“Pray that God delivers you from the evil spirits within you. No one but God, our holy father, sees the future, except, perhaps, the devil, so you will stay here until the devil leaves you. And never leave the house without our permission again, Betsy! You are a cursed girl and I will save you from yourself!” To make her especially miserable, she was given only two pieces of bread and water, so her body shook and she became dizzy, as usual.

The men in the church performed an exorcism on Betsy at her father’s request after that one. They told her to get naked on a table. She refused. She fought, she hit, she tried to run, she screamed. Finally they agreed she didn’t have to get naked. Clearly two of the more creepy men were disappointed. When she was on the table Betsy sang songs by the Beatles until her dad put his hand over her mouth. She almost passed out from not being able to breathe. “Don’t kill her, Hansen,” one of the men said. “Let me examine her and I’ll see if I can get the demons out.”

Betsy never forgot that “examination.” Her father stood by and watched, the men around her breathing heavily, her father the heaviest of all.

From the time she was young, though, she knew that sometimes she should say something, do something, to prevent something tragic from happening in the future, and sometimes she shouldn’t.

She knew that Mr. Ralph, another neighbor, was going to die soon. He was going to fall out of his wheelchair and drown in his pool. But he was ninety-four years old and he had already told Betsy that he didn’t want to live anymore. He had lost his wife, his brothers and sisters, and his best friend. He was extremely sick and coughed all the time. She didn’t know if he rolled himself in or if it was an accident, but she did nothing to prevent it.

And she knew that her father was going to chop wood in the backyard and get distracted by Miss Jane in a bathing suit next door and bring the ax straight into his leg. The leg would gush blood and he would be in the hospital for a couple of weeks because of a bad infection that would almost kill him.

She didn’t tell him what was going to happen, and she did nothing to prevent it. Those two weeks with her mother were the best ever.

No, she let the ax slide straight into her father’s leg, and when he called out in agony, she pretended not to hear.

Later, he beat her for that, too.

* * *