You may have to become a criminal momentarily to save them.

But I have had one premonition off and on my whole life, starting when I was about five years old.

In that premonition there are two women, one of them me, and one of us dies. I don’t know if it’s me or the other woman who heads up the golden staircase to heaven. I have not been able to figure this out, which is strange. My endings for my other premonitions are all quite clear, but there’s a fuzziness here, as if the premonition doesn’t even know precisely who is dead at the end of it.

I don’t know who the other woman is. I don’t know how old I’ll be. I don’t know when it will happen. What I do know is that I’m driving on a road, wide enough for only one car, alongside a mountain on my right. On my left side is a steep cliff. The ocean is in the distance, peeking through the pine trees, and there’s a whole bunch of orange poppies. I see the oncoming car, and we both swerve, and crash.

Sometimes one car shoots over the cliff, sometimes both cars. Sometimes there’s an earsplitting explosion, crackling flames and black smoke bubbling up from the bottom of the cliff, sometimes not. Sometimes we’re sandwiched together, teetering over the cliff, up and down, sometimes not. It’s blurry, this premonition. Like rain is blurring the full photo, but there is no rain.

It’s troubling to know that a car crash, on a cliff, may kill me.

Or it may not.

Other than the premonitions? I am utterly, completely normal.

Which means that I’m one hot mess.

Chapter 2

Betsy Baturra
Infirmary
Multnomah County Jail
Portland, Oregon
1975

The young woman screamed, head back, sweat and hot tears dripping down her agonized face into her thick black hair.

The nurse fastened the leather straps around the woman’s wrists. She didn’t want to do it, but she had to. It was the rule. All prisoners giving birth in the jail’s infirmary had to be strapped down, wrists, ankles, and one around the waist. One never knew! A woman could attempt an escape, yes, even one in the throngs of labor, minutes away from giving birth! She could waddle down the hallway, moaning in pain, teeter down the stairs and through the prison yard, without anyone noticing, her hand on her crotch to keep the baby in as she lithely leaped over the barbed wire fence. Escapes were definitely against the rules. So straps were always required.

The nurse, Clarissa Hortensen, knew how asinine the rules were. They were made up by men—what could one expect after all? Men thought with their nether regions most of the time. Still. She had to follow the rules or lose her job. She couldn’t lose her job. She had four kids, and her clumsy husband had lost his job when he’d broken two vertebrae in his back falling off their roof. She had told him not to get on the roof to fix a hole, but he did it anyhow.