Leopard's Kin

by Becky Norman

  When the day was over, they both returned to the log home and Noel immediately asked Lori if he could use the Jacuzzi tub. She laughed with a wicked sense of satisfaction and said, “of course.”

  Noel cocked his head with a sly smile and studied her. “Don’t mock me, woman. I’m trying to help you here, you know.”

  Lori giggled again and settled in on the couch. “Oh, I know. And I am grateful. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel good to know someone finally understands what I do in the course of a day.”

  She sat back against the pillows, folding her arms with a “so there” expression on her face and he laughed. “You are truly amazing,” he conceded with a small bow and she broke her haughty façade with a laugh.

  “No need for all that,” she assured him with a twinkle in her eye.

  He shook his head at her in mock derision. “Shall I make the queen supper when I’m done in the bath then?” he asked.

  “We approve,” she said in her best royal voice.

  Chapter 17

  Lori looked at Noel out of the corner of her eye and tried to keep her legs from bouncing on the examining table. She was extremely nervous. The x-rays had been done and now she was waiting impatiently as the doctor studied them in the corner of the hospital’s little room. Noel had offered to drive her and had been allowed to sit in on the results, since they were only examining her hand. She was grateful for his presence. Intensely grateful, she realized with some surprise.

  The kittens had continued to wrap themselves around her hand every moment she was in a stationary position in the house. She was still unnerved by that but Noel’s assurance that it could only be beneficial had convinced her to allow them to carry on. The doctor had been studying the x-rays for some time now and she was starting to worry. That worry began to bloom into panic when he started making small grunts of astonishment and murmured the words, “it can’t be” several times.

  Finally, he turned to look at her, confusion etching his round, red face with wrinkles.

  “When did you say this accident happened?” he asked in consternation.

  Lori cleared her throat. “Two days ago.”

  The doctor dropped his hands to his side, the x-rays flapping against his leg. “Two days ago?” he said, baffled.

  Lori nodded, searching the doctor’s face for some sign of what he was seeing.

  “Is there something…unusual…in that, doctor?” Noel asked from his chair.

  The doctor turned to look at him and grunted again.

  “I’ll say. From what I can see…well, it’s astounding, really. The bone has healed to the point that I would say it’s in its third week of recovery. And I’ve seen a lot of broken bones,” he added.

  He looked back and forth between Lori and Noel, as though expecting one of them to reveal the truth behind some prank, but Lori had nothing to offer him.

  “I want to cut the plaster cast off,” the doctor announced suddenly. “I was going to, anyway – we need to put a fibreglass one on – but I want to do more x-rays once the cast is off.”

  Lori nodded. “Okay.”

  The bliss she felt when the heavy plaster fell away from her arm was indescribable. She had to hold back from groaning in ecstasy as her hand was exposed to the air and her arm was released from its prison. At the same time, though, she felt intensely vulnerable and instinctively began cradling the hand against her body, shielding it from any more rough treatment.

  They did more x-rays and the doctor studied them even more thoroughly. He even called in a second doctor to take a look. All the while, Noel sat in the chair with a Cheshire-cat grin threatening to erupt on his face and made notations in his journal. He had on a pair of black jeans, his beat-up old boots, and his fringed suede coat; his foot bounced in time to her knee as they waited for a decision to be made.

  “Alright,” her doctor finally announced as the second doctor left the room. “There’s no other way to say this. Your hand is almost completely healed. At the rate it’s mending, I would say by next week it will be back to normal. I don’t know how on earth it could be, but it is.”

  He stopped to study Lori, still evidently waiting for her to leap off the table and shout, “Gotcha!” He seemed almost disappointed when she remained perched there, swinging her legs back and forth.

  “I still want you to put a fibreglass cast on, but I want you to come back one week from today. We’re going to do more x-rays.”

  Lori nodded then shrugged her shoulders at Noel.

  The new cast was heaven compared to the old – the fibreglass was significantly lighter and didn’t have to be wrapped to her fingertips. She thought nothing would ever please her as much as the simple gift of having use of her fingers again. She picked a light green colour for the cast and aside from the awkward position they asked her to tip her hand in when they wrapped it, life looked much brighter when she left the hospital.

  “Well,” Noel began when they got settled in his truck, “I guess our suspicions are confirmed. The kittens are mending your bones with their purring.”

  Lori sank back against the seat, the excitement of the day starting to catch up with her. “You’re that certain, are you?”

  Noel cocked an eyebrow at her as he backed out of his parking spot. “You think it’s something else?”

  “Well…no. But it still seems really weird to me that their purring could do that.”

  Noel nodded and put the truck into drive. “I know. For me, too. But we saw those vets online saying they had been doing experiments and the vibration frequency seemed to help.”

  “Yes, ‘it seemed to help.’ But not that fast! Not in two days’ time, Noel!”

  He glanced at her and pulled out into traffic. “Lori, you already know the four of us are different when it comes to our relationship with cats. Who’s to say that unique quality we all have isn’t amplifying our response to them?”

  She sighed and nodded, not knowing what else to say.

  **********

  Noel requested first opportunity to put something on her cast. Using a permanent black marker, he drew a stunning leopard’s eye on her wrist, its profound, calculating look following her every move for the next week.

  **********

  The day the hay arrived felt somewhat like a family reunion for Lori – with Shannon, Mark, Noel, Jeret and Lynta all assembled again there was light in the place once more and the camaraderie between all the participants was unmistakable. Since Shannon and Mark had been around a few hay bales in their time, they took on the task of stacking the hay in a way that would keep it from tipping over while Lynta pitched them off the wagon and Noel and Jeret carried them to the shed. Lori was fairly itching to help out and chomped at her figurative bit because her cast relegated her to Overseer. She tried not to command too much and trusted in the others to carry out their tasks without her interference. Still, it was difficult to watch everyone working while she stood there.

  She did find it funny, however, that Jeret and Lynta seemed to be in a teasing type of mood today – especially because their target was Noel, whom Lori was secretly beginning to revere. She would never have dreamed of mocking what she considered to be his most-profound thoughts on “life, the universe and everything” but to his two other friends, they seemed to be fair game.

  Jeret started the ribbing with an elbow in Noel’s side before he picked up a bale in each hand and carried them to the shed.

  “Hey, Noel,” he suggested, “If what you say is true about believing something and creating it in your reality, why don’t you ‘believe’ that all these hay bales are going to jump off the trailer of their own volition and bounce right on into the shed? It would save us a lot of time.”

  Noel picked up two bales himself and winked at Lori as he passed by her. “I could ask the same of you, Jeret – why don’t you?”

  “No, no, no,” Jeret countered, “that’s your forte – not mine. You’re the al
l-powerful wizard in the group.”

  Noel snorted and handed one of his bales up to Shannon. “Hardly that. But to answer your question, I can’t believe that into happening because I simply can’t believe it. My notion of reality would prohibit me from making it work.”

  Jeret gave Noel a condescending grin. “Ohhh. So you’re saying it could happen; it’s just that it’s beyond your scope?”

  Noel passed by Lori on his way back to the wagon and gave her a secretive smile. She answered with a grin of her own. “Something like that,” he conceded. “I believe anything is possible, Jeret – you know that. But I have to be in the right frame of mind to stretch my notion of reality that far...and I’m not in that mood right now. Besides, I’m enjoying this, just the way it is. If I moved all the hay on my own, using thought exclusively, then I wouldn’t get a chance to enjoy your company.”

  Jeret gave a deep rumble of a laugh. “Oh, that’s brilliant! I’ve gotta remember that one!”

  Shannon handed another of Jeret’s bales up to Mark, who was stacking up by the rafters, and drew her brows together. “What on earth are you two talking about?” she demanded.

  Lori entered the conversation, anxious to be a part of the group in some way, since she couldn’t contribute physically.

  “Remember how you told me when I started training horses that I had to ‘fake it before I could make it?’”

  Shannon nodded down at her. “Right – my dressage coach used to say that to me.”

  “Well, Noel has taken that a step further. He believes that if you think something, then say it out loud and then do something about it that you will eventually create it in your reality – regardless of what it is.”

  Shannon looked over at Noel, who was delivering another bale. “Really?” she asked sceptically as she took it from him. “No matter what?” she questioned as she swung the bale up towards her husband.

  Noel smiled up at her. “That’s been my experience.”

  Shannon thought it over for a moment then cocked her head, obviously willing to play devil’s advocate in this conversation. “I’m not so sure about that. I mean – I agree you have to have confidence and focus if you want to succeed with something...but if that was the case – if you could think, say and do something and have it become your reality – then what’s to stop all the bad people in the world getting exactly what they want, too?”

  “Oh, you’re opening up a whole new can of worms with that question,” Lynta called from the wagon and laughed. “Don’t get him talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and how our thinking makes it so,” she cautioned with a huge grin on her face.

  Noel looked around with arms upraised and an incredulous look on his face. “What is this? Pick on Noel Day?” But he grinned afterwards, clearly enjoying the banter.

  “Aww, you know it’s because we love you, buddy,” Jeret said as he punched Noel lightly on the shoulder in passing.

  “All I’ve said is that your belief about a thing makes it so. It’s all relative – you call someone ‘tall’ until someone taller comes along. Then the first guy might just be ‘average.’ You might say a skunk smells...until you fall into a sewer. Then your opinion might alter.”

  Mark laughed from atop his stack of hay. “So this might be difficult until I have to unload 1600 bales.”

  The group laughed and Noel nodded with a smile. “Exactly.”

  “And I thought the first horse I trained was a challenge...until I met Curtis’ chestnut colt,” Lori offered.

  Noel grinned at her. “Right.”

  “Okay, hang on,” Shannon interjected. “That stuff is all relative. But what about truly evil things – things that there’s no argument about? Like a pedophile or a rapist or a murderer? There’s nothing ‘good’ about what they do.”

  Noel turned to look at Shannon and was still for a moment. Lori wondered at that assessment; she wondered what he was thinking as he studied her friend. “I know it appears that way...” he started cautiously. “Those are horrific things that the majority of us believe no human should have to endure. And you’re right that there are dark forces at work...but to call them evil...do you mean by that to take away their humanity? To pass it off as Satan’s work?”

  Shannon raised her eyebrows and began nodding before Noel had finished talking. “You bet I do. There’s something much more sinister there than what a human could do on his own.”

  “But don’t you think by saying that it’s Satan at work, you’ve almost given them an out, Shannon? They go to trial and all they have to say is ‘the Devil made me do it.’ They don’t have to take responsibility for their actions.”

  Shannon was quiet, considering.

  “And if we do attribute all the evil in the world to Satan,” Noel added, picking up another two bales, “then I fear we lose touch with the human side of the people involved. What of the pedophile who was himself molested as a child? Do we – as a society – ignore his pain simply because he’s caused another’s? Do we not just continue the cycle if we ignore the issue at the heart of the matter and blame it on an unseen force?”

  “No, I disagree, Noel,” Mark said as he accepted another bale from Shannon with a grunt. “Everybody knows right from wrong – regardless of their upbringing or their circumstances. So if they know what’s right and still murder someone...there has to be Something else at work to cause it to happen.”

  “Is that what you believe?” Noel asked, handing his second bale to Shannon.

  “Yes,” Mark affirmed with conviction.

  “Then that’s your reality,” Noel said.

  Jeret groaned in mock frustration. “You can’t win these types of arguments with him, you two,” he called to Shannon and Mark, lifting another bale from the ground near Lynta. “He’ll always fall back on that argument – if you believe it, then that’s your reality.”

  Noel laughed. “Well, it’s true! Nothing is real – unless you believe that it is.”

  “Well, I believe I’m thirsty,” Jeret said. “Time for a break.”

  Lori laughed at him and held up a hand. “Give me a second, Jeret – I’ve got some bottled water in a cooler over here.”

  When she came back with the drinks for everyone, Shannon had resumed her original line of questioning.

  “You still haven’t explained to me, Noel, how your thoughts go to that next level. What if I tried to imagine you dropping dead right here? What’s to stop that from happening? It’s all well and good to encourage people to reach for their dreams with the good things. What’s to stop me from wishing bad things on others and having them happen?”

  Noel took a bottle of water from Lori’s outstretched hand and sat down next to her on one of the bales of hay, leaning over her slightly to grab one of the old towels she had brought out to wipe away sweat.

  “Well, let me start with this,” Noel said with a muffled voice as he scrubbed the towel across his face. “When you’ve wanted something good to happen in your life, have you thought it and gotten it immediately?”

  “Rarely,” Shannon answered with a chuckle. “I’ve had to work hard at my dreams.”

  Noel nodded at her and draped the towel across his thighs. Lori could feel the heat pulsating off of him from his exertion; for some ridiculous reason, that underlying reassurance of masculinity made her feel incredibly safe. She gave her head a subtle shake, trying to concentrate on what he was saying.

  “You’re right, Shannon – it is work – hard work. One thought isn’t enough to make something a reality to us. At least not usually. Some are especially gifted that way, and trust enough in the process to make it happen instantaneously. But they’re usually crucified shortly after they start demonstrating those powers,” he added with an ironic, upraised eyebrow.

  Shannon gave him a begrudging smile as she sat down cross-legged on the hay shed floor next to Mark.

  “So you’re saying it’s repetition? Or that it’
s impossible?”

  Noel lifted his chin and looked directly at her. “Oh, no,” he said softly. “It’s not impossible. What you call ‘evil’ things do happen – talk to any survivor of the Holocaust and you’ll have confirmation of that. But one thought isn’t enough for most of us. Heaven forbid! Can you imagine if every negative thought you had about another became a reality?”

  Mark snorted again. “There wouldn’t be a husband left alive on the planet,” he stated bluntly.

  The group laughed at that, but settled down when Noel leaned forward, arms on knees, to convey his point.

  “Just so,” he agreed with a smile. “One thought doesn’t pack that kind of punch. But think it every day...? And say you’re going to do it...? And then start doing it? You’ve manifested it in your reality. Most people don’t really want to hurt the ones they love – those are just random, subconscious kinds of thoughts. But when they can’t let go of it...when they fixate on how they felt about something...that’s when they get into dangerous territory.”

  Shannon was quiet and Lori watched her mulling over the concept. “You don’t agree, Shannon?” she finally asked.

  Her friend shrugged. “I don’t know,” she mused. “I can see your points, Noel, and to a certain degree, I would accept them. But I still don’t see what’s to stop someone from ‘fixating’ – as you say – on doing harm to someone and actually having it happen.”

  “Nothing’s there to stop us, Shannon,” Noel responded. “Except our own innate sense of who we are – at our core. And I believe deep-down, we’re all love – not fear. If we can get in touch with that part of ourselves – really know, consciously, what kind of beings we are, we would never come from anger or wish ill on someone else. But we sleepwalk through life – we’re not paying attention.”

  Lori glanced at Noel sitting next to her on the bale and felt a profound sense of peace and acceptance wash over her at that moment. He turned to look at her and the warmth emanating from his ebony eyes was startling. He went down into her soul with that look and cradled her in a reassurance that made her feel more protected than she ever had in her life. She felt as though she were waking up herself from a lifelong sleep.

  **********

  They worked throughout the afternoon, their continued discussions about “thought-power” making the time go fast and soon the 800 bales were stacked to the ceiling and there was just enough room for a single human to squeeze through the door.