A canary? I repeated in my head, remembering how I had blurted out that word on the airplane without knowing why. Was it a coincidence that the canary was the last animal on the test? No, I thought. Impossible.
“Is there something else?” The headmaster probed.
I shook my head. “Yes. I mean no,” I said, and forced a smile. “Thank you.”
When I got back to my room, Anya was waiting outside my door, looking annoyed. She was dressed in a tight little ensemble that was more nightclub than dress code. Her red hair was pulled into two loose braids, her dull roots showing along her part.
“Why aren’t you ready?” she asked, taking in my haphazard outfit.
I fumbled with my keys. “Ready for what?”
“Seeing your future,” she said, adjusting her purse, which was covered in tassels.
“Today? But I have to go to class.”
“Yes, today,” she said in disbelief. “And we don’t have class. It’s Saturday.”
I glanced at my watch. So it was.
“So? Are we going?”
I was pretty sure we had never made plans, but no matter. It’s not like I had anything better to do. “Okay.”
The woman Anya knew lived in Mile End, the neighborhood where Anya grew up. We traveled there by foot, winding through the city streets until we passed Mont Royal, the mountain looming at the center of Montreal, swallowing the west side of the city in its shadow.
It was a hazy morning, the sky a thick orange as Anya led the way. We chatted as we walked. She was born in Russia but had been living in Montreal since age ten. Her father ran a drugstore, and she used to help out on the weekends, stocking the shelves. That was where she first learned how to put on makeup and dye her hair, by “borrowing” items from her father’s shelves.
Even though she had been at St. Clément for two years now, she had few friends there. “I have my own people. Russian people,” she explained. But the way she talked about them was the same way I talked about everyone I’d once known in California: as if they didn’t exist anymore. They were in a different world, a world that didn’t include Monitors and the Undead, and I couldn’t tell them who I was or what I was doing.
Anya and I turned down a curved street lined with buildings that looked like tenement houses. The people who passed us on the sidewalk all seemed to be speaking Russian. “It’s across from my hairdresser,” Anya said. “See, there.” She pointed to a weathered brick building streaked with water stains. Over the entrance was a sign in huge Russian print. Anya held the door for me, and I stepped inside. It was a spice shop. The trail of cloves and nutmeg and paprika tickled my nose. Anya said something in Russian to the man behind the counter, who seemed to know her. He smiled as he responded, giving us each a honey stick before letting us through a back door that led to the rest of the building.
We walked up four flights of stairs until we reached an apartment with an etching of an eye on the door. “This is it,” Anya said, and rang the buzzer. No one answered. Anya rang it again, and tried to peer through the peephole.
“Maybe she’s out,” I said, cringing as Anya knocked and then held down the buzzer.
“No, they’re here. They’re always here.”
Moments later, we heard heavy footsteps in the hall, followed by the clicking sound of dead bolts unlatching. When it swung open, a hairy, middle-aged man wearing an undershirt stood there, appraising us. Anya said something to him in Russian. He looked at me, back at her, and then promptly shut the door.
“Zinyechka!” I heard him bellow within.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“We have to wait here for her to come meet us. If she decides to see us, she’ll let us in. If not, we have to go.”
While we waited, I peered out the tiny window in the staircase. A tall boy my age was wandering down the sidewalk below us, his broad shoulders moving beneath his collared shirt as he stepped into the street. “Dante?” I breathed, and stepped down a stair.
“What are you looking at?” Anya said.
I barely heard her as I watched the boy hail a taxi. Just before he ducked inside, he looked up. I pressed myself to the wall. It definitely wasn’t Dante.
Before Anya could ask me anything, the apartment door opened, and a woman appeared in the entryway. She was thick-boned, with thinning hair and heavy bosom. “Yes?” she said, her voice deep. Her hands were stained a blotchy red. She wiped them on her apron.
Anya spoke to her in Russian. After she was finished, the woman looked me up and down. “Why have you come to see me?” she said with a thick accent.
“I’ve been having dreams that I think might be premonitions,” I said softly.
The woman squinted at me. “Give me your hands.”
After hesitating, I placed them in hers. She squeezed them as if giving me a massage, her fingers moist and strong. Letting my hands drop, the woman said something to Anya in Russian, and disappeared inside.
“She said okay,” Anya translated, and together we followed the woman into the apartment.
The foyer was dark and carpeted, with smudged windows that looked out on a fire escape and a brick wall. It stank of meat. We walked to the back of the apartment, through a maze of little rooms—one with a boy watching television, another with a sewing machine and two mannequins stuck with pins—until we made it to the dining room.
Zinya supported her weight on the back of a chair. “Will cost forty dollars. Okay?”
Anya dropped her bag on the floor, and with wild gesticulations she spouted a torrent of Russian words, which came out so quickly, I was surprised even Zinya could understand them. After haggling, Zinya finally turned to me and said “Twenty.”
I nodded.
A fly buzzed around the windows. Without warning, Zinya picked up a swatter and killed it. “Only one at a time,” she continued, as it slid down the glass, leaving a brown streak.
“You go,” Anya said, examining a set of porcelain figurines with distaste. When I hesitated, she repeated, “Go on.”
I followed Zinya into the kitchen, which had a dingy linoleum floor and a ceiling fan. “Wash your hands,” she said, sitting at a round table.
By the sink were a tub of beets soaking in water, and a coagulated bar of soap. I turned on the faucet. Above it hung a black-and-white photograph of a rigid old couple.
“I tell you three things,” Zinya said from behind me. “One about past. One about present. One about future. But nothing more. Past, present, and future, they are always connected.” She waved a hand. “Always. You understand?”
I didn’t actually understand, but nodded anyway. What else was I supposed to do?
“Now choose a beet,” she said, motioning to the tub.
Fruit flies circled around it. I waved them away, and after some hesitation, plunged my hand into the tepid water and selected a small, irregular bulb. It was warm, as if it had just been boiled. I brought it to the table, where there was a box of parchment paper and a bowl. Zinya pushed the bowl toward me. “Now peel.”
I stared at the dirty beet in my hand, confused. I didn’t even have a knife. “I’m supposed to peel this?”
She nodded as if it were completely natural.
“Right.” I turned the beet in my palm, trying to find a good place to start.
It was a messy ordeal, the juice dripping down my arms as I inexpertly took off huge hunks of beet skin and tossed them into a bowl until I was left with the slippery, round interior.
“Good,” Zinya said. “Good.”
When I was finished, she laid out a piece of paper on the table beneath me. “Squeeze beet over sheet.”
I did as she said. Dark pink syrup ran down the sides of my palms and dripped onto the paper.
Pushing my hands away, Zinya picked up the paper and folded it in half, pressing it down with her thick fingers as if she were kneading dough.
Setting it aside, she had me squeeze the beet over two other pieces of paper. I watched as she worked each sheet, folding them over and over, compressing them with her palm until there were three tight squares on the table in front of me.
“Past.” She unfolded the first paper. It was colored with a swirled pattern that almost looked like waves. She spread out the creases and turned it around, then grunted and turned it around again, tracing a smeared mark near the bottom of the page.
Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, she looked up. Her expression was different as she scrutinized me, as if she had seen something in my face that she hadn’t expected. “Past is very dark.”
I sat back in my chair, unimpressed. It was so vague that it could have applied to anyone.
She traced a shape in the middle of the stain. “There is woman in boat. You chase her.” Zinya looked to me for confirmation.
I became alert. “Yes.”
“You take her weapon, drop it in water. Could not protect herself. She die.”
I felt so stunned that I couldn’t move. Even in her broken English, Zinya’s words had thrust me back into that hazy night, which was still so crisp in my memory that it could have been real. I felt the water, cool and still against my lips; I saw the fog part as Miss LaBarge swung the shovel down over my head; I felt the splintered wood of its handle as I pulled it from her grasp and dropped it, watching it sink into the black water of the lake. Could Zinya be right? Did Miss LaBarge die because her weapon was taken away? Could I have saved her? Leaning over, I looked at the marks on the paper, trying to see what she saw, but it was nothing but pink swirls to me.
Zinya rested her fleshy elbows on the table. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet and somehow understanding. “We can stop if you like.”
Sitting on my hands, I shook my head. She unfolded the second paper. “Present.”
It revealed a series of concentric ovals, wobbly and smeared from the folds. She squinted at the page. “Your dreams. They are not future. They are now. Present.”
A fly buzzed around the bowl on the table. Zinya shooed it away as I processed what she’d said. In my dreams, I wasn’t seeing the future, I was seeing the present. But why? That meant that I never could have saved Miss LaBarge. That regardless of what I saw in my visions, I was helpless; I couldn’t change them. What was the point?