a soft smile. “Sorry, Sparks. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. But you can’t go around sneaking up on girls who might be thinking…you know…stuff.”
I get the sheepish grin that makes him look like a little boy who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the look that reminds me of when we first met in the second grade. He started calling me Sparks back then because he said when the sun hit me just right it looked like sparks were coming out of my hair. “Sure, I get it. I guess I should really leave my abilities at home. At least…when I’m around someone I care for.”
My heart hits a speed bump and takes my mind off The Council for the first time since the talk with mom. I’ve known the guy since I was seven…is he finally getting it after all these years? Can you please stop thinking of me as your oldest female friend and look at the total package which is dying for a date? “You shouldn’t need to read minds to know how a girl feels, Ryan.” (Well, so much for playing my cards close to the vest. But honestly, when it comes to romance, the guy needs a road map, so I might have to be his GPS.) I wonder how he’s taking my comment. Does he realize I’m talking about myself, or just girls in general? His casual nod tells me it’s the latter. Sonofabitch.
“Hey, girls are always saying boys are clueless when it comes to understanding women. I
