Visions(Sylvia Skrmetta) It was a miserably cold moonless night when it happened. I was in my tiny bedroom, adorned with magazine torn-out color and black and white pictures of actors and musicians taped over every square inch of my walls. I had been studying for hours for final exams before the Christmas break. It had been snowing relentlessly the entire weekend, so being stuck in the apartment was not a bad alternative to freezing my butt off outside with my siblings who were in a state of bliss in the white frigid powder.

I did not realize how late it was getting when my petite mother walked into my bedroom. She was dressed in her red flannel nightgown and had one curler in her short black hair. She yawned as she reached for my light switch. “Goodnight sweetheart,” she said before returning to her bed.

I was accustomed to my mother walking in unannounced, and my father only giving me a short warning knock before entering my room. Privacy in my family was only enjoyed by my parents. My four brothers and I were “privaciless,” a word I had invented. It was the reason I was never naked or in my underwear when I was in my bedroom. I was allowed to lock the bathroom door to prevent my brothers from walking in on me. Such a thing would have made my prudish mother lose her mind.

With my history book in my hands, I sat on my single bed in the dark. The only light came from a street light at the corner. I laid my book down on the floor next to my bed and walked to my window. My warm breath formed a cloud of haze where I pressed my nose up against the freezing glass. I backed away slightly and used the sleeve of my nightgown to wipe a small area of my window.

The grey two story apartment complex I lived in faced a matching building. The sidewalk between the two buildings was now buried under three feet of powdery snow. I smiled when I saw my brothers’ attempts at making a snowman, especially since they had been working so hard on it most of that afternoon.

I studied the windows belonging to the apartments facing mine. My friend Jennifer would sometimes wave at me from her own window, but at this late hour, I knew she was probably sound asleep. Most of the lights in the adjacent building were out, only a few still had at least one light still on and from some of the apartments I could see the flickering lights of a Christmas tree.

For some reason one particular apartment on the first floor caught my eye. I could see the twinkling of multicolored Christmas lights through the living room’s large glass window pane. Suddenly, I felt very uneasy. The image of a fire entered and departed my mind in an instance, but not before I saw my father’s face behind a wall of broken glass.

I pulled myself from the window and slid under my icy sheets. At first I just laid in my bed staring at the ceiling. The vision kept creeping into my mind…in and out, like a worm crawling in the ground. Too many horror movies, I thought. As disturbing as the vision had been, my tired mind and body finally gave in to the “sandman.”

The shrill alarm snatched me from a deep sleep. For an instance, I thought I was dreaming, but the excited voices of my parents confirmed otherwise. My mother was screaming for her children to get out of bed. Apparently she thought the alarm was coming from our building. I heard my father assure his terrified wife that our building was not burning as he ran out of the door in his blue cotton bath robe and his worn-out house shoes..

My mother and my brothers ran to the front living room window, but the Christmas tree made it impossible to see what was happening. Immediately everyone turned and ran to my room for a better view.

My mother quickly unlatched the window and slid it open. A gust of winter air caught our breaths. We could see my father running out of the front door of our apartment building and high stepping across the snow covered sidewalk to the apartment I had been staring at just hours before. In the distance, the faint scream of sirens penetrated the frigid morning air. It took a few seconds for me to understand what was happening. I pushed my my brothers out of my way and began screaming at my father, “Daddy…no, no!”

Between the alarms, the sirens, and the icy wind, my father could not hear my pleas. He ran into the burning building. Smoke was crawling from under the burning apartment’s door and even the force of his kicks against the door did not budge it. He could hear screaming inside, and could only assume the family was trapped in the back of the apartment. By now my whole family was crying for my father to come back to us.

I saw my father running back outside to the front of the apartment. His black wavy hair was tussled by the wind that blew fiercely between the two buildings. For a moment it seemed to me that he was looking for the water hose that was sometimes attached under a neighbor’s window. Surely, I thought, he knows it would be frozen stiff.

Then something caught his attention and he plowed his way back to the front of the burning apartment. The tiny face of pajama-clad child with his face pressed against his bedroom window was the last thing anyone saw before the fiery apartment’s front window exploded.

Nothing could have prepared me or my family from the horror of seeing my father lying in the snow. The bed of ice he lay in was quickly turning red from his glass penetrated body.

My father was the only victim of that morning fire. Firemen were able to contain the blaze and rescue the horrified family. It was of no consequence that everyone hailed my father a hero for trying to rescue the family from the inferno.

I felt the guilt building in me every day after my father’s death. Why didn’t I warn someone of the impending fire? I realized the image I had seen was nothing more than a coincidence, a very horrible coincidence. But was it?

I tried to pay attention to the priest as he gave our family encouraging words about the loss of our father. “He was a good man who loved God and family above all else.” I wondered how he knew anything about my father.

As we did every Sunday, my mother and I “bookended” my four brothers between us in an effort to contain their restlessness during the mass. Rarely did my father accompany us. But today he was dressed in his best blue suit, the one my mother had bought for him for special occasions. I remember her telling him how handsome he was whenever he wore it, and how it complimented his light blue eyes. On this sad day, Daddy laid in his coffin with his eyes closed. I found myself willing him to open his eyes. Okay Daddy, you can wake up now, the joke is over!

It seemed as though everyone in the church was staring at me and my family as we sat in the front pew. Even the colorful stained glass figures of saints and angels which adorned the tiny chapel were watching us. Why didn’t you do something? The voices in my head were loud and clear, and I answered them with my mind’s voice. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!

Thoughts of the past bombarded my brain. This is not the first time it has happened. Remember the amusement park when I refused to get on the roller coaster, and I managed to talk my brothers into riding the Ferris Wheel with me instead? The “Zippo,” our pet name for the roller coaster, was my favorite ride, and I had ridden it many times. I had felt uneasiness in the pit of my stomach, and I saw the roller coaster…or parts of it I didn’t recognize flash in my brain as quickly as the flash of a camera. There had been a horrible accident later that same day. Two children fell to their death when their seat restrains on the “Zippo” tore loose.

I remembered squirming in my classroom seat and twirling a chunk of my hair around and around my index finger, a habit I acquired during stressful situations. Many school children were crying, while others like me had no idea what all the commotion was about. The victims were two of my classmates! I hadn’t known about the freak accident until kids at school started talking about it, even then, I did not associate the action I had taken to sway my brothers away from the doomed roller coaster ride to a feeling or premonition I might have had. I was only nine-years-old. How could I have known?

For months after my father’s untimely death, I could not talk to anyone about the tragic incident. Along with the guilt, came the depression that had set in the day my father was buried. No one knew what I had seen or thought in my mind the night before the fire. Everyone felt sorry for me and my family for our loss, and attributed my disassociation from my friends as my way of coping with my father’s death.

It was my mother who finally broke the silence. “Sweetheart,” she said, “we need to talk about your father’s death. I know you don’t want to, but I can see that you are carrying a heavy burden.” She took me into her warm embrace.

I began to cry, something I had not allowed myself to do since I watched my father’s body lying in a bed of blood and snow. My whole body shook until all the emotions I had pent up inside me were released.

“Talk to me,” my mother urged while still holding me in her arms.

I looked at my petite mother; she seemed to have aged ten years in the past few weeks. “I’m fine now Mom…really.” How could I tell my mother what was going on in my head when I didn’t understand it myself? I wanted to understand; I had to understand!

At night I laid in my bed thinking about the past. Had there been more of these premonitions than the roller coaster and the fire that took my father’s life? I realized there had been many occasions when I had thought of a certain person, usually someone I had not seen or heard from for some time, and that person either called or showed up unexpectedly. Were those incidences connected to those that involved tragedy? Was there a way for me to control these thoughts? All I knew for sure was the fear I had been having since my father’s death and the unanswered questions in my mind, consumed me.

Always an honor student, my grades began to suffer. I realized I was paralyzed with fear; afraid I would have a premonition and not recognize the warning and someone else would die. Whenever I could, I would put on my brother’s stereo earphones and turn up the volume of one of many of my siblings’ obnoxious music. The noise that exploded from the stereo seemed to drown out my thoughts; it also stole my ability to concentrate on my studies. In class, I found myself reciting poems, prayers, or the Pledge of Allegiance over and over in my head as I stared glassy-eyed at the blackboard. I didn’t hear anything my teachers said, not even when they called me by name.

My mother was called to speak with the guidance counselor. “Mrs. Blackwell, I think your daughter may need to see a professional.” The counselor seemed almost embarrassed to suggest this to a woman who had just lost her husband.

My mother dropped her chin down and began to cry. “I know, I know! I’ve tried to get her to talk to me, but she won’t or she can’t.” She accepted the tissue from the counselor. “Her father’s death has affected her so much. It’s as if she feels responsible in some way.”

For months, my mother made me appointments with a friend of hers who was also a very well respected child psychologist. Dr. Zela was kind and patient. She never pressed me into saying or doing anything I didn’t want to. During the first few visits, we talked about my mother or my brothers or school. She seemed to understand my reluctance to talk about my father’s death. Then one day she bluntly asked, “What are you afraid of Teresa?”

Her question caught me off guard, and I just stared at Dr. Zela for several minutes. “I don’t want to kill anyone else!”

The doctor looked puzzled. “Who do you think you killed, Teresa?”

“I killed my father,” I blurted out, “and the boys on the roller coaster!” She probably could barely hear me above my sobs.

Dr. Zela sat beside me and held me as I cried. My tears were clouded with the cheap mascara of a fourteen-year-old. A dark grey stain appeared on Dr. Zela’s beautiful white silk blouse. She would later tell me that the ruined blouse was a small price to pay for my healing. She knew she had finally broken through my wall of silence. “Why do you think you killed your father? And tell me about these boys, Teresa.”

“I didn’t warn them…I didn’t know!”

Dr. Zela moved back to her seat across from me. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

I went into great detail about the night my father died and the day of the roller coaster accident. I told her of my fear of being responsible for not warning someone else if these thoughts occurred again. “I’ve tried to drown-out my thoughts in so many ways. I don’t want to think about anything.”

“Many people have these ‘premonitions,’ or see or feel things that sometimes come to pass.” Dr. Zela paused, “I’ve had them myself.”

“You have?” It never occurred to me that I was not the only person in the entire history of people that had had these horrible experiences.

“Yes! But you have to know that there was nothing you could have done in both those cases. Nothing!”

Dr. Zela looked away. The highlights of her shoulder length honey- blond hair shimmered in the sunlight that streamed through her open window. For a moment she was immersed in her own memories. Her light green eyes seemed translucent in the sunlight as she gazed out of her window at the clear blue sky. She turned to look directly at me. “Do you remember studying about the space program in school?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she began, “It was January 28, 1986. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. I was in graduate school, and very interested in all the sciences. Many classes had gathered in the auditorium to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Everyone was excited. You know, ‘Yeah USA!’”

Dr. Zela hesitated as she thought whether to share something she had never told anyone else. “Everyone but me, I felt very uneasy. I attributed my state of mind to the dream I had the night before about a huge silver bird flying high into space. The number 73 was flashing...then I saw fire and .…” She wouldn’t go into more detail.

“It blew up? The space shuttle—it blew up!”

“Yes, Teresa,” she answered, “it blew up and seven crew members were killed!”

I sat silently staring at my mother’s friend. At that moment she seemed so fragile. “And the number 73? What did that mean?” I asked.

I could see her hesitating, and I could sense she wished she had not told me her story.

“The explosion happened 73 seconds after launch!”

Years have passed since those days of self-condemnation and guilt. Without meaning to reveal her experience, Dr. Zela, my mother’s friend and later my trusted friend, had freed me from the fears that would have destroyed me. She helped me to understand that what had happened was not my fault, and I was not some kind of freak for having an occasional premonition. “It happens.” I can still hear her tell me.

There were other tragedies in our country and around the world after the one she had dreamed about, and I wondered if she had won her battle with breast cancer would she have had premonitions about those as well. I would never know.

Over the years, I seemed to have developed a second sense when it came to my mother. Although we lived hundreds of miles apart, whenever she came into my mind, my phone would ring, or I would call her to hear her tell me she had the phone in her hand and was dialing my number.

I dreamed very little, and nothing as disturbing as the fire and my father’s death. Even so, I remained vigilant over my thoughts and dreams. I was sure I could and would recognize a cosmic warning.

But something happened last night, something that hasn’t happened since I was fourteen. From our sixteenth floor hotel room window, as I was admiring the city skyline at sunset, I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. The twin towers were glowing in a fiery red, smoke billowed from the windows on the top floors; I could hear screams and the roar of plane engines.
I must have gasped. My husband hurried to my side as I swayed and almost fell. “What’s wrong, Honey?” he asked as he helped me to our bed.

I was trembling and pointing towards the window. “Look outside!” I cried.

“What do you mean?” he asked puzzled.

“Please, look outside!” I held my hands over my mouth to suppress my scream.

He did as I asked, then took a handful of the heavy woven material and pulled the drapes completely open. He turned to me with a questioning look, “It’s a beautiful sunset Teresa!” he said.

The End

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