Chapter 20
It begins as a game.
When I ask outright if my father thinks he might be an oracle, he laughs and says, “Me? An oracle? Well … I don’t see why not.
” So I devise a project: for each day in the month of October, we will try out a different form of divination.
It turns out there are more to choose from than I had ever imagined.
There are the well-known ones, like palmistry (palm reading) and tasseomancy (the analysis of tea leaves).
But then there are the more obscure varieties: scarpomancy (telling someone’s fortune by studying their worn-in shoes), tyromancy (the reading of cheese), and apantomancy (the interpretation of chance encounters with animals).
There are some we decide to forgo, like anthropomancy (which involves human sacrifice) and umbilicomancy (the reading of umbilical cords), but most are fair game.
The format of this project works well for us because it is open-ended.
Unlike games with complicated rules or films with opaque storylines, our divination process allows us to interpret the signs as we see fit.
My father can ramble in any direction. There is no need for logic or linearity.
We are free to make our own kind of sense.
Sometimes the results are whimsical. On the day we try bibliomancy—foretelling by choosing a random passage from a book—we begin with a simple question: “What does the universe want to tell us today?” I have my father close his eyes and select a random book from the hundreds of spines that line our shelves.
We ready ourselves for profundity, but he somehow bypasses the deep thinkers (Kafka, Rumi, Laozi) and lands on a faded cookbook of Canadian recipes, where his hand fumbles before falling on the page for “Nova Scotian Hodge Podge.” We laugh at the name for what is essentially a vegetable stew, but not wanting to defy the fates, we make it for dinner that night.
Then there is the day we try favomancy, which involves throwing a handful of beans on the ground and interpreting the pattern in which they fall.
Dad is in a low mood on this day, and although his bean toss reveals what looks like a rainbow to me, his eyes well up with tears when I ask what it means to him.
“I shouldn’t be alive,” he says, weeping. “See?” He points to all the beans but one. “All of my friends are dead. I’m the only one left.”
My instinct is to try to talk him out of his sorrowful interpretation, but that wouldn’t be in the spirit of our project.
He sees what he sees. So I comfort him, assure him I am happy he is still here with me, clean up the beans, and make him a cup of cinnamon tea.
Within a few minutes, he is his usual upbeat self.
For him, it’s as though nothing happened, but for me, it’s a flash of his hidden inner world.
There’s so much still bubbling there—fear, despair, delight, awe—if only I knew how to access it.
Nina thinks our divination project is ridiculous.
I try to keep her in the loop when we have our weekly catchups, but she has little patience for my dispatches from the occult, as she calls them.
She says I’m overtaxing our father and compromising his remaining capacity.
I explain that it’s a creative pursuit—it gives us new things to talk about and helps me meet Dad on a different level where he can be an authority.
“But he’s not an authority,” she says one day over the phone. “Just remember that.”
“How do you know? He’s insightful and inventive.
He’s not just a lesser version of his former self.
” I can tell she thinks I’m in denial, and it’s possible she’s right, but I continue: “I just don’t see why Alzheimer’s has to be so depressing.
Why is it all about decline? Why can’t it be about creation, too?
It’s not like I’m making him do things he doesn’t want to do. He enjoys it.”
I can hear Nina sigh.
“Anyway, we’re almost done with it,” I say. “October is nearly over. Then we’ll move on to something else.”
“How about something rooted in reality next time?” she suggests.
I realize that Nina is having trouble relinquishing control of my father’s care, even from across the ocean.
But the more time I spend here, the less I subscribe to her philosophy of trying to keep him “on track.” It seems more humane—and interesting—for me to go where he leads, not the other way around.
When we hang up the phone, I stare out the kitchen window.
It’s true autumn now. Long gone are the bright days of September that might as well still be summer.
Now is the brown crispy time when death is in the air.
There’s an urgency to it (savor every fleeting moment of sunlight) but also a futility (winter is close at hand).
I sift through a bowl of apples and bite into one that tastes both fresh and fermented, rich with a hint of decay, like the season itself.
“Who was that on the telephone?” my father asks from the doorway of the kitchen. I hand him an apple, and he crunches into it with gusto.
“Nina,” I say.
“Nina. Nina … Now, who is Nina?”
I noticed he had stopped referring to her a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure if that meant she had left his memory entirely or if he just couldn’t remember her name.
I don’t have the heart to say “She’s your daughter” for the thousandth time—it feels too confronting.
So I offer another version of the truth: “She’s my sister. ”
That satisfies him, but I know he doesn’t comprehend the relational web that connects us all. “I didn’t know you had a sister. We should have her over sometime.”
“Good idea,” I say, as we chomp our apples. Then I venture a question I have not yet had the courage to ask: “Do you know who I am?”
“Of course.” He pauses as if second-guessing himself, but then continues with confidence: “You’re my comrade. My canoe partner. My aide-de-camp…”
He never does land on daughter, but I’m okay with all of these descriptors, as long as he sees me as a benevolent and welcome presence. This is more of a relationship than we’ve had in a long time.
He takes a final bite of his apple and concludes: “We’re a good team, you and I.”
Halloween marks the final day of our divination project, and we have worked our way to sciomancy—the interpretation of shadows.
With the autumnal equinox now well behind us, the evenings are falling earlier and earlier, and we decide to seek out shadows down by the water.
I help my father into one of his thick wool sweaters and I put on a puffer vest, and we make our way to the pond.
The flamboyant hues of early fall have mostly given way to a more restrained palette of crimson, brown, and gray.
But along the shoreline, a wall of spruces encircles the water, stalwart and evergreen.
At the dock, we arrange our chairs so that we can see both the pond and the long expanse of the boathouse wall, where the late-afternoon light dances over the chipped paint.
As is our routine, I read the definition of today’s form of divination to orient my father.
It’s clear he is not tracking our project, but that’s my job.
His job is simply to participate, and participate he does.
“Okay.” I clear my throat. “Sciomancy: a form of divination through shadows, taking into account their size, shape, movement, and appearance.”
My father nods, and we both become pensive as we study the flickers on the boathouse wall, reflections of the lapping water below.
“What do you think, Dad? What do the shadows mean?”
“Well, sometimes a shadow is just a shadow. They come and go. It’s best not to take them too seriously.”
Fair enough. We watch as the flickering slows, and the distinct light-shapes start to coagulate into a more unified blob. One side of the boathouse is now covered by a large shadow that encroaches at a diagonal angle.
My father breaks the silence: “Oh, he’s gone.”
“Who’s that?”
My father points to an area of the wall and traces an outline. “Your friend. The blond kid. He was just here, but he left when he saw you.”
“What do you mean? Where?” My heart thuds, and I can’t take a breath.
This is the type of joke my father might have played twenty years ago, but he’s not capable of that kind of deliberate trickery anymore.
He doesn’t even know I’m his daughter, so how could he remember Seth well enough to conjure him for fun?
“Right there. At the edge of the dock. He must be in the boathouse now.”
I get up and run around the corner, pulling open the door and half expecting to come face-to-face with a teenager who has been dead for ten years. But there is nothing but the boat in its bay, the open mouth of the boathouse, and the water beyond. I try to catch my breath.
He’s confused, I tell myself. He’s mixing memories, maybe even hallucinating. Perhaps we need to abort this project before it dredges up all kinds of chaos.
I return to the dock shaken, but I try to shrug it off. My father is completely at ease as he looks out over the pond. We sit in silence until the sun dissolves and the dancing shadows on the boathouse solidify into a straightforward, even shade of green.
Later that night, when I am in bed, I look up sciomancy once more.
Shadows, shadows, the reading of shadows.
But then there it is—an alternative definition that I had missed during my preliminary research.
It’s not only the reading of shadows. Sciomancy can also be a form of divination that leverages the help of ghosts.