by Amber Foxx
Mae made sure the driver was okay, then turned around and took another route to CVU. She’d agreed to meet Randi at her office to get a key to her apartment.
Walking the hallway of the health sciences building, Mae was grateful that at least she wouldn’t have to run into Charlie or Bernadette. She didn’t want to tell anyone but Randi what she was going through, and even then, the situation embarrassed her. She wished she could tell Randi that she’d achieved success with her new professional skills, not that she’d gotten fired.
Mae knocked on the teaching assistant’s office door, and Randi rose from her desk, purse slung over her shoulder, ready to leave.
“Good to see you,” Randi said. “Sorry about the situation.”
“Thanks so much for helping me out. How are you doing?”
“About the same as you. I’m trying to go home early so Rick and I can ... I don’t know if it’s worth it—no, I do know. I might as well not bother. I think we’re about done for.” She sighed, gave a rueful laugh. “Sorry. You didn’t need to know that.”
The sadness in Randi’s eyes, Mae thought, must match her own. They reached out to each other, and the hug felt better than anything Mae had experienced in days. Someone, finally, accepted her and understood.
As they let go of each other, Randi said, locking up her office, “I hope you won’t mind, but things being like they are at home, I set up another place for you to stay. I asked Bernadette, and it’s cool with her. She’s away, and Charlie handed off the cat-feeding job to me, so I have the key. Please don’t think I don’t want you, but you don’t need to be around Rick and me right now. Rick would be unbearable with a guest.”
Mae went cold inside at the thought of going back to Bernadette’s place, wishing that Randi hadn’t shared her problems with the professor. “You told her about me and Hubert?”
“Shouldn’t I? I thought you guys were friends.”
“Sort of.” If Bernadette had agreed to Mae’s staying, maybe they still were. And it was the right thing to do, for Randi’s sake. “I understand. I’ll work something out when Bernadette gets back, if I need to stay up here longer.”
Randi’s eyes widened. “What about your job?”
“That’s over, too.”
They walked down the hall and out the back exit, and Mae explained about her mother’s intrusion into her office and influence over the director, sparing as much of the drama as possible.
“I think you made a mistake, but it was inside your office, not a firing offense. No one but another trainer should have been in there.” Unlocking her car, Randi frowned. “Maybe you can get some freelance clients. I can’t hire anyone full-time without a degree, but I can give you a good reference, and I might be able to use you as a sub, if you’d want to do it.”
“Of course I would. Thank you. I’ll take any work I can get.” They got in, and Randi started the car. Mae said, “I’m even doing psychic readings at Healing Balance again.”
“You make it sound like it’s your last resort. I think it should be cool. Dana and Bernadette both say you’re good. I’ll spread the word. Might even come see you.”
Dana. Mae still had to contact Dana. She pushed the decision away, and thanked Randi for her support. People like Randi and Patsy who had no psychic abilities but took an interest in them always seemed to think this troublesome power was cool.
As they drove into Ghent, Mae still sensed the energy of the city and this neighborhood in spite of her exhaustion. She felt an unexpected comfort in looking up side streets at old houses with small, groomed gardens clustered side by side, seeing people walking on every sidewalk and pouring in and out of the businesses on Colley Avenue. When they arrived at the Madison, a tenant jogged down the stairs talking on his phone and laughing while they climbed up, and music played from one of the first-floor apartments. All the noise and busyness here had a positive, reassuring feel to it as well. Maybe staying at Bernadette’s wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Randi unlocked the apartment and handed Mae the key. “Bernadette should get back sometime Thursday.” She showed Mae where the cat food and kitty litter were, and said, “I hope you’re okay here. I’m really sorry not to take you to my place. But, it’s just too tense.”
“It’s all right. I understand. Hubert and I wouldn’t be good company for a guest now either.”
When Randi left, Mae fed the Yellow Gentleman and checked her phone messages—nothing from Jen, nothing from Hubert, two from Dana.
Almost too tired to feel anything anymore, Mae sank onto the couch. She really had left home, at least for now—left her husband and her stepdaughters. She really had lost her job. And yes, she really was in back in this place. It felt like another lifetime when she remembered how much she’d missed Hubert when she’d stayed here before, and how strange it had been to be away from him. Now, it might be permanent.
Not sure why, she brought the pouch of crystals from her purse and dumped them into her palm. She had taken them from the attic before leaving home in the morning, worried that Hubert would get rid of them while she was gone. They stood for the part of her that he rejected. It felt good to hold them now, like holding her grandmother’s hand in spirit.
Bowenite, the lime-green jade-like stone, was supposed to help protect her from enemies, as well as contact ancestors. Maybe it’d protect her if she gave in to Dana and looked for Charlie. Then Mae took out what she’d started to think of as the master stones, turquoise and amethyst, gazing at them and noticing how they felt in her hands. People in Tylerton would truly believe she had gone witchy if they could see her now. But what they thought—it was both saddening and liberating at the same time—no longer mattered at all.
She was a professional seer now. People hired her for this gift. She was not only free to acknowledge it, but financially dependent on it.
Had she gotten any better? Her search last night had been clear and almost direct, and had given her the answer she sought, but it still brought up all the painful baggage of her parents’ past. If Mae took Dana’s money, she’d feel obligated to tell her what she saw. Ideally it would be only enough to answer Dana’s question, but Mae couldn’t be sure of that. Yes, she needed the money, and had to do psychic work again—but did she have to do this particular piece of it? It seemed too much like mere prying. Could any good come of it?
Yes. If Charlie was with Bernadette, Mae would be disappointed, but it could deter Dana from seeing him further, and Dana had her marriage and her son to think about. Yes, no, right, wrong. It was a tangle, but a few more threads lay on the side of right.
The Yellow Gentlemen padded up, sat, and extended a paw. Mae clasped it, invited him up with her, and closed her eyes, letting him settle beside her. He was full of Charlie’s touch as well as Bernadette’s. The whole apartment was full of both of them. The journey should be easy. Mae could do it before she took any money, and then call Dana if what she found was something she ought to share.
Closing her eyes, Mae held the crystals she had chosen. The tunnel opened abruptly and dropped her back into the apartment.
The Yellow Gentleman walked on Bernadette’s bed, back and forth, tail in the air. At the creak of a door he jumped down, and trotted towards the sound of human steps. In the kitchen, Charlie picked up the cat’s dishes from the floor and opened a cabinet, taking out a can of cat food, as the landline phone rang. Charlie ignored it, chatting to the cat. He filled the water bowl, rummaged through a drawer and took out a can opener. He hadn’t gone with Bernadette. So why had he stopped doing this simple chore for her? Why had he disappeared?
The answering machine picked up, Bernadette’s voice telling the caller to leave a message. A man spoke. “Bernadette, this is Stan on the search committee. We have a change in your interview agenda for tomorrow. I’m not sure if this is your landline or cell phone—I’ll try the other number.” He left his number, and Charlie slammed the can onto the counter, making the cat jump.
Closing his eyes, Charlie p
ressed his fingers onto the counter until the tips turned white. His chin drew in towards his neck, and he seemed to hold his breath. Gradually, the fingers of one hand began to ripple into a slow drumming. No longer making kitty-talk, he finished his task in haste and left.
Mae pulled out of the vision. She was glad she hadn’t taken money for this, and that she hadn’t seen anything too personal or private.
She had seen a secret, though. Bernadette probably didn’t want anyone to know she was interviewing for a new job. No one would expect a tenured professor to be looking. Obviously, she hadn’t told Charlie. According to Dana, Bernadette was at a conference, and had been going to a lot of them. A lot of interviews, probably.
Mae went to the kitchen and rinsed and dried the crystals. Charlie had taken the time off for some unknown reason, probably in reaction to his discovery. He could have called that number to find out where Bernadette was interviewing and gone after her—but he didn’t replay the message, didn’t write the number down. Did it matter, then, what he was doing? If he’d arranged to have people cover his classes, it wasn’t an emergency, and Dana had no need to know. Maybe she would distrust him enough over it to break off with him. Mae texted, rather than talk to Dana, and left a message declining the work. Somehow, she would make enough money without digging too deep into Charlie.
After a dinner of leftovers she found in the refrigerator, food that Mae doubted Bernadette would begrudge her, she felt focused enough to call Hubert. She asked to talk to Brook and Stream. He said he’d told them she was visiting a friend.
“Thanks. Let me talk to them before we talk anymore, so I can be calm, okay?”
He said nothing else to Mae, but called the girls in a warm, strong voice, saying, “Hey, your Mama’s on the phone. She misses you.”
The running thunder of their little feet yanked at Mae’s heart.
The twins told her about what they’d done at school and after school at the farm with Jim and Sallie. Mae let the children run on as long as they wanted, wishing she was there in person to hold them and see them.
They said goodbye with loud kissing noises and told her that Daddy wanted to talk to her and that they missed her. When Hubert came on the phone, she could hear him walk to another room, away from the girls’ hearing.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“With Bernadette Pena. Well, at her place. She’s away right now. She’s one of Patsy’s professors at CVU.”
“You’re in Norfolk? Why?”
“Patsy had family with her. Anyway, I didn’t even want to stay down there. Mama pulled a stunt to get me fired.”
Hubert sighed. The long silence unnerved Mae. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he say anything about her losing her job? She’d had to talk him into supporting her working, but he’d come around to cheer her on in the studies and the career. He had to feel something for her loss—didn’t he?
“Hubert? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about ... back when things were still good. When you were home with the girls, when you and me were really on the same page in life. I miss that.”
“I started working now, though, and it was important to me. We’d turned that page. It’s not turning back.”
“That’s not what I meant. It’s who we were back before all this. Before you met all those people up there. That’s what I want back.” He took a breath, and the next words rushed out. “God, I miss you. I miss you like my arm was cut off. The girls miss you, but they think it’s nothing, that you’re coming back. I don’t know if you are. I don’t know if I want you to. And that kills me ... I miss who you used to be.”
She was at a loss how to argue with him anymore. His pain hurt her one way, and his words another. “I have to come back tomorrow to get some more things. I’m working at that place in Virginia Beach again. I need my clothes.”
“You’re doing psychic work?”
“I have to. I need money.”
“Damn.” She could see him so clearly in her mind, the way he got that little vertical line between his eyebrows when he worried. “I don’t want to lose you. But I feel like I already have. It’s the Mae I don’t know that does that stuff.”
“It’s all one person. I’m still me.”
“If that’s true, then I never knew you.”
How could he say that? It was as if she, too, had never known him. She hung up and broke down in tears.
Mae wanted to stop thinking about her life. She needed a nap, but there was no point in trying, with the neighbors in the building walking around and living their sometimes noisy lives. Still, if she didn’t either sleep or distract herself she’d just cry more and think about losing the girls. At a loss and tired, Mae opted for attempting sleep in spite of her doubts that she could. She was in no shape to look for work or to do anything else productive.
Moving her bag off the couch in order to lie down, she saw the square, thin shapes of the DVDs Patsy had given her poking against the fabric. Mae had finally taken them out of her locker, when she had to empty it on being fired. She had the one on shamanism that Patsy said was so good, Charlie’s talk on his travels, and Bernadette on Apache traditions. Upstairs, heavy steps clomped across the floor. Across the side street, a dog began to bark. Mae might as well stay up. It would be unpleasant in a way, but she’d once wanted to learn from this class, and maybe she still could, in spite of who was teaching it. They knew more about the spirit world than she did, and she was going to be dealing with it a lot now.
“Good evening.” Charlie beamed at the class. “We gave you some strange readings last week. We thought we should honor the trickster tradition and stand things on their heads.” He mimed entering a headstand, then said, “Which I no longer do, but she still can.”
Bernadette glanced at him with a cool, polite smile, and looked to the class. “Any questions? You read about the Sufis, and the spiritual demonstrations with self-inflicted wounds that heal miraculously, and the trance surgeons in Brazil. Before we give you our thoughts, what are yours?”
A number of students eagerly jumped into a discussion of trance surgery done on wide-awake patients by untrained healers using unsterile instruments while channeling the spirits of dead, often German, doctors.
How bizarre. The world was stranger than Mae had ever imagined. She needed to get those articles from home—from the house—when she got her clothes and start reading them again. Then she might come back to this part of the DVD, like a student.
Mae fast-forwarded through the class. When she saw only Charlie at the front of the room, she figured she had probably gotten to his talk on the studies with shamans. He was in mid-sentence when she brought the program back to normal speed. “... Ayahuasca ceremonies in the Brazilian Amazon and Q’ero rituals for honoring Pachamama, the great earth spirit, in Peru.”
This was a side of Charlie Mae hadn’t seen—the seeker, the student. Maybe this was why some people liked him and his teaching. He showed pictures of the scenery in two distinct places, deep jungles and icy mountains, and the faces of two elderly men he identified as his teachers, a wrinkled man with few teeth and a peculiar knitted hat from the Andes, and from the Amazon, a thin man with facial tattoos and piercings.
Charlie made self-deprecating jokes about his challenges with the languages and with his girlfriend, who had traveled with him. He described his struggles with the heat, rain, and insects in the jungle during his “dieta,” the fast before the Ayahuasca ceremony, and with the cold and the altitude in the mountains. Both the humor and the humility struck Mae as forced, but that could be her dislike of Charlie.
Once he’d established this background of difficulty, Charlie gave vivid descriptions of the visions of snakes and jaguars he’d had with the shaman in the Amazon, along with laughing mentions of the purgative qualities of the “plant teacher.”
Telling about his Peruvian trip, he shared tales of sacred caves and ancient carved steps in the Andes, of participating in ceremon
ies where worshipers set candles and offerings on the glacier to honor Pachamama. He also joked about altitude sickness, but implied it was spiritual, saying his teacher found him to be “laid low by the heights.”
When he was done, the students applauded.
The screen went to blue with the CVU logo, announcing a break, then the class came right back on. Mae wondered what had taken place during that break. Did Dana adore Charlie for his adventures? It had been a great story, but Mae felt that either she had missed the lesson in it, or Charlie had none to give other than “laid low by the heights.” It sounded deep, but it could also be nonsense.
Onscreen, Bernadette sat at the desk alone. She looked across the room, maybe at Charlie, her eyes steady, then spoke in a clear, precise manner.
“Shamans are practical people. I told you earlier about Lozen, the Apache warrior woman who was a seer. She didn’t have visions for their dramatic quality, but to know where the American troops were and what they were doing.” Someone like me. She could find people. Mae was intrigued in a way she hadn’t been with Charlie’s lecture. “Shamanism, as I know it, is down to earth.”
Mae liked this, too. She didn’t want to go off into some wild and dangerous world, she wanted to stay grounded. She wondered if Bernadette was intentionally contradicting or at least making a deliberate contrast with Charlie. Her talk so far sounded like a rebuttal of his approach to shamanism.
“There are three kinds of people with power. There are medicine men and women, who do chants and ceremonies to help people. Some, especially the women, also know herbal medicine. The medicine people have to be good counselors. People need to talk, and be heard, and set on the right track. Sometimes healers, or the ones being healed, have visions, but we don’t use any drugs to make it happen in the old traditions in my tribe. The medicine isn’t showy. When there’s music and dance, it’s for healing power.” She paused, sipped water from a steel bottle. “The power of ceremony is hard to explain. You may not have a big drama, might just feel something in you shift, like you’d moved just two inches sideways in yourself. Then nothing is the same even though everything is.”