[Ganzfield 2] Adversary by Kate Kaynak Page A

decent teenaged girls simply didn’t take off alone to cross the Atlantic. But she did. She ran away, booked passage in steerage on a westbound ship, and came to Boston.
    “She kept dreaming of the man during the crossing and, the closer she got to Boston, the stronger her dreams became. She got off the boat, cleared immigration, and started walking. Then, as she went, she began to recognize more and more of the area around her. Finally, she came to the fire station in Roxbury. She’d seen it in her dreams many times so she knew she’d arrived. Nan walked right in, found the man she’d been dreaming about, and held out her hand.”
    Viv paused, scrubbing at a particularly resistant black stain on one of the pans. Her mind had switched to eradicating the mark, which left me hanging.
    “So what happened?”
    “What? When?” asked Viv, distracted.
    “When Nan walked into the fire station! I mean…what did she say?” I felt amazed at the things this girl from another century had done. She must’ve been an RV, but how could she’ve located someone she’d never met like that? Especially without dodecamine?
    “Oh, right. Well, Nan walked up to the man she’d seen in her dreams, held out her hand to him, and said, ‘You’re the one. You’re the one I’m going to marry. What’s your name?’” Viv laughed gently at this in a can-you-imagine kind of way.
    “Well, Old Sean McFee was apparently rather surprised by this little piece of information, coming from this strange girl just off the boat. But something about her struck him as more interesting than crazy and he went for a walk around the neighborhood with her. She told him some of the things she’d seen him doing in her dreams, like knocking down a beehive by throwing an apple he’d bought from a green-painted apple cart. She pointed out the tree where the beehive had been and even picked out the right apple vendor when he happened by. By the end of the walk, Old Sean was convinced there was something special about this girl. After two weeks, they were engaged. They got married a month later, on her sixteenth birthday. He was twenty-one at the time.”
    Viv noticed that the drying cloth she was using was now too wet; she began to hunt for another. Once she found a new towel, her thoughts returned to the story of her husband’s great-grandparents.
    “Nan and Old Sean had five sons: Sean Jr., Seamus, Dylan, Ian, and Thomas. The boys grew up and Nan started having dreams of young ladies. She knew the dreams were like the ones that’d led her to Old Sean, so she told her boys what to look for. The first was the girl with the red hair who sang in the church choir in Walpole. Next came the one who worked as a maid in the big house with the columns in Belmont. She sent each son off to find the girl she’d dreamed for him. Ian had to go all the way to Kansas City. But each son followed the directions his mother had given him, and each time the girl she’d described was just where his mother had said she’d be.
    “The young men brought these girls home to meet their mother. Once Nan had seen that each girl was the one from her dream, she gave her son the go-ahead to court her properly. Dylan brought home a young lady who matched the description his mother had given him—the daughter of a police officer in Sharon—but he’d gotten the wrong girl, according to his mother, so she sent him back to find the right one.”
    “The sons didn’t mind dating the girls their mother had picked out for them?” The idea rankled against my modern sensibilities on several levels.
    “Turns out, Nan knew what she was doing. The boys may’ve been skeptical at first, but once they met these girls, they liked them enough to get to know them better. They all fell in love, and the girls fell in love right back. So, they each got married and had families. And Nan’s sons and grandsons all became firefighters—like Old Sean—in their turns. And many of them seemed to have