“Is there any person in particular you would like me to contact?” he asked, his tone filled with compassion. “If there is, I can try and reach them. I can’t guarantee you that I’ll be successful, it’s
them
who chooses who comes to speak to you. But I can try.”
I stared at him, hardly believing that this was for real and he was truly capable of communicating with dead people. My stomach cramped up. I took a deep breath and began to fiddle with my fingers in front of me, scarcely daring to breathe my deepest, most unfulfillable longing out loud to this dubious stranger.
“My mother,” I told him at last.
He waited, but I couldn’t say anything more.
“How long has it been since she passed?” he continued.
I gulped.
“Four years.”
I could scarcely believe it had been such a long time ago. It felt like only yesterday I was kissing her good-bye to go to university. I wondered if somehow I’d gone stark raving mad to actually expect to receive some sort of communication from... from what? A
ghost?
Besides which, I’d thought that everything my mother had ever wanted to say to me, she’d already said it in life.
At last Sergei nodded, lowered his hand to his sketchbook again and began to hum. I glanced about, wondering if apparitions would somehow just materialize out of thin air around us. But nothing happened that I was aware of.
“Your mother’s here,” he intoned at last in a hollow voice devoid of emotion. “She says not to worry about her, she’s in a good place and she loves you.”
Well, that was hardly earth-shattering news. In spite of myself, I started entertaining the notion that maybe mediums
were
bogus scam artists, as so many people claimed.
“Your mother says she comes to visit you and your baby every day. She’s proud of you. She thinks you’re a superb mother to this little one.”
He raised his gaze towards me.
“She says he’s no good for you. He hits you.”
I started in surprise. Then I turned my face, caught a glimpse of my reflection in the tarnished wardrobe mirror. There was the clear mark of angry fingers across the edge of my cheekbone in the form of a swollen bruise.
Well, it hardly took the mind of a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had happened there. All the same, I found tears starting to trickle down my cheeks.
“I’m too scared to leave him,” I whispered. “I don’t have a steady job. What if I move out, and then I can’t pay the rent? What if something awful happens to Romeo...” I gestured towards my thoughtfully sleeping baby. “What if something happens to him, and I can’t handle it? What if I’m not able to take care of him?”
Sergei fixed me with a piercing glare.
“You can handle anything, Annasuya Rose. You’re much stronger than you think.”
He waved towards Romeo.
“You’re his mother. You’re capable of doing much more than you believe you are. You’re capable of doing anything for him. Anything at all. Even giving up your life for him.”
Sergei clasped his hands together in front of him with a prayerful expression.
“So don’t be afraid to do what you
know
is right.”
He smiled and dropped his hand into his lap on top of his sketchbook.
“She says, don’t worry. She will always be by your side. She’ll help you. If you leave him, you’ll never have to face anything alone.”
He began to sketch again, and his face turned vague and absent.
“Beware of that man,” he spat out suddenly.
A shard of ice cut through deep into me, numbing me even more frozen than I already was. I began convulsing more violently than ever before.
“Do-do you mean... the man I’m with right now?” I gasped out, my voice trembling and shrill. I felt spaced out, and my head began to swim.
Sergei shook his head.
“There’s a man in your future. A dark, black, evil shadow. Beware of him. Don’t ever let your guard down.”
He traced thick strokes across his sketchbook.
“Your mother will watch over you, but you must save yourself!” he barked out. “It’s
your
test.
Your
ordeal.
Your
odyssey...
Your
choice. No one can fight that battle for you.”
His hands became as still as dead wood, folded over his mysterious sketch.
“The way out of the darkness is to follow your heart,” he exclaimed.
I laughed nervously. So maybe he was just taking me on, after all. Typical scam artist spewing inane clichés.
“Your grandparents survived the horror of hell because they never forgot their humanity,” he declaimed in a monotone. “They followed their hearts, always. They helped their fellow inmates even when doing so meant risking their own lives. They defended their friends and loved ones, even when they knew it could mean a bullet to the brain – or worse. They realized that to do otherwise – to go against their conscience and do what they knew was wrong just to save their own hides – was something worse than death. Something they could never live with.”
Sergei fixed me with his unearthly stare once again.
“What is it that you could never live with, Annasuya Rose? What would be worse than death for you?”
I felt as if I’d been dumped into the bottom of the deepest, iciest, most desolate pit on earth.
Sergei lowered his head, hiding his expression from me. Then, a minute later, he glanced up at me – with the normal, jovial countenance of someone merely carrying out a friendly conversation over a Sunday barbecue.
“I’m afraid that’s it,” he told me, shaking his head ruefully. “The spirits don’t have any more messages for you, Annasuya. I’m sorry.”
He cast his gaze over the sketch on his lap and blanched.
“What is it?” I asked, still shivering.
Wordlessly, he held up the drawing his fingers had been whittling out on automatic pilot throughout the session.
It was the image of a faceless shadow ensconced within a deep, brooding hood.
I lay in the grass by her stone cold tomb. My fingers clenched convulsively around the slab of white marble. I hugged my knees tight against me. Thunder rumbled ominously, and the same as on that long-ago and far-away morning when I’d visited the medium, the skies opened up and began to pour bucketloads of ice-cold rain over me. I hugged my knees and shivered, glad the rain was hiding my tears.
“Beware of that man.”
For months afterwards I’d wracked my brain, glaring with mistrust at every new male that ventured into my life, wondering if he would turn out to be
“that man”.
But nothing happened, and after a while I began to forget all about that warning. To laugh it off and shrug about it, frivolously, assuming that it had all been nothing but a flare of dramatic histrionics after all. A bit of pompous showing off to prove that he really was the real McCoy, a true, legit medium.
Although every time I thought about what he’d said about my grandparents, a shudder ran through me anew. There was no way he could have known my grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
The light began to fade. The sky darkened, as if on the verge of the Apocalypse. For a split second I thought the world really
was
coming to an end. Then I realized it was just the night falling. I giggled nervously, chided myself for such silly thoughts.
I tried to drag myself to my feet. My knees stiffened with the cold and I felt like a rigid, disjointed doll. I pushed myself up with effort, my thoughts straying already to other matters. Calvin and Romeo were probably getting impatient, waiting for me to show up for dinner. I wondered that they hadn’t called me to ask where I was. I dragged my mobile out of my purse, discovered with alarm that the battery was dead. Why was I always such a klutz? This was only about the umpteenth time I’d forgotten to charge it. It was really high time I made my way out of here.
My fingers grazed the tombstone one last time. It had taken me almost ten years to wander on over here. I had no idea when I would ever return. I fumbled in my pocket for the stone I’d picked up on the street and laid it on top of my mother’s gravestone with a loving caress. Immediately the rain began to wash over it, tainting the slate grey a deep black.
I picked up my purse, tried to stumble down the wide avenues dripping with sadness towards the open gates. My jacket fell open, flapping in the wind, and I let the rain soak my shirt. As I neared the gates I caught a glimpse of the washing station, squeaky clean stainless steel sinks equipped with metal jugs. I remembered after the funeral, someone instructing ignorant, unreligious me about the necessity of washing my hands after visiting a cemetery.
I squinted up at the pounding deluge, letting the rain fill my eyes, my hair and clothes, tracing diluted watercolour patterns across my frozen skin, and wondered at the futility of washing my hands in this downpour. I approached the washing station anyways, filled a brittle metal jug with water and poured it disconsolately over my wrist.
A sob caught suddenly in my throat. The metal jug clattered into the sink. Tears began to gush from my eyes and I leaned over the sink, wracked with sobs. I buried my face in my hands, my shoulders shaking convulsively, relieved at least there was no one around to spy on my moment of weakness.
I wandered through the glistening streets towards the subway station, my thoughts lost in another era as neons flickered on around me, reflecting like brilliant, multi-coloured diamonds on the slick pavement.
I saw myself sitting on a stool in the kitchen, swinging my skinny legs in white woollen tights, my mother with her face lined and creased with anxiety over her baby’s first day of school, fitting a pair of shiny leather shoes over my white-padded feet. My mother pulling fresh-baked cookies from the oven to greet me as I waltzed in the door. My mother at my high school graduation, her face beaming with pride as I brandished my secondary school certificate in the air.
I saw my mother on the last morning of her life. I kissed her, as I did every day before leaving for university, and she tucked a bagel filled with cream cheese wrapped in a napkin into my rucksack.
“A snack for you, Batya,” she crooned, calling me by the affectionate nickname only she ever used. “To keep zose brain cells fuelled up.” She patted me on the cheeks. “So one day you be ze biggest CEO zis city has ever seen.”
She grinned, and I kissed her again, then dashed off for the bus, never suspecting that would be the last time I would see her face.
You never expect to lose your mother. And even less when you’re only twenty and just starting to live life and discover everything this incredible, mysterious universe has to offer, with all your dreams of conquering the world still fresh and alive in your breast. Sure as anything that your mother will always be by your side all along the way. You see her as invincible, immortal, and even though your rational mind and common sense tell you that one day she will be gone, like all other people in the world, you just can’t believe it. Or you think it’s something that won’t happen until many decades from now. Maybe as you’re celebrating your own hundredth birthday in the company of all your beautiful grandchildren and great-grandkiddies.
But certainly not when you’re twenty.
I didn’t know how I was going to survive without her. I didn’t think I could bring my dreams to life without her. I could remember a time when I couldn’t even imagine going three days without seeing her.
And now it had been almost thirteen years since the last time I saw her face.
I curled into a dejected heap on a seat in the deserted subway train. I glanced up, and my sorry reflection stared back at me in the blackened window. Eyes swollen with tears and smudged pathetically with smeary mascara. Stringy hair plastered against the top of my head, trailing wet tendrils across my cheeks. My sodden blazer hanging from me crumpled and shapeless. Yes, I definitely was in the perfect state for seducing my boyfriend after the massive row that other night over the dead cat.
Calvin was pacing in a frenzy on the sidewalk in front of our building when I arrived, all tender and sensitive romantic geek disguised as Mr. Tough-guy in his black leather jacket and black hiking boots. He grabbed me in his arms with relief and buried me in a desperate hug, ignoring my bedraggled appearance.
“Thank God you’re both safe,” he cried, gasping. “I thought something terrible had happened to you. An accident... It’s so late. And you weren’t answering your phone.”
I surrendered myself to his grasp and let him cuddle me against his warm shoulder. Then I realized what he’d said.
“Both safe, Calvin?” I cried, hysteria starting to rise up in me. “What do you mean,
both?
”
Calvin pushed me away and stared at me in surprise.
“What do you mean, both?” I repeated.
Glancing around, I suddenly realized that Calvin was alone.
“Where’s Romeo? Didn’t you pick him up at school?”
Calvin swayed his head in confusion, started shaking himself like a dog.
“Of course not. You did!” he exclaimed.
We looked at each other numbly as horrifying realization began to dawn on us.
“I didn’t pick him up.” I mouthed the words slowly, feeling all of a sudden as if coarse cotton filled my mouth. “
You
did. Mrs. Garrison said you did.”
Calvin shook his head.
“I never even went near that place.”
We glanced at each other once more, stupefied. A minute later, Calvin jolted into action, hightailing it around the building to the car park and speeding out in seconds with his potent motorcycle. He paused only long enough for me to leap on behind him.
I didn’t need to ask what he was doing. We both knew. He careened down Old Forest Hill Road, breaking every speed limit on record, screeching to a stop within minutes in front of Romeo’s school. At this late hour, all the doors were closed except one. I breathed a thanks of immense relief that Mrs. Garrison was holding after-school art classes tonight.
She eyed us quizzically as we confronted her together.
“You said Calvin picked Romeo up,” I goaded at her accusingly.
Mrs. Garrison twiddled on the doorknob in confusion.
“Calvin, no,” she clarified. “It was his father. His real father.”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “That’s impossible.”
Mrs. Garrison cleared her throat.
“Well. How do you know?” she snapped. “Just because you’re estranged... Maybe he came back to town without telling you. Maybe he just wanted to spend some time with his son. That’s only natural...”
She studied my face probingly, her eyes roaming quizzically over my features.
“No,” I told her firmly. “That’s impossible. Romeo’s father is dead.”
*
Mrs. Garrison cleared out a space at one of her art tables and settled us onto the child-sized seats around it.
“Let’s get it straight here,” she told us, a little desperately, I thought. “You’re sure you’re not lying or making it up or something?”
I glared at her, bit back something scathing.
“My son is missing, because of
you,
” I cried, “and all you can think of to do is to
accuse
me? Romeo’s father is dead, capish? I saw him die in my own arms. What do you need to believe me, anyways? That I wave a death certificate in front of you? Tell me what happened,
right now.
Who picked Romeo up?”
Mrs. Garrison raised her hands beseechingly.
“I’m not trying to accuse you,” she hastened to explain. “But you don’t know just how many divorcees will claim that their ex is dead just because they hate them so much. When in fact, the ex is locked up in jail, or gallivanting about somewhere in the Seychelles with a new mistress.”
She gestured towards me.
“Besides which, you don’t exactly make it easy for me to take you seriously, speaking quite frankly, Ms. Adler.” She lifted her chin self-righteously. “How many times have you arrived late, and I’ve had to put in overtime to look after him –
unpaid
overtime, I might add. And all because of
you.
More than once I’ve been tempted to call in Social Services because you seem to practically have your son
abandoned
here. Sometimes you’re more than even one whole hour late.”
“That’s beside the point,” Calvin cut in. “That doesn’t make her a liar. Annasuya’s a hard-working single—”
“Cut the crap.” Mrs. Garrison banged her fist on the table. “I know these negligent types better than you, Calvin. What are you, anyways? Just a swinging bachelor. A
childless
swinging bachelor.”
She pointed at me.
“Look at how your girlfriend deigns to show up here even tonight. You look drunk, Ms. Adler. How do you expect anyone to take you seriously with such a pitiful appearance? Have you checked yourself in the mirror lately?”
I leapt to my feet and pushed her to one side. I felt like exploding with frustration.
“I am
not
drunk! I got caught in the rain, okay?” I screamed, swiping my hands unconsciously over the smeared mascara, although I was sure that was only making me look even worse. “That could happen to anyone. Where’s Romeo? Who took him?” I glared at her. “Who did you
let
take him away? What happened?”
“His father,” she reiterated, insistent. “He said he was his father. I had no reason not to believe him. After all, it’s not like
you’ve
ever given me a whole lot of details about Romeo’s father anyways.
Trustworthy
details, I mean.”
She glanced from one to the other of us.
“So,” she whispered at last. “You’re saying he really
is
dead, are you? You’re not pulling my leg?”
“Mrs. Garrison, if you’ve finished with calling Annasuya a liar...” Calvin burst out.
Mrs. Garrison merely nodded, wordless.
“So then, who picked Romeo up? Who would possibly want to have anything to do with him?” he said.
Mrs. Garrison shrugged.
“I’d never seen him before,” she explained defensively. “But he claimed he was Romeo’s father. His
real
father, I remember he put a lot of emphasize on the word ‘real’. And Romeo’s always said he had no father, but I just assumed that he meant that he had no contact with his father. Not that he
literally
had no father.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
Mrs. Garrison shrugged again.
“Ordinary. Normal. A man.” She squinted her eyes. “Brown hair, I think. Or maybe it was black.”
She looked at us lamely.
“I’m sorry, I’m not too sure. I didn’t really pay much attention.”
Calvin glanced around and snorted.
“And you say you’re an
art
teacher?” he exclaimed in disbelief.