Authors: Jessica Knauss
“Hey, Jim,” I said, putting my hands on his shoulders and holding his gaze. “I’ve had something come up. It would be a big favor to me if you could leave by the exit stairs,
very quietly
, and we could reschedule for some other time.” I nodded my head encouragingly.
He nodded, too, keeping silent about his disappointment. “Should I call you or will you call me?”
“I will call you, I promise,” I said, walking backward to give him the idea to head to the exit door. With another two minutes of calm reassurance, during which I felt like my hair was on fire but I wasn’t allowed to scream, he clunked loudly down the stairs, further jangling my nerves.
But I wasted no time—I opened the desk drawer and withdrew the wads of cash I hadn’t given to the maids, then ran to the bookshelves and upended the books, shaking each volume for any hidden bills I might have forgotten. In the end, I had several thousand dollars in tens and twenties in little stacks all over the office. I took a laptop case out of the other desk drawer and stuffed the bills inside, then as an afterthought, slipped my phone into the side pocket. I was in my shirtsleeves and I didn’t even have a sweater in the office to take with me. It was not ideal, but it would have to be my runaway suitcase. I would buy a new coat.
I used the entrance stairs because they lead to an outside door behind the kitchen, and if you were in the parlor, that should be far enough away so that you wouldn’t hear me escape. My first stop was going to be to find Emily, so as I tiptoed down, I tried to remember whether I had seen, in that confusing story she transmitted, the exterior of her house. I knew it was on Hope, and if I started in the direction I saw her and her mother going, I was bound to find it. I would knock politely at the door and ask to speak with Emily, and if I could refrain from beating her senseless for giving you that notebook, I would make her see reason. If I couldn’t make her see reason, I would bargain with her, writing out a form to release her from therapy and go back to Brown. If that still didn’t work, I would make up something to charge her with so the police could collect her and then start the procedures to have her permanently committed. I imagined she would be telling everyone I was a psychic, but I could simply reply that Emily is living in a fantasy world.
At the bottom of the stairs, I realized I was living in a similarly unreal world, making those plans, and that I was as crazy as anyone I’d ever treated. I stood on the welcome mat, which was crusted over with melting ice, salt, and sand from a winter of snowy sidewalks, and realized that I didn’t have a better idea after that, other than catching the trolley bus to some hotel in the DownCity area. Maybe I could call Lakshmi and see if I could live at her house? I could get to Ohio with this much cash.
Suddenly I was a fugitive. It didn’t matter whether I got Emily under control because you, husband who’s much crazier than I am, were in possession of admissible evidence of my unregistered Talent. How dangerous do they think psychics are? We’re people like everyone else, and I would tell them that, but then I guess I would have to register because how would I know what evils a psychic can or can’t perform unless I am one?
And it kept going like that. I’m not sure how much time passed before I heard the knock.
It was tender, as if you were petting a kitten, barely audible on the cheap door we’d had installed what seemed like a hundred years before. Your voice came through the pores of the fiberboard like slow-flowering tendrils: “Patricia?”
I held my breath and tried not to exist.
“Patricia?” you repeated. “Are you there?”
I attempted to decipher your thoughts by the timbre of your voice, but my only real practice in that has been with Emily, and as we’ve seen, I failed utterly. All I wanted was to leave, even though it was probably about twenty degrees out and the sun was already below the trees. As much as it pained me to leave you in my dream house, my hand gravitated to the latch.
You must’ve heard the soft click, because then you said, “Are you leaving me?”
“Yes.” It left my lips with ease, the way a caged bird takes flight.
The door bent under the pressure, looking like the surface of a boiling pot of water, as you thrashed and pounded it. I backed away to avoid being pummeled if the door gave way and again contemplated the outdoors through the window. In the cold with no coat, or in my cozy house with a rampaging lunatic? The only reason I stayed was that you, possibly with good strategy, started talking again.
“You can’t leave me. I haven’t hit you. You said as long as I didn’t hit you, you would stay.”
“That is
not
what I said.”
“What did you say?” I could have described your tone as challenging, and I naively accepted the challenge.
I set the laptop bag with all the cash in it on the bottom stair and fished my keys out of my pocket. I heard you back away into the kitchen as I opened the door. When I saw your eyes, I realized with horror that now you had me where you wanted me.
“I told you I would leave if you did hit me. That’s hardly the same thing as staying if you don’t,” I said, for completeness’s sake. Then I headed for the parlor, where I could get a coat, gloves, and hat out of the closet.
You stepped in front of me and grabbed my arms in the same places you’ve bruised so many times before.
“Get your hands off me,” I said.
“If you leave, I’ll kill myself.”
There it was, out in the open: the emotionally abusive ultimatum I’d seen rattling around your head a few months ago. I have to acknowledge the ugly practicality that rose to the front of my mind: if you were dead, I could stay in the house and would only have to find a way to get Emily to keep quiet about my secret Talent.
“You’ve forgotten already: I’m psychic. I can tell you don’t mean it,” I said, struggling against you.
You let go, reaching for my neck or my hair. I seized the opportunity to run to the closet and put on warm clothes. When I closed the closet door, all wrapped up, my destiny fell back into my own hands.
Abandoned on the floor, open with some scribbled pages bent and torn, was my notebook. I picked it up and smoothed the pages only so I could properly close it again, then took my purse off the table in the entryway and put it on my shoulder.
I considered leaving through the front door and taking the car to Warwick to the airport right then, but knew I would miss all the cash and my phone in the laptop bag. When I came back to the kitchen, I saw you standing near the sink with one sleeve pushed up and a cleaver in the other hand, aiming for the artery that runs through your wrist.
Much as I dislike you, the scene brought me to a halt. My heart stopped for what seemed like a full minute. It’s one thing to understand the practicality of a human being going out of existence, and another to see it about to happen.
“If I don’t have you, I have nothing,” you said. The triteness of the words contrasted with the depth of your emotion. You truly couldn’t imagine life without me. I gasped because I found myself beside you at the edge of a precipice in your mind. But the seconds went by and you didn’t make a move, so I had time to analyze your thoughts, cycling like always, and found no real intent to even touch the blade to your skin, much less to apply the pressure that would be necessary with that cleaver I never sharpen.
“You’ll be better off without me,” I said. “You’ll find someone who cares for you.” I shrugged under my heavy coat and headed for the stairwell.
“Stay,” you cried. “I won’t tell anyone you’re a psychic. It will be our little secret.” You let the cleaver clatter into the sink and wrapped your arms around my torso from behind. The coat is bulky, so you couldn’t get a good grip. I peeled you off me like a Band-Aid, whacked you with the notebook for good measure, stooped to grab the laptop bag, and opened the back door.
As I turned to shut it behind me, I caught a glimpse of your desolate thought energy. I shook it off. How many times had you drawn me back, playing on my standard human compassion?
It was enough.
I followed Emily’s path, headed toward Hope.
I’ve found this notebook crammed among the impressive psychology books in my office after . . . more than two years. How could it be that long? The first thing that came to mind when I pulled it out and dusted it off was that it contains incriminating evidence and I should destroy it. But it fell open to a blank page, a clean slate, if you will, and I can’t resist updating it before it bids the world farewell.
Most importantly, the office I found it in is the office I was writing about two years ago. The beloved yellow Victorian is still mine.
That crazy afternoon, I walked right up to the house I thought was Emily’s, my head abuzz with recriminations and justifications, but my hand, raised as it was, would not knock on the door. I was so psychologically exhausted, it felt like my hand made the decision without any of my input. I studied the golden glow from the wintry windows for a few minutes and decided that she’d already ruined my life as far as she was concerned. She probably wouldn’t do anything else, at least not before I figured out what my situation was going to turn into. And I had to give myself a break after everything I’d been through. I was still considering going to Ohio for a while, and if that husband of mine made it necessary, escaping to Canada. I’d heard their psychic centers are more therapeutic than ours. Worst case scenario, I could enter as a patient and maybe rise through the ranks to oversee a facility full of Canadian and expat psychics.
But changing countries and giving up the house I’d suffered so much for was not a decision I wanted to make lightly. I took a bus from Hope Street to DownCity and spent a sizable chunk of my cash on a night at the Omni Providence Hotel. Crouched in my hotel room with the shades drawn, I called my clients with appointments in the coming days to reassure them that I would see them as soon as I got back from my friend’s surprise wedding. (You can’t give some of these clients any negative news, so I made that part up.) I received ten or fifteen calls from my ex-husband’s number, but I never answered and no message was ever left.
With that obligation under control, I wandered the city for what seemed like years. I gravitated toward Friendship Street, rounding the snow banks in both directions, even though cars can only go one way. I did the New England thing and ignored the few people who hurried through the biting cold and gusting wind. I kept my head down and thought over what I would be willing to do to expedite a divorce, and what I could possibly do to avoid detection of my Talent and keep my dear house. The next morning, I used the hotel’s skybridge and hiked up and down the mall, letting the thought energy of all the shoppers wash through me. Nobody’s too troubled when they’re shopping at Providence Place, so it was refreshing, even cleansing.
By that afternoon, I felt transformed. The house made the decision for me. I would stay in Providence and see if I could somehow make my husband see reason, if I could plant a recycling idea in his cluttered mind so that eventually we might have something resembling an amicable parting of ways. Or maybe I had a moment of extrasensory perception. I checked out of the Omni and hiked back to the house, feeling too warm with the exercise in spite of the persistent nipping at my ears.
When I came to the front door, it was wide open. I stuck my head inside and called, “Hello?” All the lights that had been on the day before were still on, not to mention the heater, which wheezed and coughed to keep up with the air that, it seems, had been rushing out the front door since not long after I’d left. I went systematically through all three floors, even looking into my husband’s study and its powder room. The only things missing from the entire house were my husband and his wallet and cell phone. I felt a strange glimmer: I hoped passionately that he’d left because he’d already seen the reason I’d thought I would have to implant like a virus. The empty house was doubly odd because with all those university students passing by, I would’ve thought some vandalism would take place.
I made myself at home, ready to talk calmly and sanely if my husband should return. I took the time to write down everything that had happened and then hid this notebook away. When I started seeing patients again and there was still no sign of him, I dialed him. It had been two days since his number had flashed up on my phone. It dialed and rang, and rang, and then that harsh sequence of notes and the message, “The number you are trying to reach is out of service . . .”
I hung up. Then, I don’t know, time passed and I lost all sense of curiosity. I got rid of his clothes and computers, but something stayed with me like an impending migraine: would he show up one day demanding we sell the house and split the money?
On a gorgeous, burgeoning spring day, the suspense resolved. I answered the doorbell and a nondescript youth who was interning at the lawyer’s office shoved an envelope at me. They were divorce papers.
I practically fainted onto a divan with the sense of relief. It turned out that, after I left, my husband had checked himself into the hospital for suicide prevention watch. That seemed histrionic to me. I would never have left him alone if I’d seen any real intent in his eyes. The hospital had tried to contact me regularly for a few days using his phone, and then his parents picked him up and he lived with them for a month or two until he felt ready to start over, in Massachusetts.
I flipped through the divorce pages and was thrilled to see that he was offering to let me have the house—if I turned myself in as a psychic.
“Tsk, tsk,” I said to Emily, who was standing there next to me in the parlor. “Where would he get an idea like that? I’m not one of those Talented people, am I?”
Emily shook her head earnestly, even though the lie detector in her mind was ringing a loud alarm bell. Training can trump truth.
It’s taken all this time to fight that stipulation, but in the end, he could provide no proof because this book was in my possession and I wasn’t going to admit that it exists. His arguments were halfhearted. I get the sense that his parents got the first papers together, because when I saw him in court, he still hadn’t fully registered that the marriage was coming to an end. He held the exit door for me. I looked him in the eye and said good-bye.