Chapter 3

It was still early enough she didn’t have to wait long at the Chinese restaurant, and she got home before Amanda or the kids. She stashed the food in the oven, where Anax couldn’t get at it. Then she sat down at her laptop in Amanda’s sewing room, where they had set up a bed for her. She cleared out her inbox and sent a reply or two, posted a picture of the house she had just found on her Facebook page, and sent a comic report about her recent date to a friend in Minnesota, editing out the disconcerting aspect of hearing the guy’s thoughts. Instead, she pretended her own fluency in understanding body language had enabled her to read what was going through the guy’s mind.

Her friend would take it for an idle fancy, more a wish than a reality. It was true that she had sometimes wondered what it would be like to be able to guess what people were thinking. And she had reason to believe that much more was communicated by tone of voice, facial expression—and even posture—than was conveyed by the words themselves. But she was new to this kind of dating, and she had already found there were pitfalls she had never anticipated. In the old days you met your life partner at church, at school, at work, or through mutual friends. Her own case was a classic example; she had married a fellow student from college.

When Matt died, it had been quick. It could have been so much worse, like her father, who had lingered in a vegetative state for weeks. Virginia had looked up the however many stages of grief, wanting to track her own progress as a widow, but to her dismay, she couldn’t identify a single one of the supposedly universal stages in herself. Not that it had been easy or smooth. Some days were harder than others. But that was such a fundamental concept she felt silly even mentioning it to the kind people who enquired.

She reasoned that a year to recover might suffice, giving herself permission to call in sick once or twice, to cry for no reason in the office with the door closed, to refuse or accept invitations as the spirit moved her. At the end of the year, she began thinking about the possibility of meeting guys—not, of course to get married again, that was over and done with. It was Amanda who recommended a dating site for older singles. And then by moving to Colorado she had started to feel as if she was going back in time, starting over where she had been 45 years ago, in the days when she lived alone and liked it. She looked around at the other women her age and decided to color her hair. It had been a huge adjustment, and at times she asked herself if she had in fact tried to move on too soon. Her grandchildren had been a big help, both with computer problems and with the whole concept of internet dating, which she had been very suspicious of, at first.

Amanda called to say she was held up at the lab and would be a few minutes late. “Go ahead and eat without me,” she said.

Brian and Ginny came home and disappeared into their rooms. Virginia pulled out the food from the oven, zapped it in the microwave, set the table and called the kids. Her eyes seemed to have settled down, which was a relief. Also the fact that the kids were keeping their thoughts to themselves. She was not anxious to continue listening to other people’s thoughts. Her grandchildren had a right to some privacy. She told them about her date, elaborating on the body language theme, and they agreed that Dave was not a great prospect. Ginny offered to look at the ones she had identified as next in line and help her pick one for next Thursday.

They heard Amanda driving into the garage. “I need to feed your mom. We can look at the list together later.”

The kids were supposed to help clean up the kitchen, but they had gotten used to letting grandma do it, so she shooed them out and warmed the food up again for her daughter. She enjoyed sitting at the table with her in the evening, sipping a little glass of wine and talking over the day.

Sometimes Amanda came home bright and bouncy, ready to help put things away and chat about some funny thing one of the other scientists had said to her. But this wasn’t one of those days. Her eyelids drooped, and she didn’t want to talk about her job. Virginia poured her a glass of wine, placed a full dinner plate in front of her and busied herself with loading the dishwasher. She decided to wait with her funny story about her date that afternoon until Amanda was more relaxed.

After supper they sat in the living room, Virginia reading a recent feel-good mystery by one of her favorite women writers, Amanda looking at Facebook on her iPad. “Aunt Tess is going to Israel,” she said, reading aloud the Facebook item Virginia’s sister-in-law had posted.

In the dim light Virginia’s double vision kicked in, and she saw two perfect copies of her daughter’s head floating above her shoulders. The head on the left was looking down at her lap and moving her lips as she read aloud and commented on the status of friends and family. The head on the right raised her eyes to look directly at Virginia and smiled crookedly. Virginia blinked. Both faces were once again looking down with exactly the same expression.

She got up and pretended she needed to go to the bathroom, just to shake off the chilling effect of what she had just seen. Was the problem in her eyes or in her mind? Obviously vision wasn’t entirely a physical phenomenon, the brain had to interpret the images. She had once read a description of an experiment where people were forced to look at the world through glasses that turned everything upside down, and after a period of time they began to “see” everything right side up. So her mind might be showing her what she thought Amanda was thinking, although this was, in its way, even more disturbing than imagining she actually heard other people’s thoughts.

She moved slowly around the bathroom, blew her nose, and decided at last that she wasn’t going crazy, she was just seeing things. No big deal. It happened to everybody. You turn your head and, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse a shape that could be a person, even though you know it isn’t. Somebody or other she used to know always interpreted such things as breakthroughs from times past. “Maybe there was somebody in that same spot years ago.” She supposed it wasn’t completely impossible. Time could get a little mixed up, or the boundaries between the generations could be weak, or maybe under certain circumstances (or for certain people) the curtain lifted, at least briefly. After all, dogs could smell cancer. Heightened sensory perception—or even extra-sensory perception—might just be her lot.

Then again, she wondered if it could be an alternate universe coming into being. Or connecting, very briefly, with this one. There were so many things we didn’t know.

Sometimes she felt no better than a cave person (were we, in fact, “better”?) faced with the mystery of fire. Right at the moment she felt more like an ancient explorer, navigating through troubled seas beyond the limits of the world as it was known to her own people, careening toward a new definition of “world” and “people.”