The Forecast of August

The first time I noticed something was off was during the summer of 1983, when my daughter Edie was five. We lived in a cramped duplex in Wichita, just a mile from the airbase where my husband worked as a mechanic. Edie was a quiet child, but not unusually so. She spoke in complete sentences, played with her toys, and seemed to hit every milestone on schedule. That was until she started talking about ‘the man in the rain’.

At first, I thought it was an imaginary friend. ‘What man, sweetheart?’ I asked, kneeling to her eye level. She pointed out the window, where a light drizzle was falling. ‘He’s standing by the mailbox,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s wet.’ I looked, saw nothing, and dismissed it. But the following week, when a neighbor mentioned a car accident on the next block that had left a man wandering in the rain, I felt a prickle on my neck. It was coincidence, I told myself. Children have wild imaginations.

But as the months passed, Edie’s pronouncements grew more precise. She knew when the phone would ring before it did, and she’d tell me who was calling: ‘Grandma,’ she’d say, and the phone would ring and it was indeed my mother. She knew when the mailman was coming, even when he was early or late. She knew, days in advance, when the seismic airshows would rattle the windows. It was as if she had a direct line to the future, but only for the mundane, the tiny details that made up our days.

At first, I was amused. I joked to my husband, Ray, that Edie was psychic. He laughed it off, but there was a tightness in his smile. He’d grown up in a family that distrusted anything out of the ordinary, and he’d already been through enough with his own mother’s fanciful notions. But Edie’s insight wasn’t fanciful; it was practical. She knew when the car battery would die before it happened, and we replaced it just in time. She knew when the washing machine would break down, and we had it repaired before the flood. She was our own little Cassandra, but instead of doom, she brought bit of convenience.

Still, as Edie grew, her abilities seemed to dim. By the time she was eight, she no longer announced visitors or phone calls. She became a normal, slightly introverted girl who loved reading and drawing. I convinced myself that it had been a phase, a child’s fantasy that had faded with age. But then, one autumn evening, Edie came to me with a pale face, clutching a piece of paper. ‘Mom,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘I had a dream. There’s a number, 417. And a name, Marcus. And a river, and a bridge.’

I frowned, not understanding. ‘What does that mean, honey?’ She shook her head, her eyes distant. ‘I don’t know. But it feels important.’ I brushed it off, thinking it was just a nightmare. But two days later, our neighbor, Marcus, who lived two doors down, was found dead beneath the old railroad bridge by the river. The official cause was cardiac arrest, but there was no explanation for why he’d been there at that hour. Edie was silent for days after that, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d known more than she let on.

That was when I decided to take her to see a doctor. Not a military one, but a civilian pediatrician in town. I described her early abilities, her recent dream, the incident with Marcus. The doctor, a kind older man with thick glasses, listened patiently. Then he said, ‘Mrs. Porter, I’m going to be frank. There is no medical or scientific explanation for what you’ve described. It sounds like you have a very imaginative child, and you’re understandably anxious.’ He advised counseling. I left the office with a prescription for mild sedatives for myself, but nothing for Edie.

As Edie entered middle school, her visions returned, but this time they were darker. She began sketching a recurring image: a woman in a white dress standing near a grove of willow trees, her face obscured by long hair. She drew it obsessively, on every notebook, every bit of scrap paper. When I asked her about it, she said, ‘She’s waiting. She wants me to come.’ I was terrified. I forbade her from going to the old mill pond, where a stand of willows grew along the bank. I tried to keep her busy with activities, but she always returned to those drawings.

One afternoon, I found her standing at the window, staring out at the street. Her face was blank, almost trance-like. ‘What are you looking at?’ I asked. Without turning, she whispered, ‘The river is rising.’ I looked outside, but the street was dry. That night, the news reported that a flash flood had swept through the next county, drowning a woman in a car. I didn’t sleep for days.

I began to see Edie as a burden, a constant reminder of the things I couldn’t control. Ray and I fought constantly. He accused me of enabling her ‘weirdness,’ and I accused him of being heartless. The marriage, already strained, crumbled. We divorced when Edie was twelve. I got custody, and we moved to a small town in Nebraska, hoping for a fresh start.

For a while, Edie seemed to improve. She made friends, did well in school. She stopped talking about the woman in white. I convinced myself that the move had been good for us. But just before her fourteenth birthday, Edie woke me in the middle of the night. Her face was ashen. ‘Mom,’ she said, ‘I know when it happens.’ I sat up, my heart pounding. ‘When what happens?’ She looked at me with an eerie calm. ‘The accident. The one that kills us.’ I grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Don’t say that! You can’t know that!’ But she just shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve always known.’

I took her to a psychiatrist, then a neurologist, then a parapsychologist who claimed to have studied psychic phenomena. No one could explain it. Some said she was under extreme stress, others suggested epileptic activity in her temporal lobe. But her scans were clean, and her tests results were normal. The only thing they found was that she had an exceptionally vivid imagination.

One night, in desperation, I sat down with her and asked, ‘Edie, if you know the time and place, why can’t you change it? Why can’t we avoid it?’ She looked at me with a sad smile. ‘It’s like a movie, Mom. It’s already filmed. I can fast-forward, but I can’t edit.’ I sobbed, holding her. ‘Then let’s just not go out. Never leave the house.’ But she shook her head. ‘It’s not that kind of accident. It’s not a car. It’s not a flood. It’s something else.’

That fall, Edie started high school. She was a quiet girl, but she had a few close friends. She joined the art club, and her paintings were hauntingly beautiful, almost otherworldly. She painted a series of abstract pieces that critics later called ‘premonitory.’ But to me, they were just torture.

On the day of her fourteenth birthday, a Saturday, we had a small party. Ray, now remarried, came to visit. Edie seemed happy, blowing out the candles. But in the evening, when the guests had left, she came to me and said, ‘Mom, it’s soon. It’s tonight.’ I felt my blood run cold. ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll drive somewhere. We’ll go to a hotel.’ She just smiled. ‘You can’t stop it, Mom. But maybe you can make sure it happens in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone else.’

Then she told me. She said that there was a school field trip planned for the next week, to a county fairground where an old wooden barn was scheduled for demolition. She had seen, with terrifying clarity, that the barn would collapse, and a group of children would be trapped. She was one of them. She said, ‘If I stay home sick, they’ll still go. But if I’m there, I can warn them. I can get them out. The only way is if I’m there.’

I refused. I forbade her from going. I called the school and canceled her trip. But on the day of the excursion, Edie stole my car keys and drove herself there. I don’t know how she knew the way, but she did. When I got a call from the school, they told me there had been an incident. The barn had started to creak, and Edie had noticed a crack, and she screamed for everyone to get out. They managed to get out just in time as the roof caved in. But Edie, in her hurry, tripped and was struck by a falling beam. She died instantly.

The aftermath was a blur. There was a funeral, condolences, a flood of letters from parents thanking her. They called her a hero. I sat numb through it all. The only comfort, if I can call it that, was a notebook I found in her room. In it, she had written a single line, dated the day she died: ‘The girl in the white dress was me, but not now. I will be waiting by the willows.’

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if she’s truly gone or if she’s somewhere else. But sometimes, at night, when the wind rustles the leaves of the trees outside, I think I see a flicker of a white dress at the edge of the property. And I hear a voice, faint but familiar, saying, ‘Mom, don’t be sad. This is the way it had to be.’

And I sit in the dark, wondering if she still knows the future, even in death, and if she can see the one thing I never wanted to know: what happens to me.