Sisterland Read online

  “Those aren’t the same.”

  “What if we adopt kids with serious behavioral problems?”

  “That’s more common in children from Eastern European countries than China. Anyway, even if we’re imperfect parents and our kids are messed up, their lives will still be better with us than if they were in an orphanage. But if we have kids and they’re messed up, it’s our fault.”

  “Of course we’ll be imperfect parents. But do you really believe if we provide biological children with anything less than ideal lives, then it’s better for them not to exist?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Do you wish you didn’t exist?”

  “At times.”

  Jeremy laughed. “You usually do a good job of hiding your bleak worldview.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I just make one point? I know having senses has been a burden to you. But from my perspective, it doesn’t define who you are. If I were describing you to someone, it wouldn’t be in the top ten of your personality traits. It might not even make the top fifty.”

  The following week, Jeremy flew to Vancouver to present a paper on biogeochemical iron cycling, and while he was gone, I spent the nights at the apartment I still, technically, shared with Vi. On the third morning of Jeremy’s absence, I woke up and thought, I’ll have two white babies.

  It was still true that I didn’t see how having children was anything other than a roll of the dice; what was different was that being with Jeremy made me feel like perhaps luck was on my side.

  I waited until it was seven A.M. in British Columbia, called his cellphone—I had no idea if the call would cost either or both of us a small fortune—and when he answered, I said, “I’ll have two white babies.”

  He laughed. “With anyone in particular?”

  “I’m serious. But we shouldn’t wait too long, because I don’t want to be trying to get pregnant when I’m, like, thirty-nine.”

  At the time of this conversation, I was twenty-seven, and Jeremy laughed again. He said, “Is that an invitation to leave Vancouver early and come knock you up?”

  “You don’t seem very surprised. Did you think all along I’d give in?”

  “I’m happy,” he said. “This is exciting news. It’s just that I woke up about three seconds before you called.”

  As it turned out, Rosie was born when I was thirty-one, and Owen when I was thirty-three. And really, it wasn’t that Jeremy had convinced me. It was that he’d been smart enough to let me convince myself.

  Chapter 12

  On Friday, October 9, a week before the day of Vi’s predicted earthquake, a man in O’Fallon waited until his wife and children were sleeping, shot them in their beds, then turned his gun on himself. He’d done it because he’d wanted to save them from the impending destruction, according to the initial news reports, and I thought, No, no, no, no, no. It wasn’t in the morning paper, but there was an article on the Post-Dispatch’s website that I read on the small screen of Jeremy’s phone as soon as I came downstairs in the morning, while my stomach churned.

  My impression was that Vi’s prediction was mostly considered ridiculous and not credible; certainly it was seen as such by people outside St. Louis. Within St. Louis, as far as I could tell, people who’d admit to being nervous would then express embarrassment at their nervousness. St. Louisans weren’t evacuating the city. And yet, as with the warnings of doomsday cults, even if you didn’t buy the claims, you’d still breathe a sigh of relief when the day in question passed without event.

  I took Owen for a walk in the stroller, and when we returned home, Jeremy waved his phone at me. “There’s all this stuff coming out about how the guy had lost his job months ago, he was mentally unbalanced, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Obviously, he was mentally unbalanced,” I said.

  When Vi called that afternoon, she said, “People are so fucking nuts,” and I could feel her refusal of culpability.

  “And you still think the earthquake will happen?”

  She sounded impatient as she said, “If I get word to the contrary, you’ll be the first to know.”

  The next evening, Jeremy and I were sitting on the couch in our living room, watching the episode of Saturday Night Live we hadn’t stayed up for the night before, when we heard a whimper from one of the two monitors set on the coffee table. I said, “Is that him or her?” Jeremy paused the TV, and there was a silence and then another whimper—a whimper of bereftness, it seemed to me, of desolation even—and I said, “It’s her. Should I go up?”

  “She’s probably not even awake.” Jeremy hit the Play button on the remote control, and I set my hand on his arm.

  “Hold on.”

  “You’ll hear her.” But he’d frozen the screen again; he was indulging me.

  We were quiet for a minute—Jeremy pulled his phone from his pocket, presumably to check either his email or football scores—and I sat there listening. After another minute, I said, “I might go sit upstairs in the hall.”

  He looked up from his phone. “Seriously? For how long?”

  I gestured toward the television. “You can keep watching.”

  “If she needs us, she’ll let us know.”

  “I won’t go in her room unless she makes more noise,” I said. “But I just want to be up there if she does.” It wasn’t that I thought I was being rational; it was that something about hearing that whimper had triggered anxious heart, and I knew I couldn’t sit and chortle at sketches featuring men dressed as women. This was a difference between Jeremy and me, that he probably thought men dressed as women were the perfect cure for what ailed me.

  Upstairs, I took a seat on the bare wooden hall floor; I could have gotten a magazine, but I didn’t. It would in my life then have been impossible for me to feel bored by doing nothing. To do nothing was a rare treat, almost like taking a nap.

  Rosie didn’t make more noise, and after five minutes, contrary to what I’d promised Jeremy, I opened her door and crept into her room. She was lying on her stomach, her palms and knees beneath her and her little butt bunched up in the air. Her face was turned away from me, toward the wall, but I could hear her rhythmic breathing. This wasn’t, I was fairly sure, a night on which she’d get a fever, though I knew those nights well: After we gave her medicine, as she rolled around and mumbled, I’d keep getting up to check on her, and at some point, I’d just give in and lie down on the floor next to her crib.

  But no, I had to remind myself. Not tonight. Just because I knew how to slip into these nervous patterns, just because the idea of her having a fever was in my head, it didn’t mean she had a fever. I was barely psychic anymore, and moments like this were the reason why.

  When I went downstairs, the television was still paused at the same sketch, and Jeremy was reading an issue of Journal of Geophysical Research. As I reentered the living room, I said, “Sorry. You could have kept watching.”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “I want to try getting the stain out of Rosie’s pink sweatshirt. I’m not in the mood for TV anymore.” What I really wanted to do—I kept meaning to do it while Jeremy was at work—was to remove everything hanging on our walls. But I didn’t have the nerve to do it in front of him.

  He nodded in the direction of Rosie’s monitor. “She’s been totally quiet.” Had he heard me go into her room?

  We looked at each other, and I said, “I think everything will be better when we’re on the other side of Vi’s prediction.”

  “When Kendra comes this week, you should go get a manicure and try to relax. Call tomorrow and schedule one.”

  “Maybe,” I said. Apart from the fact that I no longer had manicures from one year to the next, there was a secret I kept from Jeremy, a stupid secret, which was that when Kendra babysat, I left only Rosie with her. Running errands was far easier with just Owen than they’d have been with both children, which meant that Kendra’s hours were in fact a break for me, if not exactly the one Jeremy believed I was get
ting. But so greatly did Rosie relish Kendra’s company, and so rare was it these days for Rosie to receive the undivided attention of any adult, that it didn’t seem like such a sacrifice on my part to permit her this treat. I didn’t tell Jeremy because, in the abstract, I always planned to leave both Owen and Rosie with Kendra the following week, and it was only when Kendra showed up and Rosie went berserk with excitement that I reconsidered.

  Jeremy was still watching me, and he said, “I know we haven’t talked about this for a while, but you remember I’m leaving Thursday for the conference, right?”

  Did I remember he was leaving Thursday for his conference? I remembered that that had once been the plan, but I had convinced myself that he would stay—that he’d canceled his reservation already, because surely he wouldn’t get on a plane to Denver with everything that was going on.

  “I realize this conference is big for you,” I said. “But since it’s annual, if you miss one in your whole career, it probably doesn’t make a difference.”

  “I thought our deal was that if I postponed my Cornell talk, you were okay with me going to Denver. Does that ring a bell?”

  “A lot has happened since then,” I said. “Anyway, now that you have tenure, don’t you not have to do as much stuff like this?”

  “Kate, I’m delivering a paper on Sunday morning. And I have meals and coffee scheduled with literally twelve different people.”

  “Other professors have families, too. If you say an emergency came up, I’m sure they’ll understand.”

  Jeremy sighed. “Let me put this in perspective. Courtney is still going to the conference, even after last week.” He meant after her abortion, but if he thought this was a persuasive point, he was mistaken.

  I said, “What Courtney does has nothing to do with us.”

  “Have you given more thought to going out there with me? I’m sure the tickets are insanely expensive now, but at least we don’t have to pay for Owen’s. And hey, we’re big spenders.”

  The remark was clearly a reference to Emma Hall, and I didn’t acknowledge it. I said, “Meaning we’d just ditch Vi and my dad? Besides that Owen and Rosie are hell to travel with.”

  “For the sake of discussion,” Jeremy said, “if I skipped the conference, what do you picture me doing here? I’ve already canceled my classes.”

  This was when I felt the first flare of true anger. “Really?” I said. “Because if you’re not teaching, there’s no other reason for you to be here?”

  “You want the moral support. I understand that. But I question the point of staying in town for something that won’t happen.”

  I snorted—an unintentionally Vi-like snort. “It must be nice to be so certain.”

  “I want to float an idea,” Jeremy said. “I’m not saying it’s right. But I want you to consider it. What if neither you nor Vi is psychic?”

  I glared at him. “What if you’re not really American? Maybe you’re French—has that ever occurred to you? Or maybe you’re not even a human being. What if you’re a giraffe? I’m not saying you are, but I just want you to consider the idea.”

  “Come here.” He patted the couch next to him, and I didn’t move. “Or don’t,” he said. “Suit yourself. For one thing, I’m not that tall.” I didn’t laugh, and he said, “That’s how I know I’m not a giraffe.”

  “I got it,” I said.

  “We have these articles of faith about ourselves, but sometimes they’re wrong. And for you, the senses—it doesn’t bring you pleasure anyway, so why not just let it go?”

  I sometimes forgot this, that not leaving Owen with the babysitter wasn’t the only secret I kept from Jeremy; there was the much larger secret of how two years earlier I’d discarded my own ESP. Which made Jeremy at least partly right. And his rightness, his unearned knowledge of me—it was infuriating. Looking at his boyishly handsome face, his intelligent countenance, his easygoing confidence that I was a solid wife and a good mother and that he knew more than I did about every subject in the world, including the subject of psychicness and the subject of myself, I felt indignant.

  “It’s not just Vi who has a proven track record,” I said, and at some level I was conscious of the peculiar relief of my concern about Rosie having been replaced with anger. “Have you forgotten that I was involved with finding Brady Ogden’s kidnapper, too? And at her Today show taping, I could hear the questions Matt Lauer was asking even though no one else in the room could besides Vi. I don’t want to be like this. I just am. And for you to be so sure you’re right and everyone else is wrong, especially when her prediction affects the safety of our children—it’s arrogant, and it’s really fucking insulting.”

  He still wasn’t mad; Jeremy was never mad. He said, “I was just thinking about Brady Ogden. Remember how you wanted to call off our wedding so you could devote yourself to worrying about him full-time? That seemed like a good idea to you.”

  “Why is it bad to have compassion for other people? Besides, Vi and I were totally right.”

  “All I’m saying is you let your worry get the best of you. You were doing it at our wedding, you were doing it a few minutes ago when Rosie made a noise, and you’re doing it now. I know the last few weeks have been hard, but the solution isn’t to put your life on hold.”

  “There’s never going to be a situation like this in our lives again!” I said. “This is huge, and it’s directly connected to us. And let’s say Vi is right, there’s a big earthquake, and we lose power on our street, people all over the city lose it. Or what if, I don’t know, a shelf falls on me and I break my leg and have to go to the hospital and can’t take care of Owen and Rosie? I would need you. Or what if Vi is wrong and you’re right, and nothing at all happens? This Friday is the same as any other day. In that case, Vi is humiliated and who knows what she’ll decide to do, or who will be hounding her from the media? And then she’ll need me. And if she needs me, I also need you. I can’t take care of Owen and Rosie and her all at the same—”

  He held up his hand, palm toward me. “You’re imagining worst-case scenarios. Those things could happen, sure. But I just don’t think they’re likely.” He was quiet, and then he said, “If you’re psychic, why don’t you answer the question yourself and we can plan accordingly. Is there going to be an earthquake?”

  How strange it was to be put on the spot by my own husband. And clearly this was the moment to tell Jeremy that I had destroyed my senses. But was it possible that all I had to do to get him to skip his conference was to agree with Vi, even if I wasn’t sure? The truth was that in recent weeks I had sometimes felt the dread of certainty and sometimes felt the opposite—the shame of Vi being laughably wrong. But being unsure wouldn’t keep Jeremy in St. Louis, and I heard myself say, “Yes. Yes, I do think there’ll be an earthquake on October sixteenth. I think Vi’s right.”

  The expression that crossed Jeremy’s face then—it was as if I’d said something sweet but ridiculous, like that I’d seen a unicorn.

  “And you think there’s no chance,” I said.

  “Not no chance. There’s always a chance. But it’s infinitesimal.”

  I said, “So all along, for the last seven years, you’ve thought having senses is bullshit?”

  “There are these probability experiments,” Jeremy said. “In a room full of people, statisticians figured out how many had the same birthday. The number was always much higher than non-mathematicians would guess. But the telling part was that the people who thought the coincidence was the most meaningful were the ones who actually shared birthdays. They thought it meant something because it was personal to them.”

  “In other words, all the times I’ve dreamed of something that’s come true, it’s just been a coincidence?”

  “It’s called confirmation bias—attributing greater meaning to so-called evidence that supports your existing belief while ignoring information that contradicts it.”

  I wanted to be calm as I spoke next, as calm as Jeremy. “Why do you get to decid
e what’s true about me and what isn’t? And why have you acted all this time like you were open-minded when you weren’t? Remember when you told me about that exploding church?” A few weeks after I’d disclosed to Jeremy that I was psychic, he’d referred in passing to the 1950 church choir practice in Beatrice, Nebraska, which was supposed to be a famous example of group ESP, and I’d had no idea what he was talking about. Apparently, it was when a gas leak caused a Baptist church to explode during what should have been a weekly choir practice, but nobody was injured because—the chances of this were something like one in a million—not a single one of the choir members had shown up on time. I didn’t know about this incident because I didn’t know about psychicness from the outside, as a topic I’d researched, but I had found it strangely touching to learn that Jeremy had checked out a book on paranormal phenomena from the Wash U library. I said, “Was all of that just to humor me? You pretended to take it seriously while you were laughing behind my back?”

  “I was never laughing behind your back.” After a pause, he said, “In grad school, there was this woman in my program who had blue hair. I don’t know what her real hair color was, and she didn’t have a particularly unusual personality. When I first met her, I assumed she was a punk, whatever that means, but she was a regular person. She just had blue hair. And that’s how I’ve seen your senses. They’re your blue hair, but they’re not that big a deal.”

  Perhaps there had been a time when the analogy he was drawing would have seemed sweet. But having called his bluff, having forced my loving, thoughtful husband to admit that he’d always believed I was full of shit—harmlessly full of shit, but full of shit nonetheless—it was apparent that the accord in our marriage was overly reliant on a fundamental lack of specificity or resolution. We didn’t fight because we usually stopped short of acknowledging any reason to.

  There was a wail then, a high wail, from one of the monitors, but this time I recognized it immediately as Owen, wanting to nurse. I turned to go back upstairs—Saturday Night Live still unwatched, Rosie’s sweatshirt still unclean, the question of Jeremy’s trip still undecided. Or perhaps just not decided to my satisfaction. Because in a conciliatory tone, when I was halfway up the steps, Jeremy said, “A shelf won’t fall on you. I’ll secure them all with brackets before I leave.”