Free After Her by Joyce Maynard Page B

bringing home a bird she’d found on the mountain, and then she did. That night, a second vision came to me: we found the bird dead in the shoe box she’d placed it in. And there he was the next morning, lying still in the bed of grass she’d made for him.
    More likely, an image would present itself that didn’t come from anything in front of my own eyes at the time. I could be out on my bike with Patty, or in gym class, and all of a sudden I’d know what some other person was seeing—not simply know, but see through that person’s eyes. The most disturbing moments occurred when I’d seem to enter the brain of a person I barely knew, or didn’t know at all, except that now I understood what she was thinking about.
    This could be nothing more than worrying about a pimple that was developing on her forehead. But it could be major too: I’d look at an ordinary-looking man in the supermarket, running his hand through his hair, and recognize that he was heading over to the house of some woman that wasn’t his wife, whose husband was out of town, to go to bed with her, but that her husband would come home early and find them there. (Sex hung over everything now. I saw it wherever I looked.)
    I’d observe a teenage girl, one aisle over at the mall where I was hanging out with my sister, and know there was a bottle of nail polish in the pocket of her jeans that she hadn’t paid for. Purple. I’d see a woman standing at the bus stop and know: She had a miscarriage the week before. The baby her husband had wanted badly. The boy.
    My father never liked to hear about my visions. In some ways this was out of character, because my father was, himself, a man who operated a lot on instinct—someone who followed leads that came from no discernible place but a gut sense he was onto something, which very often he was. Maybe part of his attitude concerning what I experienced came from not wanting to saddle me with the weight of some kind of otherworldly abilities that might in the end create sorrow or trouble for me, as perhaps they had for him. (He never said this, but I felt my father saw things too, though he just chalked it up to a detective’s instincts.) Suppose I saw into the future, and what I saw was frightening? Better to believe it wasn’t real.
    So he offered alternative explanations. There had been minor tremors for days leading up to that quake, he said. Pete the shoemaker had been so old he was bound to die before too long. If a person predicts the phone’s about to ring often enough, she’s bound to get it right now and then.
    â€œWhat you observe in Rachel,” he said to our mother, back when they were still together, “is how perceptive she is. She’s tuned in to her gut, and she’s a great observer. These are traits of a good detective, incidentally. She’s watched my comings and goings so well she’s gotten a feel for when I’m likely to come home. Even if it’s not the same time every day.”
    I had not mentioned, then, the other time I saw an event happening before it did. The night our mother found the key in our father’s pocket and knew who it belonged to. The crying I heard through the thin walls of our house, and our father’s low voice, saying little, denying nothing. Then gone, that same night. My vision had not revealed the woman’s face, but I knew she’d have black hair.
    Of all the people acquainted with my abilities to tune in to some other place besides the one we inhabited, Patty was the most fervent and steadfast in her conviction that they were real. In the past, my sister and I had considered the possibility that my gifts might be put to use in the purchase of winning lottery tickets or (if we could only get someone to take us there) at the racetrack. But I’d explained to her that this was not a gift I could call on at will. I wasn’t a fortune-teller. I was more like some