Authors: Lori Reisenbichler
We put the dog toys on top of the cardboard box in the ground, and Eric starts filling up the hole. When it’s full, Toby tamps it down with his bare feet, and I put a big sunflower on top.
That night, Eric and I make love for the first time in weeks. That’s when I really have a good cry.
CHAPTER TWENTY
DOGS IN HEAVEN
I
take Thud’s leashes off the hook in the garage and give his dog food to our next-door neighbors, who have a cocker spaniel. When Toby asks, I tell him we might get another dog, but not yet. Eric keeps blaming himself. I want to make sure he has his bearings before we try to replace Thud.
Ms. Pushpa is in the park today, so she follows when Toby wants to show Sanjay Thud’s grave. We walk out to it. Sanjay asks why he’s under that pile of dirt.
Toby says, parroting what we’ve told him, that Thud’s body is in the ground, but his spirit is in heaven with Grandma.
Sanjay has never heard of a grave and looks puzzled when Toby talks about Thud going to heaven. Lakshmi explains to the boys the difference between what happens when an Indian dog dies and an American dog dies. Ms. Pushpa nods her approval. Toby holds Ms. Pushpa’s hand as he tries to absorb the idea that an Indian dog’s body gets burned up, on purpose.
“In a fire?” he asks.
“Yes, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s a good fire, with smoke that floats all the way to the heavens.”
“Kay would still be mad,” he says.
Lakshmi and I exchange a glance.
“Toby,” Ms. Pushpa says, bending over to meet his eyes, “why would Kay be mad?”
“Because of the dog in the fire.”
I brace myself for the outburst, but it doesn’t come. Sanjay pulls Toby’s hand away from Ms. Pushpa and they begin running laps around the yard. “But she shouldn’t be mad!” Toby yells back toward us.
Ms. Pushpa nods, as if this makes sense.
“What do you make of it?” I ask her.
“He has something to say.” She registers no concern. “Listen to him.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. But . . .”
“Be patient,” she advises.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TALKING TO DEAD PEOPLE
F
inally, it’s Vaughn Redford day. We arrive on time, but already there’s a long line waiting for a lime-green wristband that proves we’ve all paid our $150. Pa has his “I’m humoring you, baby girl” look on his face as he checks out the crowd in line with us.
“You said it’s sold out, right? How many are supposed to be here today?” His fuzzy white eyebrows merge together in the middle. He wore that damn baby blue jumpsuit today. It’s the worst one.
I see a sign that tells me the capacity of the hotel conference room is 350 people, and I cringe when I say it to him, because I know he’s doing the math in his head. Now that he’s asked, I can’t help doing it myself so I can control my expression when he explodes about it being over $50,000 for one hour of work and goes on to ask how many shows Vaughn Redford is going to do that week. I hand him the schedule and let him figure out the answer is three, and I wait for him to snort with disbelief that we are actually doing this.
I’m trying hard not to feel I’m being taken advantage of. When I think about how I lied to Eric about the cost of the tickets, my face gets hot. We fought about my going at all. Eric’s voice got low. Mine got loud. Eventually he relented, since going was more important to me than my not going was to him. I guess I didn’t really think I’d won that one, because when he asked me how much it was, I told him $150 and let him think that was for all three tickets (mine, Pa’s, and Toby’s).
I’d worked it out, foregoing my summer haircut (there’s $50 right there), eating more chicken and less salmon, that kind of thing. We do all right, but it’s not like we have an extra $450 every month that either of us can spend without the other noticing.
I’m carrying a burden heavier than my thirty-pound toddler. I shift Toby from one hip to the other. He starts to squirm, so Lakshmi—who made good on her earlier promise to go with me—takes him by the hand and walks to the gift shop while we hold our place in the line.
Pa tells me he went to the casino with Dottie again, and I nod and ask if he had a good time. He starts to tell me about their winnings. The conversation seems freakishly normal. Like people who end up laughing in the church foyer after a funeral. Is that disrespectful to the person they are supposed to be grieving?
I look around and realize the woman directly behind us is holding a square box of tissues. She came prepared. All I have in my purse is baby wipes.
When we get nearer to the registration table, I wave Lakshmi over, and Toby runs ahead of her with a squeal. The grandmothers in the line all smile at him and whisper to each other, nodding. The two young women behind the registration table are not amused. The one with dull shoe-polish hair and a pierced eyebrow notices my nose piercing and smiles at me, but her companion, the heavy one in a black concert T-shirt, is formal and stiff. I give her our tickets, and she pulls a paper out of an accordion file and explains that, of course, she expects the child to be removed from the room if he becomes disruptive. I nod.
She hands me the paper and tells me I have to sign a release. To ensure I understand this is for entertainment purposes only. To make sure I understand that if anything Toby is exposed to during the show is upsetting to him—if there are any psychological problems later, any kind of disturbance—we can’t sue Vaughn Redford. That I will take responsibility for bringing him here.
My legs feel heavy and thick. What am I doing? Pa doesn’t want to be here. Toby would rather be on a playground. I should’ve come alone, or with Lakshmi. I pull her aside.
Lakshmi asks, “Everything okay?”
“I have to sign a release.”
“It’ll be okay. I’m willing to walk around the back with Toby. That way, he’s in the room in case John Robberson shows up. And you can sit up closer with your father in case your mother shows up.”
Like a suspicious smell coming from inside a wall, the idea seeps into my consciousness: she is completely confident there are going to be spirits “showing up” today. Her only concern is which ones.
The shoe-polish-hair girl calls out, “Doors close in three minutes.”
The hotel conference room smells like moldy carpet and manufactured air and reminds me of the large training sessions I attended for my old job. Same beige walls, same cheap plastic contemporary chandeliers, same green hotel banquet chairs, lined up in rows, facing a platform stage with one lonely chair and two faded ficus trees at either side. It’s the seminar equivalent of a traveling carnival. The room crackles with anticipatory static. I can almost feel my hair standing on end as if someone has rubbed a balloon on my scalp.
We have to settle in the middle of a row, which worries me because if Toby gets loud, I’ll have to climb over people to get him out of the room. I get him settled and he ends up sitting on the floor on his knees, facing the chair, which he converts to a table. He begins to draw on the sketchpad I brought, with colored pencils he selects from my hand when he’s ready for new ones. He’ll be okay here for a while.
This is the part of motherhood that makes women forget themselves. I embarrassed myself in my striving to attend, and now that I’m here, I’m disconnected from the very experience I sought out. All I can do is focus on the same things I’d have focused on if we were home. So why am I here?
Vaughn Redford comes out to a standing ovation that he quickly dismisses. He makes a few comments and fields the first questions, mostly the verbal equivalent of fan mail. A woman in a black-and-white geometric-print blouse, mid-thirties, with a good haircut and manicured nails, asks, “If a person dies before he can speak, before he learns to talk, then how does he communicate with you? How would he come through?”
My heart sinks.
Pa leans over and says, “Ain’t too hard to figure out why she’s here.”
I slap him on the leg. “Hush.”
Vaughn Redford says, with admirable empathy, “They’re all spirits, so it doesn’t matter what they can do with their bodies here.” He goes on to tell a story about a different woman, at an earlier reading, whose child died in surgery. That’s all she said. He explains that he had made a point of asking her not to reveal the child’s age at death. He predicted age seven. When he started her reading, the child referenced many things that were current for the mother—things like the type of vacation the mother had recently taken, a picture hanging on a wall. So the child’s spirit was still watching the mother, closely.
According to Vaughn Redford, the main reason the child came through was to tell the mother not to feel guilty, that she was okay. The mother said, “She?”
Vaughn Redford is quiet in both voice and posture when he delivers the punch. The mother said she hadn’t even known she was pregnant but had an emergency appendectomy, with no time for a pregnancy test before, and the seven-week-old fetus died in surgery, before she even knew about it. So she was thrilled to discover it would have been a girl.
The crowd gasps.
I swallow the clot of sorrow that has crawled up from my heart to my throat.
“So,” Vaughn Redford says, “the spirit is present, even if the body never even makes it to this world.”
“Damn. He’s good.”
“If you don’t stop talking, I will choke you with my bare hands.”
Pa snickers.
I turn my head away from him and can feel hot, prickly tears seeping out. All I can think about are the three miscarriages I’ve endured, and I can’t help wondering if I’m going to get a message today. Can it be true that my unborn children are spirits around me? I viscerally want to believe it. I reach over to Lakshmi, who squeezes my hand. She’s so short, she can barely see, so she’s sitting with one leg curled beneath her as a booster seat.
Pa whispers, “Hey, squirt.”
Toby looks up from his coloring book.
“You let me know if you spot your grandma, all right?”
I swallow hard, knowing that Toby has never seen his grandma.
Then the session actually begins. The air in the room feels crowded and crackly, much different than it did when we first walked in. I smell mold, but I feel something else . . . that I can’t quite articulate.
Vaughn Redford indicates he’s feeling some energy from the left side of the room, near the middle section, with someone with an
M-G
name, like Maggie, Margo, Marguerite . . . He points to the middle seats and says, “See that lady with the pink shirt? Raise your hand, ma’am. Her. It’s coming from right behind her.”
I twist in my seat as the two women sitting behind me, one older and the other who looks like she could be the daughter, whisper with their heads together. The black-T-shirt girl is making her way over with the microphone. The younger woman says, “Marge?”
He says, “That’s an
M-G
name, all right. Stand up, please.”
Marge is the older woman’s sister, the younger woman’s aunt, and she died over a year ago—and evidently, according to Vaughn, wants to come back and tell everyone she loves them.
It means nothing to anyone except those two women. I am somewhat intrigued to realize what a bystander I am to the whole process. All I can think about are those miscarriages, and in spite of myself, I find myself praying that my babies will show up.
I’ve always thought they were all boys, all three of them. I’d love to know if I was right. We agreed not to name them. So for me, they’re First Baby, Second Baby, Third.
Vaughn Redford is already on to someone else, and this goes on for a while. Each time he swings his arm around, walks over to one side of the room, and calls out a letter or number or other cryptic clue until someone responds.
This is exactly what makes people skeptical. While I was researching him, I found that most critics believe this process is the most objectionable part of Vaughn Redford’s alleged psychic skills. Some describe it as “fishing” for details, proposing that in a room of three hundred people, the odds are that someone will know someone who died and who had a name starting, for example, with the letter
D
. Other critics charge that he uses the Q&A period to gather information about people. Then, conveniently, those folks are the ones who get readings. I can see the logic in this, and it was persuasive to me at first. In fact, I’d convinced myself not to go, when I ran across a study by the University of Arizona. Vaughn Redford volunteered to be tested by a psychological research group, which confirmed that on blind readings, where he didn’t see the person being read, he was 80 percent accurate about the information he provided. Details like who died, how they died, even specific little things like pictures or jewelry keepsakes the dead people referenced in their communications; the research team concluded that he was actually seeing something. I didn’t doubt the study, and it was one of the things that made me feel better about coming here today.
But now that I’m here, all that logical proof stuff—it doesn’t matter at all to me. I’m not thinking about Kay or John Robberson or any of that. All I want is to see my babies.
I put my hand on Pa’s knee and wonder if he feels the same pull in his heart, if he is sitting there praying that Mom will show up. His fuzzy eyebrows are moving up and down as he follows the psychic bouncing ball of Vaughn Redford’s focus. I think he’s paying closer attention than I am.
Toby has been almost miraculously quiet. He stopped drawing a few minutes ago and climbed up into the chair. Lakshmi is playing a little hand game with him to keep him occupied, all the while keeping her eye on the front of the room. I wonder if he can feel the energy, or emotion, or whatever it is in the room. Maybe he sees it, and all I can do is feel it.
The next thing I know, the black-and-white geometric-print lady is standing up and saying, yes, we have a
P
name. Patrick.
Pa gets a cynical smirk on his face, which I catch. He squeezes my knee and says, “Here we go.” Vaughn Redford provides some mundane detail, which triggers the grieving mother. She chokes out the story of her eighteen-month-old who fell down, hit his head, and lapsed into a coma for eight months until he died. They celebrated his second birthday in a hospital room with nurses who dutifully ate cupcakes on his behalf. He never regained consciousness. I can picture that hospital room—all clinical and white, with pathetic balloons tied to the metal bedrails—and a teeny-tiny boy on the bed, asleep and asleep and asleep. I hope to God nobody stuck a damn pointy hat on his head.
My throat feels thick again, and my nerves are going crazy, sending out hyperjittery messages to the rest of my muscles. My leg starts twitching. The woman’s husband is sitting next to her, still as a stone, while she stands up and sobs out her story. Vaughn Redford assures her that Patrick is happy and running around, with none of the limitations he had on earth. I can see Eric in that husband, and I can’t help wondering if the boy was hurt on his watch. It would make a difference. Eric blames himself for Thud’s death.
I take a deep breath to settle my shakiness. Vaughn Redford shifts to someone else, which I don’t quite follow, so I startle when the woman one row in front of us drops her purse as she turns in her chair to look at me.
Toby looks up at the commotion as Vaughn Redford describes the husband who passed. They do their thing, and I am feeling ridiculous that I thought this would solve anything.
Then, out of the blue, Toby looks up from his book and says, “Thud!”
The people around us titter with laughter. I shush him quickly.
Almost as an answer to Toby, Vaughn Redford says, “Yes, that’s right, that’s what I’m getting. Thud? Is that a name, or a noise, or what? Does that mean anything to you?”
He points at me. “You. The kid’s mom. Can you stand up?”
Lakshmi pushes me to my feet, and someone hands me the microphone.
“Me?”
“Does Thud mean anything to you?”
“Um, Thud was our dog?”
The crowd laughs.
“You named your dog Thud? What kind of name is that?” He looks to the audience and shrugs as he walks toward the front of the stage.
“He kept running into the couch when he was little.” I smile, playing to the crowd.