“Full disclosure? I’ve never heard of her. Do I lose points for that too?”
“No. October would prefer it, actually. You should know this before you come in. She’s a very private person. Sensitive. Needs a lot of space. Her assistant has to be quiet and unobtrusive.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “I’m pretty introverted myself. Trust me, she won’t even know I’m there.”
“Also,” Rae went on, “October is not into people who make a fuss about her, so don’t come in and try to impress her with a bunch of stuff you think you know about her or you’ll be out of luck.”
“I just told you I don’t know anything about her.”
“I’ll text you the address. Be there by nine, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The next morning I was heading west on the Richmond Bridge just after sunrise. There was an accident up ahead, and traffic was at such a standstill that I put my truck in park, reclined my seat, and scanned my brain for a positive thought on which to focus.
That day, like most days, I’d woken up with the sense that I was invisible, that I’d disappeared inside the heavy, cloudlike mass of my past, that I’d gone too far astray and was unable to get back on track no matter how hard I tried.
The city of San Francisco was to my left; to my right the fog was just starting to lift from a midpoint above the water like a big white circus tent being erected over the Bay.
I kept staring out to the north, and maybe a mile in that direction a tiny rock of a landmass off Port Richmond caught my eye. The rock was East Brother Island, a light station built in the late 1800s to guide sailors safely in and out of the Bay.
That morning I could see the light in the lighthouse blinking. Having grown up in the Bay Area, I’d driven across the Richmond Bridge more times than I could count, but I’d never noticed a light on in the tower, and for one surreal moment I wondered if I was the only person who could see it. I watched the flare trying to reach up toward the sky, barely making it through the fog, and all I could think was That’s me.
As the traffic began to lurch forward, I put the truck back into drive and did something I do when I’m feeling lost: I talked to my dead brother. That day I asked him for a sign. I needed him to remind me that I wasn’t as alone as I felt, and if he could let me know whether this job was the right move, that would be cool too.
I didn’t necessarily think Sam could hear me, let alone respond, but I figured it was slightly possible, in as much as it was highly improbable, that his energy or spirit or whatever you want to call it was out there somewhere, probably rolling its spectral eyes at me but willing to help if he could.
“The sign needs to be something unmistakable,” I said aloud, because as far as I’m concerned, interpretation is for the faithful—the skeptical and hopeless need to be hit over the head with certainty.
I asked Sam to deliver his message to me in the form of a song. The next song to come on the radio, to be exact.
Normally I listened to NPR in the morning, but I switched over to Live 105 to receive my brother’s communiqué. It was the station he’d listened to when he was alive, so I figured it would be the music he could control best as a spirit. There was a commercial on when I tuned in, and this seemed fortuitous. It meant Sam had extra time to play a mind trick on the DJ and get him to put on a relevant song after the commercial was over.
I still remember the commercial playing that morning. It was an ad for a discount diamond store that I’d been hearing since I was a kid. Now you have a friend in the diamond business.
When the commercial was over, the DJ started jabbering about a contest the station was having: Starting tomorrow, if you were the fifth caller after you heard the next song, you would win a trip to a music festival in Southern California, where this band would be playing in a couple of months.
The DJ said Cal’s name, along with something about the song being the first single off Callahan’s new, critically acclaimed