Sisterland (26 page)

“You don’t have three chins.”

After the segment finished, she said, “That wasn’t bad.”

“Didn’t you believe me?” Then I said, “You haven’t changed your mind about October sixteenth?”

Vi was looking into the distance, in the direction of our dining room but not at the dining room itself, and simultaneously I didn’t want her to visualize a natural disaster from inside my house and I felt her separateness from me, her mysteriousness, in a way that was almost impressive. She did have an ability, one I’d never been impressed by back when I’d shared it; but now mine was mostly gone and hers was sharper than ever.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

I’d said she
was welcome to stay over—although this prospect had seemed unappealing a few hours earlier, it had proven pleasant to spend the evening with Vi—but her cellphone had rung a few times, and around nine, her friend Nancy, hostess of the millennium New Year’s Eve party, had picked her up to go meet people for drinks. Though Vi and Nancy remained close, Vi had grown apart from some of her other meditation friends; she’d told me they were jealous that after the Brady Ogden case, she’d been able to make a living as a psychic while they still had to hold down day jobs.

Nancy didn’t come inside, and I waved to her from our porch as Vi headed out. “If there are any reporters, or just any weirdos, waiting at your house, come back over here,” I said. “When Nancy drops you off, don’t let her leave until you’re inside.”

“You’re being paranoid.” Vi grinned. “It’s kind of flattering.”

As she reached Nancy’s car, I called, “Don’t forget about writing the statement for your website.”

“Aye, aye,” she replied.

I locked the front door, organized the diaper bag, went around turning off the lights on the first floor, and set the security alarm; normally Jeremy closed up the house while I was nursing Owen. Had Jeremy eaten dinner? I hadn’t, except for some stale pretzels I’d brought out to the living room after we’d watched Vi’s interview.

It was definitely unusual that he hadn’t returned downstairs, though it was also clear why. And I’d never before dreaded walking up to bed, but on this night I did; the door to our bedroom was closed. I went into the bathroom, and when I was finished, I paused in front of our bedroom—I wondered if I should knock, but that would be downright bizarre—and when I pushed the door open, I saw that the light on Jeremy’s nightstand was on, and he was sitting up in bed, wearing his glasses and an old Wesleyan T-shirt, the sheet and comforter pulled to the middle of his chest. He held his phone in front of him with one hand, the glow from the screen reflected in the lenses of his glasses, and I heard what sounded like a bus driving and then a man saying, “That’s for sure,” from which I inferred that Jeremy was watching a TV show or movie, and for some reason the smallness of the screen and him up here alone, in his college T-shirt, made me sad.

“Hi,” I said, and in a tone that was tight but not gratuitously mean—he wasn’t trying to show that he was pissed, he just
was
pissed—he said “Hi” back.

I took a step forward. “Are you mad because I said we’d pay for the publicist or because I said it without you agreeing to it?”

“Both.” There was no humor in his voice, despite a joke’s easy proximity, and it was only then that he paused whatever he was watching and really looked at me. He said, “I’m curious how much you think we have in the savings account.”

I swallowed. “Twenty thousand?”

“Well, I got paid today, and that put us just over eleven.”

“Eleven thousand?”

“Yes,” Jeremy said. “Eleven thousand.”

Would Emma accept payment by credit card? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a conversation about it, but I really want Vi to work with this woman, and I was afraid that if she knew how much it costs, she’d say no. She wouldn’t even listen. And instead she really liked her, and she said—Vi, I mean—she said she wouldn’t talk to more reporters without having them go through Emma. That’s exactly, exactly what I was hoping.”

“You need to realize that you can’t control Vi’s behavior. I’m serious, Kate. She’s a grown woman, a willful grown woman. And even if you’ve temporarily got a leash on her, this idea that you can keep her in line is going to end badly in the long run.”

I folded my arms. “Okay.”

“I’m not saying this to be a jerk. I’m saying it because I’m worried that you’re setting yourself up for something really ugly.”

“I get your larger point,” I said. “And I’m sure you’re right. But to have a professional handling the media—I don’t see how that can be bad. Vi is in over her head. You’re the one who listened to those messages on our voice mail. Well, multiply that by a hundred and that’s what she’s going through. Every time she turns around, another reporter wants to talk to her, and she can’t say no. She loves the spotlight,
and
she believes she’s helping people.”

“So let her talk to the reporters. They’ll go away eventually.”

This was such a radical notion, so contrary to the frantic way I was expending my energy, that there was in it something enticing, something liberating. What if I simply stepped back and did nothing at all? But I couldn’t. I said, “Let’s just give Emma a chance.”

“And our savings.”

Would our disagreement have had a different tenor if I were still generating an income? But then he said, “If you were going to impulsively spend fifteen grand that we don’t have, I wish it had been on a really awesome flat-screen TV.”

So he was going to forgive me; I was lucky.

I gestured toward his phone. “What are you watching?”

“A comedy that’s completely not funny, which is a feat.”

I took another step forward. “You feel like doing something else?”

For the first time since I’d entered the room, he smiled, or at least he half-smiled. “It depends what you have in mind.”

I climbed onto the bed, over him, so that my knees were on either side of his waist. “I have a few ideas,” I said. I took his phone out of his hand and set it on the nightstand, and when I leaned in and kissed his mouth, he kissed me back right away. Jeremy and I were like everyone else with young children—we went weeks without having sex. We were always too tired, or a baby was crying. We joked about not having it, while listening to our children on the monitors. “We could schedule it,” I’d once said, and he’d said, “I never wanted to become those people,” and I said, “But you can see why it happens, right?”

As he pulled his shirt over his head, then raised my arms to pull off mine—I kept my bra on during sex, so I wouldn’t leak milk—I thought that maybe this was what we ought to do every night: forgo ice cream and TV downstairs and just come up to bed. I could’ve done without the fight, though as we kept kissing, as he rubbed his hands over me, I thought that what people said about make-up sex was true.

I was still on top, and he had been inside me maybe four minutes when I felt that surge, my body shuddering against his. I was usually first, though he didn’t take much longer; we were compatible in this way. (And maybe, given our efficiency, there was no reason we didn’t do it far more often.) As he was coming, Jeremy said in a kind of heaving whisper, “I love you so much, Katie,” and I kissed his neck. I don’t know if he realized that the only time he called me Katie was when we were having sex.

We’d fallen asleep
with the light on, and were both still naked except for my bra, when Owen started crying. I scrambled out of bed and gathered my clothes from the floor on Jeremy’s side, hastily pulling them on as I walked.

Owen’s room was dark except for the starfish night-light. As soon as he
saw me, he stopped crying, and I scooped him up and sat us both in the glider, him sideways on my lap.

Earlier, with Vi, as we’d talked to Emma and watched the
Today
interview, a scheming sort of air had developed between us, a mood like the one twenty years earlier on all those afternoons when we’d practiced our dance routine for “You May Be Right.” Other people receded until it was only us and our project. Or so it had felt, but as I nursed Owen, it no longer felt this way at all. Vi’s prediction wasn’t fun; it was scary. And the people I’d allowed to recede were my children, who were so small, who needed me so completely. Owen weighed sixteen pounds; he could do nothing for himself, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even reliably sit up; he slept in pale blue pajamas and a sleep sack with a brown teddy bear on the front. There was nothing that mattered besides protecting him and Rosie. Maybe we
should
leave town, I thought. Or, at the least, I needed to convince Jeremy not to go to Denver.

Owen was mostly asleep as I changed his diaper and brought him back to the glider to burp him. He breathed deeply, curled into me with his left cheek pressed over my heart, and for a long time I kept on patting his back, holding him in my arms.

Vi had writer’s
block, she explained when we spoke around ten o’clock the next morning, which was why she hadn’t yet finished the statement for her new website. I was pretty sure that writer’s block was code for being hungover, but scolding her wouldn’t help. “Emma wants this as soon as possible,” I said. “I’ll hammer something out and call you back.”

I’d just put Owen down for his first nap, and I set Rosie up in front of an episode of
Dora the Explorer
and opened Jeremy’s laptop on the dining room table. I probably had about ten minutes before Rosie started wandering around, and so in seven, I finished a paragraph, which was all Emma had requested.

Hello, my name is Violet Shramm
, I wrote.
Thank you for visiting my website. Since childhood, I have experienced premonitions, also known as extrasensory perceptions. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I
enjoy cooking, watching reality TV (my guilty pleasure), and spending time with my family. As you may have heard, I recently had a premonition that an earthquake will happen in the St. Louis area. It was not my intent to scare people. Instead, I wanted to help them make preparations to stay safe
. We could link here to FEMA’s recommendations, I thought. I concluded with a variation on what Vi had said to the Brookstone cashier when she’d bought the slippers for our father:
I sincerely hope that my prediction turns out to be wrong. I am not a scientist, and I’m capable of making mistakes like anyone else, but it is only in good faith that I share my views and ideas
.

When I called to read Vi what I’d written, she wanted me to insert references to her having helped the police find Brady Ogden, as well as to her having publicly predicted Michael Jackson’s death, both of which had been mentioned on Channel 5. (The latter had occurred during a session with clients at her house, which I wasn’t sure counted as public—in June, two days before Michael Jackson died, she’d told clients she was worried about his health.) After I’d reluctantly taken her suggestions, she also wanted me to cut the last line; I convinced her to keep it, and she convinced me, even though it made me cringe, to add
To anyone reading this, I wish you a day full of positive energy
. Emma subsequently excised the first two sentences; the rest of the paragraph appeared on Vi’s website, which was up later that afternoon. Next to the statement was a picture of Vi I’d taken the previous Thanksgiving; she was wearing a red cape, but it looked like a normal sweater if you didn’t know, and she was smiling prettily. In the original photo, Rosie had been sitting next to Vi, so I’d emailed the photo to Jeremy, had him cut Rosie out—I didn’t want Rosie on Vi’s website but didn’t have the technological skills, modest though I knew they were, to remove her myself—and then emailed the photo to Emma.

While sending this email, I saw dozens of notifications of Facebook messages from people I hadn’t been in touch with in years, and I realized that I couldn’t go back on Facebook itself until after October 16, or perhaps I could never go on again. I closed my email and found the website of a large national sporting goods chain, from which I ordered a crank radio, a first-aid kit, three LED waterproof flashlights (we currently owned one
flashlight that wasn’t waterproof), and a propane stove. If Jeremy asked, I wasn’t going to lie about what I’d bought. Still, I couldn’t help hoping that the packages would arrive while he was at work.

In those first
days following Vi’s appearance on the
Today
show, I would read the comments that appeared online after articles about the prediction.
This woman is an idiot and anyone who trusts her is an idiot, too
. Or:
She should quit trying to scare people, take a good look in the mirror, and go on a diet!!
And of course:
If she can predict the future, why doesn’t she win the lottery and buy a nicer house? Hers looks like a shithole from what I saw on TV
. There was always, always that lottery one.

Vi was reading the comments, too; she’d call me when Rosie and I were building a tower out of blocks or I was changing Owen’s diaper, and I’d answer because what if it was urgent? In the past, I’d sometimes not pick up if I was in the middle of something, but this was one of the ways of quantifying her celebrity, that now I didn’t dare. “Okay, listen to this,” she’d say, and begin reading: “ ‘Like other end-of-the-world prophets, Ms. Shramm obviously has not only delusions of grandeur but outright delusions.’ But I never said the end of the world is coming! When did I say that?”

“Ignore it,” I’d say. “Quit reading.” It was in advising Vi not to read the comments that I was able to convince myself, which is to say that I persuaded one of us.

“I never realized how mean people are,” she said another time, after an article in an online magazine—not even the comments but the article itself—compared her to an agent of Satan.

“Really?” I said. “You didn’t?”

During one of our calls with Emma—again, Vi was at my house, Jeremy was watching the children upstairs, Emma was on speakerphone—Vi said, “How do we get websites to take down the stuff people are writing about me? Because it’s not true, and they don’t even have to put their real names.”