“My nephew,” Paula says with obvious pride. “A little older than you. He’s an arborist, so he’s always up a tree somewhere. Lives near Long Lake.”
“We might need some trees taken down at some point, right, Dad?” I say, trying to involve my father in the conversation, though I fear he may struggle to follow along tonight. “We have lots of trees.”
“More trees than we know what to do with,” he confirms. Carl and Paula smile. I appreciate their acceptance and ease around my father, which is never a given with Alzheimer’s. It’s an affliction that often makes people self-conscious, worried about making a misstep, worried about others’ missteps, so afraid of awkwardness that they can’t help but create more of it. Isolation is often easier than trying to maintain a social life, but tonight, our haphazard foursome feels manageable. More than that: it feels right.
Sandy returns and plops down our drinks. Less than a minute later she is back with our plates. Lorne’s is not known for its culinary prowess, but after a few bites of my club sandwich, I am confident that this meal is far better than anything I could have conjured up. Paula orders another martini, and I follow suit. We’re now properly tipsy, and I can’t resist bringing up my recent fixation.
“So I think my father might be a medium. Or an oracle. Or something like that.”
“Oh?” Paula looks intrigued as she plucks an olive from her martini and eats it.
I explain how it started with the loons, and how the tarot reading led to our exploration into divination. My father, still sipping hisCoke, nods along. Perhaps influenced by Nina’s incredulity, I stop a few times to hedge: “It’s probably all in my mind.” But Carl and Paula don’t seem to think so, and I haven’t even gotten to the Seth sighting yet.
“Do you remember… when I was a teenager… there was a snowmobile accident?” It’s hard to even bring it up.
“Of course, love. Such a tragedy,” says Paula, without judgment. I look at Carl, who seems in the dark.
“When I was sixteen, my boyfriend, Seth… well, he wasn’t my boyfriend at the time, but anyway, he died here. He crashed his snowmobile on the ice on New Year’s Eve.”
Carl winces but then meets my gaze again.
“And a few weeks ago, my father saw him. We were on the dock, and he said Seth had just slipped around the corner into the boathouse. He was sure of it. It didn’t seem like a confused memory; it seemed real.”
My father listens intently, as if unaware that I’m telling a story about him.
“And it’s not the first time he has mentioned Seth. But it seems to come and go.”
“Who’s Seth?” my dad asks.
“See?” I say. Then I respond to my father: “He’s an old friend.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t someone else? Like a real person who resembled Seth?” Paula asks.
“I checked. There was no one there.”
“Could be a hallucination, but I doubt it,” says Carl.
“So maybe Arthur really was visited,” adds Paula. “You know, he was always very perceptive. We were on the Conservation Committee together a while back. He could practically predict the day the buds would bloom.” Then she addresses my dad directly. “Arthur, remember that year when you rallied everyone to battle the Japanese knotweed? And thankgod. It’s a nightmare, that stuff. Invasive species.”
“Knotweed…” muses my father with clear hostility toward the plant.
“This is only one dimension of many, you know,” continues Paula,circling her hand through the air around us. “There’s more to life than meets the eye. There has to be.”
“You believe in that stuff? The occult?” I ask.
“What’s the alternative—notbelieving in it?” Paula shakes her head. “No thank you.”
Sandy slides up to our table and plunks down four fat wedges of pumpkin pie. “On the house.”
As we chirp in gratitude, Carl takes a slice and ventures, “Just because we don’t have an explanation for something doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
Paula nods, and then adds, “Or maybenothingis real.”
I’m emboldened by their open-minded reception. “So you believe me?”
Paula nods enthusiastically as she daintily drags the tip of her pie off with her fork. Out the window of our booth, snow has begun to fall with increasing gusto, lacing the trees and sugaring the tops of the cars in the lot.
“I believe Arthur can sense things before they happen. And I believe he can commune with people who are on the other side,” says Carl, pausing thoughtfully.
