THE INVISIBLE EYE

An excerpt from the novel by Sparrow Hall

I stand at the side of the bed and nudge my father’s shoulder until he flinches awake, rubs his eyes, and reaches for his glasses. “Hey, sweetie, what is it?” he mutters. I step back from the bed, motioning for him to follow. He regards me for a moment, squinting in the purple darkness, then folds back the covers and gently tucks them back in around the sleeping mound of my mother. I put a finger to my lips and lead him down the hallway, halting him at the threshold of my bedroom. I scan the room.

The moonlight beams in from the window over the bed, fanning a milky blue across the floor, making shadows of things. My father rests a hand on my shoulder and steps around me. He moves to the window and checks the latch, peering out into the night. “Did you see something?” he asks.

I shake my head no.

“Hear something?”

No.

“Feel something?”

I nod.

He looks for my eyes, to read something in my face, then sits down on the edge of the bed. He pats the covers beside him. I remain at the door, judging the distance between here and there, and then, cautiously, tiptoe forward, one foot in front of the other, arms at my side, fingers spread wide. I feel something in the air, a breath of static, humming along the hairs on the back of my hands. I hurry to my father’s side and push up against him. He puts an arm around me, keeping his voice low. “What do you think it is?” he asks.

I look at the length of my forearm, the little hairs standing up like white fur.

“A monster?” he asks.

I nod.

He considers this, then leans into me. “Can I tell you a secret about monsters?”

I coax up a shrug, still watching the room.

“They don’t want you to know this,” he whispers, “but you’ve got it backwards.”

I look up into his spectacled face.

“The monsters are scared of you,” he says.

“Of me?”

“You know when you lie down in bed and don’t want to close your eyes because that’s when they’ll come to get you?”

I nod.

“They’re thinking the same about you,” he says. “Why else do you think they sneak around at night?”

“Because they’re hungry?” I ask.

“No. Because they think you are.”

My eyes clenched tight, I imagine it there. A white pinpoint of light, pulsing like a beating heart in the black cavity of my ribs. A torch in a cave, it illuminates the dark walls of my organs, my bones. I focus on the light, my eternal self, sizzling and white, moving it up through me, up the long dark tunnel, into the dome of my skull, down the back of my neck, to the span of my shoulder blades pressed against the wall of the elevator. I smooth the front of my dress to feel my stomach breathing inside it, to know that I’m here. Here, now, in this moment. Here among others, and that I’m fine. I’m fine.

I breathe in through my nose and out through my lips, face tilted down, eyes closed and hidden beneath the brim of my hat.

My belly lifts and settles, billowing like a parachute as we descend through the floors, then wait, then descend again. I draw in one long, deep breath, filling my lungs, then slowly expel it through my lips as we touch down and the doors glide open. We pour out into the marble lobby, through the revolving glass doors, out into the white blast of Seventh Avenue at rush hour. A mangle of sounds—delivery trucks and clattering carts and honking horns. I blink to get my bearings as a flood of people stream around me. And there, farther upstream, the soft, unfocused shape of a woman, charging straight at me. We edge from side to side, trying to avoid one another, until she’s right on top of me, face to face, and the pale green pools of her irises blink into mine, and my inner self is sucked forward like a tissue in a vacuum tube, down into the black void of her pupil, into the swirling tunnel of her past—

Walls like quicksilver spin around me
like water down a drain.
Shards of images,
still frames,
moments,
a hundred million filmstrips whipping by in beams of light.
I clench myself to stop,
to pull myself back,
but it’s like tripping forward with nothing to grab.
I reach out
into the light,
and it seizes me,
snatches me down
into a moment,
a scene,
jump-cutting like a movie with the fast-forward button held down.
A man in a suit passes me in a hallway
of an office building.
He ignores me.
I turn to watch him go…
Now I’m huddled in a bathroom stall,
making a whispered phone call.
I’m in tears,
the saltiness dripping down my face,
into the corners of my mouth…
Now I’m in an apartment,
a bedroom.
I’m staring into a closet crammed with clothes.
I drown my sorrow with things.
I buy away my pain…
And then, I’m standing in front of a medicine cabinet,
gazing at my reflection—
her reflection,
the woman on the street.
She looks deep into her eyes,
and I wonder, does she see me there?
Does she see me looking out?
Suddenly I’m thrust backward,
back into the lightning curl.
Down farther,
faster.
So fast and so far that the flashes streak into white-blue beams of light,
lifetimes screaming by.
I’m snared by a slash of light,
ripped down into another body in another time:
My arms ache, my legs heavy,
bare feet the color of ash,
caked in mud.
My palms are scarred, rock-hard, a man’s hands.
I’m outside, in a farm field,
rows of thick stalks rising overhead, stretching to the sun.
Dark figures move through the rows,
gathering leaves into woven baskets the size of bathtubs,
their voices low, murmuring.
My head goes faint,
my face cold.
I sway, stumbling backward,
back into the light,
through the slipstream of time—

back into this moment, here on the sidewalk at rush hour, and the woman ducking past me, looking back over her shoulder like, Crazy bitch. I watch her as she marches off.

I try to hold myself here in this reality, but I can feel it shuddering, trembling apart—the white lines of the crosswalk, the edges of the buildings, glitching, switching, revealing other heres, other nows—street scenes shuffling like a deck of cards. I grip my phone, the date and time lighting up the screen—WED AUG 17 2011 5:13 P.M.—but the day, the time, the year keep switching, and the mismatched sounds of the flickering city come faster and faster, clipping together, rising up into a single, sharp, angry hiss bearing down on me like a giant snake. I put my hands up to shield myself as something like a wall screeches to a halt before me. I look up—at a man, a bus driver, blinking down at me. Someone takes me by the elbow, guiding me, a woman holding a giant iced coffee. “Holy shit, are you OK?” she asks. Another woman scuttles around our feet trying to collect something scattered in the street—the burgundy square of my purse, its contents dumped out. A crowd has formed, and I hear another woman’s voice cry out, “That woman almost got hit by a bus!” She’s pointing at me. I scan around, mortified—at the faces of the onlookers, the bus driver unbuckling and hurrying down the steps. I watch as the woman gathering my bag shovels everything back inside, wiping it off, holding it out to me. I lunge for it, snatching it away from her, completely freaking her out, then squeeze through the encircling crowd. I duck around the corner, under the scaffolds on 37th Street, where I stop and take a deep breath, gripping the brim of my hat, shielding me from the stares of the people streaming past.

I hurry down the subway steps, slipping in through the closing doors, squeezing into a seat, small and tight. I keep my head down, breathing in through my nose, out through my lips, white knuckles digging into my purse to keep my hands from shaking. Two women watch me from the seats across the way. One of them leans over to whisper in the other’s ear. I pull my bag closer, wishing I could disappear inside it.

Today was meant to be an easy day—plenty of time to rest, to be alone, until a text buzzed in from my Chloé client asking if I could come in to meet the designer. She’s in town last-minute. Can you show her the forecast in person? Which meant rushing from my 10 o’clock way out on 12th Avenue, and checking the presentation in the cab three times to make sure I swapped out all the names from one label to the other to give the impression that this forecast is all about them, their singular vision. They would die if they knew the truth—that all of this was prewritten. You just have to have the eyes to read it. That’s what leaves me like this, too depleted to maintain my grip on the present, and all I’m left with is my bag of tricks, my last vestiges of control. “Gnittes syawla si nus eht,” I recite under my breath. “Gnittes syawla si nus eht.” Until the train pulls to a halt at West 4th Street and I lurch forward, out onto the platform, up the stairs into the white blast of light.

I fish out my keys, pushing into the vestibule of my building, faking a cheerful hello to my neighbor Charlotte as she lugs her 10-speed down the stairwell. I grip the bronze rail, heaving myself upward, one flight, then another, to the fifth floor. Damp with sweat, I shove the key into the lock and push inside my apartment, shutting the latch, my knees shaking. I close my eyes and focus on the smell of home—the warm green scent of the fig tree baking in its patch of sunlight, the bitter black coffee grounds spilled in the kitchen sink. I steady myself down the hall into the living room, dropping my bag, my hat, and collapsing on the sofa.

I need to lie down, to lie flat, flatter than the sofa will let me, so I slide myself to the floor, splaying my legs and arms like a star. I need to be someplace else, someplace safe. I will my mind backward, back to another time, lying in the grass at school, the quad at night, the buildings and dorms rising up around me like the walls of a fortress…

“Do you ever think you’ll go crazy?” I ask. I’m lying on my back on the shag carpet in Leslie’s off-campus apartment, gazing up at a diaphanous tie-dyed sheet pinned to the ceiling. Streaks of white and green and indigo swirl together into a sea-colored cosmos.

“I hope so,” Leslie mutters. She sits hunched over her sewing machine beside the window haloed in the sunlight, her unwashed golden hair pinned up in a loose bun. “But, like, sexy-crazy,” she clarifies. “Like Edie Sedgwick, in one of those old WASP-y sanitoriums, drawing pictures of horses and then getting out and fucking Mick Jagger.” She holds up the beginnings of a plaid skirt, pulling her glasses down from her forehead to inspect the seam, then leans forward, chugging the pedal.

“I feel like I’m always hiding,” I say, gazing up at the canopy.

“Everyone’s hiding,” Leslie says with a sniff.

I roll my head to watch her work, the purposeful shape of her silhouette, perched forward on her stool.

“Maybe I need something like you have—like sewing,” I muse half-heartedly. “Something to focus on.”

“You just need some tricks.” She ties down a stitch and snaps off the thread with her teeth. “When I was little, my brother showed me how if you play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backwards, it sounds like a poem to the Devil. Honestly, it sounds like a bunch of garbled bullshit, but whatever. I had him play it backwards, and I sat there and read the liner notes in reverse, and you’ll never guess what happened. All the Winks disappeared.”

“Winks” were what Leslie called the ghosts that inhabited her childhood home, an old New York townhouse overlooking Central Park. The ghosts had resided there with her family as long as she could remember. When she was a baby, an old woman would sit in the rocking chair in the corner of the nursery and sing her to sleep. As Leslie got bigger, she realized the woman wasn’t like the other people in the house. The nursery was the woman’s room long before it was Leslie’s, and they both were inhabitants, each in her own way.

Leslie called the ghosts Winks because of the way they flickered like eyelashes winking. She once described how she saw the world with two realities playing over each other—one of the living and one of the dead. Most people only saw the living reality, but Leslie saw both at once—to the point where the flickering was the only way to tell them apart.

“There were a couple of ghosts that lived in my brother’s room,” Leslie says, rummaging through a bin of ribbons and scraps. “They were from different times. One was an old man, the other was a little boy. The moment I read the lyrics backwards, they both went poof! Gone. Like I pulled a plug from the socket. But not just them. The whole house—every room. It was spookier than when they were there. I didn’t know what a regular house sounded like. You get used to it—the voices and the sounds and the creaking floorboards. The ones that pass through walls like they’re sleepwalking. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing what ‘normal’ was like.”

“So then what happened?”

“The song ended, and they all popped back in. The whole house blinked back on. But something was different. The Winks, they were messed up—like, out of it. The old man was trembling. He had to hold on to the wall just to keep from falling down. And the little boy, he was an absolute mess, just completely freaked out. But I wasn’t sad for them. I was sad for me. I was like, why are you here? This is my house.” She chugs the pedal and the sewing machine comes back to life—she leans into a stitch. “I thought maybe if I kept it up, I could scare them out of the house. So I sang the song backwards every night until it was the only way I knew how to sing it. I’d lie in bed at night and sing myself to sleep.”

“I don’t understand. How did it work?”

She turns to me. “How did what work?”

“The song. How did it shut them out?”

She thinks about it. “I don’t know, maybe it confuses your brain. Like, the part that tunes all that stuff in—it switches it off somehow.”

“But why do they come back all messed up?”

“Maybe they needed me to be tuned in to them. And when I wasn’t, they lost their connection.”

“But where did they go?” I ask.

“Maybe they went to Heaven,” she says with a shrug. “Maybe they saw where they were supposed to be and realized they were lost.” She turns back to the machine and lines up another stitch. “All I know is you can recite anything backwards and it works the same way. But I like to use that song. It’s kind of like my ‘fuck you’ anthem.”

I lay on the floor, my mind lifting from the memory, back into my apartment, back into the now. A blare of car horns echo from the street below. I imagine crawling across the room, reaching up to the record player, and clicking the special switch that spins the record backward, letting the muddy slur of reversal fill the room, fill my mind. I think of Amy standing there that night, flipping through the record sleeves as I watched her from the kitchen. “I can’t believe you have a record player!” she exclaimed, delighted. “Concrete Blonde! Madonna! True Blue! Oh my god, I stole this album from my sister. I literally wore this record out!”

I knew Amy from the gym, a part-time trainer who tended bar at a French bistro a few blocks away. I memorized her schedule so I could accidentally run into her on slow nights, and buy her a drink and talk and laugh at the end of the bar—until one night I mustered the courage to invite her back, a night like this, when all my other tricks had failed and I was desperate for the one thing that could tether me to the here and now. I stood in the kitchen, watching her select the perfect record and set it on the turntable, fitting the pin—my hands shaking as I poured our glasses of wine.

I think of how she looked across the table, the flash of her smile, her laugh, radiant and alive. And how I willed myself to be cool, to just let things happen—pop in a movie, prop up the pillows, feel the warmth of her beside me. And how, when she looked for my eyes, I wanted to let her see me, but knew I wouldn’t have the strength to keep from falling into her gaze, tumbling into her past. So I concentrated on her mouth, the air between her lips, the way her legs felt as they pressed against mine. Unzipping, peeling off, the softness of her breasts, the warmth of her ribs, her stomach, her breath catching as I lifted her up to me, to my mouth, and the slow grind of her hips, finding her rhythm, commanding me not to stop as I held her there, at the edge, gripping her nails into the back of my head, pulling me in, to finish her. Her body flinching, shuddering, melting down the length of me, turning me, positioning me the way she wanted. How she held me there, feeding upon me, swallowing me down, until everything slowed—the air in my lungs, the light in the room—shifting, coalescing into a form, a diamond-shaped door, hovering there, shining into my hollow eyes, my gaping mouth, calling me to it, calling me home…

The whine of an ambulance siren breaks the spell, and I’m here again, lying on the floor. I pull my phone to me, wanting to text her, but the words won’t come, so I dial instead. I’ll know what to say when she answers. But it rings twice and goes to voicemail, and a wave of panic runs through me, a feeling like falling, the floor dropping out beneath me, pulling me backward into the void.

I slouch forward at the breakfast table, my face in my hands, listening to the coffee maker splutter. Drawing in a long, deep breath, I sit up straight and pull my laptop toward me, lifting the lid. A cascade of emails floods in—clients, designers, project managers, message threads overlapping one another. A calendar notification bings in the corner of the screen: Dad’s birthday. I gaze at it for a moment as it hovers there, asking me to do something, but I don’t know what.

I do the math to figure out how old he would be today…62. I subtract my age from that and realize I’m the age he was when he had me.

I picture him here now, seated across the table, his thick, wavy hair gone gray, his lean runner’s frame still strong, his pale pink button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

What a handsome couple he and my mother were. She could have been a model if she wanted. I’d watch her getting ready at her bathroom sink, doing her makeup in the mirror, her hand precise as she drew the lipstick across her lips. How she looked gazing at her reflection, alone with herself, as if I wasn’t there. And then she would cap the lipstick and hand it to me with a wink.

Do you see me now? I wonder. What do you think? Are you disappointed? I know you’d say no. But are you?

A reminder chimes in the corner of the screen: Gucci Fall Walkthrough—11 a.m.

I close the lid and slide the laptop away.

I slouch forward at the breakfast table, my face in my hands, listening to the coffee maker splutter. Drawing in a long, deep breath, I sit up straight and pull my laptop toward me, lifting the lid. A cascade of emails floods in—clients, designers, project managers, message threads overlapping one another. A calendar notification bings in the corner of the screen: Dad’s birthday. I gaze at it for a moment as it hovers there, asking me to do something but I don’t know what.

I do the math to figure out how old he would be today…62. I subtract my age from that and realize I’m the age he was when he had me.

I picture him here now, seated across the table, his thick, wavy hair gone gray, his lean runner’s frame still strong, his pale pink button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

What a handsome couple he and my mother were. She could have been a model if she wanted. I’d watch her getting ready at her bathroom sink, doing her makeup in the mirror, her hand precise as she drew the lipstick across her lips. How she looked gazing at her reflection, alone with herself, as if I wasn’t there. And then she would cap the lipstick and hand it to me with a wink.

Do you see me now? I wonder. What do you think? Are you disappointed? I know you’d say no. But are you?

A reminder chimes in the corner of the screen: Gucci Fall Walkthrough—11 a.m.

I close the lid and slide the laptop away.

Something catches my eye on the way to the subway: a hand-painted sandwich board propped outside a shop window. An open eye in the palm of a hand. It gazes back at me. Written beneath:

PSYCHIC
$10 READINGS

A bell trings over the door as I step into the vestibule, a tiny cubby of a space made smaller by a pair of hulking floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with objects—religious icons, tiny woven baskets, ancient figurines depicting Hindu gods and goddesses, their arms fanning around them like rays of the sun. A glittering menagerie of crystals fills the front window, purple and emerald and pink, catching the daylight and reflecting it around the room. A thick curtain cuts across the front parlor—behind it, I hear the soft shuffle of house slippers. A plump, wrinkled hand pulls back the curtain, revealing Sofiya in her long woolen sweater, oblivious to the late summer heat. “Yes, hello?” she blinks up at me.

“It’s me, Sofiya. It’s Catherine.”

“Oh goodness, what a surprise!” she gushes in her thick Ukrainian accent. But I know it’s no surprise at all. I bend down to give her a hug and breathe in her sweet, powdery smell. Her embrace is warm and comforting, like a bowl of chicken soup.

“Turn the sign,” she orders, waving to the door as she waddles to her chair and plunks herself down.

I flip the door sign from OPEN to CLOSED and join her in the opposite chair.

She pats my leg, smiling. “It has been months since I have seen you,” she says, giving my hands a squeeze. “Let me see your eyes, dear. Please, look here. You will not fall in,” she assures. “Please, look to me.” I do, reluctantly, my gaze meeting hers. Her soft amber irises are flecked with shards of green. The muscles of my mind impulsively tense, trying to hold myself back from tumbling forward into her past—but nothing happens. I’m held in place.

“You’ve learned a new trick,” I say. “What is it?”

“No trick, dear. A prayer. I have prayed for your eyes. For peace to find you.” She pauses, examining my face. “But I see it has not. What can I do?” she asks.

“I have something for you, Sofiya,” I say, digging through my purse. “This is a business card for Dr. Zimmer, the chiropractor I told you about. I want you to have him look at your knees. Will you do that for me?”

She tugs her reading glasses up from her bosom, holding them to her eyes, examining the card.

“He’s in touch with Spirit,” I explain. “I saw his other lives. He’s been a healer for a long time.”

She looks at me over her eyeglasses. “Is he handsome?” she asks.

“Well, yes!” I laugh. “But he’s also—”

“Then I will go,” she says flatly.

“Is that all it takes?”

“Is there a better reason?” she says with a grin, slipping the card into the pocket of her sweater. “I am very shallow, I know. But I do not want to talk about me. What can I do for you, my dear?”

“I just wanted to sit with you, Sofiya. Just for a moment, if that’s OK. Tell me how you are.”

“Well, I have been very busy thanks to you!” she says, laughing. “All of these girls you send to me! They are like supermodels! Who are these girls? They are girlfriends?”

“Well, no.” I blush, fumbling for an answer. “They’re just—”

“My dear. Please,” she stops me. “American girls, you call it ‘experiment.’ In Ukraine, we call it ‘winter.’” She squeezes my hand with a wink. “Why don’t you let me read you? Just tarot.”

“Sofiya, I don’t—“

“Just tarot!” she implores. “I know you don’t like to see, but that is when you are doing the seeing. Here, you let me. Spirit protects us, you know this.” She retrieves a large deck of cards from a basket beside her chair and places the stack in my hands. The cards have soft edges, worn down from decades of use. I shuffle the cards, cutting the deck into threes, then restacking them into a single pile. Sofiya gathers up the deck and flips the top card, snapping it down on the table, then another, then another, forming a horseshoe. I name the cards in my head as she flips them.

Present Position: The Hanged Man
Present Desires: The Tower
The Unexpected: Death
The Immediate Future: The Fool
The Outcome: The Magician

I sigh as the arrangement takes shape. “This is why I don’t want to be read.”

“My dear, please,” Sofiya insists. “It is important.” She rests her hand on the first card, closing her eyes, as if listening to it. “Here now,” she begins. “Present Position: The Hanged Man. You see how he hangs from one leg, but he is not in pain? He hangs by his own choosing. He is caught up in his own troubles, distracting thoughts, bad habits. He has complicated his life, and now he forces himself to stop. He hangs himself by the left leg, the leg that represents the higher self. And you see his right leg crossed over the left? This means a crossroads, a lack of decision. But look at his face. Calm. Because he knows the answers will come to him when he is still. His gold hair hangs down around his head like a halo. This is enlightenment. The knot at his foot. He has tied this himself, and he knows the more he struggles, the tighter it will get. But look how he hangs. At peace. He knows he can reach up and untie the rope and set himself free whenever he wishes…which leads us to Present Desires,” she continues, moving her hand to the Tower card.

“The Tower in flames. Bodies falling from the sky. Lightning and wind and the sea crashing all around. We see this and it looks frightening. We think of terror and cataclysm. But this is only about change. A very big change. It is nothing to be scared of. Change is sudden. That is what scares us. But it is necessary. When we change we become better than before. It is a change handed down from God. You see?” She points. “The lightning bolt. This is how he touches our lives. To move us forward.”

Her hand hovers over the next card. “And this will have a big effect, because here now we have Death,” she says. “The Unexpected. This is not a death of the body. It is a death of what was. Do you see behind the figure? Do you see the sun rising? This is to remind us that when one thing dies, something else is born. Something new. The white flower. Purity and promise. Which takes us to the Immediate Future, the Fool.”

“The Fool represents adventure. Going where others fear to go. The Fool has blind faith. He follows his heart. And to help him comes the dog. A loyal friend who keeps him safe from danger. The dog pulls at the Fool’s robe, guiding him to safety. And look now at what he carries. The sack at the end of the stick. You see how it hangs, like testicles? This is his seed, which he will sow into the earth. And he will reap what he sows. This is the responsibility he carries with him…

“And now,” she touches the final card, “the Outcome: The Magician. The one with power over reality. You see the infinity symbol over his head? And the snake around his waist? The infinite energy of the universe that cannot be created or destroyed. An endless cycle. He is a master of this energy, and he knows that how he shapes the energy has infinite consequences. He knows we come into this world with all the things we need to live the best life. These are represented by all the symbols of the tarot spread out before him. He reminds us that we are the master of our gifts and that we are not slaves to our circumstances.” Sofiya turns her face to the light of the window, her eyes closed, sensing something. “My dear, what brought you here today?”

“My father,” I say. “Today is his birthday.”

She looks to me. “He hears your heart. You are asking him things. Things about his passing.”

“I replay it in my mind—the night they died. The knock at the door. I was hiding at the top of the stairs. All I could see was their feet. The police officers’ shoes and my Aunt Teri’s slippers. My parents had gone to dinner and my aunt was watching me. There was a knock at the door. She went and opened it, and the officers stepped inside. She called up to me and said to wait in my room and that she’d be right up. But I stayed there, at the top of the stairs, frozen, listening. They went into the kitchen. And then I heard a shriek. I never heard a sound like that. It was like an animal screeching. Then Teri was shouting. One of the policemen was trying to say something to her, trying to calm her down, but she was screaming at them, pushing them out, these two giant men. One of them saw me at the top of the stairs. My aunt looked up and our eyes met, and something left me. It flew out of me, from the center of my brain, out of my face like a bat, down the stairs, into her wet, crying eyes, down into the tunnel of her past. And I saw her. I saw her with my father. As children. As teenagers. My dad behind the wheel, driving Teri to school. I could feel Teri’s heart beating, how proud she was to have her big brother driving her to school, being seen with him. And then a flash, further back, younger. My father as a boy. He’s furious because he’s been grounded. Teri is sneaking him comic books under his door. And then a flash, further back. Teri as a baby, held in her brother’s lap, and a warm feeling—of love and safety. And then I’m ripped back through the tunnel, out of her eyes, up the stairs into my body, and Teri is snorting back the tears, reaching up to me, telling me to come down.”

Sofiya listens to the story as if she’s feeling her way toward something. “They died together,” she says. “Your parents. Water. I see water rushing in.”

“There was an accident,” I say.

“But you think it was not.” She looks to me. A chill races through me. “A secret,” she says. “In your heart. There is something calling you. There is something you must find. It is here, in the cards. You are being called.” She touches one card, then another, closing her eyes. “You are the same age?” she asks. “As your father when you were born?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

She opens her eyes. “Then this is no coincidence. You see here,” she points to the Magician card. “It is the cycle continuing. The infinite. The snake around the Magician’s waist. It is a message. Where your father’s story ends, this is where your story begins.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “What story?”

She touches the Death card. “You see here? The sun rising behind you. The answer is there, on the horizon.”

A faintness sweeps over me, a cold sweat. “I’m sorry, Sofiya, I have to go.”

“Yes, go,” she says, patting my knee. “Listen to your heart. It will give you clues.”

I kiss her soft cheek, and she heaves herself forward, limping beside me to the door.

As I hurry up the block, I glance back to see Sofiya standing at the window, watching me go—then she flips the sign from CLOSED to OPEN, and her silhouette recedes into the dark.