The Sensitive Lunatic

It’s hard to muster a nonchalant tone when the hair is standing on the back of your neck and you need to fight hard to control the urge to shudder. “You didn’t recognize her,” I say in my best attempt at a calm voice. “And she hasn’t been back since so I wouldn’t worry about it.” The phrase oh fuck plays over and over again in my mind. “It’s probably just all that medicine you have to take,” I say in an attempt to reassure Mother, although I know this isn’t the case.

When she’s tired, Mother’s memory isn’t so good and she seems a bit out of it. This is not unlike my normal state during the Daughter’s sleepless first two years. On this particular visit, though, Mother couldn’t have been more lucid. As I prepared to back out of the alley to leave, she stood at the car window as she always does. Instead of waving to the Daughter and laughing to herself at the inappropriate comment she makes to the two year old, usually something along the lines of, ‘Don’t worry - - you’ll be as good looking as your brother someday”, she instead says to me, “I need to tell you something. I didn’t want to tell your father because I don’t want him to think he is going to die.” She says this in the type of tone that normal people likely use when discussing matters of a very serious nature, a tone that we never use. We simply ignore matters of a very serious nature until they have us by the throat. Then we either joke about the issue, rely on viciously bitter sarcasm, or simply turn on each other like a pack of rabid dogs. But very rarely, if ever, do we have a serious conversation about it. Mother’s tone alone is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.

I shift into neutral and roll the window down all the way. “Last Thursday, when (Sibling #6) stayed at your house, I had a visitor in the night.”

This is where the goose bumps kick in and a knot of dread begins to form in my stomach. “What?” I ask.

“I woke up in the middle of the night,” she continues, “and a woman dressed all in white was standing at the foot of my bed. For a minute I thought it was (Sibling #6) that had woken up and needed something. Then I remembered she was at your house and I realized it was some strange woman standing there. The woman turned and walked out of the room so I got up to see where she went. I followed her into the kitchen. She turned and looked at me. It was a woman I didn’t know with a big, round, moon face and then she just disappeared.” The repetitive oh, fuck begins to play in my head, the speed of its repetition an equal match to my now racing heart.

At this point I attempt my best calm voice and try to reassure her, but I can see it isn’t working. She is convinced the woman was a summons and as Father is due to have surgery, she assumes it is for him. After I pull out, I begin the calls to the siblings. Visions are on par with hospitalizations; everyone needs to be notified. I call Sibling #3 and we discuss it in unfamiliar serious tones. She is not pleased that I chose to share this information with her when I knew her husband would be working a night shift. She fears the night terrors will come calling. I call Sibling #4 and she attempts to joke about it. I remind her of the picture hanging in her house and the laughter dies in her throat. The conversation continues in very serious tones.

Sibling #4 has a few pictures of Father’s relatives hanging in her home. We don’t really know who any of these people are as we had limited contact with Father’s relatives growing up. Much of his family was involved in a lifestyle that makes for popular Al Capone type movie plots, hence the very limited contact. These family pictures are all from the 1920s or earlier and everyone is dressed very formally with equally solemn expressions. A man in one of these pictures has always stood out in my mind. And, although I’ve only seen the picture a handful of times, I could describe the man perfectly. He stands out from the other people in the picture because he has a big, round, moon face.

Sibling #4 gasps audibly when I mention the picture of the guy with the round face. “Oh, my God! I know exactly which person you are talking about! He does have a big, round, moon face.”

“Look,” I say when she falls silent, considering the implications of this, “I have to go to work. Call Sibling #2 and warn her.”

A normal person would see this as a highly irrational response to what is likely only a nightmare brought on by pre-surgery stress. Despite our lunatic tendencies, my siblings and I tend to be fairly rational and have chosen careers that require a high degree of rationality. We count among our numbers an engineer, a lawyer, a law enforcement agent, an occupational therapist, and an archaeologist turned teacher that has even taught college level scientific methodology courses. We are not too arrogant to recognize, though, that the universe is vast in its mysteries and science has yet to unlock many of them. Mother’s visions are one such mystery.

A day or two before her brother died suddenly of a heart attack, Mother’s already deceased sister appeared to her in a dream. We all remember this vividly because Mother was so disturbed by the dream at the time. Then she got the phone call telling her she needed to get on the next flight home for her brother’s funeral.

Sibling #4 has a similar ability. She was living across the country from the rest of us when she got a sudden vision of our great aunt. She called home, only to find out that the great aunt had been rushed to the hospital, underwent emergency heart surgery, and died on the operating room table. This is the same sibling that was walking up the steps of the stage in high school to collect a raffle prize she had just won, only she was about thirty seconds too early as they hadn’t actually drawn her name as the winner yet. So, when one of the lunatics gets disturbed by a round faced woman appearing to her in her sleep, we all take notice.

It seems to be only the dark haired siblings, well the girls at least, that have inherited this sensitivity. Perhaps that is why they are frequently such witches. I don’t know if the brother, who is also dark haired, has this ability. If I call and ask him, he will likely utter an unspeakable oath and then hang up on me, something he has done to my siblings and I in the past when we purposely taunted him with details of our love for Obama during that historic election season. The brother lives in a red state.

Sibling #2, the eldest dark haired girl, once had an interesting exchange with a new therapy patient at a nursing home where she worked. The new patient was a blind woman from the Deep South. After spending a few moments with Sibling #2, the woman looked up at her with her unseeing eyes and said, “You’re sensitive, aren’t you?”

Taken aback, Sibling #2 could only respond, “What?”

The woman nodded her head and smiled. “I know, honey. I can feel it. You’ve got the sensitivity.”

Sibling #2 moved into Nanny’s house after Nanny had died and the stories Sibling #2 would tell of sudden presences and her dog frantically barking at and following such a presence as it moved from room to room, frequently raised the hair on the back of my neck. Sibling #2’s sensitivity isn’t so much the dreams, but the actual ability to see or feel ethereal presences, if you will. At her horse farm where she does hippotherapy, horse therapy for handicapped children, she has become friends of sorts with the reclusive artist that owned the property some time before her. He has been dead for many years. One afternoon, one of her clients, a small, handicapped boy of about six, was being a real pain in the ass and giving her a hard time. She had him stand on the cement square, outside of the riding arena, to await his turn while she held the reins of a horse another handicapped child was riding around the arena. She had to cut the ride short, though, when the child waiting for his turn began screaming. He was, inexplicably, sitting in the barrel of water that is left out on the cement square for the horses to drink from. Due both to the height of the barrel and the nature of his condition, it was simply impossible for him to have gotten into that barrel by himself. No one else was at the arena and the child had no idea how he had gotten into that barrel.

Father’ s surgery proved to be uneventful. Sibling #4, meanwhile, has located a woman dressed in white with a big, round face in one of the family photos she has. We are not sure who this woman is. We have since learned, though, that Father’s cousin, a relative with a big, round face that Father looks after because she is mentally incapable of caring for herself, was admitted to the hospital the morning after Mother’s woman in white appeared. We all breathed a sigh of relief. Not even a tin foil hat can protect us from some things.