I squinted my eyes at her. “What kind of gift?”

“I know that you see things,” she said. “Visions.”

She must have noticed the look of panic on my face because she immediately laid a gentle calloused hand on my shoulder.

“No, no, don’t worry now,” she said. “I’m not angry with you, and you’re not in any trouble. My, your mother did a number on you, didn’t she?”

“Mom thought the visions were shameful,” I said. “Like there was something wrong with me, like my brain didn’t work right.”

“My dear boy, there’s nothing in the world wrong with you,” said Grandma. “It almost breaks my heart to think that you believe your gift to be a malfunction of sorts. Nothing could be further from the truth. You’re just special is all. Your mind’s eye is open to things that most people can’t even fathom. I’m the same way, of course, though my gift is much more limited in scope than yours, I assure you.”

“How do you know?”

“Lee, honey, I felt it the moment you set foot on my porch,” she said. “The power emanating from you, like a halo sparkling right over your head. My father had the same power. He’s the one who first bought this land. The Farm was his vision originally, before he passed it along to me. You were born for this, is what I’m saying. It’s your talent, it’s in your blood. But like all talents, it is worthless unless cultivated. You must practice, Lee, learn to open the doorways in your mind so that the Spirit can flow easily through you. You must control the visions so that the visions do not control you.”

I thought I was starting to understand. It had never even occurred to me that this was something I could actually have power over.

“Okay,” I said. “I mean, that sounds pretty good, I guess. But how do I do that?”

“You can start with this little exercise, okay? Now shut your eyes and try to picture all the truths of your heart. Make them into little objects, bright and shining things, separate, like tchotchkes on a mantle. Or better yet, relics in a church. Picture the best day of your life like a saint’s holy anklebone or your favorite poem like the Shroud of Turin. You got it?”

I tried. I shut my eyes and pictured a museum gallery like the one Mom took me to that time we went to Washington, DC. All the portraits lined up in a row, hanging on the walls—all the best memories I had, all my favorite and most beautiful things in the world. I remembered this old Federico García Lorca poem where he said, “They come to me, my essential things. / They are refrains of refrains.” And so they arrived: The moon over Lapham Lake in August, fog gathering at the edge of the water. The clock from that one Georg Trakl poem. Mom’s laugh, bright and scattered and alive as a flock of hummingbirds. Murphy’s grin after she knocked her front tooth out playing basketball. William Blake’s painting of a flea. Rilke’s puppet show. The last milky slurp of a Coke float. Anna Karina dancing in Band of Outsiders. That one eagle’s nest I saw, big as a baby’s crib. The stars in the desert when Mom drove us to the Hoover Dam, how it was the first time I understood how many there were, how in all of the universe we are unique and not alone.