Irene said she could read the future in the way birds fly across the sky, and I believed her. She was like a wild animal, like a little bird herself: something that would flutter in your hand; a creature with a racing heart. She’d once called the Beatles’ manager and, when he wouldn’t let her talk to them, left a message for Ringo: I want to make love to you seven times. She said he would understand. She’d married a man she suspected of being CIA, and they’d spent her inheritance traveling in Europe. Then he’d raped her in Amsterdam and tried to have her committed to an insane asylum and tried to have her wealthy parents murdered. She once sent him a collection of pages torn from a child’s coloring book in which she had colored all the hands yellow. She said he would know what she meant.