Quadruple Duty

built, down by the lake. One minute Kara was eating ice cream at the kitchen table, just daydreaming. Staring past the yellow-orange curtains that framed the window, into the bright blue sky.

The next minute, she was gone.

Or rather, her surroundings were gone. Kara was still there. Still seated at the table, still eating ice cream. Only she was now somehow outside. No curtains, no window… just the lake.

When she looked down, it was like being in a dream. Her bowl, her spoon… everything was fuzzy and disjointed. Nothing had clear edges. Like it was there, but also not there — somehow at the same time.

At first she’d been scared, almost to the point of panic. But then a strange sense of calm stole over her, and Kara found she could feel the warmth of the sun. She could hear the sounds of the insects, the birds, the wind. The sounds of summer.

That’s when she saw him: the man in the faded red hat.

He was a big man, gentle-looking and soft, with a broad, gap-toothed smile. A warm smile. The kind of smile only truly good people had. The kind of happiness that was impossible to fake.

The man looked at her. Looked past her. That part Kara was always unsure of — whether or not he actually did see her. There were times she knew in her heart that he couldn’t have. But also times when she swore that he did.

He walked past her, and for a split second his features came into sharp focus. Angular nose. Brown pants and suspenders. His expression still plastered with the same deliriously happy grin.

There was a rush of sound, and noise, and suddenly Kara was back again. Sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen. Eating vanilla ice cream out of a plastic Tupperware bowl.

All she remembered after that was the screaming. It had taken forever just to calm her down.

It was several months before she saw him again, this time in an old, black and white photograph hung in her grandmother’s room. The man stood wearing the same suspenders, wielding the same gap-toothed grin. Kara didn’t have the slightest doubt as to who he was. Though he was missing the hat, it was unmistakably him.

The man, she’d eventually learn, was her great-uncle Amos — one of three brothers who’d helped her great-grandfather build the lake house. When she described what she’d seen, no one believed her. Everyone had brushed it off with placating smiles.

“You probably saw the photograph before,” her mother had said. “And forgot you saw it. Or maybe you’re just remembering it strangely.”

Kara almost bought into that idea. That is, until she mentioned the red hat. Whenever she talked about that part of her vision, her grandmother’s face always went grave. She refused to talk about it… but she knew that hat. And moreover, she knew that Kara knew too.

For the rest of her life — all two and a half years of it — her grandmother had looked at her the same way one looks at an unpredictable dog… one that could bite at any time. There was still love, still affection, but also a distance. An unspoken wariness that drove an unfortunate wedge between them.

It was the only aspect of her clairvoyance Kara would ever truly regret.

From there it happened again, although infrequently, over the years. Kara would see people, places, even events… all where there was nothing to see. “It’s like a bunch of stuff that’s already happened,” she’d said, describing it to friend once. “Echoes of the past. Brief flashes of things that used to be.”

All of her friends laughed it off. Not one of them believed her. They didn’t see things the way her grandmother did, and that was just fine with Kara.

When she was twelve, Kara watched the apparition of an old woman pass through her classroom. This happened every day for a solid week; same woman, same time, same class. Curiosity eventually overrode caution, and Kara found herself raising her hand… and getting excused to the bathroom, so she could follow her.

The strangely-garbed woman led her through a series of hallways, and then down into a broken and abandoned part of the school. There, hidden beneath an old floorboard, Kara unearthed a whole purse full of gleaming gold coins. A purse she knew was there only because she’d watched the apparition put it there… so many, many years ago.

The district took possession of the coins immediately, leaving Kara with one as a souvenir. But the story made headlines. There was enough of the ten-dollar gold eagles to rebuild the gymnasium, and everyone had called her ‘gold digger’ for the rest of her school career.

Not long after that, she saw Xiomara for the first time.

The old woman looked pretty much the same as she did now, small and frail, her silver-black hair pulled tightly back over her tiny head. She showed up in strange places; at stores in the mall, in seats at the movie theater, even once in the audience during her junior high school play. It was easy to pick her out among the crowds, as she wore an seemingly endless array of bright, multi-colored robes. And always, she’d be looking at her. Staring at Kara intently through her wire-rimmed glasses.

It wasn’t until her sophomore year of high school that Kara actually had the guts to approach her. She walked straight up to the old woman in the parking lot of a convenience store, and asked her what the hell she wanted. And Xiomara had grinned — a full blown smile — before uttering those first four words: “It’s about fucking time.”

It was Xiomara who told Kara all about her gift, and how it was a blessing and not a curse. She explained that her visions were among the most important and wondrous things in the world, and that she shouldn’t ever feel badly about them.

Somehow, she knew everything.

Later on, Kara would realize the old woman picked up on her gold coin story, and had been keeping tabs on her ever since. It was scary at first, but it was nice to finally be believed. Besides, the old woman seemed harmless. Kara had questions about her abilities, and Xiomara had answers. Hell, she was the only one with answers.

They began spending time together, and that’s where Kara learned just how special she was. Xiomara taught Kara how her abilities could be commanded, directed, even somewhat controlled. When the visions occurred, she showed her how to sharpen the details. To enhance and focus on things. It was like owning an expensive amplifier for a long time, and finally having someone show you what all the knobs and dials were for.

“Clairvoyance,” the woman had told her at their second meeting. “The ability to see things as they happened, or as they will happen.”