Page 41 of The New Couple in 5B

I pointed to the stove and said a single word. “Fire.”

But nothing was burning. She’d not even yet turned on the stove top. And then I snapped back to myself, continued eating like nothing had happened.

Later that night when my mother was cooking dinner, a dishrag caught fire on the stove, and the flame quickly spread to the curtains. Only my mother’s quick work with the ready fire extinguisher saved it from spreading further.

She told my father and he declared me a seer, which I’m sure he just made up then and there. Another freak for his show: Dad, the healer; Mom, the tarot-card reader; Grandma and Sarah were dreamers; now Rosie, the seer.

And truthfully, as I grew, Iwasprone to vivid daydreams. Because they were tolerated and even encouraged, they became ever more detailed, consuming. Occasionally, the things I sawdidcome to pass, but mostly not. This fact didn’t seem to bother my father at all.

This life is a multiverse. You’re looking into a kaleidoscope, the facets always shifting, every moment impacting the moment that follows. You’re seeing the possibilities.

He believed that I could see the future, even if it was a future that might never come to pass because of the myriad ways in which each moment shifts, impacting the next.

Dr. Black has another theory.

If your family had discouraged these daydreams, recognized them for what they were, eventually they would have faded, Dr. Black posits.Instead, they gaslit you into thinking that you had some kind of prophetic vision.

But I was right sometimes, I counter.Some of the things I saw did happen. Like that time on the train.

Dr. Black has an explanation for that, too.

We’re all prone to dark imaginings, where we get swept away by vivid fantasies about the future. It’s possible that some of these daydreams will later come to pass. When it’s positive, some might call it manifestation or creative visualization. But there’s no fast forward on reality, no preset version of the future to which you have special access.

His theory about the train specifically was that there had been a lot of stories in the news about the violence on the subway. I had mentioned in my early sessions with him that when I came to New York, after the quiet and natural beauty of where I grew up, I found the city frightening at first, especially the subways. The recent violence had awakened some of those fears. And because I had this propensity for vivid daydreams, that I’d been raised thinking were real, that this was some gift I’d been given by God, I had one of those daydreams. That a girl was just minutes later killed, was simply a tragic coincidence.

It wasn’t a perfect explanation. But it was one I could work with.

You can run from who you are, Rosie, my father said when I left home.But you can’t hide from it.

Those words ring back to me when I have vivid daydreams, when things I imagine come to pass. The only reason I don’t hate my father more is that I think he truly believed the lies he told me, himself, everyone. He really did—does—think we’ve been gifted with mystical powers. That he can heal the sick, and my mother can advise the lost with a deck of cards; Sarah’s and Grandma’s dreams have prophetic qualities, that Grandma’s potions, charms and spells have some special powers, that I can see possible versions of the future. He just happens to be dead wrong.

“Is this it?” asks Max as the cab finally pulls up to the curb. It’s an area of the city I have never visited, a neighborhood of warehouses, garbage littering streets, a spider’s web of electrical lines overhead. To our right a junkyard of wrecked cars and boats with rotting hulls; to our left a brick building lined with freighter truck bays. I check the address: 1245 Viele Avenue.

“I think so?”

Max runs his card through the slot.

“No,” I protest with a hand on his arm. “Let me.”

“Let’s call it research,” he says. “That’s not too far off, right?”

“Most of what a writer doescouldcount as research. Are you going to pay for my Netflix, too?”

“I’d do anything for you, Rosie,” he says. “I think you know that.”

He gives me a look I can’t read, and I feel the heat come up to my cheeks. I thank him—again—and get out of the cab, wondering how we’re going to get another one up here and where the nearest subway stop is.

“Oh.” He points off into the distance. “I think the MTA iron shop is up here. Where they fabricate structural steel for the subway.”

Max is a bit of a New York City nerd, prides himself on knowing about iconic buildings, hidden alleys, obscure historical facts.

“Over across the East River?” he goes on. “That’s Rikers. Did you read the article in theNew Yorkerabout all the men who died there?”

Max talks a lot when he gets nervous. I, on the other hand, go quiet.

He goes on about how he and his buddies play paintball up here. Hard to imagine his urbane hipster pals, into craft cocktails, art films and poetry playing war games. He must clock my skepticism.

“What? I do guy things.”

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