project that easily should have been mine to win. Honestly, I just don’t feel like myself.”
My mother abruptly dropped her brush on a tray and turned to face me. “Olivia, you are not yourself,” she said. “Not really. You haven’t been yourself for many, many years. I think maybe it is finally catching up with you.”
I should have seen the speech coming. But I was feeling so lousy that I had forgotten where this kind of conversation would lead with my mother. Now, there was no avoiding it.
“Mom, please.”
“You’re agitated. I don’t blame you,” she continued. “But you have turned your back on a part of yourself, Olivia Rose. It’s like wearing contact lenses when your vision is fine to begin with. You’ve intentionally turned off your own sixth sense. It’s no wonder you don’t feel like yourself. How long did you think you could keep this up?”
“For as long as I live,” I said, as an image of my mother drinking in our darkened kitchen crept into my mind.
“I don’t need to use my skills to sense your anger at me, Olivia, and I understand. I love my gift, but it does overwhelm me at times. Your gran was the only person who knew how to help me keep it in perspective. It’s one reason why I never married. I didn’t want to have to pretend I could control my emotions.”
“So it was OK to be out of control around me?” I snapped back.
“No, but it’s not the same thing,” she said.
“You could have turned it off, Mom,” I said, cutting her off. “I have. You don’t need to open yourself up like that.”
Rose shook her head. “Look at my paintings, Olivia,” she said gesturing toward her easel. “Do you really think they would be so alive if I stopped feeling? I could not function if I closed myself off,” she continued. “Every time I place a brush to the canvas, I feel the energy of life though my hand. I cannot turn my back on who I am because it’s difficult.”
“Difficult? You call boozing your way through life difficult? You call taking drugs and sleeping for days difficult?” I said. “That’s not what I call it. I call it chaos. I think this curse from our family is a disability. And you medicate yourself to survive.”
My mother leaned back on her painter’s stool, looking beleaguered.
I had said too much and regretted my words immediately. I apologized and she forgave me, never having been one to let an emotional outburst offend her.
Soon after our argument, I left her studio and retreated to the guest house to go to bed, but my sleep that night was miserable. I tossed and turned, in the grip of a terrible, unexplained anxiety. At one point, I was plagued by a dream featuring an enormous black panther that seemed to be stalking me. When I woke up in the morning, I decided to head straight back to San Francisco. I felt guilty leaving my mother without saying goodbye, but knew that she would understand.
****
CHAPTER 3
For several days after returning home I did not sleep well. Though I fell into bed exhausted, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a dream featuring an enormous panther walking beside me. The setting for these walks seemed familiar to me, but I could never tell exactly where we were. A very odd detail in these dreams was that I felt the animal wanted to speak to me. But of course that was ridiculous.
Lack of sleep made me increasingly agitated as the days went on. Indeed, I was in no mood to be gracious when the call came from one of my clients asking for an impromptu meeting at my offices. In my experience, no client ever wants to meet the same day unless they intend to fire you. I agreed to the meeting and spent the better part of the morning trying to keep my already shredded nerves from disintegrating.
At 1 pm inside our office conference room, I greeted my client, a real estate developer who wanted to buy a pair of apartment buildings, tear them down, and build two enormous towers in their place. It would be a difficult project because it involved temporarily relocating hundreds of people, and then offering them a chance to return to the new apartments in the towers, but at the same rent they paid previously. My client also wanted the height of the two buildings to be greater