In the summer of 1969, the four Gold children—Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon—go to a fortune teller who claims that she can predict when a person will die. The woman tells Varya that she will die on January 21st, 2044, when Varya is 88 years old. Varya soon discovers that her siblings are unsettled by their predictions, though none of them reveal exactly what the woman said.
The first section of the book is told from Simon’s perspective. Nine years after seeing the fortune teller, when Simon is 16, the Golds’ father Saul dies of a heart attack at 45. Simon is supposed to take over his father’s tailoring business, but because the fortune teller told Simon he would die at 20 years old, Simon doesn’t want to waste his life preparing for a job he doesn’t want. He is also gay, and since he doesn’t feel that he can be open about it in his home city of New York, he runs away with Klara to San Francisco.
In San Francisco, Simon finds a job dancing at a club and attends ballet classes during the day. He is thrilled to be able to have sex with whomever he wants, and even though he is initially hesitant about learning ballet, he finds that it empowers him and makes him feel like he can fly. He begins a relationship with another ballet dancer, and he rises in the ranks of the ballet company. But after Simon has been living in San Francisco for four years, AIDS begins to tear through the city. Simon refuses to quarantine, since he believes that he will die in six months anyway and he wants to enjoy what’s left of his life. In having sex with many different people, he contracts the disease and, on June 21st, the day the fortune teller predicted, Simon dies.
After Simon’s death, Klara mourns with her family and then returns to San Francisco. She is a magician who specializes in sleight of hand tricks, and she also performs a trick called the Jaws of Life, which involves her hanging from a rope by her teeth. Klara loves magic because it expands people’s sense of wonder and possibility. After she reconnects with a man, Raj, whom she met during her first days in San Francisco, they become business partners and later romantic partners.
As Klara expands her show, she also starts to have strange experiences. She drinks frequently and often blacks out. She also starts to hear “knocks,” which she attributes to Simon trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave. She starts to time the knocks in order to see if they spell out words, and they consistently spell out “MEET ME.”
In 1998, Klara and Raj are married, and soon after they have a daughter named Ruby. Klara is exhausted by the grind of performing and finding bookings, and Raj convinces her to go to Las Vegas because they can have more stability and higher pay there. Klara and Raj audition for The Mirage hotel, and they book a show after she stuns executives by making a strawberry appear in her hand. Afterward, however, she tells Raj that she doesn’t know where the strawberry came from. Raj is frustrated and a little frightened that Klara appears to believe in her own magic.
Klara drinks more and more, and she yearns to communicate with Simon. She also grows nervous because her predicted date of death is the opening night of her show in Las Vegas. A few days before, she realized that even if she dies, she’ll be able to communicate with the living just as Simon communicates with her. Furthermore, she realizes that if she dies on the day that the fortune teller predicted, it will prove that magic is real. On her opening night, Klara decides to hang herself.
After Klara’s death, the family once again gathers to mourn. At the memorial service, Daniel meets Eddie O’Donoghue—Eddie had seen Klara’s act several times and was in love with her. He was also the one to discover Klara after she hanged herself, because he planned to see her opening night show. Eddie tells Daniel that he is investigating Klara’s death in case it wasn’t a simple suicide, and Daniel reveals the story of the fortune teller in case she may have had something to do with it.
Fourteen years later, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, 2006, Daniel is suspended from his job as a military doctor in Albany, New York. His job is to determine whether men are healthy enough to go to war, and his supervisor thinks that he is turning too many people away. Daniel is frustrated because he believes fully in free will, and he feels that Colonel Bertram is hobbling his ability to make decisions. Faced with a two-week break before returning to work, Daniel decides to invite Raj and Ruby to Thanksgiving. Following Klara’s death, Raj started to teach Ruby Klara’s act, and they have since become extremely successful. When Raj and Ruby arrive, Daniel enjoys bonding with Ruby, particularly because he and his wife Mira have no children.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Daniel receives a call from Eddie, who tells him that they have connected the fortune teller to five suicides. Daniel grows obsessed with the idea that the fortune teller’s prediction may have prompted Klara to kill herself, and he looks up information about the woman’s whereabouts.
The day after Thanksgiving is Daniel’s predicted death day, and Eddie O’Donoghue calls Daniel, explaining that the FBI has cleared the fortune teller. Daniel is furious. Feeling helpless, he takes a gun and drives 10 hours to in order to find the fortune teller and get her to confess that she caused the deaths of his siblings. When he arrives, the fortune teller simply explains that she thought that giving people knowledge would help them live the life they wanted to. When Daniel threatens to kill the fortune teller, Eddie arrives on the scene—Mira had called him and told him where Daniel was going. Daniel is in a frenzy and refuses to back down, forcing Eddie to shoot him.
The final section follows Varya, now 53, who has become a biologist. She is working on a 20-year study that theorizes that a severely restricted diet will increase the lifespan of monkeys. Varya is also an extreme germophobe; since the fortune teller’s prediction, she has been fastidious about remaining healthy, which limits her ability to experience the world. In addition, because she didn’t want anything bad to happen to her siblings, she kept a distance from them for most of her life and cut herself off from all relationships.
Varya explains her research to a young journalist named Luke. During the week he is at the lab, Varya is dismayed that one of the monkeys, Frida, has become so miserable because of the captivity and lack of food that she has started to hurt herself—biting her own leg and plucking out her fur.
At the end of Luke’s time at the lab, he reveals that he is actually the child Varya had when she was 27 and decided to give up for adoption. Varya explains to him that she had an affair with a visiting professor when she was in grad school and got pregnant. She decided to give Luke up for adoption because she was too afraid to take care of him—too worried that she would lose him. Luke also learns that Varya has been restricting her own diet for years in an effort to increase her longevity, just like the monkeys. He is sad that she is making herself miserable, arguing that a longer life isn’t necessarily a better one.
After Luke leaves, Varya returns to the lab, extremely upset. She discovers that Frida has been chewing on her own arm and is very weak. She tries to get Frida to eat—even giving her food that Varya isn’t supposed to give her—but Frida throws up the food and bites Varya on the chin. Varya is sent to the hospital and fired for compromising the experiment. But afterwards, she starts to make changes in her life. She eats more, decides to teach, and tries to rebuild her relationship with Luke.
The book ends a few weeks later, when Varya and Ruby visit Gertie—the Gold family matriarch—at her assisted living facility. Ruby is in college and plans to become a doctor. Watching Ruby, Varya is amazed at her skill and wishes that Klara could see her. And while she’s sad that Ruby plans to give up performing, she knows that magic and medicine are simply different ways to “keep people alive.”
