One Week Ago

It’s nine o’clock, Miley, time to snuggle up in bed and get warm,” Annie Guevara said, patting her two-year-old dapple dachshund on the head as she got up from the sofa. Annie gently nudged the reluctant dog off the couch and toward the bedroom. “Come on, girl. It’s chilly tonight.” The dog waddled down the long hallway at her own pace, as Annie walked ahead of her into the bedroom.

The dog looked on as Annie patted the top of a wool shawl spread out on the bed. The shawl was Annie’s security blanket, a Christmas present from her daughter, Grace, who had given it to her nearly eight years ago, when she was twelve. To Annie, it seemed like yesterday.

Grace had been gone three years, and Annie was just coming to terms with the loss. She was still working on forgiving herself for letting the sixteen-year-old run off on a wild adventure with her father.

Miley let out a bark, dashed through the door, and leapt onto the bed. “It’s about time, girl.” Annie said, as the dog found her favorite spot. Annie settled in under the covers, and the dog put her head down and drifted off to sleep.

Annie had decided to review some student papers in bed before retiring, but she couldn’t concentrate on them. She couldn’t sleep, either. She lay awake, still thinking about Grace and what a generous soul she had been. Giving was Grace’s gift—one of many. She had developed a special gift-giving practice around her tenth birthday, which was Christmas Eve.

Her favorite pastime, besides drawing, was showering gifts on her parents and grandparents—birthday presents, Christmas presents, I-love-you presents—all from the heart, and always out of the blue. To earn money, Grace took on extra chores, cleaning her parents’ room, clipping the hedges for old Mrs. Kegley next door, even washing cars. She helped her best friend, Derek, with his term papers in exchange for part of his allowance. She was always more excited to see the grownups open their gifts than she was to open her own. Strange girl, that one, Annie thought with a smile. But the smile faded, and her lips began to quiver as the heartache surfaced again.

She let herself cry to release some of the pain. Her beloved child had not been her only loss. The divorce from Caesar was like another death. The cloud of depression that surrounded him after Grace was killed had not only affected their marriage but also caused problems with her work and her faith.

She had begged him to forgive himself, and she constantly reminded him that he still had a wife who forgave him and loved him. But Caesar could not forgive himself for taking Grace along on a nighttime exploration, when the dangers were greater.

Annie had hated to walk away, especially considering Caesar’s severe injuries. But she could not go on living in spiritual doubt and constant sorrow. She had given Caesar every chance to recover, but when Grace died so had he. And yet she had never completely given up hope for him.

Annie liked to be in bed by 9 p.m. Early to bed, early to rise was her motto. Despite the memories that haunted her each night, a bit of reading or paper grading usually took her mind off the past, and she usually slept well and woke refreshed. But that had suddenly changed. Every night for three weeks she’d awoken at 11:11 p.m., the exact time of Grace’s death. The coroner had recorded 11:00 p.m. as the time of her passing, but the watch Grace was wearing when she fell had broken on impact, with the hands frozen at 11:11 p.m. Annie momentarily thought about the irony of the broken watch. For all three of them, time had stood still.

Caesar had tortured himself with the number. He developed an obsession for finding those same digits on a clock twice a day. He said it was an omen, a constant reminder of his failure as a man and a father.

The watch had been a present from Caesar. It marked Grace’s first excavation trip, and she had worn it ever since. Grace loved that watch. Before the funeral, Annie had the watch’s crystal replaced, and she put it in the casket next to her daughter. She wished now that she had kept it.

Annie closed her eyes and envisioned the inscription on the back of the watch. It read:

Grace had loved the watch’s design. It looked like an Incan calendar and also had a compass, which Caesar said was to keep her on the straight and narrow. That had made everyone laugh, since Grace was not only virtuous and centered but also had the keenest sense of direction of anyone either of her parents had ever known. Annie smiled at the memory and was thankful she had so many other beautiful memories of Grace and Caesar.

Annie set the papers on the night table. She yawned, pulled the shawl up to her neck, and curled up next to Miley. She soon fell asleep.

Annie felt Miley’s warmth against her side. Still in a dream state, she imagined Grace curling up next to her as a child. Suddenly she felt a jolt of electricity course through her body. She sat bolt upright, trembling so furiously that she startled the dog. She was wide awake and fully alert. She looked at the clock—11:11 p.m. She heard a faint whisper, or maybe she only imagined it, saying, “Are you ready to fly?”

She pinched herself to make sure she was really awake. She was. It had happened again.

“Are you ready to fly?” the voice had asked. She had always been ready to fly. From the time she was a child, she often dreamed she was flying low across a river, her fingers gently brushing the water as she glided over it. But the voice she’d heard was not a voice of carefree childhood dreams. It was a voice of sad desperation.

Annie pressed a palm against her forehead. These can’t be premonitions, she thought. That kind of thing only happens to Caesar.

She corrected herself out loud. “Happened—past tense, Annie. He’s not in your life anymore, remember?” She hadn’t spoken to her ex-husband in nearly three years, since the day of the divorce. He often called her, though, in the middle of the night, but he never said anything. Now when she answered a late-night call, she picked up the phone without a greeting. Sometimes it took him twenty minutes to hang up, but she never hung up first, and neither ever said a word. In some strange way, she had come to cherish those calls, despite the sadness that always followed.

She thought about Caesar’s gift, his ability to sense or see in his mind’s eye when something was going to happen. It was always linked to some terrible event—plane crashes, natural disasters, random killings that eventually wound up on the news. He would see scenes of events days in advance and describe to her in great detail what would happen. It was a gift, he had said, that ran in the family. Relatives reported similar experiences as far back as he could remember.

One day, after he’d related one of his premonitions, she told him, “You’re freaking me out with this stuff, Caesar.” He responded by making light of his gift, claiming his visions were coincidences or lucky guesses.

Then Grace joined the act. She admitted to “seeing the future,” though her glimpses were related to everyday items like lost keys or an unannounced letter on its way from her grandfather.

Stranger still, Grace seemed to be able to control her gift. Caesar even claimed her navigation skills were aided by her ability to peek into the future. “That’s what makes her a human GPS,” he’d said.

Grace’s precognition had never been confirmed. There were no visits to specialists or tests with Zener cards. It was all just fun and games for Caesar and Grace, while Annie observed their gifts in silence, hoping they wouldn’t turn out to be a curse.

And now Annie was having premonitions. That’s not a gift I want, she thought as she rose from the bed. She went into the bathroom and washed her face. Caesar had tried to ease her fears by pointing out the positive aspects of his and Grace’s gift. “At least we won’t get eaten by bears,” he liked to say, which always made her smile.

Then he came back from Peru alone, and there was no more joking, no more smiling. The premonitions and visions of terrible future events also ceased, as far as she knew, anyway. In fact, Caesar hardly spoke a word to her at all when he returned to the States. They had grieved separately, though his grieving was more like self-loathing.

Annie’s father had finally explained to her why Grace’s body had been flown back without Caesar. He was sitting in a Peruvian jail cell, charged with reckless endangerment while the authorities decided his fate. “That’s as far as those snakes in the grass took it, darlin’, reckless endangerment,” Galton had told her. “I made sure he was safely aboard a plane before I skipped town myself. Took a good deal of finessing to get him out of there without him doing time.”

Annie had once overheard Caesar talking to her father in the living room just before their divorce. Caesar was blaming his gift, claiming it had failed him. If he had sensed any danger, he wouldn’t have attempted to work so late at night, much less drag his daughter along. Annie remembered the powerlessness in his eyes and the desperate need to understand it all.

Her father wasn’t much help in consoling her husband. He was too bent on trying to talk Caesar out of believing in foolish premonitions and visions of the future to actually comfort him. Lionel Galton was a tough Texan who had his own ideas about the way things were.

Annie was close to her father now. That wasn’t the case three years ago. Their relationship had been strained when she had insisted that he knock some sense into her husband, and he had refused. “That’s none of my business,” he had told her each time the subject came up. At the time, Annie felt that she had no one else to turn to since he was the only father-figure Caesar had. Though he never told Caesar to get some help, ultimately, it was Lionel Galton who tried to talk her into “sticking it out,” as he put it. All she could say in response was, “I tried, Daddy.”

Her father had reached out to him back then, just not in the way she wanted. Annie wanted her father to “fix” her husband. He had a lot of power in business, and she was used to daddy making things right.

She and Caesar had known each other since childhood. Their fathers had been best friends and neighbors. Just before he succumbed to pancreatic cancer, Caesar Sr. asked her father to look after his son. Caesar was seventeen. Lionel Galton always lived up to his word. He took Caesar in to live with their family. For a time, things were great, and life was good for all of them. Then, as young adults, when Caesar and Annie fell in love, Lionel Galton was beside himself. “You two are practically sister ’n’ brother! This just ain’t right!”

He eventually came to terms with the situation, and after the dust settled, Annie knew her father still loved Caesar like a son, although he never admitted it. Lionel and Caesar butted heads over mundane issues from then on. One item of contention was Annie’s name; Caesar liked to call her Anna, because he liked having his own variation all to himself. “Quit calling her Anna, boy,” Lionel once barked. “That’s not the name we put on her birth certificate!”

Caesar had replied hotly, “Well we didn’t name our daughter Gracie, Lionel. Quit calling her that.”

Caesar never knew that Lionel winked at Annie behind his back over the name incident. Lionel simply loved to tease, especially those he liked and respected. But that was back when things were good.

Annie left the bathroom and headed downstairs for some warm milk. She lived in the large house alone now, save for Miley. Caesar used to refer to it as a three-story “mansion.” She figured he would probably consider it a waste of space for just one person, but she couldn’t bear to leave it. There were too many memories here.

She had to pass Grace’s room to get to the stairs. She had kept it just as it was three years ago, a shrine to Grace’s short life. But Annie kept the door closed and rarely looked inside. She walked past the room and headed down to the kitchen.

Annie set a small pan of milk on the stove, then turned on the radio. John Fogerty’s song “Premonition” was playing softly. When she listened to the lyrics, she felt the back of her neck prickle. She shook it off and told herself not to be creeped out by a song. She forced herself to sing along. “I must be crazy, I must be seein’ things,” she sang softly.

She heard a noise coming from the living room. She turned off the radio and listened, but all she heard was the tick, tick, tick of the kitchen clock above the stove. She reached into the back of the cabinet under the sink and grabbed the .38 Special she kept hidden there. She tried to keep her hands from trembling.

When she stepped into the dark living room she strained her eyes, wondering if her mind was playing tricks on her. She thought she could make out a shadowy figure against the wall as she inched toward the lamp in the corner. Despite the nightly waking of the past three weeks and the ghostly voices, she was not prepared for what happened next. She was struck dumb and rendered immobile, the gun frozen in her hand. She stood transfixed, barely believing her eyes while a hazy panoramic vision filled the large living room.

She could see Caesar, her father, Fiero, and some others unknown to her. Smoke was spreading everywhere, making it hard for her to see them. The figures suddenly evaporated, but she could still feel the danger they were in.

Annie felt a sudden heaviness that left her woozy. She felt as if she were falling. Suddenly she was in a confined space, the smoke turning to dust around her. She breathed it in, and it choked her. The falling sensation intensified, and she could faintly see her father and Caesar again. They were directly in front of her, terror-stricken as the ground rushed up to them. She was going to lose them, the two people she loved most in life.

The living room came rushing back into view, and she stood up, her heart racing, as the shadowy figure against the wall floated toward her. The apparition flew through her, whispering, “Are you ready to fly? Are you ready to fly?”

The voice was Grace’s. Her scent filled the air as Annie inhaled and realized it had been Grace reaching out these past three weeks. She was trying to warn her about Caesar and Lionel. They were in trouble, or they were going to be. Annie wasn’t sure.

Another chill went down Annie’s spine as the apparition floated back toward the wall, vanishing through it as it whispered the same question again. But now the word “fly” sounded like “die.” “Are you ready to die?”

When Annie could move again, she fell to her knees and put down the gun. Tears welled in her eyes.

This is what it must have been like for Caesar and Grace, with their so-called gift that allowed them to peer into the future. Grace had allowed Annie to experience it, but Annie wanted more. Silently she begged for the visions to return. So many questions remained. Where were they? And what were they doing there? Was it a future or past event? How much time did they have left?

Annie got up and rushed upstairs to get dressed. Then, with Miley in tow, she headed for the driveway. Middle of the night or not, she was going to see the only person who could answer her questions—Lady Adelaide.