"OK"

[sonreir]

Visionary


Dad could tell the future. Not in a positive way, mind. He wasn't like Aaron's father, who could look into your eyes and tell you whatever good news was headed your way next, or Joe's mom, who was adept at palmistry and had successfully predicted how many children each of the women who had come to her would bear. Most of Dad's prophecies ran toward the sort of grim "this terrible thing will happen on this date" variety.

Just what the terrible thing was varied, but it was always just that: terrible. It ranged from mild ("she's going to cut herself trying to peel that apple") to major ("the Garcia's house is going to burn down"). He did what he could to soften the blows and prevent them, whenever possible.

Dad was the only one we knew with the gift, and most of the other kids on the block said that they were jealous. It was nice, sometimes -- like when he told the Garcia family about the bad wiring in their attic, and they got it fixed and invited us over for a barbecue to celebrate not losing their house, or when Dad knew a bad storm was going to come through and knock power out to the region for four days, so he was able to warn everyone to stock up on extra non-perishable food and fuel for generators and camp stoves, and everyone in the neighborhood threw us a party afterward.

Mostly, though, it sucked. I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was twelve, because Dad kept having visions of me getting hit by a car. Ditto learning to drive -- I was almost eighteen before he finally let me, three years after all of my friends had learned how. He wouldn't let me bum rides from them, either, always citing the same thing: "I have visions of you dying in a terrible car accident, Sara, and I don't want them to become true."

Mom put up with it with a smile and good humor. She ran her own business out of the back of our house, selling potions and minor charms to those that weren't capable of performing the magic themselves, or who didn't want to take the time to make anything complex. Dad was able to tell her what she should or shouldn't take a chance on, when different people came to her asking for complicated things. He'd been able to tell her, for instance, that Mrs. Zade would be able to pay in four weeks (after a favorite aunt died and left her an inheritance), but that Mr. Mulligan shouldn't be trusted (as he was due, Dad said, to suffer an unexpected tax bill, and would use it to short Mom what she was owed). She appreciated what Dad could tell her, and endured what she couldn't change. I couldn't complain to her.

When I tried, she always told me the same thing: "He's trying to keep you safe, Sara."

My early childhood was probably the worst. Dad could foresee everything before it would happen. He'd be walking with me, holding my hand to help me cross the road, and see that in fifteen minutes, I'd trip over an uneven patch in the sidewalk and land funny, breaking my wrist. He wouldn't want it to happen, so instead of letting me walk, even up to the point he'd seen, he'd carry me. It wasn't always for big stuff, like the wrist, either. Oftentimes it was a simple, "I saw that you would fall and it would hurt, and I didn't want to let that happen."

I recognized that it came out of a place of love -- he did the same things for Mom -- but it drove me batty.

"Can't you just please let me be a normal kid?" I asked him, more than once.

His response was always the same: "I just don't want to see you hurt."

I rolled my eyes and dealt with it every time.


Not all of Dad's visions were about small stuff, the weather. Sometimes they were about big things -- like really big things. Dad foresaw that political extremists were going to attack the Prime Minister before it happened, and let him know. (The extremists were arrested and their plan was discovered before anyone could get hurt, thanks to a 'credible anonymous tip'.) He knew that the students at the mage's college fifteen miles away were going to screw up one of their summoning spells and accidentally bring forward a sending they couldn't contain, and he let the Dean know about that, too. (The students were watched carefully, and when things went awry, senior faculty members were on the scene to make sure that everything stayed where it was supposed to.) He refused accolades for these things, saying that he was just doing his job, the way that he was supposed to, but I saw how it stressed him out.

"It's my duty, Sara," he said, when I suggested that he could quit -- that if he did, he'd have more time to be a dad and maybe fewer gray hairs. "I'm the only one that can."

"You don't have to worry about everything," I fought back.

"But I do," Dad always finished. That was usually when Mom would step in and tell me to let it go and don't interfere in grownup stuff.

"Be glad," said Mom. "Be glad that you didn't inherit his talents."

I was glad. Mom and Dad had gotten me tested when I was thirteen, the normal age for talent to begin surfacing. When the test proctor came in with the results, they shrugged.

"A minor gift for charms," they said, "and perhaps a glimmer of talent for foretelling. No strong talents."

They were disappointed, I could tell, but I was relieved -- relieved that I wouldn't have to fill Dad's shoes, that I wouldn't become him.

I saw what it was like to be him. I didn't want that life. Dad had a thousand things that he was constantly worried about at any given junction. He'd given up on trying to keep me safe after I hit adulthood, respecting my decision to be told only when it was something that would threaten life and/or limb. He didn't let me know, for instance, that if I opted to split a soda with my friend Cath at the movies (deciding to be cheap and not buy my own) that I'd end up with mono and feel miserable for a month. He didn't tell me that, when high school ended, my boyfriend was going to break up with me, citing "long distance" as the reason why we couldn't make it work while secretly hooking up with my best friend behind my back.

"I don't want to go through life afraid of everything!" I told him -- and so he didn't tell me anything that wasn't of grave importance.

That was our compromise. That was what we came up with to keep the peace.

All of that shattered when my gift declared itself.


I was a sophomore in college, studying psychology. I had some vague idea of what I'd do with the degree, nothing concrete. I went to a local school, and my loans were small. I knew I'd be able to pay them back. I tried not to worry about anything.

And then I started having visions, same as Dad.

It started small: I reached out to hold my boyfriend's hand, and had a vision of him receiving bad news -- that his cat, one that he'd owned since he was in middle school, the first real pet that had been just his -- had cancer.

I started, when I saw it, and jerked my hand away.

"Babe?" he said. "Sara? What's wrong?"

"Um," I told him. "Nothing, I just remembered I have to work on a paper for my Social Psych class, so I can't stay out too late."

He accepted this without pressing, and when he texted me later to tell me that Socks was sick, I did my best to sound shocked and sympathetic -- easier to manage through a written medium.

I called Dad, after I got the text.

"Hey," I said, unsure of how to broach the subject. "How are you and Mom?"

"I saw, Sara," said Dad heavily. "I thought..."

"Maybe I can ignore it," I told him, my voice coming all in a rush. "Maybe if I just pretend that I don't see anything, it won't -- I won't have to -- "

"It doesn't work that way," said Dad. "It's not...you can't turn it off. You'll know, and you'll have a choice to act."

"And if I don't?" I pressed.

Dad sighed into the phone. "You can choose not to act," he said, "but then you'll be responsible for whatever happens. Remember the Garcias?"

"Yeah," I said. "You saved their house."

"In the vision I had," said Dad, "I saw their youngest boy, Matias, dying. I thought, what if that were Sara?, and that..."

"Dad," I interrupted. "I don't -- "

"I can't not do anything," he continued, as though I hadn't said anything. "It's not a choice, Sara."

I bit my lip. "But what if it could be?"

Another sigh. "It won't be."

"I have to go," I blurted.

"Sara," said Dad, just before I hung up. "Come home."


I didn't last another semester at school before dropping out.

I could have lived with it, learned to grin and bear it, even, but on my first day of Language and Cognition, the professor walked into the room, began discussing the syllabus, and I saw, with sudden, horrifying clarity, that she would be dead before the end of the year, killed by a tumor she didn't know she had.

I fled the lecture hall, drove back to my apartment, flung the few things I'd need immediately into a duffel bag, and drove home.

Dad was waiting when I got there.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry."

I didn't say anything, just cried.


I sent an email to the professor. I let her know what I'd seen. She didn't write me back, but I heard from friends later on that she'd gone to the doctor, that they'd found the tumor and she was undergoing treatment.

It was the first time I'd told anyone what their future would be, and I didn't know what to think.

"You did the right thing," said Dad, and I knew that he was right, but it hung over me like a cloud: I told someone they were going to die.

"It's better to know than not know," said Mom. "This way, she can get treatment, before she's at a point where neither magic nor medicine can save her."

I accepted this platitude for what it was, and tried not to dwell on my actions. It wasn't hard -- whereas before I'd always been inclined to think too long on the past, now I was trying desperately to keep my thoughts anchored to the present moment.

"It gets easier," said Dad, after a day in which I'd seen more than I wanted to -- nothing truly unavoidable, but nothing terrible, either -- just a long litany, little pieces of awfulness that added up to a mountain of misery.

I didn't believe him.

The one kindness was that I didn't know anything about myself. My own future was like a dark room I was moving through slowly -- there were things, here and there, that I might stumble over, but I couldn't see them, couldn't avoid them in time.

Dad could see, but he didn't tell me.

I could see his, and I didn't tell him.

We didn't need to discuss it.


Dad kept seeing things, and he kept trying to pull me in.

"I saw..." he'd start, and it would be something about the weather or one of our neighbors, someone we cared about. He'd go to interfere, and I'd stay put.

"If it's going to happen, it's going to happen" became my line. "I don't want to interfere."

The professor I'd had, the one I'd sent an email about cancer, had died anyway. Everyone I had tried to warn about the awful things that were going to happen to them, had experienced them, even the ones that had believed me. I'd warned one of my friends from college that he was going to be fired if he was late to work one more time, and he, heeding my warning, left an hour early -- only to be laid off a week later, something I hadn't seen coming. When I warned Mom that she was going to cut herself cutting an avocado badly enough that she'd need stitches, she nodded and thanked me, only to hurt herself trying to cut something else later on.

Everyone becomes complacent, I thought. There's no fixing anything. Sometimes all we can do is be prepared.

I started taking that to heart instead. When I knew a friend was going to get dumped, instead of saying anything beforehand, I made sure to be available when she called and wanted to cry, and made the drive up to the college to hang out with her, eat ice cream, and talk about how shitty her ex was, dumping her for a girl he'd met at the campus rec center.

When I saw that Dad was going to sprain his ankle badly, trying to rake leaves in the front yard, I casually threw a couple of ice packs into the freezer, helped him hobble into the house and ice his ankle when it happened.

"You saw," he said. "And you prepared."

I wondered how to tell him, it isn't the same. I saw, and I prepared, but I didn't dread it, the way that he did. I didn't agonize over it, and I didn't feel a need to tell anyone. I adopted the same approach I'd asked him to take with me: unless it was life-threatening, I didn't intervene.

"It's our responsibility to warn everyone," said Dad. "We're the only ones that can" -- but I didn't want to believe him.


I got a job in the hospital, working in the ER. I did patient processing as they came in. I figured that the ER was a safe place to be -- the worst had already happened, and anyway, for those where the worst had not happened, it wasn't my job to predict anything. All I was supposed to do was take down contact and insurance information. It was safe, and the few times it wasn't -- when I could tell that the kid with a high fever had meningitis, for instance, and would die unless we did something fast -- I could say something to the nurses or the attending, and it was their problem. I didn't see anything horrible. I didn't see anything that I had to tell the patients about. The ER wasn't fun, but it was a place it was possible for me to work, and it paid well.

Around the time that I started working in the ER, when I was just beginning to think about moving out of my parents' house and maybe getting an apartment, thinking about going back to school and getting back on my feet, Dad started having visions about something worse than usual.

He'd had them as long as I could remember -- always something dire, always something where he was quietly able to do something -- but these were different. It was something nebulous, at least at first. They weren't clear pictures.

"Sara," he said, cornering me at home. "Can you see anything?"

I didn't lean into the gift, the way that he did. I didn't want to see. At work, I'd nudge things a little, try to feel if there was anything we were missing, but only in cases where there was something else at play. Someone who needed stitches, I wouldn't push, but if someone came in claiming they had chest pains, I would.

I didn't want to use that lean to help Dad, though.

"Nah," I said. I didn't feel like explaining that I wasn't going to try. "Nothing."

"Try," he urged me, and I shrugged.

"I don't feel anything," I lied.

The truth was, I did feel a pull, something huge from the future, something coming down the pipeline -- but I didn't want to know.

I thought that everything would be fine, if I didn't interfere. Everything would be still be OK, somehow, and if it wasn't, it wasn't meant to be.

If it's not me, it's someone else, I thought, or else it was meant to happen.

Dad didn't see it that way, but then again, he'd saved more people than he'd lost.


Dad got more details about the big bad thing, leaning into it and figuring out when and where, if not what.

"The neighboring city," he fretted. "Forty minutes away. Something bad, Sara. Are you sure...?"

"Yeah," I said. "I can't see anything."

I could feel it, lurking at the edges of my periphery. Don't you want to know?

Dad kept focusing. Maybe he focused a little too hard, because next thing I knew, something I could have predicted but didn't happened to him: he exhausted himself and ended up in a hospital bed.

The official diagnosis was pneumonia. Dad was older, and he'd always been asthmatic. They wanted to keep him for a couple of days, at least until they'd pumped him full of antibiotics and he was back on the road to recovery.

"It'll be good for you to have some R&R," said Mom serenely.

He looked over at me. "Sara," he started.

"Dad, no."

"Sara, I've seen it." He grasped at the covers, trying to make a point. "It -- there's going to be something bad, I can feel it. Something awful. People will die if you don't intervene, Sara."

I took a deep breath. "We don't know that, Dad."

"You have to find out," he said. "I think I know where, but..."

I shook my head.

"It's not up to us," I told him.

"You're being stubborn," he warned me. "It's tonight. People will die if we don't intervene." Unspoken, but implied: you're the only one who can stop this.

"Dad," I said. "It's not our responsibility. Maybe it never was."

I left for the night before he could say anything else.

When Mom called, I didn't answer.


I drove myself home, unlocked the door and walked upstairs to collapse on my bed, the vision still lurking at the edges, waiting for me to call it forward.

Do I want to know? I thought. Is there anything I can do?

I called it forward, and I saw.

Tonight, I thought. A chemical plant on the outskirts of town, some kind of explosion. There's a tank leaking and they don't know it yet.

I thought for a moment, then looked up the number for the facility.

"Hi," I said, when someone picked up the phone. "This is going to sound insane, but..."

"Lemme guess," said the nice-sounding women on the other end of the line. "You're calling about the leak in tank 3."

I processed this slowly. "Um, yeah."

"You're just about the twentieth person we've had call tonight. Thank you, it's being addressed right now. We appreciate y'all's help."

She hung up, and I stared at the phone, wondered what to say.

The twentieth?

I started laughing, as it hit me. I laughed until I cried, and then I sobbed for a good hour.


I went to see Dad the next day.

"Nothing on the news," he said, dropping the remote. He looked -- pleased. Exhausted, but pleased. "I assume you did your duty."

"I did," I told him cheerily. "I called in."

"See?" he said, triumphant. "If you hadn't..."

"Nothing would have have happened," I said. "I was the twentieth person to call in."

He looked genuinely surprised. "The twentieth?"

I took a deep breath. "Dad," I said. "What if I told you, your gift isn't rare at all? What if I told you, there are hundreds if not thousands of people just in the tricities area alone? All of them working in tandem, sharing the burden, and making sure that nothing truly awful happens, but never taking it solely on themselves to know everything?"

Dad laid back in silence, stunned.

"It's not just us?" he asked. "It's not just me?"

"No," I told him, smiling. "It's not. It never has been."

He lapsed back into silence, so quiet that for a moment I wondered if I'd done something wrong, if he was still breathing.

"Sara?" said Dad finally.

"Yeah?"

"Thank you."


Dad doesn't tell me much about the future anymore.

He never told me about mine, but now he doesn't tell me about Mom's, or the neighbors, or the big bad things that will happen in the world that I must help him fix.

He's decided that maybe, just maybe, he doesn't need to know everything.

Maybe, just maybe, he doesn't have to lean into his gift.

So far, everything has been OK.