I felt for my mouth, to see if it was drooping.

“Can I say a simple sentence?” I said out loud. Yes, fool, I thought. You just did.

I swear on all that’s holy, I was a practicing, celebrated psychic, but when I saw my mother sitting there, I was certain I was dying.

My mother was just looking at me, smiling, not saying a word.

Heatstroke, I thought, still not taking my eyes off her, but it wasn’t all that hot.

Then I blinked. And she was gone.

In the aftermath, I thought of a lot of things. That if I’d been on the 101, I probably would have caused a multicar pileup. That I would have traded everything I owned to hear her speak one more time.

That she did not look the way she had when she died, feeble and brittle and birdlike. She was the mother I remembered from my childhood, the one strong enough to carry me when I was sick and scold me when I was being a pain in the ass.

I have never seen my mother again, although it’s not for lack of trying. But I learned something that day. I believe we’ve lived many times and have been reincarnated many times, and a spirit is the amalgam of all the lifetimes in which that soul existed. But when a spirit approaches a medium, it comes back with one particular personality, one particular form. I used to think spirits manifested in a certain way so that the living person could recognize them. Yet after my mother came to me, I realized that they come back in the way they want to be remembered.

You may hear this and feel skeptical. You’d be right to feel that way. Skeptics keep the swamp witches at bay; or so I thought, before I became one myself. If you haven’t had a personal experience with the paranormal, you should question what you’re being told.

This is what I would have said to a skeptic, had they approached me the day I saw my mother in the passenger seat: She was not translucent or shimmering or milky white. She was as solid to me as the guy who took my parking ticket minutes later when I pulled out of the garage. It was as if I’d Photoshopped a memory of my mother into the here-and-now, a trick of mechanics, like those videos where the dead Nat King Cole sings with his daughter. No question about it—my mother was as real as the steering wheel under my shaking hands.

But doubt has a way of blooming like fireweed. Once it takes hold, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. It’s been years since a spirit has come to me for help. If a skeptic said to me right now, Who do you think you’re kidding? I suppose I’d say, Not you. And certainly not me.

The kid at the Genius Bar who is supposed to be helping me has the people skills of Marie Antoinette. She grunts as she turns on my ancient MacBook and lets her fingers tickle the keyboard. She doesn’t make eye contact. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

For starters? I’m a professional psychic with no connection to the spirit world; I missed my last two rent payments; I stayed up till 3:00 A.M. last night watching a Dance Moms marathon; and the only way I could get into these pants today was by wearing Spanx.

Oh, and my computer’s broken.

“When I try to print something,” I say, “nothing happens.”

“What do you mean, nothing happens?”

I stare at her. “What do people usually mean when they say that?”

“Does your screen turn black? Does anything come out of the printer? Do you get an error message? Did you document anything?”

I have a theory about Gen Y, these narcissistic twenty-somethings. They don’t want to wait their turn. They don’t want to work their way up the ladder. They want what they want now—in fact, they’re sure they deserve it. Young people like this, I believe, are soldiers who died in Vietnam, and have been reincarnated. The timing’s right, if you do the math. These kids are still pissed about getting killed in a war they didn’t believe in. Being rude is just another way of saying: Kiss my twenty-five-year-old ass.

“Hey, hey, LBJ,” I say under my breath. “How many kids have you killed today?”

She doesn’t glance up.

“Make love, not war,” I add.

The techie looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Do you have Tourette’s?”

“I’m a psychic. I know who you used to be.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“No, not him,” I correct.

Chances are, if she was killed in Vietnam in her past life, she was male. Spirit is genderless. (In fact, some of the best mediums I’ve ever met are gay, and I think it’s because they have that balance of masculine and feminine in them. But I digress.) I once had a very famous client—a female R & B singer—who had died in a concentration camp in a previous existence. Her current ex was the SS soldier who had shot her back then, and her job in this life was to survive him. Unfortunately, in this existence, he was beating her up every time he got drunk—and I will bet you anything that, after she dies, she’ll return in some other incarnation that crosses with his. That’s all a human life is, really—a do-over, a chance to get it right … or you’ll be brought back to try again.

The techie opens a new menu with a few keystrokes. “You have a backlog of print jobs,” she says, and I wonder if she will judge me for printing out the Entertainment Weekly recap of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. “That could be the problem.” She pushes some buttons, and suddenly the screen goes black. “Huh,” she murmurs, frowning.