But by the time the last Spirit Week activity, the Seeing Off, is over, and we’ve walked through the halls saying goodbyes and giving out hugs to teachers and underclassmen, I’ve figured out the only thing I really can do.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Megan asks as we walk out to our cars. “I can make sure Dr. Chan knows you’re not crazy.”
“Good thinking. I’ll just bring a friend to see a psychologist I don’t have an appointment with, and you can open with ‘She’s not crazy!’ So she’ll know I’m not crazy.”
“I can wait in the car.”
“No, you can wait at Steak ’n Shake with the soccer team, where I know you were planning on going before I sprung this on you.”
She sighs. “Call me after the Cleary Family Celebration Dinner and let me know how things went?”
“Sure. Or maybe, like, while I’m still on Dr. Chan’s couch. If she questions my sanity, I can demand we conference you in.”
“Sounds good. I’ll put you on speaker with the soccer team. We can have them vote on whether they think you’re crazy.”
“Perfect. Thank you.”
We exchange a parting hug and climb into our cars. A few minutes later, I’m cruising on 275 East, a wide and rarely congested highway that winds out from the suburbs through a scrubby, rural valley occasionally punctuated by towns even slower and smaller than Union, pretty much until you get to the college. Though I’ve driven to NKU a couple of times for friends’ games and friends of friends’ parties, once I make it to campus, it takes me a while of aimlessly circling until I spot the psychology building: an enormous, gray-brown cement block with tiny windows grouped in twos that remind me of coin slots in an arcade game, and a faded red roof slanting up from the three narrow towers separating the two wings. The parking lot’s mostly empty, and I take a spot near the front and slip inside.
The building is chilly, if out of date and poorly lit, and I find Dr. Chan’s name posted outside a yellowed wooden door at the end of a narrow corridor. The door is cracked open but I knock anyway.
When I hear no reply, I push the door open, and it whines on its hinges. The little office is packed. A chocolate-brown desk and a whiteboard are wedged between two bookshelves, an office chair just barely squeezes in between the desk and the window beyond, which overlooks a long yellow lawn and a little blue pond. On my side of the desk, there’s another chair and a small couch, both of which are completely covered in stacks of stuffed filing folders and loose papers and books.
“Can I help you?” someone says behind me, and I spin to find Dr. Chan in the doorway. She has a short, blunt bob and a dappling of freckles across her nose. Without makeup or the structured blazer from her portrait, she’s barely recognizable. She looks about twenty years younger than the austere middle-aged woman I was expecting, and not quite old enough to be the person who holds the keys to unlocking Grandmother’s secrets.
“God, I hope so.”
Dr. Chan sits in the chair on my side of the desk, chewing the back of her pen, apparently deep in thought. The piles of displaced files surround her ankles like eager puppies; meanwhile my tailbone’s been balanced on one corner of the paper-strewn black sofa for the length of my life—with Grandmother—story.
“Fascinating,” Dr. Chan says finally, leaning down to dig through a stack of notepads on the ground. She chooses one and flips to a clean page. “I’ve never heard of anyone having such long conversations with Them—the Others—before. And I’ve sure as hell never heard of a full-on scenery change.” She scribbles at the paper until the ink starts flowing.
“So there are more than just the ones I’ve seen?” I stammer. “What are they? Ghosts?”
She laughs and splays her hands out. “Oh God, we’re so far from knowing that.”
“Well, have you seen any of them?” I ask. “Do you know Grandmother?”
“No,” Dr. Chan replies. “But I saw Others, when I was a kid. The black orb you described? That’s very common for people like us, Natalie. I’ve been calling that orb ‘the Opening.’ I think that’s sort of what it is: the beginning of the encounters with the Others. I can call it whatever I want, because no one else wants to touch this kind of stuff. Not in my field, at least. Anyway, there’s the Opening, and then there’s what I call the Closing. The equal and opposite event.”
“So it will stop?”
She tips her head back and forth. “For me, yes. For you? No idea. The research is all so new. I hate to think how long I’ll be dead by the time anyone figures this stuff out. But . . . well, you’ve described some very unique things.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and drums her nail-bitten fingers against her mouth. “Okay, so typically people who have these encounters are sensitive types—they tend to be somewhere between INFJ and ENFJ.”
“I’m not tracking,” I say.