Clarity | TMFU

THREE

AROUND THE AGE WHEN MOST MOTHERS SIT WITH their kids to talk about how babies are made, my dad sat my brother and me down and warned us about our impending freakdom.

"There's no guarantee you'll be blessed," he'd said, rubbing his hands together in excitement. "But considering your lineage, I figured it's time to tell you what to look for."

My mother and father were originally from a small town in East Germany that calls itself a "spiritualist community." Everyone in town claims to have some sort of paranormal ability, and the most gifted families are encouraged to interbreed to keep the genes strong. Some marriages are even arranged.

My mother and father came from "good stock" — meaning the freakage went back several generations. There was no way to predict how my twisted DNA would reveal itself. The only constant from our people seemed to be the fact that abilities emerged in puberty.

I'd always known about my father's gift. I couldn't get away with anything, for one. When I was little, Dad would always know when I was lying. Rudi, being two years older and wiser, filled me in on some of his Dad-blocking tricks before I could get myself into too much trouble. So when Dad told Rudi and me that we may have special abilities, too, it wasn't anything kooky to me. It was just a fact, like any other inherited trait.

Dad had explained that our gifts were like any other talent. Some people are born with a great singing voice or athletic ability and they only need to practice and nurture that talent, and it would bloom. Same with us. After our gifts began to emerge, my father helped us identify, harness, and utilize them, just as his father did for her. We realized what Rudi's gift was when, at age twelve, he simply told Dad that his mom said hi. Grandma, his mom, being dead was the first clue.

When I was eleven, during a parent-teacher conference, my teacher told Dad that I wasn't concentrating well lately and she feared I wasn't living up to my potential. Most fathers would be worried. Mine was ecstatic. He came home and questioned me, trying to get to the bottom of the problem. I admitted I'd been having trouble. I kept finding myself pulled into daydreams, most of which made no sense to me. I had no idea that this could be my ability beginning to emerge.

I experienced my first vision in front of my entire sixth-grade class. After Cody Rowe completely messed up an easy math problem on the whiteboard, the teacher dismissed him and asked me to come up and give it a try. I hated being the center of attention, but trudged to the front of the room as told. With trembling fingers, I erased Cody's wrong answer. I uncapped the marker and found myself slightly disoriented from the strong smell and the feeling of twenty stares on my back. I closed my eyes, hoping to calm my nerves, then realized I'd forgotten the math problem I was supposed to solve. I tried hard to remember and then the answer came to me. I wrote it on the board, with my eyes still closed, then stepped back to look at my work.

First came the snickers, then full-on laughter when the teacher ordered me back to my seat. I'd rewritten Cody's wrong answer. I was so confused. Math had always come easily to me. Sitting in the safety of my desk, I knew what the right answer was, and didn't understand why I'd written something different. I didn't realize that the "answer" my mind retrieved wasn't my own, but the one Cody had come up with minutes before while holding the same marker.

Once Dad explained my gift to me, he helped me to control it, and I learned to decipher the real and the now from the visions of the past.

Right now, though, standing in our foyer with the Binghams gone, I wished we were just a normal family, with normal family problems.

Dad was on a rampage. He was angry with me for blurting out Mr. Bingham's secret and breaking our "no bad news" policy. I was too rattled by Milly's report of the murder to defend myself. I took my scolding from Dad until he turned to Rudi.