My excitement spiked.

“A woman.”

My excitement plummeted.

“Your grandma.”

“Which grandma?”

“She says her name is…Mary?”

I shook my head. No granny called Mary.

“Bridget?”

Another shake of the head.

“Bridie?”

“No,” I said apologetically. I hate it when these people get it wrong. I get so embarrassed for them.

“Maggie? Ann? Maeve? Kathleen? Sinéad?”

Morna listed every Irish name she’d ever heard of, from watching Ryan’s Daughter and buying Sinéad O’Connor CDs, but didn’t come up with either of my grannies’ names.

“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t want her getting discouraged and asking me to leave. “Don’t worry about the name. Tell me other stuff, what else are you getting?”

“Okay, they don’t always give me the correct name, but she’s definitely your grandma. I can see her clearly. She’s telling me she’s very happy to hear from you. She’s a little bitty thing, dancing around, in boots and a flowery apron on over a dirndl skirt. She’s got gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck and small round eyeglasses.”

“I don’t think that’s my granny,” I said. “I think that’s the granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.”

I didn’t mean to be snide; I just had too much desperation and hope swilling around in me and all this time-wasting was doing me in.

And if you’d ever met my granny Maguire, with her black teeth and her pipe and her penchant for setting the dogs on us, or Granny Walsh, with her tendency to growl if you tried to take away her perfume (she drank it whenever they’d found all the other bottles and emptied them down the sink), you’d never confuse them with the granny in Morna’s description.

Morna looked at me, alert to my sarcasm. “So who do you want to talk to?”

I opened my mouth, took a big, shuddery breath, which became a sob. “My husband. My husband died.” The tears were suddenly sluicing down my face. “I want to talk to him.”

I rummaged in my bag for a Kleenex while Morna pressed her fingers to her temples again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m getting nothing. But there’s a reason for that.”

My head jerked up. What?

“You have terrible energy. Someone has put something bad on you, this is why all these bad things are happening to you.”

What? “You mean like a curse?”

“A curse is a strong word—I don’t want to use that word, but yeah, I guess like a curse.”

“Oh, fuck!”

“Don’t worry, baby.” For the first time, she smiled. “I can take it away.”

“You can?”

“Sure, I’m not going to give you bad news like that if I can’t help you.”

“Thank you, oh my God, thank you.” Briefly, I thought I might faint with gratitude.

“Looks like you were meant to come here today.”

I nodded, but my blood was running cold. What if I hadn’t come to midtown today? What if I hadn’t been given the flyer? What if I’d put it straight in the bin?

“So what happens? Can you take it away now?” I could hardly catch my breath.

“Yeah, we can do it now.”

“Great! Can we get started?”

“Sure. But you’ve got to understand that removing a curse as big as the one on you will cost money.”

“Oh? How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

A thousand dollars? That jolted me out of the bubble and back to reality. This woman was a chancer. What would she do that could cost a thousand dollars?

“You’ve got to do this, Anna. Your life will only get worse if you don’t deal with this.”

“My life will definitely get worse if I throw away a thousand dollars.”

“Okay, five hundred,” Morna said. “Three? Okay, two hundred dollars and I can remove this curse.”

“How come you can do it for two hundred dollars now and it was a thousand dollars a minute ago?”

“Because, baby, I’m afraid for you. You need this removed, like now, or something really terrible will happen to you.”

For a second she got me again, I was frozen with fear. But what could happen? The worst thing I could ever think of had already happened. But what if there was a curse on me? If it was why Aidan had died…?

Suspended between fear and skepticism, my thoughts seesawed back and forth when we were interrupted by the sounds of children banging on a door somewhere in the apartment and calling, “Mom, can we come out yet?”

I snapped back to sanity and couldn’t leave that place quick enough. My anger was so immense that on the way down, I kicked the elevator wall. I was raging with Morna and raging with myself for being so stupid and raging with Aidan for dying and putting me in that position. Back on the street, I couldn’t stop walking long enough to hail a cab and I powered all the way to Central Park, fueled by hot, sour fury, shouldering into other pedestrians (at least the short ones), not apologizing, and generally giving New York a bad name.

I think I must have been crying because at the Times Square intersection a little girl pointed at me and said, “Look, Mom, a crazy lady.” But that might just have been because of my clothes.

By the time I reached the office, I’d calmed down. I understood what had happened: I’d had bad luck. I’d met a charlatan, someone who preyed on vulnerable people—and did it really, really badly because I was as vulnerable as fuck and even I hadn’t fallen for her shit.

Somewhere out there is a real psychic who’ll put me in touch with you. All I have to do is find them.

34

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Baked Alaska

Dear Anna,

I hope you had a “good” weekend. If you see Rachel will you tell her that baked Alaska is a beautiful dessert. The waiters light it with sparklers and turn off the lights and carry it through the room. As you know, I am not a woman who “blubs” easily but when they did it on our last night in Portugal, it looked so beautiful, tears came to my eyes.

Your loving mother,

Mum