Awash in Talent (27 page)

I sat up. The sight of the telephone urged me to call the police. Emily has dangerous tendencies I can’t control and a specific person could be victimized. It was absolutely my responsibility to call the authorities at that point. But I hesitated because Emily still didn’t know exactly where to find Carlos, and she couldn’t activate any plans at all until I cooperated, declaring her sane and fit to return to Brown without supervision.

I cleared my throat and stood up painfully. “Emily, is there anything you’re not telling me?”

“Nope,” she said in a newly sinister way. “You know all there is to know, just as I know you must be deeply surprised by my real plans and are now going to try to bring me back to some kind of dull, anonymous existence in which I do what society thinks I should, obey my parents, and never see my true love again.”

I got that sinking feeling, as if I had been caught cheating. As I might in that situation, I responded, “What are you talking about?”

“You’re a psychic.” She said it with such certainty, I thought she might be psychic, too—that she’d been reading my mind while I was engrossed in hers. But if I’d had time to analyze her hyperactive thought energy, I might’ve seen that she was only making a string of assumptions. I’d just witnessed her paranoia about psychics reading her mind without her permission, which was part of the reason she was dead set against her sister having a Talent. My perturbation at everything I’d seen and my own guilt made me speak without thinking.

“You can’t tell anyone,” I said, admitting my crime. It had been only a sin of omission, not telling anyone about my Talent, but now I was trying to draw her in as an accomplice.

Her eyes grew wide and her thoughts looked like hundreds of exclamation points with the shock of having called me out correctly.

My hands went inexorably toward her eyes. I only meant to close them so she couldn’t look at me anymore.

I ended up putting her in a headlock and forcing her knees to the floor.

She screamed, as anyone would in that situation, and it was loud enough that I couldn’t hear you, my husband, climbing the stairs before you appeared in the still-open entrance door.

Your mind raced to make sense of what you saw, discarding explanations as soon as you came up with them.

“Primal scream therapy,” I said over Emily’s continued, rattling howls.

You gaped, not believing it, but finally decided it was easier to accept the explanation and headed back down the stairs.

“Was that your husband?” Emily asked in a voice that was surprisingly calm, still on her knees.

“Yes,” I replied.

“How did you end up with that fat piece of lard?” she said, turning to me so that I could see she at least respected me enough to think I deserved better.

I laughed it off. By mutual unspoken accord, we took up our usual places, with me in the chair and she on the couch, but nothing was really the same anymore.

“I suggest a deal,” Emily continued.

I knew I couldn’t really make a deal with someone so deranged, but I played along.

“You pretend you never saw into my mind and I won’t rat you out.”

I wanted to say, “That sounds wonderful.” But all of sudden professional responsibility was foremost in my mind.

“I have to uphold the Tarasoff rule . . .”

“No, you don’t have to uphold the Tarasoff rule, a judge has to uphold it. Don’t try to blind me with fancy words. You don’t have any obligation under the Tarasoff rule in Rhode Island to have me committed.” She was aware enough of her situation to research some legal possibilities related to therapy. Through her eyes, I saw the blinking computer screen in her room late at night, surrounded by hidden aluminum, and I shuddered at how sinister it all seemed.

“No, but I do have to warn potential victims or I’ll lose my license.”

“Victims? What victims?” In her mind, she is the only victim. I was sloppy to use the word. “I’m the one who’s been in the presence of an unregistered psychic all along and never knew it.”

She was thinking that if she turned me in, she would be assigned a different therapist, one she could manipulate even more easily than me. Reassigning Emily sounded like a beautiful option, but obviously not at the cost of presenting myself at the Talent registry. My mind raced: how could I get rid of Emily
and
keep her mouth shut? Maybe the deal she’d proposed wasn’t so insane. No, it was. The idea of releasing her into society twisted up my insides.

“I’m sorry I ever tried to deceive you, Emily,” I said humbly, trying to appeal to her ego. “For your own safety, you shouldn’t tell anyone that I’m a psychic. We need to continue our therapy sessions, and now, you should start taking your prescriptions and really make an effort to get well.”

Her thoughts blackened and she clenched both her fists, then relaxed them, and with an effort that was visible only on the psychic level, she pushed the blackness away and started sending me thoughts I can only describe as pink and fluffy.

“What did you do just there?” I asked her. “It seemed as if you were profoundly changing your mind. You wanted to get up and walk out, and then you decided to stay. That’s really impressive. Maybe that technique can help you with your bigger issues.”

The pink fluff wavered. She asked, “How does it work? Is there any way I can keep you from reading my mind?”

I shook my head with a smile. But as we continued chatting, I imagined it would actually be fairer if Emily sat there with her eyes closed. It would be like a normal person’s therapy session. She would show me only what she wanted to show me and I would put the pieces together like a puzzle. I wouldn’t be distracted by Emily’s weather-like thought conditions, and she wouldn’t be paranoid about my abilities. I spent quite a bit of time for the rest of that hour wondering whether I would ever have gone into psychology if I hadn’t been born a psychic.

When the session came to an end, Emily moved deliberately toward the exit door, her thoughts sloshing back and forth as if they were oil and water in a glass bottle. Her mother was waiting on the landing.

“Mrs. X,” I said from across the room. She waited patiently while I came to the doorway, weighing whether I could speak privately with her. “Emily,” I finally decided, “could you wait downstairs for a minute? I need to speak with your mother.”

She looked at me and at her mother, a million different speeches on the tip of her tongue explaining that there was nothing either of us could say to each other that we couldn’t say in front of her. Having come quickly to the boil, her thoughts simmered down and she headed for the first floor without even a response to her mother’s pat on the shoulder.

Emily’s mother waited for me to speak with something between curiosity and abject fear. “Mrs. X, did you know that Emily is supposed to be taking prescriptions?”

“No.” She was horrified and disappointed in herself for not keeping better tabs on her un-Talented daughter. Her thoughts were skittish, darting here and there as if they were trying to be in the right place whenever required.

“I’ll need you to oversee the drug dispensation and make sure she takes them. Don’t let her hide them under her tongue or any old trick like that. She . . . needs to take these pills.” I chose my words carefully so as not to add to her growing alarm.

“Is there something terribly wrong with her?” she asked. She was comparing her daughters in her mind, Talented Beth and troublemaking Emily, but felt guilty even while she was doing it and tucked the thoughts away like contraband.

“I’m going to continue with this therapeutic approach, and if you help me by making sure she takes those prescriptions, I think she’ll finally start to improve. She has a real chance here, with your help.”

I gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder, not unlike the one she’d given Emily, but she still felt overwhelmed with the responsibility I’d heaped upon her. I waved good-bye to give her the signal that the conversation was over, and she finally turned away, leaving me with a thought I didn’t expect from her: no one could help either of her daughters because they’re both insane.

I shut the door and let Emily’s thoughts wash out of me with enormous relief. I went to the window and held my hands over the hissing radiator, letting my mind go in a million different directions, trying to process everything I’d seen while I watched the students avoid the giant pool of ice melt in the broken sidewalk on Bowen Street.

It occurred to me that I should be able to see Emily’s route through this window: every memory she had going back and forth to sessions alternately with her friend and her mother were along Bowen Street. I waited for some time until finally, Emily and her mother came into view at a rapid pace, with Emily dodging the foot traffic and her mother barely able to keep up. I don’t know how they usually walk together, so I might not have realized anything was unusual, except that Emily stopped short and cast her gaze up at my window.

I took in her thought waves, muted through the distance and the glass, hardly believing what I perceived. With the horror of receiving a telegram in wartime, I looked back at my desk to see that it had only the computer and the telephone atop it. Could she really have done such a thing? Was
that
why she could say with such confidence that I’m a psychic? I ricocheted down the entry stairs, leaving my next appointment in the waiting room, bewildered. I don’t remember my feet on the stairs.

There you were, husband-for-not-much-longer. You stood in the parlor near the front door, your thought energy one big question mark. You held in your right hand, away from your body, as if you could erase the information it held with mere distance, the notebook in which I’d been writing the sad confession addressed to you.

I tried to calculate how fast you read, but I couldn’t remember how many pages in I started to admit my total and utter lack of love for you. The only thing for sure was that I’d already admitted to you that I have an unregistered Talent.

“Give that to me,” I said, reaching for the notebook.

You held your hand up as if it were a game of keep-away. “That girl,” you said. “Who is she?” Meanwhile your thoughts churned around the idea of taking me in to register as a psychic. It offended you that I’d eluded categorization for so long.

“She’s one of my clients—my patients,” I said, still reaching for the book. “She’s actually my most difficult case. This notebook is hers, a project I had her work on for therapeutic reasons. You really shouldn’t be reading it. She’s a pathological liar. What did she tell you?”

“She said this was something you’d written to me and asked her to deliver . . .” You processed my lies for a split second, then came back with, “She doesn’t look old enough to have a husband, and she’s definitely not a therapist. And this is your handwriting.” The facts piled up in your mind and I could see that you hadn’t read quite far enough to see how much I’ve been disdaining you this last year. It was a relief to have some little secret left, but it didn’t matter much because you grabbed my wrist with the intention of taking me to the police station that instant.

“No, not the police station,” I said. If worse came to worst, I would turn myself in at a registry. Maybe the whole thing could stay quiet, avoid getting the law involved. “Those words are a piece of fiction. I wanted to put some of my clients’ cases in a book and had to fictionalize it.” Your grip around my wrist was like a vise. I cried out with the pain, but also with the firmness of your thoughts. My lies were not convincing you. In your mind, we were already at the police station, punishing me.

Oddly, although you believed the words on the page, you didn’t fully understand what my being a psychic meant, because I could find no traces of fear that I was reading your mind, no desperate effort to hide your thoughts in some dark corner. I always thought if I told anyone I was a psychic, that would be the response. You surprised me yet again.

“I have a client upstairs.” I tried a fact. “Let me see him so I don’t have to reschedule, and then you can take me to the registry.”

Your grip relaxed with hesitation, so I seized the opportunity to wrest my arm out and take several steps back.

“Okay,” you said. You thought you were in complete control of the situation, which might make another person sloppy, but you didn’t forget to press the notebook firmly between your fingers.

I stood for a moment, playing out the scenarios of my plan. I considered asking for the notebook back, but, looking into your thoughts, I could tell it would be useless. You were going to keep reading as soon as I was out of sight. Overwhelmed trying to remember exactly what I’d written and calculate how many pages you could read before you understood I was vaguely hoping to leave you, I started up the interior stairs. My intent was to grab a suitcase and some clothes, maybe some toothpaste and deodorant—the kind of kit any therapist would advise an abused client to put together in advance so it would be ready whenever the moment came.

But no, you followed right behind me and watched as I unlocked the second-floor back stairwell to go up to my office. I eyed the open bedroom door behind you, longing to dart inside and get something, anything, for the kit I should have made long ago. I covered my true desire with a lame wave, hoping it would seem like a promise to return to you, before I shut and locked the stairwell door behind me. I leaned against the door, exhaled some of the tension, and crossed my fingers that what had just happened had been a definitive good-bye.

When I came back through my office, my poor client was standing in the doorway on the entrance side. His eyes told me that he had been gazing over the threshold with his toes inside the office ever since I had darted out, leaving the door open. I smoothed my hair, smiled, and said, “Come in,” loudly so you could hear.

This client is a young grad student who comes from an uneducated family, so he feels inferior to the other students in his department. If only he knew—they all feel like impostors, no matter how illustrious their families. Being able to read such thoughts was a major advantage for me in grad school. He’s soft-spoken and doesn’t make a lot of eye contact, so I tried not to startle him.