Foreteller Read online

  “You’ll have some tea?” Bernadette poured Zoey a glass with a squeeze of lemon before she could answer one way or the other.

  “Thank you. Exactly how I like it.”

  Bernadette took a sip of her own tea, then set it down on a narrow table that must have been carved from the same tree as the chairs. She remained seated on the edge of her chair and reached over to touch Zoey’s abdomen. Zoey got the distinct impression that this was not the first time Bernadette had touched someone in the visitor’s chair. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised to find that Bernadette had situated the seats just so, in order to be in intimate contact with her guests.

  “The baby,” Bernadette said. “Very determined. Unwavering in her determination to exist, at least at this time, in you.”

  Zoey watched Bernadette’s face as she spoke and sensed that though she was quick with the spoken word, she used each one exactly as she wanted to. “It’s funny,” Zoey said. “Although I haven’t known for very long that I’m pregnant, I’ve felt strongly that it’s a she.”

  “Of course it is,” Bernadette said, as if even the most unperceptive of humans could determine the baby’s gender.

  “But what do you mean by determined and unwav—”

  “She chose you. All souls choose their parents.”

  Zoey decided to play along. “Why me?”

  Bernadette pulled her hand away abruptly with a knowing smile. She assessed Zoey for a moment, then merely nodded. “This baby planned to get in there with nothing but an iota of a chance, through the narrowest of openings.”

  “I believe that,” Zoey said, reflecting on her rare drunken seduction of Jake that night in Boston.

  “Tell me about the foretelling,” Bernadette said, again not hesitating to leap into a jam-packed subject.

  Zoey leaned forward, energy bursting from within, ready to recite the entire story to Bernadette when something stopped her. Her mother had told her to keep the letter a secret. Shouldn’t she honor that wish, at least until she knew more about this woman? “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but my mother asked me to keep the contents to myself.”

  Bernadette didn’t flinch or hesitate as she gulped her tea. “I understand. What can I do then? You want to know about Susan?”

  “Yes, all about her, and her foretellings. I’ve been a little negligent in researching—”

  “Of course you have. Brainwashed from an early age to think your mother was a nut case, right? Magda accepted nothing—and knew nothing—of your mother’s gift. It cost Magda in the end. She shut herself off from one of the most wonderful people I ever had the privilege of knowing.”

  Although Zoey knew that Bernadette and her mother had been friends from a young age, she hadn’t fully realized that Bernadette would have known Zoey’s grandmother, Magda, as a mother to two girls. She must have known Aunt Eva as a teen, also. Bernadette might prove to be a magnificent window into the past.

  “It’s hard for you, all of this, isn’t it?” Bernadette said. “A letter from your mother revealing a bridge to your past just as your own future grows inside of you.” She scrunched up her nose. “And a future unwanted by some parties.”

  A frown creased Zoey’s smooth skin, a decided chill stifling her warmth. Bernadette’s words cascaded into a ball of frenzy inside Zoey as the woman had tapped into a revelation she’d barely admitted to herself—that Jake wanted nothing to do with this baby. “What do you mean? How do you know that?”

  Bernadette touched Zoey’s arm. “Unwanted,” she repeated. “By which parties, I’m not certain. Possibly more than one. But from your reaction, I sense deep concern about the father.”

  Zoey cringed. “There’s a good chance the father wants to—” She cut herself off, unable to complete the thought.

  “And you know this how?”

  Zoey sighed. The complete explanation would force her to talk about the foretelling and her specific words to the future attacker: If you kill me, you kill your child. She could, at a minimum, share Jake’s reaction to the pregnancy. “My fiancé hasn’t said it outright, but he told me he won’t make a good father, and he doesn’t want an extension of himself out there.”

  “You must listen.”

  Zoey’s eyes went wide with shock. “To what he wants to do?”

  “Listen. Not obey. But listen.”

  Zoey sank farther into her chair. This was not why she had come to see her mother’s friend. She neither wanted nor expected a personal psychic reading. “Can we talk about my mother?”

  “Certainly. I don’t see how we can avoid it. Your mother’s presence here is very strong.”

  “Really? Right now?”

  “Certainly. Now, obviously, I pick up on her aura from you. But far more of Susan lingers within you, and around you, than a mere genetic offshoot.”

  Zoey, without meaning to, glanced about, as if searching for fireflies between flashes of light, perhaps one with her mother’s eyes.

  Bernadette chuckled. “You can’t see her.”

  Zoey shook her head in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. This is all new to me. I’m more of a hands-on person. I like hard evidence, a buried bone in the sand, if you will.”

  Bernadette looked skeptical for a moment. “People with similar beliefs drove your mother underground.”

  Zoey recalled the hatred emanating from Bernadette’s own father and realized it represented only a sampling of what her mother might have endured. “I need to know about my mother’s foretellings, whether you think they are warnings, likely outcomes, symbolic or literal, or… predetermined fate.”

  Bernadette laughed, a light, lilting, unexpected sound. “If only I knew. If only your mother knew. That’s what made it so difficult. Did you know that in her junior year of high school, NASA confidentially approached Magda to ask permission to study her? Of course, Magda refused, and not only that, she became so concerned that word would get out about Susan’s abilities that she practically kept her prisoner in the house for a year.”

  Zoey found the idea a bit fantastical. NASA? Approaching Grandma? If Bernadette’s source of information had been Susan, wasn’t it possible that Susan had fabricated that story as well?

  “I had no idea,” Zoey managed insincerely.

  “To give your grandmother a little credit, I think she rightly feared that NASA or some foreign government agency might kidnap Susan in order to study her—or use her.”

  Oh come on. Zoey’s cynicism sensors kicked into high gear. Government kidnappings? Foreign agencies? She had dealt with her share of conspiracy theorists in her own profession—those who believed the government denied permission to dig sites because of buried aliens, or people who claimed dinosaurs still roamed remote islands but that the government shielded them from detection in order to use them as weapons. Paranoid fanatics flourished everywhere.

  “Wow, NASA,” Zoey said, a trace of patronization creeping into her voice.

  “No one knew, except Susan,” Bernadette continued, either disregarding Zoey’s tone or not picking up on it. “I believe she only told me.”

  Of course, Zoey thought. Conspiracies always involved exclusivity.

  “As for your earlier question about foretellings,” Bernadette said, “all I know is that once a foretelling is out there, it changes its nature. By the act of revealing someone’s future to them, it alters that person’s behavior. If it involves a positive outcome, like marrying the boy you love, then the foretelling serves to bolster one’s confidence in sticking with that boy through thick and thin. But if the foretelling involves a negative outcome, such as the one predicted for your grandfather—”

  “My grandfather?”

  “Surely you know about that one at least.”

  “My grandfather died in a farm accident.”

  Bernadette rested her chin in her palm, and frowned at her guest. “I worry about you, Zoey. You can’t build a life without a foundation, and apparently yours is lacking all sorts of solid information.”

 
Zoey’s brow furrowed in a mixture of shame and impatience as she waited for Bernadette to fill in the cracks of her foundation. To be honest, she knew almost as little of her grandfather as she knew of her father. Supposedly a hard-working, grave man, he had been crushed by a tractor when her mother was eighteen.

  “Your grandfather believed in Susan’s gift,” Bernadette said, “because he could explain it biologically. Although his gruff manner alienated some, he and Susan shared a strong bond. A year or so before he died, they braved a roller coaster ride at the county fair and Susan reached over to clutch his hand during one of those sudden drops. Unfortunately, she experienced a foretelling. She saw your grandfather riding his pick-up truck along the road in front of their farm. When a deer leaped out in front of him, he swerved left and smashed into a tree. In the foretelling, he appeared paralyzed, maybe even dead. She simply had to tell him.”

  “But that never happened,” Zoey said, her voice filling with hope. If her mother had been wrong once, she could be wrong again.

  “Of course it didn’t happen,” Bernadette said. “Because your grandfather listened. He never drove his truck on that road again.”

  “So he fought the foretelling.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Zoey clenched her jaw, envisioning her own potential fate near the Schuylkill River. “Yes. I’d fight it with everything I had.”

  “From then on,” Bernadette said, “your grandfather parked his pick-up on another road bordering their land, and he would ride his tractor down a hill and across a field to get to it.”

  Zoey sank back in her chair again as her hopes plunged to despair. “He ended up dying because of that tractor.”

  “Yes. One day, after a heavy rain, the tractor slid on the hill, flipped over, and crushed him. The doctors said he’d most likely be paralyzed from the waist down if he survived, but on the third day, he succumbed to his injuries and died peacefully. Of course, your grandmother had thought him crazy to ride that tractor, and she told him so in front of your mother. Often.”

  “My mother must have felt horrible. He was riding that tractor because of her prediction.”

  Bernadette sighed. “It didn’t help that your grandmother was a powerful inducer of guilt. The Irish are so gifted in that area. She ladled it on like gravy after your grandfather’s death.”

  “I can’t imagine the things Magda must have said to her.”

  “That was the thing with Magda. She never said a word. She did it in other ways. It made the guilt that much more powerful.”

  That was true. Magda could slice through any situation with her weighted silences and disapproving glares, not to mention her weary sighs. “Did my mother stop revealing her foretellings after that?”

  “She certainly didn’t brag about them or sign up for public testing.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes, the flowing water in the background providing a tranquil backdrop to Zoey’s thoughts. She reflected on the validity of her grandfather’s foretelling; perhaps his demise had nothing to do with Susan’s prediction. He did own a lot of land. Weren’t tractor accidents common? Mightn’t it have happened anyway? And deer probably always darted in front of cars in the country. Zoey had spotted one in the woods on the way here. No, she decided, the grandfather story simply didn’t hold water. It didn’t even happen as her mother had foretold.

  Bernadette broke the silence. “My personal feeling is that her foretelling held water; your grandfather only shifted his fate.”

  Snug as Zoey was in her form-fitting chair, she nearly fell out of it. Had Bernadette been reading her mind? Or had the running water behind them caused them both to think in terms of liquid? Zoey shook away the coincidence and focused on her own fate. “Bernadette, do you believe that anyone who tries to avoid a foretelling eventually succumbs to it? In an alternate way?”

  “Only sometimes. I—and your mother—believed that a foretelling offers one of many probabilities. Think of it as a timeline where the foretelling is the final event. The closer to the foretelling a person is, the harder it is to shift course and change the outcome. But with enough warning, a person can make significant changes and steer themselves away from that outcome.”

  “In which case,” Zoey said with a trace of anger, “the sooner a person becomes aware of a negative possibility—

  “Probability,” Bernadette corrected.

  “Okay, but either way, the sooner the better. What if a person is already nine tenths of the way to matching the foretelling?”

  “Think of it like a kayaker approaching a waterfall.”

  “The closer he gets to the waterfall, the harder to turn back?”

  “Exactly,” Bernadette said.

  Zoey stared up at the sky and watched a hawk settle in a high branch. She could benefit from a bird’s eye view of all the angles in her life right now. With a weariness edging in around her, she turned to her hostess. “Bernadette, the letter my mother… well, it contained a very negative foretelling. She experienced it shortly before she died.”

  Bernadette closed her eyes, inhaled, letting her stomach fill and then release. “No wonder you have come to me. You must have hoped I could tell you that your mother had lost her mind after the stroke, and to disregard her foretelling completely.”

  Zoey nodded weakly.

  Bernadette looked sorrowful. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Then I’m afraid my kayak is on a steady course for the cliff. How can I avoid it? And why didn’t my mother tell me sooner?”

  “I don’t know. But if your mother’s gift was as amazing as I believed it to be, then the foretelling should contain plenty of details that can help you.” Bernadette leaned over and touched Zoey on the leg. “Pay attention to every word.”

  Chapter 21

  Silicon Valley, California

  Aviva Descutner rolled her eyes yet again in the perfectly appointed bedroom she shared with Cesar. Some might call the zebra-stripe chair and tiger skin lamp shades tacky, but Aviva prided herself on trendy mismatches.

  “Enough,” she said as Cesar thrashed in the bed. The sun wasn’t even up and she’d already dealt with a midnight disturbance from one of the twins; another episode of kicking and yelling by Cesar would surely put her in a bitchy mood for her mother’s 9:00 a.m. coffee visit.

  She sat up, grabbed Cesar’s thick shoulder, and shook him like the appletini she’d drunk hours earlier. “Cesar!” she managed to shout in a whisper. “Wake up! You’re dreaming again.”

  “Keeks!” he cried out. He mumbled a full sentence after that, but Aviva couldn’t make it out. The fact that he remained asleep told her this was more than a run-of-the-mill dream. She took advantage. “What’s that, Cesar? Say it again.”

  Cesar’s voice turned strangely articulate, but filled with a passion she rarely heard from him anymore. “You never should have left.”

  “Left who?” Aviva asked quietly, but she lost the conversational connection. Cesar’s legs leapt into motion. She shook his shoulder again, but he kicked her hard enough to make her scream. At least it finally woke him.

  “Cesar,” she said bitterly as she rubbed her bruised shin, “you need to go to a sleep clinic.” Then her anger turned into a pout and she gazed at him like an injured deer.

  Normally, Aviva’s hurt tone of voice evoked sympathy, and provided the perfect excuse for Cesar to take her in his arms and shower her with attention—a result they both enjoyed. But Cesar had other ideas this morning. Aviva may as well have been absent from the room.

  “I’ve got work to do,” he said.

  “Oh no you don’t! You’ve got some doctors to see, or some skank to dump, but you do not have work to do.”

  Cesar turned on her, a nasty glint in his eye that dared her to say another word. She didn’t. Then he rose and got out of the bed, his naked body more buff than the day they’d married. He’d always been a block of a man, with shoulders, hips and waist all the same width, but years of weightlifting had toned and
slimmed the waist, giving him the desirable V-shape Aviva loved. She watched him throw on a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a black tee-shirt. His casual sexiness and barely suppressed ire stirred something within her. Perhaps because of her roots in an argumentative family, indignation and wrath did it for her.

  “Cesar, come back to bed. I need you.”

  “I told you. I’ve got work to do.” He said it with no apology or excuse, and strode from the room without another glance in her direction.

  Bastard, Aviva thought, and then her face assumed a snakelike visage. She might not be certain what he was up to—yet—but she knew exactly which computer he would use. Sucker. Then she smiled and let her head sink back into the downy softness of her three-hundred dollar pillow. He’d be back, and in the meantime, she’d enjoy the entire bed to herself.

  Chapter 22

  Lynchburg, Virginia

  Bernadette and Zoey walked along a path that wound behind Bernadette’s cottage and into the woods bordering her land. The breeze had picked up, acting as a teaser for the storm yet to come.

  “Do you know what I found most amusing about your mother?” Bernadette said. “Aside from her cooking, her wicked sense of humor, and her gift for cutting sarcasm?”

  Zoey swallowed, wondering how much more she could handle. The small act of learning that she and her mother shared a taste for the sardonic already filled her emotionally. “What?”