The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,56

East Side for an unforgettable party. A fortune-teller would help to make it unforgettable, I had suggested. The roommates enthusiastically embraced my suggestion, so I had been assigned the task of finding the fortune-teller. In the end, I liked the price this woman had given me over the phone. I had come to her apartment to meet her face-to-face and to make sure that she was legitimate, or at least that she wasn’t going to murder us all. And just maybe, I thought, I would allow myself to be the guinea pig to see if she was—on the off chance—the real thing.

After we finished discussing the logistics for the party, she agreed to read my palm for twenty-five dollars for one half hour—a reasonable price—and without that icky eagerness that would have hinted at a woman desperate for business. I liked that. I was cautiously optimistic.

We sat across from one another at a little smoky glass table. She flipped on the lamp next to us, its light bright enough to uncover the darkest mysteries, I thought. Then she slipped her frameless reading glasses on her nose, snapping shut their case with a quick thwack. She held out her hands toward me.

“Now I have to see both your palms,” she said.

I met her halfway, extending my arms so that my palms rested between us, their countless lines staring up at both of us.

“For a woman, her right palm tells the truth about her life as she now lives it, while her left palm reveals clues into what her life might have been in her alternate fate.”

Well, that was new to me, and a fascinating notion, if true.

Her cool hands were white against mine, her light green veins pronounced, her fingernails neat ovals with clear polish. She grazed the lines of one palm with her fingertips and then bent my fingers on both hands back farther than I thought they could go, lowering her head another couple inches to scrutinize the tiniest lines. Then after what seemed like endless minutes of silence, interrupted only by the sound of my own breathing, she looked up at me.

“Well, your palms are very interesting,” she said quite deliberately.

Yep, just stalling to give yourself more time to make up something grand, I’ll bet. I hope at least you come up with something a little more original or else I’m really going to feel like a moron (yet again) for wasting money.

“There is a big difference between your right and left palms, a very dramatic difference,” she continued. “In the right one, I see a good long life. You see how your life line goes all the way down here and how deep it is?” She traced the line with her right index finger.

Sure, I guess so.

Not waiting for a response, she went on. “But then look at the life line on your left palm. It’s short, and there are so many lines cutting into it. This palm tells me that in your alternate life, you would have suffered much illness, frustration, and unhappiness, and early death.”

Okay, now that’s original.

She looked up again. “There must have been a profound change in your life. Something happened that truly altered the course your life would have taken,” she said, clearly intrigued by the story my palms were telling her.

I had made it a policy to not help these fortune-tellers, to give them minimal information about myself, but sometimes they did need something a little bit more specific and concrete to guide them along.

“Well, I left home a few years ago and decided to live far away from my family,” I offered. That was nice and vague but still somewhat informative.

She gave her head a quick shake. “No, no. That might be part of it, but it’s not that. There’s something else, something that happened when you were little.” The woman seemed genuinely puzzled and bothered. I decided to take some pity on her, to tell her part of what had instantly come to my mind when she mentioned illness and frustration.

“Well, I was born in Vietnam and came here when I was almost four years old. That certainly changed my life very dramatically.”

She was looking at me again, peering intently over the top of her glasses in a way that made me just a little uneasy. “Yes, that makes more sense. But I think there’s more to it…It has to do with your eyes, doesn’t it?” Her voice trailed off, as if she were musing to herself