Chasing Amanda by Melissa Foster Page B

children. Not many people really knew Rodney.”
    Molly nodded, sitting forward in the pew.
    “He was the kindest boy. Never hurt a fly. He was a bit slow. Drove my parents crazy as they got on in years,” she looked away, as if reliving a memory. “They passed a few years back. Mom, of cancer, and my father, well, I think of a broken heart. I brought Rodney here with me twenty-five years ago, he was just twenty-one years old then.”
    At the mention of his age, Molly’s eyes grew wide.
    “Rodney was…an accident if you will,” she turned her head to the side and looked at Molly. “There were eleven years between us.”
    Molly nodded again, understandingly, she thought.
    “He used to help out the residents with yard work, stuff like that, but even those he helped didn’t really get to know him. They considered it charity.”
    “Pastor Lett,” she began, “I sort of… know things, too. I wanted to find out if he knew things the way I sometimes do.”
    She smiled, ruefully. Everyone thinks they’re special . “Well, what do you mean?” she asked, to humor her.
    “I have visions—I guess you call them that—sometimes early in the morning when I’m not really asleep but not really awake, other times when I am near a place where there is danger or something is going to happen,” she said, her hazel eyes pleading for understanding.
    Pastor Lett politely paid closer attention. “Go on,” she said.
    “I’m not always sure if what I see is real or not,” she looked away, as if embarrassed by her admission.
    “I’ve never met anyone else who truly possessed the same power as Rodney,” Pastor Lett said. “Perhaps, Molly, your insecurities, or your past, interfere with your present,” Pastor Lett said authoritatively.
    Disheartened, Molly replied, “No, I’m sure it’s not that.”
    Pastor Lett continued, “When Rodney was a little boy, he used to tell me that things were going to happen. Bad things were going to happen. I never gave any credence to what he said to me, but then, as I got older and started really paying attention, I realized that they had started coming true, and the connection was undeniable.”
    Molly released a breath, her disappointment subsided. “So it is true. He did know things.”
    Pastor Lett nodded, “He knew facts and details about catastrophes that he couldn’t have read about or predicted by any means.” She turned her body toward Molly and looked her in the eye, welcoming the opportunity to discuss this hidden aspect of her brother’s life, craving the acceptance, and, she was ashamed to admit, the purging of the burden. “I don’t know how to tell if what you see, or what you know, is real, but I can tell you that with Rodney, it was. It was a little scary.” She took a deep breath, about to reveal what nobody understood, or cared to try to understand, years ago. “When Rodney was four, he woke up on June 16, shaking and crying. I remember because for years afterwards, every time he cried in the morning I prayed for a full forty-eight hours, even as a young woman, that nothing bad was going to happen. Anyway, he ran around our house yelling, something about a big bomb going off. The poor kid, he spent the whole day—and even slept that night—in the cellar, petrified. The next day, of course, June 17, 1967, China exploded its first hydrogen bomb. Rodney worried for years that they would bomb us and we’d all die.” She looked away, remembering Rodney screaming and frightened, as their parents yelled at him to just be quiet and stop making up stories. The memory saddened her.
    “Then there was the time, he was about five years old, when he started talking about this man that would walk on the moon in the month twenty. We had no idea what he was jabbering about. He kept repeating, over and over, ‘Month twenty, man walk on moon.’ He drove us crazy, until July 20, 1969, when he bound into the room and said to me, ‘See! Man walk on moon month twenty!’”