Forever Odd

knowing any of this to be true. I felt it in a half-assed precognitive way that is far more than a hunch but far short of an unequivocal vision.
        Why I see the dead but cannot hear from them, why I can seek with psychic magnetism and sometimes find, but only sometimes, why I sense the looming threat but not its details, I do not know. Perhaps nothing in this broken world can be pure or of a piece, unfractured. Or perhaps I haven’t learned to harness all the power I possess.
        One of my most bitter regrets from the previous August is that in the rush and tumble of events, I had at times relied on reason when gut feelings would have served me better.
        Daily I walk a high wire, always in danger of losing my balance. The essence of my life is supernatural, which I must respect if I am to make the best use of my gift. Yet I live in the rational world and am subject to its laws. The temptation is to be guided entirely by impulses of an otherworldly origin-but in this world a long fall will always end in a hard impact.
        I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and the irrational. In the past, my tendency has been to err on the side of logic, at the expense of faith-faith in myself and in the Source of my gift.
        If I failed Danny, as I believed that I had failed others the previous August, I would surely come to despise myself. In failure, I would resent having been given the gift that defines me. If my destiny can be fulfilled only through the use of my sixth sense, too great a loss of self-respect and self-confidence would lead me to another fate different from the one that I desire, making a lie of the fortune-machine card that is framed above my bed.
        This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.
        I would not call Chief Porter. If my heart said I alone must go after Danny, I would obey my heart.

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    THIRTEEN
        
        AT MY APARTMENT, I STUFFED A SMALL BACKPACK WITH items I might need, including two flashlights and a package of spare batteries.
        In the bedroom, I stood at the foot of the bed, silently reading the framed card on the wall: you are destined to be together FOREVER. I wanted to pry out the backing and remove the card from the frame, to take it with me. I would feel safer with it, protected.
        This was a variety of irrational thought that could never serve me well. A card dispensed by a machine in a carnival arcade is not the equivalent of a fragment of the true cross.
        Another and even less rational thought tormented me. In pursuit of Danny and his father, I might die, and having crossed the sea of death, arriving on the shore of the next world, I would want to have the card to present to whatever Presence met me there.
         This , I would say, is the promise I was made. She came here ahead of me, and now you must take me to her.
        In truth, although the circumstances in which we had gotten this fortune from the machine had seemed extraordinary and meaningful, no miracle had been involved. The promise was not of divine origin; it was one that she and I had made to each other, with mutual trust in the mercy of God to grant us the grace of eternity together.
        If a Presence meets me on the farther shore, I cannot prove a divine contract merely with a card from a fortune-telling machine. If the afterlife I envision is different from the one Heaven has planned for me, I can’t invoke the threat of litigation and demand the name of a good attorney.
        Conversely, if this grace should be granted and the promise of the card fulfilled, the Presence who meets me on that distant shore will be Bronwen Llewellyn herself, my Stormy.
        The proper place for the card was in the frame. There it would be safe and could continue to inspire me if I returned from this expedition alive.
        When I went into the kitchen to call Terri Stambaugh at the Pico Mundo Grille, Elvis was sitting at the table, weeping.
        I hate seeing him like this. The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll should never cry.
        He shouldn’t pick his nose, either, but occasionally he does. I am sure this is a joke. A ghost has no need to pick its nose. Sometimes he pretends to find a nugget and to flick it at me, then grins boyishly.
        Lately, he’d been reliably cheerful. But he