“It will be a kind of joke. I don’t understand the joke. But I know this career will make you very happy. Proud. Well done, Cherry.”
Her voice became quieter. She was tiring. I opened my eyes again and she looked exhausted, her shoulders slumped, my rings still held loosely in the palm of her hand.
“Will I have a family?” I asked. “Children?”
Another long pause.
She said, “I see a little girl. She will come on a plane.”
That would have been so impressive if she hadn’t already known about the potential adoption.
“She will come. Just when you need her the most. Her first name begins with…”
A long pause.
“It doesn’t really matter, Mum…Madame Mae,” I said. I always found the predicting of initials to be so pointless. A chip on the roulette table. You never know! If they get the initial right, everyone is amazed; if not, no one is that worried.
“B,” said Madame Mae. “Her name will begin with the letter B.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
There was another pause, and when she spoke again, her words became garbled. It frightened me. I was worried Auntie Pat would be cross with me for suggesting she give me a reading.
“The little girl won’t stop the pain, terribleterrible pain nothing like it, IknowIknowIknow hurts so much, it’s unfair, it’s unbearable, can’tstopithurtingdarling…but she will help, she will be a reason to get up, likeyourlittleface gave me a reason, you just need a reason to get up, look for the notebooks, if there is a way, promiseIwillbethere keepbreathing keepbreathing that’s all you can do.”
She stopped.
Her face looked terribly old. There were beads of sweat on her forehead.
She opened her eyes, shook herself slightly, flicked “Stop” and “Eject” on the cassette recorder, and handed me the tape. She said, “That will be fifty dollars, Mrs. Smith.” Her eyes lost their spooky glaze and she grinned at me. Madame Mae was gone. It was Mum again. “Only joking, you know I always collected payment upfront. Did you find that helpful? Do you feel more hopeful?”
She looks tentative and vulnerable, as well as spent. “I know sometimes people wish I could be more specific, more prescriptive, but that’s not…that’s not the way it works, of course.” There was something so defensive about her, as if I’d come backstage to meet her after a performance.
And was it a performance? That’s what I still didn’t know.
I thought of all the books she had continued to borrow from the library; she’d taken her ongoing professional development requirements as seriously as a chartered accountant. I thought of the times she’d mentioned a new technique she was trying, and how she had always taken half an hour at the end of each working day to write a little reflection, I guess you’d call it, about her day’s work.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you, Mum. That was wonderful.”
I didn’t know what I felt.
Mum got her test results a few days later. It was not good news, but of course you already know this. We all knew it. She’d left it too late. The silly diets had not been the cause of her digestive problems. The silly diets had masked the true cause.
“Six months,” they said. “A year at the most.”
Chapter 100
“So I understand you have a rather significant birthday coming up, Leo?” says Lilith brightly, as if she were speaking to a kindergarten kid excited to be turning six.
Her pantsuit today is the pale green of a not-quite-ripe avocado.
“I’m turning forty-three in November,” says Leo. He knows where this is going. It’s gotten crazy. Since the YouTuber’s death, everyone at work seems to be talking about the prediction. The jokes have gotten out of hand. People give him a wide berth, even if he’s in the office. They’re joking. Or maybe they’re not.
“You didn’t think to let me know about this psychic prediction of a workplace accident?” says his boss now. She sits at her desk opposite him. There is a silver framed photo of Lilith with her husband and two children on her desk, angled so the person on the other side can see it. Presumably they are real people, but the husband has never accompanied Lilith to a work function, and their smiles are so plastically bright Leo sometimes wonders if she photoshopped herself into one of those photos that comes with the frame.
“I didn’t take it seriously.” Leo pinches his nostrils shut. Lilith’s perfume is especially overpowering today. It’s Calvin Klein Secret Obsession. He knows this because once he was in a department store with Neve and she was spraying perfume onto cardboard strips, and when she waved one in front of his nose he reacted with visceral horror. “Euww, Lilith!”
“But you made an announcement about it at a meeting.” Lilith taps a fingernail on her desk.
“I was joking,” says Leo, “you know, along the lines of ‘so let’s make sure we take workplace safety seriously’!”
“Which we certainly do,” says Lilith.
“We certainly do,” agrees Leo.
Lilith says, “So I’m thinking we keep you off-site as soon as you turn forty-three.”
Leo’s mouth drops. “I need to be on-site to do my job effectively.”
“You can work around it,” says Lilith. “FaceTime and so on.” She waves an airy hand. “It’s the only way. The feeling is that you’re kind of, you know, cursed.”
“Right,” says Leo. “Well, that’s kind of you.” It doesn’t feel kind, it feels like people believe his mere presence will cause an accident. “I guess.”
“Obviously, we’ll have to look at your key performance indicators in light of this new flexibility, discuss your utilization rate and so on.”
“Obviously,” says Leo. She means he will be expected to work longer hours. She means she intends to squeeze him and squeeze him like a damp cloth until every drop of him is gone and he’s bone dry.
Leo says, “My wife wants me to give up work for a year.”
