Reaching the stairs, I pitched forward, grabbing the railings and thrusting my hips out in front of me, launching myself down several steps at a time. What can I say? I was always the last kid off the monkey bars when recess ended.
Hitting the ground floor with a loud thunk, I stood for just a minute in the marble enclosure, soaking up the cool air before braving the heat and the bustle of people I knew would be waiting for me outside.
I live and work in a suburb of Detroit called Royal Oak, which stands as one of the last great bastions of middle-class neighborhoods buffering Detroit from its much wealthier suburbs slightly to the north, thus saving the area from total plutocracy.
Royal Oak is a city bursting at the seams, sandwiched between Ten Mile and Fourteen Mile Roads. In southeastern Michigan, the mile roads measure roughly how far from Detroit you are—the farther north the location, the bigger the mile number and the farther north the real estate's price tag. A single mile can be the difference of a cool quarter million or more.
In the past several years Royal Oak has transformed from a place to avoid to the place to be seen. These days many of its residents spend their time in the city's downtown area, strolling the streets and lounging on benches, doing nothing but ogling. All kinds are welcomed and represented here: Gens X & Y, homos, heteros, winos, midlifers, boomers and dinks. The place is a regular United Nations.
My office is located in the Washington Square Building, which rests on the northern tip of downtown, just before Eleven Mile. I share the four-room suite with my best friend, Theresa, who is a psychic medium. We chose this particular location because not only is the building the biggest in Royal Oak but it's structurally one of the quirkiest.
By all appearances the building is an absolute marvel of architectural indecision. Its layout is a hodgepodge of brick and mortar, chalky brown in color. Boxy sections contrast drastically with sharply angular wings, and windows range from arch shape to rectangular depending on what floor you're peering up at. A huge neon sign advertising a local newspaper drapes the cornice like a necklace and can be seen for miles, making it easy for Theresa and me to give directions to new clients.
Inside, small shops, galleries and restaurants make up the street level establishments, while professional suites occupy the upper floors. Theresa and I are sandwiched between an accountant and a computer graphics firm on the building's northern square end. The rent is reasonable, the building is well maintained, and nobody in the other office suites has complained yet about our liberal use of candles and incense. For four years it's been the perfect place to operate.
After sufficiently soaking up the cool lobby air, I stepped courageously out into the furnace of the mid-July day. I turned right toward the center of downtown and pulled my cell phone out of my purse. Flipping the phone open I hit the number for voice mail and listened intently as I walked down Washington heading three blocks south to the Pic-A-Deli Restaurant for a tuna on honey whole wheat with extra-hot peppers. I had one message, from Theresa.
Theresa and I had met four and a half years earlier through very unusual circumstances, and to this day I still marvel at the magnitude of the gift that led her to me.
I was working in a bank at the time, trying my best to fit into a world that never really accepted me. My childhood had been filled with unusual singular events that since they occurred over the spread of several years were fairly easy for me and my family to ignore: my announcement of a fire in our basement a week before smoke alarms woke us from a sound sleep; my premonition of my grandfather's death ten minutes before the phone call from my aunt; and finally, to the chagrin of my social-climbing parents, my proclamation that my father's high-paying executive position was going to fall victim to corporate downsizing a full month before he received his pink slip.
To parents who distrusted anything metaphysical, it was as if my divining such things meant I was forcing them to happen and that if I had just shut my mouth we could have avoided such hardships. I learned pretty quickly that it was better to keep my premonitions to myself.
As I grew older, my "episodes," as I'd come to call them, happened much more frequently and were much stronger. One day when I was in college I was overcome with a feeling that forced me against my better judgment to approach my statistics professor just before class. I hopped from foot to foot behind him, anxious to get his attention, and when he finally turned to look at me I blurted out in a rush that he needed to get to the doctor right away because I saw a problem with his heart.
He looked at me oddly for a long moment before asking me to take my seat so that he could begin his lecture. A week later the class was canceled due to the death of our professor. You guessed it—heart attack.
That single event convinced me far more than my parents' insinuations that I had somehow been the cause of a terrible thing. I felt that by speaking the words aloud I had somehow caused my professor's premature demise. I didn't know anything about intuition back then, how it worked, what it felt like. I just knew the pattern of causation: I saw things in my mind's eye, I said them out loud, they happened— ergo, I made them happen.
For the rest of my years in college and into my early career in banking I refused to speak things that I saw aloud again. If I had a flash of something in my mind's eye I quickly focused on something else and began humming. By the time I was twenty-six I was humming constantly.
Then one morning when I was working at my desk in a local bank I got an odd feeling that someone was looking at me. Glancing around I saw a young woman across the lobby with curly chestnut hair and large brown eyes staring at me in an odd, almost blank way. I smiled at her, wondering if I knew her from somewhere. She smiled back and continued to stare. I shrugged my shoulders slightly in question; she nodded back, then exited the bank. Even as I puzzled over her strange behavior, I couldn't shake the feeling that I would see her again.
The next day I had just come out of the supply room, my arms loaded with flyers and pamphlets for the lobby, when I noticed the same woman sitting at my desk. I set down the pamphlets and hurried over to her, eager to find out how we knew each other.
"Hello," I said as I settled into my chair. "May I help you?"
She looked at me for a moment, and it was as if she was looking through me. "You're Abigail, right?"
"Yes?" I said, nudging the little nameplate at the front of my desk closer to her.
"My name is Theresa, and I know this is going to sound really crazy to you, but I'm a medium and I have a message for you."
I'm sure the look on my face changed in an instant from polite inquisitiveness to caution. I didn't know what a "medium" was, and so I was prepared for some sort of Bible-thumping lecture that I was sure would end with my calling Security.
When I said nothing Theresa continued. "Do you know someone named Carl?" she asked.
My mouth fell open a little. "My grandfather's name was Carl." He and I had been very close, and he'd died when I was twelve.
"And who is Sum— Summer?" she asked, working to get the name right.
"Sumner," I corrected. "He was my other grandfather."
I was conscious at that moment that I had suddenly stopped breathing, as if the sound of my breath would distract her from talking further.
"And Margaret?"
Unbidden tears sprang to my eyes; no one I socialized with knew the names of all my grandparents, "My grandmother—she was married to Carl and died when I was six."
"Okay, well, your grandparents have been talking to me for two days, and they have a message that I'm supposed to deliver. They want you to know that they know you can see things. They know that you have a gift, and they want me to help you develop it. You're supposed to be using your gift, not this"—she waved a hand at my desk—"to make a living."
For a very long moment we just stared at each other. To her credit, Theresa looked as unsure of the message she'd just delivered as I felt. I considered the possibility that this was a joke, that some sick bastard thought this w
as funny and had put an actress up to it. Or maybe this woman was crazy, and she'd just made three very good guesses. But what I couldn't discount was the fact that she had just voiced aloud what I'd inherently known all my life: that I was, in fact, "gifted."
Up to this point, it hadn't felt much like a gift, but when I understood what kinds of emotions could be stirred by the encounter I was now having, I felt that term was more than appropriate.
I'd love to tell you that I had a Jerry Maguire moment, jumping up and announcing to one and all that I was quitting my boring bank job to go be a professional psychic, but the truth is that it took a long time for me to warm to the idea.
Theresa left me her card—she was doing readings out of a little coffee shop back then—and told me to call her when I decided to trust my own intuition and follow the path I was meant to be on.
For three months I mulled it over, unwilling to make a decision either way; then fate intervened and the decision was made for me. A larger conglomerate bought the bank I was working in, and I was downsized. Finding myself unemployed and a bit desperate, I looked up Theresa, who's been my tutor, best friend and partner ever since.
Together we've built a business that combines our talents: She connects people with their deceased loved ones, and I connect them to their futures. It's a great mix, as we really don't compete, and we like to compare notes a lot. Yes, we do that—we intuitives love to talk to each other about what kinds of messages come through. It helps us calibrate our skills and understand the mechanics of what's happening.
People think that we can hear these magic beings in our head, or that we get this full-color film reel of an event and that's how we predict the future. In truth, the reality is much less glamorous.
What happens is that a thought or an image that feels like a memory will pop into my head, and this is coupled with a strong compulsion to blurt out what's swirling around in my mind's eye. It's a little like psychic Tourette's, things seem to tumble out of my mouth that have no forethought, and somehow these are always the most accurate bits of imformation.
The best way to describe it is to compare it to the game of Clue. In my mind's eye I may see a peacock, a pool table and some candles. When I see these images, I will have a strong compulsion to say something like, "Who's the pool player who wears peacock feathers and likes to play by candlelight?" which would be the way my logical mind might translate what I'm seeing. It's then up to the client to put together the clues and figure out that Mrs. Peacock did it in the billiard room with the candlestick. My readings tend to be very interactive that way, and the more cooperative the client the better the results in the end.
Walking to the deli, I smiled as I listened to Theresa's voice sing over the recorded voice mail. She was currently in California, where she'd been for the last three weeks meeting with producers and other Hollywood types negotiating a possible television pilot centered around her ability to connect people with their deceased loved ones. As a psychic medium, Theresa's focus isn't like mine, where I use my talents to predict the future. Her ability rests almost solely on bridging the gap between the living and the dead, and Theresa wasn't just good at what she did, she was amazing. Her sessions were most powerful in large group settings, with lots of tears and jaw dropping drama as she is able to intuit with incredible accuracy names, places and dates relative specifically to people who have crossed over, giving hard proof that life continues beyond the headstone.
Watching her at work is really mesmerizing, which was why Hollywood had come knocking on her door one day and asked her to come out and talk. These days, if you want to become famous for having a sixth sense, you gotta be able to talk to the dead, and as I don't relish a lot of attention, I'm lucky not to have this particular talent. Besides, Theresa's far more suited for all the attention. Of the two of us she's much more poised, and even though she's a few years younger than me, she's typically the grownup between us.
Her message was short and excited. "Hey, girl! I've got news! Call me!" I immediately hit speed dial to her cell phone and waited for the sound of her voice. She picked up on the fourth ring.
"Hey, what's up?"
"Oh, hi! I was just about to try you again. I don't have a lot of time—they're calling our flight in a minute here—but I had to tell you that we signed this morning!"
"Told you so," I said, smiling. There is no greater feeling to me than being right. I had given Theresa a reading before she left for California, and it was music to my ears to hear that something I'd predicted had come true.
"And you were right about the house too. We found this adorable little three-bedroom for rent in Santa Monica, and we just confirmed with the woman who owns it that we're going to rent it beginning the first of the month!"
Most of me was damned happy; however, the part of me that had grown used to hanging out with Theresa and Brett, her husband, felt sad and abandoned. "So you're really leaving me, huh?"
" 'Fraid so, my friend. But I'm headed back today, and we have the rest of the month, and there are like a billion planes a day flying between Detroit and L.A. You can come out here, I can come there…really, it will be okay."
I reached the Pic-A-Deli, but my appetite had disappeared. I walked inside anyway and stood in line, pouting like a three-year-old. I'd always known this day would come, but that didn't help—it still felt cruddy. As I listened to Theresa talk about her exciting new television career I feigned interest and forced my voice to higher octaves of excitement. I don't think I was a very good actress though, because she finally said, "Hey, I'll be home later tonight—I'll call you and we can talk it through then. You could always move out to L.A. too, you know."
Since intuition is a right brain activity, I mentally asked the question on the right side of my head—a technique I used when I needed a yes or no answer: Should I move to California? The difference between a "yes" and a "no" is that "yes" feels light and airy on the right side of my body and "no" feels thick and heavy on the left. Now my left side felt thick and heavy.
Putting my acting voice back on, I said, "Sure, give me a call tonight, Theresa. We'll talk more then."
I was next in line, and Theresa's plane was boarding, so we disconnected. Marching up to the counter, I smiled at the heavyset man with receding white hair and forced a smile I didn't feel.
"Abigail! The usual today?"
"Sure, Mike, but extra extra-hot peppers. I'm feeling reckless."
Mike laughed and nodded at me. As he reached for the bread knife, however, a thought flickered into my head. Most people think that psychics are "on" all the time, like we walk through the streets able to detect good people from bad and at a moment's notice know everything there is to know about total strangers. The truth is that we're only "on" when we want to be. In other words, it's very similar to a phone ringing in the distance; it's always ringing, sometimes loudly, sometimes not. If we pick up the phone, we know we'll get some info, but if we don't pick it up, we get nothing. As Mike began cutting the bread, my intuitive "phone" was ringing very loudly. Annoyed, I answered it, and got a flash and a feeling. I looked at Mike. He knew what I did for a living; in fact, he let me hang my card on his bulletin board and didn't seem too unnerved by it, so I decided to blurt out the thought that was now zipping through my head.
"Uh, Mike?"
"Yeah, Abby?"
"You drive a silver car?"
"Yeah! How'd you know?"
I smiled and tapped my temple, winking conspiratorially. "I think your car's leaking fluid—oil or antifreeze or something. You may want to check it later."
Mike stared at me for a long moment without blinking, his mouth hanging slightly open, then a huge grin spread across his face. "Abby, you're good! I noticed a small stain on the floor of my garage this morning and I was thinking I'd take it to the gas station this weekend. Hey, can you tell me the winning lotto numbers?"
If I had a nickel for every person that asked me that question, I wouldn't need to work anymore. I'd be retired and
rich, rich, rich!
"Pal, if I knew, I'd be playin' 'em!" I said as he wrapped my lunch and handed it over the counter to me. I paid for my sandwich, throwing in a Coke and some potato chips, and headed back to the office.
As I trundled up the stairs to the hallway leading to my suite, I noticed a woman pacing impatiently just outside the locked door. I felt a moment of panic and looked again at my watch. It was a little after eleven thirty. Had I misread my appointment book and looked at the wrong day? Did I forget to write in an appointment?
Truth be told, I wasn't the best at the administrative side of the business. I usually considered it a pain-in-the-ass part of the job, and sometimes I took a little longer to get back to people than was appropriate, and sometimes I missed an appointment or two altogether.
Red-faced now, I walked briskly up to the woman and smiled my most winning smile. "Hello," I said. "I apologize—I don't remember booking an appointment for this time. Did I goof?"
The woman was tall and thin with shoulder-length chestnut hair, horn-rimmed glasses and big brown eyes that looked both exhausted and anxious at the same time. "Are you Abigail?" she asked in a voice soft as Minnie Mouse.
"Yes."
"Oh, thank God. My name is Allison Pierce. My friend Connie canceled her eleven o'clock with you, and I thought perhaps if you hadn't filled it you might be willing to see me?"
I checked my watch again and looked at the bagged lunch I now carried. My initial reaction would have been no, I don't do "please-please-please-with-sugar-on-top-just-fit-me-in-this-one-time" readings. Experience has taught me that the moment you make an exception you can count on it becoming the rule.