“What’s the matter, dear?”

Her voice brought things back. I tried to speak but couldn’t. She slowly worked her way down. When she got to me she put a hand on my elbow. “I was sitting by the window and saw you come in. I got worried when you didn’t ring.”

She helped me up the rest of the stairs. Without that help, I don’t know how I would have made it.

“It’s all my fault.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Frances. Unless you made all these things happen to me.” I tried to sound facetious, but the words came out sounding self-pitying.

“You don’t understand; it’s more complicated than that.” She began walking around the room.

I had just finished telling her everything. From the day I saw the ghost of James Stillman on the street, right up to the impossible sounds I had heard out in the hall. Once I’d started, the whole story leaped out like an animal that had been trapped in a cage too long. Simply recounting all of the strange events made me feel better.

Frances was silent throughout and spoke only after a long pause. “I knew you were pregnant the day we went to Crane’s View. I don’t know if you remember, but when we got to my house I stood on the porch and asked to be alone while you two went in.”

“I remember that. Hugh mentioned it.”

“I didn’t want you to see my face because I might have given it away. That’s when I knew.”

“How, Frances? Are you psychic?”

She shook her head. “No, but when I was a young woman in Romania I met people. Shumda introduced me and they taught me some things. That was the greatest mistake of my life: they were willing to teach me much more but I wasn’t interested. Incredible. Incredibly stupid.

“Shumda was Romanian. He had been raised in the country, and to country people, real magic is no big deal. Things like that shouldn’t be a big deal. They are to us because we’re so sophisticated and skeptical that we’re above all that primitive hocus-pocus.

“But there is another world, Miranda. Most of us refuse to accept that because it scares us. It threatens to take away our control. But that won’t make it go away. Let me read you something.” She walked to a table and picked up one of the many notebooks she kept around the apartment. She called them daybooks and filled them with her thoughts and quotes from things she had read and liked. She leafed through this book. “Here, listen to this: ‘Maybe what comes from elsewhere will make me do crazy things; maybe that invisible world is demonic and should be excluded. What I can’t see, I can’t know; what I don’t know, I fear; what I fear, I hate; what I hate, I want destroyed.’”

“But Frances, I do believe in those things. I always have. I’ve just never had any contact with them until now. Did you really know I was pregnant that day? How?”

“Your smell. And the color of your fingertips.”

“What does a pregnant woman smell like?”

“Like hope.”

I smiled and felt my spirit lift. “It’s possible to smell hope?”

She nodded. “When you know how.”

“And what about the fingertips?”

“Look at them.”

I held up my left hand but saw nothing at first. Then I gasped. The tips of my fingers were changing colors—the colors of clouds on the sky. As if a strong wind was pushing fleecy clouds across the sky, clouds that were white, purple, orange-red. They moved over my fingertips in a passing rush. The colors of storms, sunsets, early morning. All of them together flying across my fingertips.

I guess I made some other noise because the moment I did, the colors disappeared and my fingers returned to their proper color. I kept staring at my hand. Eventually I looked at Frances again but with a whole new perspective.

“That’s what I saw when we were in Crane’s View. You can’t because you haven’t been trained. I did it to you now so you could see for yourself.”

“All women have that? On their fingers? All of them when they’re pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“And you learned how to do that in Romania?”

“Among other things.”

“What else, Frances? What else do you know?”

She sighed loudly. “Not enough. I was too young to appreciate what they were offering. Knowledge pursued me, but I was faster. When you’re young you’re only interested in parlor tricks, Miranda, things that can impress others or get you in the door.

“But these people, and they were from all walks of life, were willing to teach me incredible things because I was with Shumda. If only I’d had the patience and dedication! I met a Yezidje priest, people in the Sarmoun Brotherhood… You can’t imagine who I knew when I was there. But none of it penetrated. The young are like rubber—everything bounces off them.

“Shumda called me bimba viziata, his spoiled child, and I was.” She sighed again and rubbed her hands up and down her sides. “You talk to shadows too much when you get old. Old memories, old regrets. I could have learned so much when I was a young woman, but I didn’t and that was a great mistake. But I do know some things. I knew you were pregnant. I know that what you’re going through now is a result of that pregnancy.”

“And James’s ghost? Or the noises I heard outside? The little boy in our house?”

“They’re part of it. Believe me, it’s all necessary for you now. Something enormous is about to come into your life and all of these things are part of the overture.” She walked over, put her hands on my tense shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. It was the first time Frances had kissed me.

When I got back to Crane’s View, the rain was having an intermission and the sky was full of black fat thunderclouds. After getting out of the train I stood on the platform and stared at that turbulent sky, remembering my fingertips and what had happened in Frances’s apartment earlier. The day had exhausted me, but I decided to walk the mile to our house. I wanted the exercise. The air smelled delicious and ripe as it always does in the country after rain.

As I walked and breathed deeply of the thick air, I kept thinking about what she had told me. More than anything else, “there is another world” kept chiming in my head like a clock striking twelve. Like it or not, that world had become part of mine. I would have to accept it and go wherever it led me. But how would it affect my relationship with Hugh? And our child?

Frances told me about a dull man she knew who suddenly, in middle age, was able to see what people would look like when they were old. For the rest of his life he had to live with that… talent? Curse? What would you call it?

Another man suddenly developed a frighteningly accurate ability to read palms. That lucky fellow went mad because it reached a point where he could see nothing else but people’s palms and the certain fates that awaited them.

“Need a ride? You look tired.”

I looked up and saw Chief McCabe leaning on the roof of his car in front of the bakery. He held a French cruller in one hand and a small carton of milk in the other.

“No, thank you. I just got off the train and this walk is bringing me back to life. But I have a question.”

He grinned and nodded. “You don’t want a ride but you got a question. Okay. Shoot.”

“Have you ever known anyone with special powers? People who could tell the future or read palms, that sort of thing?”

He didn’t hesitate. “My grandmother. Spookiest person I ever knew. Always knew when you were lying. The family legend. No one of us ever lied to her because she always knew. Worst part was, if you did lie, she hit you. Lie—BANG! When I was a kid she must’ve got me a thousand times! Shows how smart I was, huh? Why do you ask?”

I didn’t even know McCabe, but for a moment I wanted to tell him everything. Maybe after what had happened that day, I just needed a friend.

“Oh, yeah,” he went on, “and Frances Hatch too. She gets tuned into weird channels too sometimes.” His car radio squawked and he bent in to listen. I couldn’t make out what it said.