Mom set me down on the ground and grabbed me by the cheeks and looked into my eyes. “Just because you see something, that doesn’t mean it’s really there. Never forget that.”

“But Mom,” I said.

“If you see something that shouldn’t be there,” she said, “you just ignore it, okay? Don’t tell me about it. Don’t tell anyone about it. Just close your eyes until it goes away. Got it?”

“The cat was real!”

“Lee,” said Mom, “listen to me. You don’t want people thinking you’re crazy, do you? You know what they do to people who see things that aren’t there?”

I didn’t.

“They lock them up,” she said. “In special hospitals. For the rest of their lives. And no one ever gets to come visit them, and they never see their families again, and they’re alone forever. You don’t want that to happen to you, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” said Mom. “Then we’ll keep these little hallucinations to ourselves, won’t we?”

I nodded at her.

But it wasn’t as easy as all that. It was hard to ignore it when reality broke, when it was like time snapped in half and some new world would wash over me like a flood. Remember, these were visions, not simple hallucinations. They weren’t just little images conjured up by my mind or chemicals or drugs or something. They had an extra dimension to them. They had heft, is what I’m saying.

A real vision refuses to be ignored.

And in that case, the vision came true. Not a week later an orange tabby cat showed up on our doorstep, mewling something awful. It had just been in a fight, you could tell—it was all mangled and bloody, like a dog had gotten to it—and I was pretty sure it was pregnant. The cat limped around, its back left paw curled up under its body, moaning that horrible sound hurt cats make. I opened the door and let it in, even though I knew Mom would be furious. Because something in me knew that this was the cat from my vision, more or less, and that this cat needed me.

I picked up the bloody, wounded thing, and she went slack and quiet in my arms, which seemed like a miracle to me. And I demanded that Mom take us to the vet. I told her I’d hold the cat the whole way, that she wouldn’t even have to touch the thing, just could we please help this poor creature?

Mom agreed, and we went to the vet. The cat lived, and so did all the kittens. Of course Mom wouldn’t let me keep any of them. Her eyes were already swelling shut just from having the cat so close to her in the car. We ended up leaving them all at a shelter. I cried and cried, but Mom wouldn’t relent.

“But it was supposed to be my cat,” I said. “Remember? I saw it last week.”