“My mom’s obsessed with that kind of stuff, and I try to avoid anything she might someday use to psychoanalyze me over breakfast.”
She waves a hand flippantly. “The I stands for introvert, someone who gets energized by alone time. Its counterpart is E, extrovert, a person who gets energy from being around people. The N stands for intuition, meaning you take your cues from internal sensations or sudden knowledge rather than concrete, observable facts. The F, feeling, indicates people who tend to make decisions based on emotion rather than thought. It’s an important trait, but so is the J, which stands for judging. A person who’s judging prefers to know what to expect at all times, to work with a schedule or outline or checklist, to make plans ahead of time rather than going with the flow.
“The combination of intuition, feeling, and judging creates people who are sensitive yet structured. They prefer boundaries and expectations, which is rarer for the intuitive, feeling type. It’s an odd mix of personality traits in and of itself, but then you throw in a little trauma, and bam! You’ve got someone with a disposition toward creative symbolic modes of thinking—e.g., vivid dreaming—and somewhat unique stress triggers and responses. Usually these responses manifest as nothing but brief flashes. Usually, but not with you. In other words, you’re super open, Natalie Cleary. You’re like the goddamn Florence Walmart on Black Friday.”
“Open to what?” I say.
“That’s the question you and I are going to try to answer. So this Grandmother person told you to come to me—any idea why?”
“I was hoping you would know,” I say. “I figured maybe . . . she’d come to you too, that she knew you’d be able to help me bring her back. Can you?”
“Probably not,” she says. “In fact, that last visit may have been your Closing.”
“Then what about what happened at school and at the football stadium—when everyone disappeared?”
She tilts her head back and forth again like she’s weighing a few internal arguments. “Okay, second theory: Your Closing happens in three months. Grandmother knows that something will happen, possibly within that time frame or possibly not, but you only have three months left to gather information and prepare.”
“So you think she’s sending me these visions?” I shake my head. “Why not just tell me what’s going on?”
“Who knows? But look at every single religion in this world: They leave room for visions and prophecies when, presumably, their deities could make things a hell of a lot easier.”
“Listen, Dr. Chan,” I say. “I appreciate your theories, but I really think the best thing would be to get Grandmother back. She can explain everything.”
She nods fervently. “Call me Alice, and believe me, I’d love to. So let’s think about this. You did EMDR. Tell me a little bit about that—what was the memory you used?”
I feel suddenly naked, if not totally transparent, as I grudgingly launch into the story. “My birth mother showed up when I was three,” I tell her. “I was sitting on my mom’s bed while she was in the bathroom, drying her hair, and I heard the doorbell ring. I went downstairs and opened the door, and a woman leaned down and held her hand out to me.” The memory’s foggy, even now. I can’t even see my birth mother’s face, just a blur where it should be. “She asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I said yes. So we went down the sidewalk.”
I remember asking, What’s your name?
She smiled and said, You can always call me Ishki.
Ishki. I whispered it once aloud. We didn’t talk any more; we just were. I wonder if some part of me understood who she was. If I knew even then, years before Grandmother came, years before I’d pore over the Internet for clues about my past and find that word associated with at least two different tribes, that ishki means mother.
“According to the reports, we walked for twenty minutes. By the time I returned, after she pointed me back toward my house and got into her car a few blocks away, there was a swarm of police cars with flashing blue and red lights crowded in and around my driveway.” I was afraid—terrified, actually. “And when I ran down the street to meet my mom, she was crying.” I felt so ashamed, so utterly guilty for scaring her like that. She scooped me up and held me tight, whispering, Baby, baby, I was so scared she was going to take you.
Before the therapy I hated to think about that memory. It made my stomach tense and my skin crawl. Whenever my mind wandered toward it, I distracted myself.
Alice looks up from her furious scribbling. “So how did the process itself go?”
“The therapist made me choose a negative self-belief, something that might explain why Grandmother had showed up.” I’m not wanted. I don’t belong. I didn’t bother telling Dr. Langdon I didn’t really believe those things. Counseling always went better if I nodded my head a lot. Back then, I’d thought she was a total hack. “Then she made me choose a positive self-belief to replace it with. She made me sit on the couch, and she sat across from me. She moved two fingers in front of my face, side to side, up and down. She said I didn’t need to understand it—I just needed to let my eyes follow her fingers all the way to my right peripheral, left peripheral, up and down, without moving my head.
“While her fingers moved, she asked me questions. About the negative self-belief, the positive self-belief, other things like that. I answered her, repeated after her when she told me to”—feeling incredibly stupid the whole time—“and when she was done, she told me to go back to that memory, and feel it fully. Before we’d started, she’d asked me to score how anxious the memory made me feel. I’d said a seven out of ten. After the process, I said five.” I’d surprised myself. “Then she sat forward and repeated the process again. The fingers, the questions, the scoring. We did it three times, and when she asked me to go back to that memory the last time, I told her, honestly, I only felt about a one on the anxiety scale.”
Recalling it now, it sounded like hocus-pocus. And yet, afterward, Grandmother, the man in the green jacket, all the flickers in my bedroom had been shut out for nearly three years. And, still, when I think about that memory—no anxiety. “I don’t know how, but it worked.”
Alice’s eyes glitter with excitement. She leans forward, touching the back of her head. “There’s a part of the brain called the amygdala. It stores things that you’re unable to process—like trauma. Before we’re eight years old, our minds have very few cognitive processing skills. So everything we’re unable to work through at that young age gets stored up in the amygdala, as general associations or a roughly pieced-together idea of cause and effect—a warning for future events. When we dream, our eye movements signal to the amygdala that it’s time to work through that backlog.