SIBYL SET DOWN HER SUPPLY BAG, LIFTED THE WOODEN LEVER ACROSS the barn’s entrance, and pushed open one of the sliding double doors. It opened with a loud groan of disuse, mixed with a strange, nasally keening sound: Twyla’s goats, Nocturne and Diurn, braying for their lunch. Instantly, the smell of musty, stale air and something more fetid hit Sibyl’s nostrils.
“Hi, little friends,” Sibyl called out uncertainly. Twyla had told her, apologetically, that while she’d “cleaned and tidied” the barn to prepare for Sibyl’s sessions, she had nowhere else to put the two goats, who slept together in one of the stalls. Could Sibyl be a doll and just let them into the outside pen and feed them real quick, before her first client, then she could have the barn completely to herself? And if they wouldn’t go outside, well then, Sibyl could simply loop the leather straps hanging on the wall outside the stall—shanks, she called them—around the goats’ necks (“Gently, please!” Twyla had said) and lead them out into the sunshine.
Of course, Sibyl had said yes, though her shoulders had tensed with annoyance. She heard her mother’s voice: Beggars can’t be choosers, Debbie girl.
Sibyl tapped on the flashlight on her phone and located a bank of light switches on the wall, which she flipped on. The barn leaped into light, and the goats’ braying grew louder.
“Settle down,” Sibyl muttered.
She shoved open the other half of the sliding doors and surveyed the barn’s interior with dismay: the concrete floor was cracked and filthy, the windows and skylights hazed with grime, cobwebs everywhere.
How on earth could she do a session here just forty-five minutes from now? Jesus, the smell. She’d brought lavender spray but doubted it would make much of a difference.
Well, she had no choice. She’d already signed up for this.
She found the bin of goat food, filled a coffee can with the foul-smelling brown-gray pellets, and walked around the back of the barn to the outside pen, where she dumped it into the feeder beside a trough of water. Then bracing herself, she unlatched the outside door of the goats’ stall, as Twyla had instructed, freeing them from the barn. As Twyla had predicted, the two animals, larger than Sibyl had expected—the size of Doberman pinschers (Sibyl was a dog person, not a goat person)—bolted into the pen and beelined for their feed, burying their faces in the dusty meal as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Sibyl double-checked the latch to the pen to verify it was secure, so that the goats could not escape out onto the property. (“They don’t exactly get along with Klondike,” Twyla had explained.) She had just enough time to sweep before her first client. Hopefully the guests would not be too disgusted by the setting. Sibyl didn’t want anyone, especially not Mia Meadows, demanding refunds.
Her first session, scheduled to start soon with a novelist named Graham Caldwell, would need to go well. From the small amount of internet research Sibyl had done, she knew he was going to be tough to please. For a time, she had scorned preemptive research on her clients, but the truth was, it had been a while since she’d read for anyone other than Twyla (open book that she was), and Sibyl was more than a little nervous to read for the likes of Mia Meadows and her friends. So, she’d also glanced at Graham’s Amazon.com page and author website, studying the black-and-white photo of the intensely serious, half-scowling middle-aged man in a tam-o’-shanter (to hide his thinning hair, she guessed) and thick-framed Warby Parker glasses. Talk about open book—the scrivener was trying way too hard. Insecurity galore. Sibyl had memorized the titles of a few of his novels—The Last Sommelier, Elysian Park—wondering who the hell wanted to read such books.
But the biggest clue about Graham Caldwell she’d gleaned from Twyla’s Airbnb guest log, in which Twyla had jotted down the names of her visitors in spidery blue script.
On this weekend’s page, Sibyl had read:
“Graham Caldwell & Cecily Goshen.”
Graham was supposed to have had a companion at Celestial Ranch this weekend.
Sibyl had played the name over in her mind, Cecily Goshen—it evoked a sort of WASPy, tennis-skirted wealth—on an instinct honed from years of absorbing strangers’ personal minutiae. Cecily’s crossed-out name was the detail, Sibyl decided, that she’d utilize in the session with Graham. Clearly, Cecily had canceled last minute; surely, Sibyl thought, Graham was not thrilled. Even if her reason was benign—a summer cold, a pollen allergy—Sibyl would use it to open a door to Graham’s psyche. In general, romantic partners were the easy route to entry—lovers or mothers, really—and once Sibyl was in the door, well, her subjects did most of the work for her, inadvertently guiding her through the session. This was Sibyl’s only true trick: creating the illusion that she was in control of the conversation, when nine out of ten times, her subjects led the way, guiding her to relevant conclusions without realizing they’d handed her all the clues.
The little she’d learned about Graham Caldwell in advance was enough to boost her confidence, to turn her apprehension into excitement for the session. Even though it was taking place in a crumbling barn reeking of goat shit, she felt an expansion of her consciousness as she awaited Graham’s arrival. The feeling of being truly present buzzed at the base of her neck, her throat, starting its slow journey down her shoulders, her arms . . .
She covered the hay bales that doubled as seating for her sessions with blankets and turned on a few electric candles, the kind that appeared to flicker. It killed Sibyl not to light real ones for a session—cedarwood were her favorite—but it was fire season in Topanga, as Twyla had reminded her many times, and Topanga usually stayed in the high-risk zone all summer.
A delicate tap-tap came at the door of the barn, and then Graham Caldwell appeared, glancing warily around the barn, as if he expected bats to swoop down from the rafters. “Hi there. I’m here for my, ah, appointment.”
“Welcome.” Sibyl summoned her most generous smile and indicated the hay bale across the table. “Please, have a seat.”
Graham stepped gingerly toward her. Sibyl saw he looked a bit ragged, perhaps hungover, and that he bore a strong resemblance to the aging, ex-hipster dads Sibyl often saw at the farmers’ market on Sundays. He wore a wrinkled beige linen blazer over a white T-shirt, jeans, skateboarder sneakers, and the sort of newsboy cap Sibyl associated with the Great Depression. His graying hair matched the scruff shadowing his lined face, but he was still handsome in the worn, affable manner of an English professor or a latter-day Hugh Grant.
On his ring finger, Sibyl noted, he wore a gold wedding band.
“It’s best if we forgo introductions, to maintain the integrity of our session, but I’m Sibyl, and it’s a pleasure to have you.”
“With all due respect,” said Graham, frowning at the hay bale and skimming his palm across the blanket before sitting down, “I’m here because the host of the birthday party I’m attending already paid, and it seemed rude to decline. Also, I’m hungover and have PTSD from nearly getting stung to death by a swarm of bees this morning, so we can make this quick?”
“Oh, yes,” Sibyl said. “I heard about the unfortunate incident with the bees.”
He leaned in and she smelled the faint odor of booze leaking from his pores. “Couldn’t you have given us a heads-up?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.” She lied, knowing exactly what he was about to say.
“The bees. You’re a psychic, no?” He crossed his legs with effort. She could see he was not yet accustomed to the extra weight around his thighs. Was it the “Quarantine 15,” as the talk show hosts called it? The alcohol? Newlywed bliss? Perhaps his last novel had sold poorly.
“If you’re not in an open frame of mind, Graham, we won’t be able to do our best work, anyway.”
Graham laughed dryly; Sibyl heard the note of condescension. Silly psychic!
“Look,” he said. “I know who you are. From—you know, the news. So we don’t need to play any games here.”
Sibyl’s happy buzz vanished.
She’d been expecting some of the guests to know about her disgrace. Of course they would: Her name and face and a clip of the live The View footage had gone viral for weeks, maybe even months, after the accident, seemingly front and center on every news app, social media, live TV.
Sibyl, Seer to the Stars, scandal!
And the infinite, forever-on-the-internet memes of Merry Williams . . . Merry in her jump gear ascending the plane steps, Merry giving two thumbs-up from the open door ready to jump, even Merry plummeting to earth—they were legion.
Of course Mia Meadows’s friends would know.
She just hadn’t been prepared to be called out in the first ten seconds of her very first session.
Graham’s words stung worse than she’d imagined they would. I know who you are.
Sibyl wished she could tell him to fuck off.
Instead, she forced a light, knowing chuckle. “Well, Graham, it is good to know you haven’t been living in a cave. But we’ve all got a past, do we not?”
“Well—” Graham fumbled. “Yes, that would be true.”
“Good. Listen, I’m glad you told me you know who I am. Transparency is necessary to a successful session, no? So, I’d like to state up front that I also know you. In fact, I’m a great fan of your work. I’ve only read The Last Sommelier, but I thought it was truly brilliant.”
Instantly, she felt the air soften between them. Graham leaned ever so slightly forward, training his tired blue eyes on her.
“Could we just be gloves off here?” he said. “No disrespect, but I’ve never embraced this sort of thing.”
He had that quality she’d observed in writers over the years: desperately insecure, while somehow simultaneously radiating superiority.
“And what sort of thing is that?” Sibyl was used to this kind of opening; her lines came back to her like muscle memory.
“As in, uh, mystical—or, I guess, spiritual activities? Mia told us she gifted everyone a session and made us promise we’d use them. And you just don’t say no to Mia—it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
Sibyl filed that detail about Mia Meadows away even if it wasn’t any surprise after the woman’s attack on Klondike the day before—still, it could be helpful in the session Mia had scheduled for herself later that afternoon. The most important session of the day, as Ms. Meadows was supplying Sibyl with that month’s mortgage payment.
“So here I am,” Graham said and sighed. “I’m a curmudgeonly skeptic by nature, so I’m wondering if we can do away with the pageantry and maybe just have a conversation? You’re getting paid either way.”
So, he was one of those, Sibyl thought, the guy who pays for a prostitute so they can just talk, and then ends up asking for a blow job. A man who needs to believe he’s different, better than those other men. She’d dated too many guys like that. Her ex, Steven, two exes before Darryl, her last ex, had been addicted to massage parlors, a fact she’d discovered after he’d charged three thousand dollars’ worth of “massages” to her Amex.
“Why don’t we do this?” said Sibyl. “What if we do five minutes of a real session? Just give it a small chance, and if it’s not interesting to you, we’ll switch over to a regular conversation. Does that sound reasonable?”
Graham shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Wonderful.” She reached into her bag at her feet and pulled out two blindfolds, blue and green. She handed Graham the green one. “I’ll ask you to tie this over your eyes. I’ll do the same. It’s best if you can’t see anything, but if that makes you too uncomfortable, or you have issues with darkness, you can tie it any way you like.”
She found this was a surefire way to motivate her subjects to block their eyes entirely; no one wanted to risk being perceived as a coward. Even, she thought, by Sibyl the disgraced psychic.
“A blindfold?” Graham laughed. “You’re not going to make me walk a plank, are you?”
There he goes, she thought, putting in a little more effort. Even turning on the charm. They were getting warmer. This was her favorite part of the work—the subtle shift in the dynamic between two people, an electric sizzle in the few feet of air between Sibyl and her subject. The change burned extra hot with challenging subjects—atheists, lovers scorched too many times, the devoutly religious—as it did right now.
He tied the blindfold tight around his head. Good boy, she thought, and then she did the same, leaving the smallest opening that would allow her to see his hands if she cast her eyes downward. Usually, the hands of her subjects were all she needed to see to know she was on the right path. Hands and jawlines were where people held their feelings. Given Sibyl’s gauze trick, she’d become especially adept at reading hands. And the stories they told.
“No planks, I promise,” she said, tying on her own blindfold. Sibyl always used an imperceptibly sheer navy blue covering for her own face. Clients hardly ever noticed the slight transparency of the fabric, and if they did, Sibyl said something about her insurance requiring a modicum of visibility, for safety reasons, which was not true. If they asked to look through it, she let them. They almost never did. “To start, we’ll just breathe together. Ready? One, two, three . . .”
Graham’s breath was shallow and quick.
“Let’s slow down,” said Sibyl. “There’s no rush here. I want you to make your exhales twice as long.”
“I’m not a yoga person,” mumbled Graham. The wobble in his voice, the sudden vulnerability, almost (almost) had her forgiving him for that shitty I know who you are comment at the start of the session.
“That’s okay,” said Sibyl softly, soothingly, “neither am I.”
She waited a few more counts, until Graham’s breathing had slowed down.
“A woman is presenting herself to me,” Sibyl began. Thank you, Cecily Goshen. “Lithe and athletic, attractive, medium height, blue eyes.”
Blue eyes or brown eyes were always safe, as the vast majority of the population had one or the other, so Sibyl always used whatever color her actual subject had—that way, if she was wrong about what she “saw,” she could easily explain herself out of the mistake. This person wants to see things your way, through your eyes, etcetera.
“Um, okay,” said Graham. “That’s not entirely off track. Go ahead.”
Sibyl had forgotten how easy this could be, how pleasing the gradual acceptance of her subject as he or she felt the details of their life accumulate in the prettily wrapped gift (their unique truth) Sibyl would have ready to present very soon.
“You’re having relational tensions,” she continued (who wasn’t, at any given time, especially during the claustrophobic confinement of the pandemic?). “It’s thrown off your equilibrium. This person is physically absent, but also very present.”
In her narrow window of vision, Sibyl saw Graham’s hands link together on the table. A sign that he was engaged with the session, at last.
“Go on,” he said.
“There’s another force at work here,” she said. “An oppositional one”—as if, she thought, this wasn’t the most basic law of nature—“that is taking shape . . . as another woman, though it could also be a nonhuman entity with feminine energy—”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
His defensive tone told Sibyl she was on precisely the right track.
“I’m not sure yet,” she said. “I only know I’m seeing two women.” She thought of the gold band on his finger, considered her original deduction that he was probably on his second wife, or possibly his third, and her gut told her to proceed with the hunch. “Or—possibly three. Are there three women who have been very important to you, at various times in your life, or even concurrently?”
Graham seemed, she thought, like the type of artiste who left his longtime devoted wife for a younger, bohemian woman, then wrote essays (praised by literary critics) about how the choice tortured him.
His breathing quickened again. “Kind of.”
Bingo. Typical self-involved artist/cheater, Sibyl thought, whose commitment to monogamy lasts only as long as his partner’s pert ass and belief in Graham’s brilliance.
“One is younger, one is older, and the third—” Sibyl paused, pretending to be scrutinizing the images in her own head, when, on cue, Graham jumped in: “Jesus. Don’t say it! She’s African-American, right?”
Sibyl exhaled, as if he’d validated her precisely. “Yes . . . exactly. That’s correct. The third is a woman of color. The three of them are standing together, in my mind’s eye, asking no more of you than to— Wait a moment, while I listen to them—” She paused and counted silently to five. “Okay. They’re asking you for courage and decency to take responsibility for your past, and to make strong, true commitments going forward. Only one—the younger, I believe—requires your ongoing love and devotion, but the others are just asking for, well, respect. Honesty.”
She was, Sibyl thought to herself, simply speaking on behalf of all women everywhere who’d suffered the romantic vagaries of self-important men like Graham.
On the table, she could see Graham wringing his hands.
“This is fucking bizarre,” he muttered.
“Shall I go on?” said Sibyl.
“I’m not sure,” said Graham. “Yeah. I guess. I mean—whatever you want.” In his voice, she heard defensiveness mixed with intrigue. Her subjects always desired more, even as they feared the truth.
“What? Have I touched a nerve?”
“Maybe. But you’re also being pretty vague. Like I said, I’m familiar with how this stuff works—I’m a novelist, for chrissakes—so if we’re going to stick with the session, I’d like you to tell me something really specific.”
Oh, but she was ready for this. As soon as Twyla had told her there was a novelist (a male, to boot) in the group, Sibyl had known, with a tingle of anticipation at the possible challenge, she’d have to counter his doubt. It was the creatives who were tougher to guide. Novelists, screenwriters—poets were no problem, they existed in the ethereal zone—those who believed their imaginations so vast there were few mysteries they had yet to crack.
They were also so egocentric; they were happy to apply virtually anything Sibyl said to their own lives. She’d found, over the years, that with writers especially, she could be daringly specific, simply plucking from a memorized list she’d composed years ago of common human scenarios, based on no one in particular (perhaps she, too, was a writer!). All she needed to do in her sessions was choose a scenario from the list and apply some highly specific details: hair color, street names, song titles, foods, and boom—her subjects would fold them, somehow, into their own lives.
In an instant, she decided on one of her go-to favorites from the list, one that seemed just right for Graham.
“I’m getting a very pointed message about you, Graham. It’s distilling now—hold on, let me see—” She took one long, slow breath, pretending to concentrate very hard. “Are you ready?”
“Hit me.”
She spoke haltingly, as if struggling to read small print in low light. “I’m seeing that you’ve lost a lover but kept a friend. A child is involved. So is . . . dignity. Family dignity, it appears. You are struggling to see a path. You’re grappling with grit versus glamour, past versus present, and transcendent love versus sexual desire. I see a Spanish-style house on a tree-lined street. Bougainvillea and jacaranda trees. A woman sits in the window, weeping quietly. Her hair is long and shiny, or once was, and her eyes are light. She is not the woman for you.”
Through her blindfold, she could see his hands had begun to tremble. She smiled to herself. As expected, he was hearing prescient observations about his own life. Via a basic Shakespearean plotline, adorned with ubiquitous LA flora and hairstyles.
“Goddammit.” Graham dropped a balled fist on the card table; it shuddered, toppling his water bottle. He stood and pulled off his blindfold. “Fucking Dawn,” he said—almost spat. “Couldn’t even keep her mouth shut for twenty-four hours. I can’t believe she’d bring Cecily and Ethan into this.” He jumped to his feet, knocking back the hay bale. “We’re done here.”
“I’m sorry?” said Sibyl. She removed her blindfold. Sunlight angled through the slats of the barn roof. Faintly, she heard from somewhere in the stalls the rustle of those little rodents that were plentiful as roaches. Twyla called them beechies.
“Dawn must have put you up to this. Or was it Mia? Of course, I should’ve known better than to let those two rope me into a goddamn psychic session.” He looked down at Sibyl, his eyes blazing. “I’m sorry. This has nothing to do with you. I actually feel we had a bit of a connection. But it’s fucked now.”
She watched him whirl around and stomp over to the double doors of the barn, where he heaved them open—with considerable effort, Sibyl noted. There were few sights more satisfying, she thought, than a haughty intellectual in the wilderness.
“By the way,” he yelled over his shoulder as he left the barn, “it stinks like hell in there!”
The heavy barn door shut. The barn shook—Sibyl was sure the roof was about to collapse in on her. Instead, her phone announced a new text.