Proof of Life

by Sheila Lowe

  Between them they bundled the afghan around the boy, pulling it up around his head so that only his face was visible. Her hand brushed against the icy cheek.

  “He’s lost too much heat,” said Sage. “We’ve got to bring his body temperature up.”

  “The afghan should help. And I can go get the clothes we brought him.”

  “That will help, but this is hypothermia. He needs to be warmed on the inside, too. We need to get some warm fluids inside him.” When Jessica looked at him in surprise, he added, “I had to take pediatric first-aid training before we opened the Center.”

  Grateful that he had, Jessica took one small, cold hand in hers and rubbed it, then the other. Ethan squirmed and moaned. “Thank God,” she murmured.

  Sage ran out to the car and brought back the bag with the warm clothes they had purchased.

  “We need to get him back down the mountain,” Jessica said, as between them they got Ethan changed into fleece pajamas with feet and a puffy down jacket and knit hat. They wrapped the afghan around him again.

  Sage said, “There’s an emergency room at Bear Valley Community. They’re open all night.”

  “Can’t we take him home?”

  Ethan moaned again and his eyes fluttered open, unfocused, then closed again. “I had a bad dream, Mama,” he murmured and went back to sleep.

  Jessica stroked his forehead. “I know, baby. You’re okay now. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Keeping her voice to a whisper, she said, “Let’s get him back to Abby. Taking him to a hospital is going to add to the trauma. At this hour traffic won’t be bad and we can be there in a couple of hours. He already feels warmer.”

  “Your call, Jess.”

  “I’ll check in the kitchen and see if there’s anything I can heat up for him.”

  “Okay, but let’s hurry.”

  There were a few canned goods in the kitchen cabinets, but the prize was a clean thermos bottle and a box of individual packets of cocoa. Thankful that the power had come back on, Jessica zapped water in the microwave and poured it into the thermos. Her hands were shaking and she spilled some grains of cocoa powder onto the counter. The truth was, she was close to losing it. All that was holding her together was gratitude for the role she had been given to play in this drama. There would be plenty of time later to break down and sob the way she needed to.

  With no child safety seat, Jessica climbed in the Tesla’s backseat and Sage belted Ethan across her lap. It was not ideal, but she held him against her, rocking him a little, the way she used to rock Justin. And as she rocked him, she called his mother and gave her the news.

  Then she called Zach Smith.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Three weeks later

  “You wouldn’t have found him without help,” said Jenna.

  “Help from the spirit world, you mean? It’s going to take a while for the poor little guy to work through everything that happened—what he saw.” Jessica sipped coffee, her eyes on her two little nieces who were playing with their Barbies on the other side of the den.

  “I’m so glad Sage was able to take Ethan into the program. Abby rented an apartment for them to stay near the Center. She’s been taking him over every day for school and therapy.”

  “Does she get to stay at school with him?”

  “It’s out of the norm, but Zebediah evaluated him and gave Abby special dispensation. She sits in the back of the classroom so he can see that she’s there. For the first week, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. He would wait outside the bathroom door for her to come out. He’s still having nightmares, but he’s starting to loosen up in class and looking for her less and less. Annabelle is working with him one-on-one, too. He’s starting to make friends.”

  “I can’t imagine a parent doing what Trey did,” said Jenna, revulsion written across her face.

  “I know. I like to think he was trying to redeem himself by telling me at the last minute where to find Ethan. He’d given him several Ambien—the bottle was on the dresser in the cabin. He must have expected that Ethan would die in his sleep and never know about him shooting himself. It’s amazing that he didn’t die. I think he must have a very good guardian angel watching over him.”

  “He would have died if you and Sage hadn’t ridden to the rescue the way you did. Why do you think Trey didn’t just do it in the house, instead of going to some ratty old cabin out in the woods?”

  “We’ll never know for sure. All I can think of is, he had some misguided sense of duty to his clients, and didn’t want to mess up their house by killing himself and Ethan in the A-frame. They would have had a hard time selling it after that.”

  “Misguided is a nice way to put it. Can you imagine that little boy finding his way back to the house, drugged and freezing?” said Jenna.

  “He was so cold when we found him. God knows how long he was hiding with no heat and just his damp jammies. We hauled ass back down that mountain, as much as you can haul ass with chains on. We were so lucky the snow had stopped. The chains came off as soon as it was practical. Then we really hauled ass. We got back to Thousand Oaks around five in the morning. I thought Abby was going to come unglued. I sure would have.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  They talked about Jessica’s hellish dream and the X’s on her hands. She got a big surprise when Jenna said, “That’s not the mark of the Devil, you doofus.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. The X is the mark of Christ. It’s a symbol of the crucifixion wounds where the nails went into his hands.” She reached over and grabbed Jessica’s hand. “He was protecting you.”

  Jessica tried to speak but emotion clogged the words in her throat. She remembered the hand that had reached out and taken her away from the demons that tried to hold her. If only she had trusted her sister and asked her sooner.

  A commotion across the room drew their attention and, with a final squeeze, Jenna let go of her hand.

  “Emma, don’t put your doll in the flowerpot. She’s getting dirty and you’re making a mess, getting soil on the floor.”

  The cheeky little face with the pert nose turned to her mother. “But she’s digging her garden, Mama. She has to plant some pretty flowers.”

  Jessica grinned. “That’s my niece.”

  “I’m having a really hard time right now not saying ‘why can’t you be clean, like your sister?’” Jenna said in a stage whisper.

  “Please restrain yourself. I had to hear that the whole time we were growing up.”

  “I know you did, and I’m sorry.” Jenna took a deep breath. “And I’m sorry for everything I did to mess things up between us. You’re my other half, Jess. I have to have you in my life.”

  “I’m sorry, too. Look, I get that it’s hard for you to deal with me hearing spirit voices. It’s not something I can turn off at will. I wish I could make you understand that they’re not evil spirits. They’re just people who are trying to get a message across to someone they love.”

  Jenna did the thing with her lips where Jessica knew she was battling her emotions, too. “I’ll work on it,” Jenna said. “I promise I will.”

  Jessica put down her coffee, leaned over and hugged her twin. “That’s the very best I can ask for.”

  She drove home from Jenna’s house, grateful to have her sister back and at least a move towards spending some time with her nieces.

  That night, Sage brought dinner to the cottage. He said he wanted to spend the evening with the two most important people in his life, and invited Jay. Afterwards, when the conversation was finished, the food and wine was cleared away and Jay had driven off in his Prius—he didn’t just ride a bicycle—Sage and Jessica resumed the conversation they had begun on the night they rescued Ethan Starkey.

  “I want you to know why I built the Center,” he said as they snuggled together under the comforter. “I’ve never told anyone before.”

  “I want to know. And I’m glad you want to tell me.”

  J
essica pressed against him, steeling herself for something that she knew instinctively was going to be hard to hear. His arms tightened around her. “Some of this is pretty hazy, but other parts are like it just happened. I was four. My birth mother—Roxanne, and this guy—I don’t know whether he was my father, I just think of him as ‘asshole.’ They were having a huge fight—pretty much a daily occurrence as I remember it. He was always beating her up. There was a difference this time, though. He started beating on my little brother, too. I tried to pull him off. So, he turned on me.

  “Roxanne was screaming. She pulled me away from him and told me to take Jade and the baby to our room and stay there. All the screaming scared the shit out of me. But then, it was him screaming, not her.” Sage faltered, then continued. “I wanted to protect her. I shut the little ones in the bedroom and snuck back to the kitchen. He was on the floor and she was straddling him. I remember her arm pumping up and down. Over and over and over. Blood everywhere. On her face, her clothes. The walls, the cabinets, a puddle on the floor. There was this gigantic knife in her hand. Well, it looked gigantic to my eyes.”

  No wonder he had been unable to speak for a year, Jessica thought, remembering what Jay told her. Wanting more than anything to erase the memory from his soul, she put her hand over his heart and sent him every bit of healing energy within her.

  “I couldn’t move,” he said. “I was petrified. Then asshole stopped screaming, stopped moving. I must have made a sound. Roxanne turned around.” A single tear leaked out of Sage’s eye. It ran down and landed on Jessica’s cheek, as if they were the same person.

  “I’ll never forget her eyes when she saw me. I thought she was about to pull that knife out of his chest and come after me next.”

  “What happened after that?” Jessica murmured when he fell silent again.

  “All I can remember is, we were driving around and around for what seemed like hours. She must have cleaned the blood off herself. We stopped in some neighborhood I didn’t recognize and she got out of the car. She took the baby with her. I couldn’t see where she went. But when she came back, no baby. Then, she kept Jade with her and left me with Regina. They were friends—they’d met as teenage runaways. Regina told me all about it. They stayed in touch, but went in very different directions.” He sighed. “I never knew what happened to Jade until last year when I confronted Roxanne in prison and made her tell me. She dumped him off at a mall and told him to find a cop. She’d left the baby at some random house where there were toys in the yard and hoped they would take care of her.”

  “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through,” said Jessica, suffering over the three little ones abandoned by their mother and for what Sage had been forced to witness.

  He reached up to stroke her hair. “I was the lucky one, having Regina raise me. There are too many kids who go through much worse than what we did. I know I can’t fix them all, but I intend to spend the rest of my life doing everything in my power to help as many of them as I can. I hope you’ll want to be a part of it.”

  Jessica raised herself onto her elbow and laid her hand on his chest, drew his eyes to her. “I want to be a part of everything you do.”

  Sage rolled on his side to face her. His hand rested on her hip, drawing her to him. When she lifted her face to his, his lips tasted of the faintest hint of wine.

  “You’re all the proof I need,” he murmured. His hands were in her hair, then tracing the contours of her face with his artist’s touch, making her breaths come trembly and shallow.

  She drew back just far enough to gaze into his incandescent blue eyes, which were shining in a way she had not seen before. “Proof of what?”

  “That in spite of all the ugliness in the world, in spite of the evil, goodness exists. Kindness, sweetness, beauty exists. They’re all in you.”

  Just then, a voice sounded in her head, speaking over the others.

  “I like him, Mama, he’s nice.”

  Me, too, baby. Me, too.

  Love had found Jessica Mack and she was no longer afraid.

  AFTERWORD

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for reading Proof of Life. I hope you enjoyed it.

  If you haven’t yet read the “prequel,” What She Saw, click here to share Jessica’s journey from when she first wakes on a train, not knowing who she is or where she’s going, to discovering why her memory has been wiped clean.

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  Thank you again for being one of my readers. I hope we’ll be together again soon.

  Happy reading!

  HOW I BECAME INTERESTED IN THE AFTERLIFE

  When I was seven, my mother started studying the Bible with a fundamentalist religion. They teach that any contact with the spirit world was demonic. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me now, as the Bible is filled with tales of spirit contact—people talk to angels all the time. Growing up, we were instructed that meditation was bad because if you emptied your mind, it would leave room for the demons to come in and take over. Having learned from such an early age to blindly obey what the organization said, I simply accepted what I was told and was afraid.

  Fast-forwarding through a really difficult marriage to an elder in the church and, despite the religion, a divorce, I was raising three kids on my own, struggling to “keep the faith.” My oldest child, Jennifer, had more than just the usual teenage “issues” and we had a love/hate relationship for many years as she struggled through numerous abusive relationships. She was in high school when she brought home a Ouija board. I freaked out, terrified that the demons were now in our house. Of course, nothing bad happened, but I insisted she get rid of it.

  I count myself fortunate to have been kicked out of that religion on my 35th birthday, told by the elders that I was “clearly a danger to the congregation.” They practice shunning, cutting off all contact, including family (now 90, my mother still does not allow any communication), so I had to find a new support system. Soon, one of my wonderful new friends took me for my first psychic reading. When I did not find myself demon-possessed afterwards, I was emboldened to learn how to read the tarot for myself. I was exploring a whole new world and I liked what I was learning.

  Perhaps that “opening up” was to prepare me for the nightmare to come. On February 19, 2000, Jennifer, then 27, became the victim of a murder-suicide by her boyfriend, Tom Schnaible. That’s when my exploration of the Afterlife began. I am positive that’s what saved me.

  Now that my mind was open, I was ready and grateful to receive the many signs Jen sent, letting me know that she was still very much alive. Her perfume would suddenly scent the air, lights would flicker. My phones rang, both landline and mobile, and when I answered, there was only static and a distant voice whose words I could not make out. I knew she was trying to get through to let me know she was okay.

  There were many other manifestations, too—the car radio volume increased when no one touched it. The overhead light in the car going on by itself, etc., etc. On one occasion, I saw her walk past my kitchen door. On another, I heard her call me outside my ear. As a skeptic who is not quick to believe this sort of thing, I assure you, these events were not my imagination. I was not asleep. They were quite real. My sons experienced similar contacts f
rom their sister, too.

  At that time, I began meditating daily and reading every book I could find on life after death. My first favorite was One Last Time by John Edward, who picked me out of a crowd of a thousand people with very specific and astounding messages from Jen. Those who say he does research or reads your mind have no explanation for the things he told me that even I did not know until a week later. James Van Praagh’s books were also helpful. A year after her death, Jen arranged for him to come to my house and tape a segment for his show.

  Six weeks after Jennifer crossed over, as scheduled, I hosted a handwriting analysis conference—it was too late to cancel—and then started a year-long book tour to publicize my first book. At the end of the tour, when I stopped running and finally faced my daughter’s death, I became very sick with mononucleosis and was pretty much toast for the next month. After my recovery I found myself unable to meditate, which was frustrating, as I’d felt I was making good progress in my spiritual journey. Somewhere along the way, I gave up on all of it. Not consciously, the spiritual stuff just drifted away as difficult life experiences continued.

  It was not until 2016 that I began to have experiences that made me feel as if I was being guided back onto a spiritual path. I also learned about the Afterlife Research Education Institute, which has become an important affiliation for me. I’ve now attended two AREI symposiums in Scottsdale, where I met some of the people who are making important contributions to the field: Dr. Gary Schwartz, who has been performing scientific research into life after death at the University of Arizona, Tucson for many years. Suzanne Giesemann, a former naval officer who became a phenomenal evidential medium and teacher after her stepdaughter was killed by lightning. Scott Milligan, a young physical medium who makes mediumship training available to anyone who feels called. Sandra Champlain, whose We Don’t Die YouTube interviews bring fascinating information and comfort to thousands. Dr. Craig Hogan, an author and researcher who leads AREI. And Sonia Rinaldi from Brazil, who made me one of her “Group of 30.” To try and explain the scientific process Sonia has developed would take a lot more space than I have here. Suffice it to say, she has been receiving actual photographs of people from the other side, including Jennifer, which are posted on the internet. I could write an entire book about these experiences alone.