2. Cheribelle #2
Thankfully, she did so. As she settled, I lifted my gaze to study her and the canvas she was beginning to fill.
What do I see? What do I see?
Did I leave the oven on? No, when did you last cook?
Concentrate ! I am!
Am I doing too much?
Yo! Concentrate on the colors!
Shaking my head, I banished the commotion building in my brain and poured my focus into the woman sitting across from me. And finally, with all those background thoughts fading, I watched as she revealed herself to me.
It started with a simmering, lime-sick sort of smoke that rose up from the floor, leaving streaks of rot wherever it reached or where its bubbles popped.
Anxiety. That made sense. Although my client was perfectly poised, I had long since learned that people—especially women—often withheld entire storms within themselves. Women had violent maelstroms of acrid emotion bottled up beneath a placid veneer.
“Breathe in deeply through your nose,” I murmured as I continued observing the tapestry forming around her. “Hold it in your chest, then release.”
Of course, the anxiety wasn’t the only thing filling the empty space of my small reading room. No, there were also alchemical swirls of deep, decrepit blue, clinging to anything it could get itself on like lingering cigarette smoke.
Dread.
There were other streaks that would occasionally lance through the mess: the bright red mist of rage, the yellow lightning strikes of insecurity, the dull gray clouds of denial.
It was a cacophony of colors all swirling and fighting each other, almost enough to make my eyes hurt. The busy display wasn’t metaphorical for me, wasn’t abstract. It was as real and tangible as anything else.
Because I was an empath.
“Reach into those deep, deep parts of you and open them. Allow the fates to move through you.”
I wasn’t an empath in the way the worst people in the world always loved to claim on social media, of course.
I was one in the oracle kind of way. The magical bloodline sort of way.
As in, actually saw emotions in a synesthesia sort of way, with even the most hidden secrets and guarded feelings being laid bare.
Every single eldest daughter in the Donmoue family had been given some sort of gift of sight, and I was no exception.
My mother had had precognition, which she’d turned into being quite the popular psychic personality.
Her mother had been a medium, and able to communicate with and channel the souls of the dead.
Her mother had been a telepath, and so on and so on before that.
All leading down to little ol’ me, the emotion detector.
I wasn’t going to lie, it sure came in handy to see everything a person was feeling—even things they didn’t realize themselves—but it certainly wasn’t as showy as being able to see the literal future.
So, after a very long time, I’d made peace with not following in the footsteps of the great Ophelia Donmoue and letting Haus de Donmoue gracefully close.
But then my mother died.
It had been surprisingly early for one of our kind. She’d only been seventy. My mother had had me at forty-five, so we hadn’t had a lot of time together. I’d suddenly found myself unwilling to let go of the business my mother and grandmother had built.
So, I’d decided to take up the mantle of Ophelia Donmoue, née Annie, and become her official psychic heir. It was going okayish, or at least as okay as one could imagine for someone with no precognition at all.
What I did have was ADHD .
“Your spirit is crowded,” I said, still staring at the woman and drinking in everything I could about her—not just the technicolor miasma behind her. “You are afraid, but also afraid of said fear. You are conflicted. The fates cannot wade through such murkiness.”
The woman took a little breath. “You can sense all that?”
“I only know what the fates tell me,” I lied. Yeah, I felt a bit guilty for it, but nobody was going to come see an empath, especially when the term had been hijacked by pop culture as an excuse for people to cover up shitty behavior—not always, of course, but too often.
Or maybe I was a bit sour about it because I was an actual empath.
“What is it that you seek?” I asked, closing my eyes and mentally going over everything I noticed.
“Clarity.”
“I see,” I said, perhaps a little ironically. But already, I was turning my mental picture of her this way and that, my mind beginning to rattle off anything and everything about her.
I can see her wedding-ring tan above her ring. Must have been fiddling with it nervously before she entered and jammed it back on too hard. In my head, a mental image of her twisting it up and down the digit played.
If she’s gotten it lower on her finger, she’s lost weight recently.
Judging by the anxiety, I would say it’s from stress rather than purposeful effort.
Fingernails bitten. Manicure chipped. Fallen behind in self-care?
Clothes are expensive, designer?
but wear and the way they sit scream that they’re from a while ago.
Did she have wealth and lose it?
Or a gift from someone who no longer likes spoiling her?
Shoes?
Expensive but scuffed visibly at the toe.
Purse has signs of wear.
Eyes: red, slightly puffy. Allergies, or cried within the last hour ?
Occasional sniffle and slight smearing of makeup leans toward the latter.
All those details, combined with the growing bloom of darker and darker emotions wafting out of her, had me reaching a conclusion. I knew a broken heart when I saw one.
“How long have you been worried your partner has been cheating on you?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.
The gasp the woman gave stroked my ego, but it was difficult to be too celebratory when I was interacting with a woman who had a very difficult decision coming up in her life.
“How did you know that?”
As much as I would have loved to tell her that I was just noticing the little things and seeing the emotions she was trying so desperately to keep contained within her, that would sort of be giving up the schtick, and without the schtick, I doubted people would come to see me and continue my mother’s legacy.
After all, seeing a psychic was cool, while seeing someone who dealt exclusively with pesky fee-fees ( come on, call it feelings .
Fee-fees’s just disrespectful! ) was something that insurance could cover—provided the therapist was within network, of course.
“Comes with the job,” I said, less flippantly than I normally would. Because hey, while I was neurodivergent, as the doc liked to say, I could still read the room. “What is it that makes you feel this way, but also makes you doubt yourself?”
“It’s… it’s silly, really.”
I set my palms on the table, affixing the woman with the most grown-up look I could muster. “None of that.”
“Pardon?”
“In this room, we do not dismiss ourselves, we do not push our instincts away. You feel what you feel for a reason, and even if your partner isn’t cheating, it is important to acknowledge why you have these anxieties.”
It was a bit strange to discuss this in my overly formal, performance voice, but I couldn’t really drop the act now. It would ruin the illusion and possibly ruin whatever revelation my client was about to have.
“Oh, well, uh… it’s a lot of little things.
He always had a healthy sexual appetite before, but now, he barely even touches me.
And suddenly, he keeps getting project after project at work, which requires him to stay late or travel.
While that’s always been a part of the deal, it’s never been so frequent.
“At first, I told myself it was stress. He was gunning for a promotion and just spreading himself a little too thin. But a couple of weeks ago I got an email warning that one of the credit card companies we used had a major leak and we should change all our passwords. Normally he handles all the finances, but since he’s been so busy, I thought I would do it.
When I logged on, I saw purchases from my favorite lingerie boutique and an expensive jeweler he used to take me to when we were young and newly in love. ”
It took quite a bit of willpower not to grit my teeth and comfort her with an “oh, girl!” but somehow, I managed. Yet, as the woman kept talking, I became more convinced that my observations were exactly right.
Then again, when weren’t they?
“I got excited, thinking it was for my birthday. But then, when my birthday rolled around, he got me a gift card to the arcade the kids like to go to and a gym membership. I already have a gym membership.”
Oh dear.
“Thank you for acknowledging the instincts your ancestors have given you. Now that you have opened yourself to the truth, I shall attempt to commune with the fates again.”
Now I was in a moral quandary. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the woman’s husband was cheating.
Between what she told me and everything else I’d observed about her, it was like a neon sign.
But at the same time, I couldn’t really know for sure.
While ADHD sometimes felt like a superpower and sometimes like a curse, in the grand scheme of things, it was neither.
So, what to do? Did I tell her to kick the cheating scumbag to the curb and risk being wrong, thus torpedoing a relationship that might be salvageable? Or did I cop out?
Neither seemed like a great situation, and words my mother had told me long ago floated to the surface in my head.
“ When people come to me, often they don’t actually need to know the future. They just want assurance that they’re making the right decision in the now.”
All right, assurance. I could do that.
“The fates have spoken.”
“Really? What are they saying? Did you really see it in that crystal ball?”
I didn’t answer that, instead plowing ahead. “The fates do not wish for me to dictate the path you shall walk on, as it is your choice and your choice alone.”