Its in the family

     It was a truth in my family about our gift though we didn’t always admit to it. Sometimes we were thought to be crazy until our dreams came to pass. At times we were avoided by the people around us and other times they came for aid.

 My grandma told me a story about how her mother had awoken one night covered in sweat. She didn’t take the time to put on her boots or a coat, she just bolted out the front door to the neighbors. She watched through her window as her mother ran across the field looking like the ghost of some beautiful lady in her white nightgown, blonde hair flying in the wind.

She returned that morning, her nightgown no longer white, but singed and blackened with soot. It took some time for her to get the smell of smoke out of her hair, but she managed to stop the fire before any harm came to the neighboring family or their farm.

My great-grandma could predict the future with her dreams, but that didn’t always mean she could stop it. One day her husband had gone out hunting. My great-grandma Delila begged him not to go. She said he was in danger of being mistaken for a deer. He didn’t listen until a stray bullet whizzed past his head. He finally decided to heed his wife’s warning and head home. While walking across the back road to get home he was hit by a car. The driver had been injured and was found muttering about hitting a deer.

My grandma Layla told me about her dreams and how her predictions weren’t as strong as her mother’s but they still came true with some interpreting. She always knew when her husband was doing things he shouldn’t. She tried to stop him before he gambled away all their money. He thought her predictions could help him at the track but she told him it didn’t work that way. But all it took was her pointing out the winning horse one time and he was hooked. 

They had often fought about how she was lying about not being able to predict the winners. He thought she was trying to hold him back. He threatened to divorce her if she didn’t help him out. She agreed to the divorce. The day after it went through she went to the races, picked a horse and won more in one day than her husband had in the last five years. 

Layla always maintained that it was luck, but her ex-husband never believed it. Since there had not been a prenuptial agreement she got half of everything along with alimony.  

I asked my grandma if she had really been okay with him leaving and she said that there would be another man, a better one. She married that man a year later. He had come to town shortly after the divorce on business and met my grandma as she had lunch on a park bench. Before that day my grandma had never sat on that bench let alone ate lunch there. She said she dreamed of that bench the night before and that morning she went to that bench and sat there until he arrived.

“Did you know what he would look like?” I asked her.

“I never really knew what he looked like in the dream, it was more like a blurry figure in the shape of a man. All I knew was that he felt like kindness and warmth and home. He felt like a lifetime of happy memories and children I could pass my gift to,” she answered.

And she did. She passed that gift to my mother and her sister. My mother in turn passed it down to me, the only girl in the family. It was only ever the women in our family who had it and over the generations it had diluted some, but it was still there. Some people dismissed it as “women’s intuition” but we all knew it was a bit more than that.

I often thought that if it had gone back generations upon generations ago it must have been a truly powerful gift to behold. That my ancestors were probably thought of as witches or oracles, but it only went back as far as my great-great grandma. Grandma Layla said her grandma had made some money working as a fortune teller after coming to America, but she got more fortunes wrong than right. Layla said she had to otherwise something bad might happen to her. People were more superstitious where she was from and didn’t treat her right. Layla never went into too much detail. I think she was afraid I would reject my gift if I knew.

There really had not been a reason for that, my gift barely existed. It worked more for convenience. I would dream about mundane things like if there was going to be an accident before I went to work. Nothing bad, no injuries, just traffic. I would hear a phone ringing in my dream five minutes before it rang and I would know who was going to be on the other line.

I felt that, with how my gift manifested, my future daughter could look forward to a constant feeling of deja vu and nothing more. Grandma Layla said it could take time for my power to fully manifest, but I was now her age when her first husband divorced her, and older than my great-grandma when she stopped that fire. Even my mother had her strongest premonitions when she was younger than me. 

She was stronger than me but still couldn’t stop the car crash. Grandma Layla said my mother saw it coming, she told my grandma about it, but she still couldn’t stop it. When I was old enough Grandma Layla told me that she saw it too, but she knew something that didn’t appear in my mother’s dream. She told me that if she had tried to change fate or if my mother tried to stop it that we would have all died in that crash. My brother, my father, and me. She turned the car just enough so that she took the force of the impact. I don’t know how she knew how to do that, maybe instinct, but she did. I ended up with a head injury and a concussion but was otherwise fine, the same with my father. My brother was in the ICU for a few days, we thought we might lose him too, but grandma assured us he would be okay, and that was all I needed. 

I remember asking her why the accident had to happen, why there was nothing that could be done to change fate. She told me some things just couldn’t be changed. My mom’s fate was set in stone but ours could be changed at that moment. Sometimes destiny needs a little help and that's what we were for, that's what our gift was for, even if we can’t see it at the time.

I understood her words but I never felt like they applied to me. My gift was so useless I couldn’t see how I would be able to help fate or destiny whatever it was, along. On the bright side I knew how and when I would be getting a promotion at my job. I knew when I should dump a guy or not bother showing up to the date at all, but beyond that I still hadn’t got those fortunes of doom and destruction my elders had gotten. I guess I should be thankful for that. 

Some things I could change, but others, if I tried to intervene it would cause the event to happen, which was frustrating. I went along with my life and career trying to do what I could with my little talent. It was more for my mom and grandma than for me. They would have been heart broken if I turned my back on it, especially being the only one in the family now that could pass on that knowledge.

I got ready for work one morning. I avoided wearing the heels I usually wore. I loved them. They hurt like a son of a bitch at the end of the day, but before that I was tall and confident. I woke with a kick that morning as I dreamed I fell down a flight of stairs at work. So I went with a more sensible shoe, thinking that that had been the cause of the fall. 

I went to work a little early that morning. I had a meeting that day, I had been preparing for for weeks. My neighbor wished me luck as she left with her twins to school. I told her not to take Grant street. She listened, even if she didn’t entirely believe in my gift, she still would listen to an extent. The meeting went well and I walked confidently to the stairs leading down to my office. I could have used the elevator but it often got stuck and it took less time to walk than to ride down. 

I began my descent when my shoe slipped on the edge of the stair. I lost my footing and before I knew it I was at the bottom of the staircase. I forgot that the reason I never wore these shoes was because they had terribly slick soles. 

I laid in a crumpled mess at the bottom of the stairs. I heard a loud repetitive “tip-tap” of feet running toward me. Several people came to my aid. Some tried to help me up while others insisted that I shouldn’t move. My head was killing me. I felt a large goose egg protruding from above my right eyebrow. One woman grabbed a bucket as a nauseated feeling crept up my throat. Another woman called for an ambulance. I tried to assure them I was okay, but I wasn’t. I don’t recall it but apparently I had lost consciousness for about ten seconds.

At the hospital the doctor told me I had a pretty severe concussion and my ankle was sprained. He had asked about an old injury he saw on the x-ray of my head. I told him about the crash. He seemed concerned about that and told me I was to stay overnight for observation and that I should be okay to leave the next afternoon, if nothing went wrong. 

I tossed and turned most of the night. They gave me something for the raging headache but everything still hurt. They didn’t want to give me anything that would be a sedative in case something happened. A nurse checked on me every hour or so. I could feel her watching me try to sleep. Finally I dozed off for a couple hours. 

I awoke drenched in sweat with tears streaming down my face. I saw something horrible in my dream- no - in my nightmare. The heart rate monitor they had me attached to was going off like crazy. A nurse and a doctor soon entered my room in a panic. 

“Are you alright?” they both asked as the doctor went straight to the monitor to access the issue. 

“I-I’m fine. I just- I need to get home right away.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t think that would be wise,” the doctor responded.

“Then I need an officer to go to my neighbors apartment.”

“Why would you need that?”

“Somebody is going to hurt them,” I blurted out.

“How do you know that?”

“I had a dream. My dreams always come true. It's a family thing.”

“You believe your dreams foretell the future?”

I hardly ever let people know about my family's gift, mostly because of the condescending tone that was delivered upon me. This doctor had an especially patronizing way of speaking, but that might be the doctor in him.

“Look, I’m sure your neighbors are fine and that it was simply a bad dream. You did have a serious fall with a head injury and that can cause such a thing to happen.”

I wasn’t convinced that he believed that. After checking my vitals both he and the nurse left. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed 911.

I explained the situation to the operator, making sure to omit the details about my prediction. Honestly I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I had never had a dream this vivid, but I knew it would come to pass if I didn’t do something about it.

 They did a wellness check, but nothing came of it. The family was just fine, a little shaken from being woken up to an officer in the middle of the night but otherwise fine.

This was the first time I had doubted my talent. It was so real like every other dream. Maybe I was missing something. 

I was discharged the next day. I caught the elevator up to my apartment. It was early in the evening by the time I got home. I tried to recall the dream, it was horrifying. A man had broken into my neighbors apartment looking to steal anything he could. I heard a gun go off several times. There was blood everywhere. That man had killed them all. Maybe it was just a dream, I did have a head injury. Who knew how that would affect my ability.

I recalled the dream again trying to think of any detail I missed. It had been raining in the dream which didn’t make sense since it had been sunny for days with no cloud in sight. I made myself dinner and tried to shake the last twenty four hours off.

I dozed off for a few minutes after eating. I had only been asleep for about five minutes before I heard a knock on my door. I listened for another and...nothing. I looked down the hall of my building, I didn’t see anybody. My head must have been worse than I thought. If that were true I couldn’t trust my abilities. 

I sat down to watch some t.v. before bed when I heard a loud crack of lightning, then another crack, not lightning. A full downpour sounded through my apartment. Rain! I limped to the door, (ignoring the sprained ankle) thrusting it open in time to see a man I had never seen before about to enter my neighbors apartment. I saw in his hand, a gun. I didn’t know what to do, I was a bit shocked that my vision was about to come true. The strongest vision I had ever had. He stopped, staring at me. I panicked as I grabbed the fire alarm just outside my door. There was a loud explosive sound and then my whole body felt numb. I watched his feet run past me and then another set. It was my neighbor’s husband. He pressed against my shoulder as his wife dialed 911. Another ambulance ride in less than two days.

I was told that I was lucky that my neighbor was a surgeon. He knew how to slow the bleeding down just enough for the ambulance to make it. I was told I was luckier still that the bullet had just missed my heart. I was in the hospital for a week. It took a while for everything to heal. In time, the head injury I had sustained the day before healed as well and with it my visions returned to what they were before, well, maybe a little stronger.

My neighbor went on to save countless lives. Lives that may have been cut short if that intruder had accomplished his goal. I later found out that his children followed in his footsteps going into medicine. I remained friends with the family. 

The night before my daughter was born, I knew trouble was coming. Like his father saved me, the son saved my daughter after a difficult labor. I don’t know if I had really helped fate or destiny along that night, but I taught my daughter what my grandma taught me, even if her talent was little more than deja vu.