“He says get a job.” Pause for Leisl to listen to the voice in her head. “Or marry a rich guy.”
“That’s outrageous!” Leisl added.
Mackenzie’s tanned face was flushed. “Tell him from me he’s a drunken asshole who knows nothing. Get me Great-aunt Morag! She’ll know.”
Leisl sat with her eyes closed.
“Get me Great-aunt Morag!” Mackenzie ordered, as if Leisl was a personal assistant.
I felt very sorry for Leisl—having to pass on stuff that people didn’t want to hear, and even though the messages were allegedly coming from somewhere else, she seemed to get the blame.
“He’s gone,” Leisl said. “And no one else is coming through.”
“This is bullshit!” Mackenzie exclaimed. She huffed and puffed for the next little while about how she should be in the Hamptons right now—I knew it!—but that she was coming here to help her family and—
“Shhh,” Pomady Juan said. “A little respect.”
Mackenzie put her hand to her mouth. “I’m so sorry.” Then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Sorry. Sorry, Leisl.”
Leisl was sitting very still. She hadn’t opened her eyes in a while.
“Anna,” she said slowly. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
Instantly my forehead was drenched with sweat.
“It’s a man.”
I closed my eyes and clenched my fists. Please God, oh, please God…
“But it’s not your husband. He’s your grandfather.”
Again with the grandparents!
“He says his name is Mick.”
My arse! I’d no granddad called Mick. But hold on a minute, I thought, what about Mum’s dad, Granny Maguire’s wretched spouse? What was his name? I didn’t remember him because…
“You never knew him. He died shortly after you were born, he says.”
All the little hairs on my arms lifted and a shiver shot down my spine. “That’s right. Oh my God. Has he met Aidan? Up there? Like, wherever they are?”
Leisl’s brow was furrowed and her fingers were pressed to her temples. “I’m sorry, Anna, someone else is coming through, a woman. I’m losing him.”
I wanted to leap from my seat, grab her head, and shriek, “Well, get him back, for God’s sake. Find out about Aidan. Please!”
“Sorry, Anna, he’s gone. The woman with the stick is back, the angry woman from last week, who was talking about your dog.”
Granny Maguire? I was in no mood to talk to that old witch. It was probably her who had scared Granddad Mick away. The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was going to say them. “Tell her to fuck off!”
Leisl flinched, then flinched a second time. “She has a message for you.”
“What is it?”
“She says, ‘Fuck off yourself.’”
I was speechless.
“Oh boy.” Leisl sounded upset.
The mood in the room was extremely uncomfortable.
“I’m so sorry,” Leisl said. “Today has been very strange. This is usually a very loving place. A lot of angry energy here today. Should we stop?”
We decided to continue and the remainder of the messages—from Nicholas’s dad, Steffi’s mother, and Fran’s husband—were uncontroversial.
Then the time was up, the Oklahoma! boys needed the space, and out in the corridor afterward, I cornered Mitch.
“Thank you so much for this.” I indicated the piece of paper. “Do you mind…can I ask you a bit about your reading with Neris? Like, what convinced you she was for real?”
“There was some personal stuff that no one else could have known about. Trish and me, we had special names for each other.” He smiled, half embarrassed. “And Neris told me them.”
That sounded convincing.
“Did Trish say where she was?” My obsession: Where was Aidan?
“I asked her and she said she couldn’t describe it in a way that I’d understand. She said it was less of a question of where she was and more of a question what she had become. But that she was always with me.
“I asked her if she was scared, and she said no. She said she was sad for me, but that she was happy where she was. She said she knew it was hard but that I had to try to stop thinking of her as a life interrupted. It was a life completed.”
“What happened…to Trish?”
“How did she die? An aneurysm. One Friday night she came home from work, same as usual—she was a teacher, an English teacher. About seven o’clock she said she was feeling dizzy and nauseous, by eight she was in a coma, and by one-thirty A.M. in the ICU, she was dead.” He paused. Like Aidan, Trish had died young and suddenly. No wonder I’d felt such a tangible connection with Mitch.
“Nothing anyone could have done. Nothing that would have showed up in any tests. I still can’t believe it.” He sounded baffled. “It happened so quickly. Too quickly to believe it, you know?”
I knew. “How long ago did it happen?”
“Nearly ten months. It’ll be ten months on Tuesday. Anyway.” He swung his kit bag on his shoulder. “I’m going to hit the gym.”
He looked like he went to the gym a lot. There was a bunched force in his shoulders and upper body, like he lifted weights. Maybe it was his way of coping.
“Best of luck with Neris,” he said. “See you next week.”
50
I called Neris Hemming’s number as soon as I got home, but a recorded message told me that their office hours were Monday to Friday, nine until six. I slammed down the phone far too hard, and in one of those sudden uprisings of acid rage, I shrieked, “Oh, Aidan!”
A storm of tears overtook me and I convulsed with frustration, my powerlessness, and my terrible, terrible need.
A few minutes later, I wiped my face and said humbly, “I’m sorry.”
I repeated, “I’m sorry,” to every photo of Aidan in the apartment. It wasn’t his fault that Neris Hemming’s office took Sundays off. And this was a holiday weekend, so they probably wouldn’t be in tomorrow either.
I’d ring from work on Tuesday, I decided. I was so terrified of losing the number that I wrote it in several—hopefully unexpected—places, just in case someone ever broke into my apartment and decided to steal all the Neris Hemming numbers. I put it in my organizer, I wrote it on a receipt and hid it in my knickers drawer, I wrote it on the inside cover of Never Coming Back (never coming back? Oh, we’ll see about that, missus), and I indented it in the lid of a very old tub of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey (the pen wouldn’t work on the cold, waxy cardboard) and replaced it in the freezer.