Her thoughts turned to her daughter, and she felt the familiar pangs of worry deep down in her belly. She had trouble remembering the exact time she began to wonder about her little girl. It was disconcerting to say the least. Usually she could pinpoint specifically when something began, and file it away in the deeper recesses of her brain, locked up for future reference. But when Jessie’s strange premonitions began, she couldn’t recall. The first few times she had dismissed them as coincidence. What they had here was an unusually bright child, nothing more. And that made sense. Jessie had shown remarkable ability to mimic and learn from others, almost from the moment she was born.

But gradually she began to realize that Jessie was not just a bright little girl, and suddenly that awareness had become unsettling, almost frightening. Once, when Jessie was less than two years old, she had been bouncing off the walls all day, saying “bike, bike” so loudly and so excitedly Helen had wondered how she didn’t hurt herself. Sure enough, by suppertime David had shown up with a brand-new plastic tricycle, and while Jessie was trying to pedal the thing around the living room, her little legs hardly reaching the pedals, Helen had sat on the couch and wondered how she possibly knew it was coming. She asked David, but he swore it had been a total surprise even to himself, buying it on a whim when he saw it at the mall that day.

Perhaps even then, she thought, she had dismissed it as coincidence because the alternative was so utterly alien and unsettling to her that it was almost unthinkable. No, it was infinitely easier both as a human being and as a mother to ignore this, even when it was shoved rudely into her face to some extent every day. So she did: at Jessie’s third birthday party, when her daughter told her that her grandparents were dropping by to surprise her, and they showed up two minutes later holding balloons; when Jessie had told her that Mommy’s friend was angry with her because she had forgotten something, and two hours later she realized that she had—she had forgotten a school board meeting that started five minutes ago. These things would terrify her if she let them, but she refused with stoic persistence, beating back the incessant clamor and urgent whisperings of her conscience. She tried to dismiss it altogether at first, then later decided Jessie was picking up the stress in the house now that David was out of work, and her feelings had begun to surface in the form of these dreams.