I took that as a sign.
Everyone else on the planet would rather look at a folded masterpiece than the original flat piece of paper, but not me. Me, I had to start from the beginning. So I spent hours gingerly unfolding my mother’s handiwork, pretending I could still feel the heat of her fingertips on the bill. I went step by step, as if I were performing surgery, until I could refold the dollar the way she had; until I had a small herd of six new tiny green elephants marching across my desk. I kept testing myself all day, too, to make sure I had not forgotten, and every time I succeeded I flushed with pride. I fell asleep that night picturing a dramatic, movie-of-the-week moment when I finally found my missing mother and she didn’t know it was me, until I fashioned a dollar bill into an elephant in front of her eyes. And then she hugged me. And did not let go.
You’d be surprised at how many psychics are listed in the local yellow pages. New Age Spirit Guides, Psychic Advice from Laurel, Pagan Priestess Tarot Readings, Readings by Kate Kimmel, The Phoenix Rising—Advice on Love, Wealth, Prosperity.
Second Sight by Serenity, Cumberland Street, Boone.
Serenity didn’t have a big ad or a 1-800 number or a last name, but she was within biking distance of my house, and she was the only one who promised to do a reading for the bargain price of ten dollars.
Cumberland Street is in a part of town that my grandmother always tells me to stay away from. It’s basically an alley with a bankrupt convenience store that’s been boarded up, and a hole-in-the-wall bar. Two wooden placards sit on the sidewalk, one advertising two-dollar shots before 5:00 P.M. and another, which reads: TAROT, $10, 14R.
What is 14R? An age requirement? A bra size?
I’m nervous about leaving my bike on the street, since I don’t have a lock for it—I never have to lock it up at school or on Main Street or anywhere else I normally go—so I haul it into the corridor to the left of the bar entrance and drag it up the stairs, which smell like beer and sweat. At the top is a small foyer. One door is labeled 14R and has a sign on the front: READINGS BY SERENITY.
The foyer walls are covered with peeling velveteen wallpaper. Yellow stains bloom on the ceiling, and it smells like too much potpourri. There’s a rickety side table propped up on a phone book for balance. On it is a china dish filled with business cards: SERENITY JONES, PSYCHIC.
There’s not much room for me and a bike in the little foyer. I jostle it in a stilted half circle, trying to lean it against the wall.
I can hear the muffled voices of two women on the other side of the interior door. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to knock, to tell Serenity I’m here. Then I realize that if she is any good at her job, she must already know.
Just in case, though, I cough. Loudly.
With the bike frame balanced against my hip, I press my ear against the door.
You’re troubled by a very big decision.
There is a gasp, a second voice. How did you know?
You have serious doubts that what you decide is going to be the right path.
The other voice, again: It’s been so hard, without Bert.
He’s here now. And he wants you to know that you can trust your heart.
There is a pause. That doesn’t sound like Bert.
Of course not. That was someone else who’s watching over you.
Auntie Louise?
Yes! She says you were always her favorite.
I can’t help it; I snort. Way to recover, Serenity, I think.
Maybe she’s heard me laugh, because there’s no more conversation coming from the other side of the door. I lean closer to listen more carefully, and knock the bike off balance. Stumbling to keep my footing, I trip over my mother’s scarf, which has unraveled. The bicycle—and I—crash into the little table, and the bowl falls off and shatters.
The door is yanked open, and I look up from where I’m crouched in the pretzel of bike frame, trying to gather the pieces. “What’s going on out here?”
Serenity Jones is tall, with a swirl of pink cotton-candy hair piled high on her head. Her lipstick matches her coiffure. I have this weird feeling that I’ve met her before. “Are you Serenity?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Shouldn’t you know?”
“I’m prescient, not omniscient. If I were omniscient this would be Park Avenue and I’d be squirreling my dividends away in the Caymans.” Her voice sounds overused, like a couch with its springs busted. Then she notices the broken bits of china in my hand. “Are you kidding me? That was my grandmother’s scrying bowl!”
I have no idea what a scrying bowl is. I just know I’m in deep trouble. “I’m sorry. It was an accident …”
“Do you have any idea how old this is? It’s a family heirloom! Thank Baby Jesus my mother isn’t alive to see this.” She grabs for the pieces, fitting the edges together as if they might magically stick.
“I could try to fix it—”
“Unless you’re a magician, I don’t see that happening. My mother and my granny are both rolling in their graves, all because you don’t have the sense God gave a weasel.”
“If it was so precious, why did you just leave it sitting around in your entryway?”
“Why did you bring a bicycle into a room the size of a closet?”
“I thought it would get stolen if I left it in the hall,” I say, getting to my feet. “Look, I’ll pay for your bowl.”
“Sugar, your Girl Scout cookie money can’t cover the cost of an antique from 1858.”
“I’m not selling Girl Scout cookies,” I tell her. “I’m here for a reading.”
That stops her in her tracks. “I don’t do kids.”
Don’t or won’t? “I’m older than I look.” This is a fact. Everyone assumes I’m still in fifth grade, instead of eighth.
The woman who was inside having a reading suddenly is framed in the doorway, too. “Serenity? Are you all right?”
Serenity stumbles, tripping over the frame of my bike. “I’m fine.” She smiles tightly at me. “I can’t help you.”
“I beg your pardon?” the client says.
“Not you, Mrs. Langham,” Serenity answers, and then she mutters to me: “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the cops and press charges.”
Maybe Mrs. Langham doesn’t want a psychic who’s mean to kids; maybe she just doesn’t want to be around when the police come. For whatever reason, she looks at Serenity as if she is about to say something, but then edges past us both and bolts down the flight of stairs.
“Oh great,” Serenity mutters. “Now you owe me for a priceless heirloom and the ten bucks I just lost.”
“I’ll pay double,” I blurt out. I have sixty-eight dollars. It’s every penny I’ve made this year from babysitting, and I’m saving it for a private eye. I’m not convinced Serenity is the real deal. But I’d be willing to part with twenty dollars to find out.
Her eyes glint when she hears that. “For you,” she says, “I’ll make an age exception.” She opens the door wider, revealing a normal living room, with a couch and a coffee table and a television set. It looks like my grandmother’s house, which is a little disappointing. Nothing about this screams psychic. “You got a problem?” she asks.
“I guess I was kind of expecting a crystal ball and a beaded curtain.”
“You have to pay extra for those.”
I look at her, because I’m not sure if she’s kidding. She sits down heavily on the couch and gestures at a chair. “What’s your name?”
“Jenna Metcalf.”
“All right, Jenna,” she says and sighs. “Let’s get this over with.” She hands me a ledger and asks me to put down my name, address, and phone number.
“How come?”
“Just in case I need to communicate with you afterward. If a spirit has a message, or whatnot.”
I bet more likely it’s to send me emails advertising 20 percent off my next reading, but I take the leather-bound book and sign in. My palms are sweating. Now that the moment’s here, I’m having second thoughts. The worst-case scenario is that Serenity Jones turns out to be a hack, another dead end when it comes to the mystery of my mother.
No. The worst-case scenario is that Serenity Jones turns out to be a talented psychic, and I learn one of two things: that my mother willingly abandoned me, or that my mother’s dead.
She takes the tarot deck and begins to shuffle it. “What I’m about to tell you during this reading might not make sense right now. But remember the information, because one day, you might hear something and realize what the spirits were trying to tell you today.” She says this the same way flight attendants tell you how to buckle and release the latch on your seat belt. Then she hands the deck to me, to cut into three piles. “So what do you want to know? Who’s got a crush on you? If you’re going to get an A in English? Where you should apply to college?”
“I don’t care about any of that.” I hand the deck back, unbroken. “My mother disappeared ten years ago,” I say, “and I want you to help me find her.”
There is one passage in my mother’s field research journals that I know by heart. Sometimes, when I am bored in class, I even write it in my own notebook, trying to replicate the loops of her handwriting.
It’s from her time in Botswana, when she was a postdoc studying elephant grief in the Tuli Block, and she recorded the death of an elephant in the wild. This happened to be the calf of a fifteen-year-old female named Kagiso. Kagiso had given birth just after dawn, and the calf was either born dead or died very shortly afterward. This was not, according to my mother’s notes, unusual for an elephant having her first calf. What was strange was how Kagiso reacted.
TUESDAY
0945 Kagiso standing beside calf in broad sunlight, in open clearing. Strokes its head and lifts its trunk. No movement from calf since 0635.
1152 Kagiso threatens Aviwe and Cokisa when the other females come to investigate body of calf.
1515 Kagiso continues to stand over body. Touches calf with her trunk. Tries to lift it.
WEDNESDAY
0636 Worried about Kagiso, who has not been to watering hole.
1042 Kagiso kicks brush over body of calf. Breaks off branches to use as cover.
1546 Brutally hot. Kagiso goes to watering hole and returns to remain in vicinity of calf.
THURSDAY
0656 Three lionesses approach; begin to drag off calf’s carcass. Kagiso charges; they run east. Kagiso stands over body of calf, bellowing.
0820 Still bellowing.
1113 Kagiso remains standing over dead calf.
2102 Three lions feed on calf carcass. Kagiso nowhere in sight.
At the bottom of the page, my mother had written this:
Kagiso abandons body of her calf after keeping vigil for three days.
There is much documented research about how an elephant calf under the age of two will not survive if it’s orphaned.
There’s nothing written, yet, about what happens to the mother who loses her baby.
My mother did not know at the time she wrote this that she was already pregnant with me.
“I don’t do missing people,” Serenity says, in a voice that doesn’t allow even a sliver of but.
“You don’t do kids,” I say, ticking one of my fingers. “You don’t do missing people. What exactly do you do?”
She narrows her eyes. “You want energy alignment? No problem. Tarot? Step right up. Communicating with someone who’s passed? I’m your girl.” She leans forward, so I understand, in no uncertain terms, that I’ve hit a brick wall. “But I do not do missing people.”
“You’re a psychic.”
“Different psychics have different gifts,” she says. “Precognition, aura reading, channeling spirits, telepathy. Just because I’ve been given a taste doesn’t mean I get the whole smorgasbord.”
“She vanished ten years ago,” I continue, as if Serenity hasn’t spoken. I wonder if I should tell her about the trampling, or the fact that my mother was brought to the hospital, and decide not to. I don’t want to feed her the answers. “I was only three.”
“Most missing people disappear because they want to,” Serenity says.
“But not all,” I reply. “She didn’t leave me. I know it.” I hesitate, unwinding my mother’s scarf and pushing it toward her. “This belonged to her. Maybe that would help …?”
Serenity doesn’t touch it. “I never said I couldn’t find her. I said I wouldn’t.”
In all the ways I’ve imagined this meeting going down, this was not one of them. “Why?” I ask, stunned. “Why wouldn’t you want to help me, if you can?”
“Because I am not Mother Freaking Teresa!” she snaps. Her face turns tomato red; I wonder if she’s seen her own imminent death by high blood pressure. “Excuse me,” she says, and she disappears down a hallway. A moment later, I hear a faucet running.
She’s gone for five minutes. Ten. I get up and start wandering around the living room. Arranged on the fireplace mantel are pictures of Serenity with George and Barbara Bush, with Cher, with the guy from Zoolander. It makes no sense to me. Why would someone who hobnobs with celebrities be hawking ten-dollar tarot readings in East Nowhere, New Hampshire?
When I hear the toilet flush I race back to the couch and sit down again, as if I’ve been there the whole time. Serenity returns, composed. Her pink bangs are damp, as if she’s splashed water on her face. “I’m not going to charge you for my time today,” she says, and I snort. “I’m truly sorry to hear about your mother. Maybe someone else can tell you what you want to hear.”
“Like who?”
“I have no idea. It’s not like we all hang out at the Paranormal Café on Wednesday nights.” She moves to the door, holding it wide open, my cue to leave. “If I hear of anyone who does that sort of thing, I’ll be in touch.”
I suspect this is a flat-out lie, spoken to get me the hell out of her living room. I step into the foyer and wrangle my bike upright. “If you won’t find her for me,” I say, “can you at least tell me if she’s dead?”
I can’t believe I’ve asked that until the words are hanging between us, like curtains that keep us from seeing each other clearly. For a second I think about grabbing my bike and running out the door before I have to hear the answer.