Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy Silverstein was the author of Sick Girl, which won a Books for a Better Life Award and was a finalist for the Borders Original Voices Award, and My Glory Was I Had Such Friends. She earned her Juris Doctor at New York University School of Law, served on the Board of the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), and was an active speaker and writer on women’s health issues and patient advocacy. She lived in New York.

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Sick Girl

Grove Press

Chapter One

"You are in a family business. There is stock involved," she said, offering up the first evidence of her clairvoyance.

"Well, you got me there. Score one for the great Madame Clara!" My father was in a playful mood as usual, ready to challenge the dark-haired woman sitting opposite him with fast quips and charming good humor. "Seems you know me like the back of your hand-or my hand, as the case may be."

She continued intently, her black eyes unwavering. "You have an important deal in the making; it will fall through. Do not feel distressed when this happens. Something bigger awaits you."

"Bigger than a bread box?"

Madame Clara laid her pointer finger on the center of my father's palm and traced a diagonal line slowly, stopping at points to whisper their significance. "Respect. The rewards of hard work. Bounty."

"Await me, right?"

She looked up from his hand. "Yes, but only after a disappointment. You will not get what you have been seeking."

These words had significance for my father. The year was 1984. He was in the process of trying to sell the family business that his father and uncles had started some forty-five years earlier, which had grown to become a publicly traded company on the Stock Exchange. On the day my father offered his palm to a fortune-teller for the first time in his life, he believed he held in his pocket a firm offer from a large conglomerate to buy the business for a share price that was more than respectable. It was an imminent coup; the company had fallen on hard times and my father was one of the major forces to save it, with tough decisions and careful maneuvers that included firing every last family member who had long become a useless fixture. He was not a popular manager at first, but his efforts breathed not only life but unprecedented productivity into the company. To pull off a sale at this point would yield a profit for shareholders, including the cousins he'd sent out the door.

Did Madame Clara just tell him that the deal would fall through?

My father grimaced.

"Oh, Arthur, don't be ridiculous," Beverly said. The sudden furrow in my father's brow told his wife just what he was thinking. She grabbed his forearm and gave it a little shake, followed by a couple of reassuring pats. "Well, for Pete's sake, there must be something else in that hand of his, Madame-ah ... Clara?" She forced herself into a grin but there was nothing cheerful about it; Beverly's expression was flat-out imploring.

It was time to change the subject, and Madame Clara was ready. She had been holding back but would now reveal the prophecy she may have seen and had been reluctant to mention: that one of my father's two daughters would become very sick.

My father had not told her he had any children at all, let alone two daughters; the fortune-teller had hit upon another truth. There was Jodie, who'd just graduated from college, and her younger sister, Amy, who still had two years to go. Both were healthy young women.

"There will be a surgery-a serious one. And a miraculous recovery. The daughter will be okay."

"Splendid," my father said. "Next time, let's stick to the collapse of my business deals. It's more fun."

Madame Clara shrugged. "I see what I see-dark and light."

"Maybe I should have washed my hands first," he said. My father reached into his pocket for a twenty dollar bill and handed it to Madame Clara with a wink. "Thanks for the memories!"

Or at least that's how I pictured it. My father had recounted his fortune-teller story so many times it ran like a movie in my head. The first time I heard it, Madame Clara's prophecy about the sale of the family business had already come true: the original deal had fallen through just as she said it would, only to be replaced several months later with a different buyout arrangement for nearly double the price. Dark and light-that's what she'd told him. Oh, she was right. Madame Clara was the real McCoy. What a story!

And what a nightmare: there had also been a prediction about an illness. My father had to keep this part quiet and hope with every bit of the skeptic still left in him that it would not come true. But the amazing Madame Clara had turned him into something of a believer. The best my father could do was push the sick daughter prediction to the back of his mind, stay silent about it, and wait for the passage of time to prove that the fortune-teller's insights had been imperfect.

Three years later, illness hit me hard and fast; I would undergo the serious surgery that Madame Clara had foreseen. My sister, Jodie, would remain healthy. In time, I would move on to a recovery that was every bit the miracle that had shown up in my father's palm. But the fortune-teller had also said that I, the sick daughter, would be okay; this part of her prediction was flawed. While I would, in fact, survive for a surprisingly long time after surgery, nothing about living with a fragile heart would ever be okay with me. This is not to say that Madame Clara was wrong. She was, after all, reading my father's palm, not mine, so whatever she drew from it would naturally reflect his perceptions and experiences to come. My father, like nearly everyone else in my life, would always see me as okay in my post-surgery body. Perhaps Madame Clara had not misread his future at all.

But she'd misread mine. Months before I would sense the first inkling of a heart problem, I took a short trip to Atlantic City with my boyfriend, Scott. On my suggestion, we sought out Madame Clara's shack on the boardwalk and there it was, right where my father said it would be. Scott was reluctant to go in. The whole fortune-telling thing gave him the creeps, he said, even while parting the glass beads that served as the door to the reading room. As Scott took his first tentative step inside, I reached down and pinched his butt cheek, hard and quick. Into the air he flew, with a gasp.

"And I didn't even have to yell boo!" I teased.

"I'll show you boo!" He spun around and grabbed the sides of my waist, squeezing in spurts that brought me to breathless laughter within seconds.

Madame Clara emerged from behind a makeshift curtain and sat, annoyed, behind her crystal ball. I squirmed out from Scott's clutches and brought the fun to an end, knowing I was in the presence of the great seer who'd predicted, with amazing precision, the fate of my family's business. It excited me to think of what she might say about my own destiny; I'd...