介绍： 014 | What the Psychic Knew

YEARS ago — panicked, on the cusp of 30, between jobs and wondering where life would take me — I consulted a psychic. I remember staring at the sea of green carpet in her home as she addressed the usual concerns.

She told me to marry Mark, the man I was living with, that I woul...

介绍： 014 | What the Psychic Knew

YEARS ago — panicked, on the cusp of 30, between jobs and wondering where life would take me — I consulted a psychic. I remember staring at the sea of green carpet in her home as she addressed the usual concerns.

She told me to marry Mark, the man I was living with, that I would have a son and a daughter, and that my future with them would not be in New York City, contrary to what I had long assumed.

Finally, I asked the question I really wanted answered: “When will I die?”

“That’s not what I do,” she said. “So I can’t say.”

“You can’t because you don’t know, or because it’s bad?”

She tilted her head to one side.

“Can you tell me how, then?”

“I see a severe blow to the head,” she said, catching me squarely in the eyes. “It will be sudden, and you won’t feel pain.”

“That’s a relief,” I said. I was born with a death sentence, like every creature that walks the earth, but I instantly regretted having this expertise into how I would leave it.

“But here’s what I can say about this life,” she continued, referring presumably to the time before I would be felled by a foul ball at Fenway Park or a tree branch in the woods. “Your purpose is love.”

“As opposed to what?”

She shrugged. “Power, money. Great acclaim.”

“Too bad,” I said.

We chatted for another minute until our time was up. I took the cassette from the recorder and stuffed it into my pocket, and wrote her a check for $150.

The bits about marriage and children seemed like something any psychic could safely say to a woman my age. So did the blandly good news about love: consolation, perhaps, for bad news about my future bank overdrafts.

But the prediction about my death surprised me. In my family everyone seemed (or was doomed, perhaps) to expire of old age. I admit that at times her insight has kept me uneasy company and on high alert (I never drive behind a truck carting things that might slip off at high speed, for example) as the years, a decade and more time passed.

By then, the psychic was three for three. I lived with my husband, Mark, and my son and daughter away from New York City. But the part about my purpose being “love” had been sidelined, or so I thought, once the power vacuum of middle age descended, sucking the youth from my body, my spirit and my marriage.

Everything I had to give went to my children, and though I loved them and my husband utterly, the drudgery of the day-to-day made it seem as if not love but coffee, my Toyota and sheer logistics were what propelled me through life.

I could see no distant future, just the clean slate of each day that filled up with the murk of worries and exhaustion. There was a relentlessness about my life, and there was resignation in me.

At 45, I had a hip operation, and the following eight weeks gave me a brief window into old age. The view was unlovely. My family soldiered through a long winter with me hobbling. We all needed to get away.

So I booked a few days at a seaside room in Miami with one king-size bed. My kids — then 8 and 11 — and I arrived to glorious Florida blue skies. That first day the sun knocked the kids out early and they fell asleep on either side of me in the sprawling bed, their shoulders already browned up and still smelling of sunscreen.

I had dropped 15 pounds after my operation, and as I was not too fleshy to begin with, the loss made me look more haggard than I felt. I tried to right my pajama bottoms that had twisted around me, and as I did I became aware of something in my abdomen, a lump that obviously didn’t belong there.

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