Saxman Suzan - The reluctant psychic : a memoir

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For
Gavin Albion,
for putting up with a mother who lives between the worlds

Contents

Pretending to be a child

No matter where I move or how many times I change my name or what color I dye my hair, people find me. I dont advertise. I dont have a Web site. I dont even answer the phone. And still when I arrive at my used-clothing store in town, there are people lurking in the parking lot hoping to get a reading with me. Its urgent, they tell me. Im desperate, they plead. Ive heard what you can do.

They show up with photographs, locks of hair, bloody shirts ripped apart by bullets, and so many questions, hundreds of questions, about the other side.

And its not just the living who are insistent. The dead pursue me, too. They always have. Even before the living knew what I could do, the dead were getting in line, crowding close, and demanding that I carry their messages across the veil. Im sorry. I love you. Why did you buy that car? Tell Bobby hes a piece of shit. Dont throw away my stuff!

The other day a couple came to me because they were worried about their kid who had been sick for months with some mysterious illness. I ushered them into my reading room, a little alcove near the Victorian dresses I sell to the steampunk crowd. I sat them down on stools opposite a table with Tarot cards and crystals.

I dont need anything special to communicate with the other side. But it calms people down to have something to touch or do when Im giving them a reading, sort of like teddy bears to hold in a therapists office. But before I could even ask these people to pick a card, the spirit of a tall, thin man with a scraggly beard had staggered into the room. He looked incredibly uncomfortable, embarrassed even.

Whos Paul? I asked.

Paul?

Paul?

The couple exchanged glances, confused. The name didnt ring a bell.

But now I was seeing more about this man. Paul tells me he lives in a cardboard box in your living room.

The woman gasped and clutched her husbands hand. The mans face had gone white.

Why does he live in a cardboard box in your living room? I asked. Its often hard to make sense of what I see. Oh, I realized all at once. Hes dead.

It turned out that almost a year earlier the woman had agreed to hold on to the ashes of her sisters ex-husband, a terrible drunk who had died indigent and utterly alone. I didnt really know what to do with him, she said. I put the urn, its in a cardboard box, behind the bookcase and I guess we kind of forgot about it.

Well, Paul wants to be out of your house, thats for sure, I told them. He hates it. He knows you always disapproved of him. He feels very ashamed. He doesnt care where you bury his ashes, though; just get rid of them. He needs to move on. He really does.

Is that why our daughters sick? asked the man, concerned.

Oh no, I said, remembering why theyd come in the first place. Thats something else. Something small. A tick. I could see it crawling up a young girls leg. Lyme disease?

I knew it! said the woman. I told the doctor thats what it was, but he wouldnt believe me.

Theres a test, I told the woman. Not the one the doctor gave her, but another one. Ask him for the other test.

How do you know that? asked the man. What are you anyway? An intuitive? A medium? A clairvoyant? A psychic?

I shrugged. I dont really know what I am. I never have. But Ive always been like this. I see the things no one else seems to seebits and pieces of the future, past lives, forgotten stories, hidden secrets, an angel or two, some demons, and the dead. The dead are everywhere. Now and then I can hide from the living, but I can never hide from the dead. What am I? I dont know. But in between cleaning up after my pets and selling jewelry in my shop, I talk to the living, I talk to the dying, I talk to the dead.

As soon as I began speaking, I knew I couldnt let anyone hear my real voice. How old was I? A little older than one? Maybe two? But I knew that I was not a child.

I felt like I was awakening from a dream and didnt know where I was. I didnt know what life I was in. I didnt even know who I was. Suzan? Was that my name? Really? I was an old woman, older than anyone in my family. What was I doing on Staten Island when I should be living in a cottage somewhere in England or walking the streets of London? I was an old British woman. Thats what I sounded like to myselfthe voice I heard in my own head. I certainly wasnt a child.

Instinctively, I knew that if anyone discovered who and what I really was, I would be in danger. Even as a toddler I was on my guard. I knew I could not trust anyone, not even my parents, especially my parents. Especially my mother.

What would happen if she found me out? Would she put me up for adoption? Would she leave me in a basket on someones doorstep? Would she report me to the authorities? Would she bring in the priests and the exorcists? Would she burn me at the stake?

All of these were barely understood possibilities, left over, I suppose, from lives I had lived where all of these things had happened. I was an old, melancholy baby right from the beginning. Who would possibly want me?

In my earliest memory, my mother walked into the living room and said, Who left the radio on?

I was clutching my favorite doll, a Casper the Friendly Ghost toy, and I had been talking to it. In my real voice. My old-lady English voice. I started babbling when my mother came into the room, because I knew I had to pretend to talk like a baby.

The radio wasnt on. I pulled the string on my toy and made Casper talk. That seemed to get me off the hook. This time.

But I could not always hide the things I knew and saw. They slipped out and they got me in trouble.

I was very young when I began telling my mother the things I knew about her. I saw her, in my mind, as a little girl pulling my aunt Mary, disabled from polio, in a childs red wagon. They were down by the train tracks with a group of other children, and my mother was wearing a red dress. They were putting pennies on the tracks and waiting for a train to come and crush them flat.

I told my mother what I had seen.

I never told you that, she said. How did you know I was wearing a red dress?

I saw it, I said innocently. In my head.

What do you mean, in your head ?

You were mean to Aunt Mary. I saw that, too.

I was not. How can you say that? I had to help her go everywhere because she couldnt walk because of the polio. Ive told you that. I did everything for my sister.

I was beginning to feel anxious and frightened. My mother was angry at me and I didnt understand why. I started to cry, but I couldnt hold back from describing what I was seeing. It was too powerful. And I knew that it was true. But you threw that big shell at her, I said. You made that scar on her forehead.

My mother stared at me in astonishment. How do you know that?

I saw it, I said, which was the truth.

I had been in the room with my mother, and while my eyes had focused on a single object, on a chair, the eye inside my head had witnessed a scene unscrolling across my brain. The world around me had blurred, while the movie inside my head appeared before my inner eye with absolute clarity.