She wouldn’t miss it for a few hours, though. Aunt Vera went to the farmers’ market every Saturday. She spent eons there.
A quick glance at Aunt Vera’s browser history told Ava that Aunt Vera was mainly interested in recipes. That came as no surprise. With Mama gone, Aunt Vera continued to do most of the cooking for Nate and the girls.
Ava discovered that Aunt Vera also appeared to be addicted to an old TV show called Charmed. That was a surprise. Aunt Vera hardly ever watched TV, unless it was a PBS special or a live broadcast of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. Some quick googling revealed that Charmed was about three sisters, a missing mother, and magic. Magic?!
Never, ever would Ava have guessed that Aunt Vera might watch a show—choose to watch a show—about magic. And not only that, but on the sly! After recovering from the shock, Ava felt a wave of fondness for Aunt Vera. It was cool how people always had more layers than it first appeared. Did Natasha and Darya know that, or would Ava always be their dreamy baby sister?
More googling revealed that the sisters in Charmed were witches—“good” witches—who had an ancient spell book called The Book of Shadows, which taught them how to fight off demons, warlocks, and other baddies. They also had witchy, paranormal powers, which added another layer of intrigue to Aunt Vera’s fondness for the show.
Might Grandma Rose, who seemed as practical as Aunt Vera, harbor a secret fascination for such “nonsense” as well? What if people sometimes claimed to detest the very things they were obsessed with, for fear of how others might perceive them? Or, what if people claimed to detest the things they feared, for superstitious reasons of their own?
Ava learned that the youngest sister on Charmed, Phoebe, could see both the past and the future. “Premonition” was the name for Phoebe’s type of magic. Ava also learned that all three sisters could communicate through telepathy, which meant they could read one another’s thoughts.
Ava did a Google search on telepathy. Some people said it was real; others insisted it was a sham. Ava dug deeper. She found a wealth of scholarly articles on telepathy, articles as dense as the ones about time travel that she’d struggled with yesterday at the public library.
Contrary to Ava’s expectations, plenty of research supported the claim that rare individuals could read the thoughts of others. For example, a neuroscientist with an unpronounceable name set up an experiment in which people in India used electroencephalographs to send thoughts to people in France—and it worked! Electroencephalographs was the long name for EEGs. EEGs, Ava learned, were skullcaps made from dozens of small electrodes.
The neuroscientist hooked up matching EEGs to pairs of subjects: one skullcap was placed on a person who lived in India, and the other was placed on someone in France. The subject in India was asked to visualize something specific, like an apple, and the subject in France was asked to draw what he or she saw.
The article spewed out elaborate graphs, statistics, and more long, unpronounceable words. Ava didn’t understand much of it, but the takeaway was clear.
“With a relative standard deviation of 2.96, our study provides compelling evidence that no less than one percent of humans demonstrates an accurate and replicable ability to read the thoughts of others,” the article concluded. “This phenomenon, termed ‘telepathy’ in common parlance, is indeed real.”
One percent of humans had telepathy, Ava marveled. Scientists said so!
An article in Yale Scientific also stated that telepathy couldn’t be discounted, and a paper in a journal called Behavior and Brain Science suggested that even claims of communication between humans and ghosts shouldn’t be rejected out of hand. Ghosts! It was mind-blowing!
“Assume, in the name of philosophical consideration, that a ‘ghost’ is the non-material energy of a person deceased,” the author of the paper argued. “If the thoughts of a living human exist without material form, why, then, shouldn’t the thoughts of a ghost exist in the same way? The extension of this claim is self-evident: If humans can communicate telepathically when alive, then it is reasonable to assume that humans can communicate telepathically with beings no longer extant.”
Ava looked up extant. It meant “still alive.” So, okay. The author of the paper was using fancy words to say that humans could communicate with ghosts.
Wow.
Ava hopped from link to link, falling deeper into the rabbit hole that was the internet.
She learned that in the olden days, people accused of having telepathy were burned at the stake. She learned that even now, some people considered telepathy to be the devil’s work. She read about kids with telepathy who were cast out of their families because the kids’ abilities freaked out their parents. She read about adults with telepathy who were diagnosed with mental illness and put on so many medications that they no longer knew their own thoughts, much less the thoughts of others.
Much of what Ava discovered gave her a shuddery feeling at the base of her spine. It also gave her a new perspective about the “magic” said to exist in Willow Hill. Plenty of Willow Hill’s residents dismissed the possibility of magic completely: Grandma Rose and Aunt Vera, for example. Others held a friendly “why not?” sort of attitude. Others, like Mama, were true believers.
If Mama’s account of what happened after her Wishing Day was true—that Emily was there one day and gone the next—then Ava couldn’t blame her.
Ava thought again about Grandma Rose, and from Grandma Rose to Grandpa Dave, who was Papa’s father and Grandma Rose’s ex-husband. Did Grandpa Dave remember a once-upon-a-time daughter named Emily? Or, if he didn’t, did he slip every so often, the way Grandma Rose did when she’d called Ava “Emily” during their last visit to the nursing home?
Ava blinked, recalling an incident that she must have buried in her subconscious. As the memory rose to the surface, Ava experienced the same burning whiteness she’d felt beneath
