by Amber Foxx
Mae felt relieved at the change of subject. Maybe they could have a civil parting after all. “I am.”
“Good. I raised you right. You’re having a career, like I have. I tried to be a role model for you, you know, though I despaired of you living up to it sometimes. I’ll get work at the hospital when we get to Palm Beach. Roger should practice at least half-time if he has any sense. You have to have purpose, you can’t just sit on your fanny.” Rhoda-Rae nodded to the closet, indicating Mae should get another armload, which she did, and began the next round of folding and rolling. “So you got a personal trainer job already, sugar? I’m so proud of you.”
“Yeah. I work part-time at a really nice health club, and I’m a sub at a couple of others.”
“Part-time? What— Is Hubert helping you out then?”
“No. And I don’t want him to. I work at the Healing Balance store in Virginia Beach, too.”
“What is that?” Rhoda-Rae frowned, then seemed to pull up a memory. “Oh, I think I’ve seen that, when Roger and I went to the Beach—” She stared at Mae. “Don’t tell me it’s that New Age place with all the crystals and tarot.”
“That’s the place.” Mae felt her nerves jerk at how casually when Roger and I went to the Beach came out, as if cheating on Arnie was no longer wrong now that the secret was out. “It’s got a health food store, too.”
“Is that what you do? You’re a clerk in a health food store?” Rhoda-Rae shook her head and sighed. “I guess after being around the Ridleys so long you have to be all organic.”
The contempt was too much. “No, I’m not a clerk there. But it wouldn’t be awful if I was. I can’t seem to hold your respect for more than a minute, and then you only think well of me because you’re taking credit for what I did right. I do psychic readings and healings. Daddy sent me Granma’s crystals.”
A hard, cold silence fell between them as they looked into each other’s eyes.
“So your father helped you turn to the devil.” Rhoda Rae’s face shut down, eyes closed, lips pressed tight. She slammed her suitcase full of scrubs shut, and leaned with her fists against its lid, squeezing the words out without moving her clenched jaw. “God is punishing you. Your life is a mess. And you’re getting what you deserve. Even a liberal like Hubert Ridley has more sense than to want a witch for a wife. Now get out.”
“Mama—”
“You heard me.” Rhoda-Rae went from zero to sixty, from lockjaw to a shriek. “Get out!”
Mae dropped the dress she’d been folding to the floor and left without another word.
It shouldn’t still hurt. Mae drove to Tylerton fighting tears and rage, arguing with Rhoda-Rae in her heart and mind, and getting nowhere. She needed to give Hubert her house key, pick up her mail. Pulling up in the driveway of the house where she had lived with him, the place she’d called home, she parked and sat unable to move. Even a liberal like Hubert Ridley has more sense than to want a witch for a wife. It wasn’t true—but because one corner of it almost was, it had to be the meanest, coldest thing her mother could have said. There would never be closure and peace with Rhoda-Rae. Mae would have to do what Bernadette was doing with Charlie—make peace in herself, however long it took.
Finally, Mae got out of the car. Hubert was at work, and the girls weren’t done school yet. For one last time, she let herself into the empty house. Home for so many years. So much time and work, so much love and so much frustration here. She walked through each room, lingering in Brook and Stream’s room the longest.
There was more to like here than she realized. Simple things spoke to her. Their yard-sale weight training equipment. The pile of Hubert’s magazines in the living room: Runner’s World, Car and Driver, The American Prospect. It was like a little bit of his mind lying there, reminding her of the things he cared about.
When she came into the kitchen, the view of the backyard through the glass door, daffodils glowing alongside the porch full of cats, made her think of the snake. The last freak accident in her run of bad luck.
She walked outside, strolling down to Ronnie’s fields. Green shoots crowned the rows of soft earth, and the windbreaks, fully leafed out, sheltered wild daffodils and narcissus. The tracks of deer, cats and raccoons told their night stories in the dirt.
There was nothing this peaceful in the cities except her room at Healing Balance. With the tree-shadow walls, it even reminded her of this spot.
Cutting across the fields, she thought of going to the post office to do her change of address, but Bernadette’s place was temporary. Mae didn’t have an address yet. Hubert could still save mail for her, and she could get it when she came to see the girls. Mae passed the guinea fowl and the yappy dogs, to arrive in the silent graveyard. It was always cool here somehow, as if the stones of the church and the graves held the dampness of shadows even in the sun.
No one on the back steps. She wondered if Mack still came out here to drink and smoke and read great novels and pretend he could write one. As she strolled among the resting Tylers and Ridleys, she stopped to visit Elizabeth Andrews Tyler Ridley. No snake anymore on the grave. Someone had removed it, or some scavenging crow had taken it.
But the grave had a new decoration—a brandy bottle with fresh water and cut flowers in it. Mack.
Honoring not this ancestor, but Mae. She got it. He knew she’d gone. It was a poem in a way. She would never die here. And he was already buried.
She walked to Buddy’s to give Hubert the key. Preoccupied with the mixed love, pain, and anxiety over seeing him, she didn’t even notice the old men on the bench until she heard Joe’s voice.
“Ready?” he said. He stood by the bench where his friends sat clutching their Styrofoam coffee cups. Alternately clapping his hands and snapping his fingers in a steady beat, Joe nodded his head after eight counts. Four husky, smoke-roughened old-man voices sang in unison the first few lines of That Old Black Magic. Then Joe broke into his cackling laugh and grinned at Mae. “Good morning,” he said, and followed it with something she didn’t make out.
Mae stopped and glared. Then laughed back, earning a puzzled frown from Joe. He didn’t matter anymore. Not at all.
Hubert looked up from the engine of a dirt-gray, boxy old car, wiped his hands on a rag, and stepped out into the parking lot. “Hey. Sorry Joe’s still at it. You know how he is.”
“He can sing his heart out. I don’t care. Here’s the house key.” She put it in Hubert’s hand and noticed the distance, how they didn’t hug, didn’t know how to be near each other, what to say or what to do as a separated couple. “I still need you to save my mail another week or two until I get a place. My friend Randi might need a roommate. I may move soon as her boyfriend moves out.”
“No hurry. We’ll be seeing you every week, won’t we?”
“Of course.”
“Thought you might still be thinking about that school where your daddy works.”
She’d been too overwhelmed to look that far ahead. “I don’t know yet. I might. I’ll let you know—of course.”
He nodded, looked across the street. “Young’uns miss you. They’ll be happy to see you.”
“I miss them, too. Guess I’d better go catch them. They must be getting to the farm soon.”
Hubert handled the key, then put it in his pocket, met Mae’s eyes. He looked sad and confused. She felt it, too. No way this wouldn’t hurt for years to come. It might still break their hearts in some way forever, even if they found new loves. This wasn’t like letting go of Rhoda-Rae or of Tylerton. Hubert had a piece of her, and she had a piece of him. They couldn’t help it. She reached out to him, and they held each other tight for a moment. Then he let go, nodded to her as if to say thanks, and hurried back into the garage.
Chapter Thirty-One
After her last client at Healing Balance, Mae locked the green tree room and drove to the Sentara hospital in Norfolk. It had been a hard evening, with clients wanting to find missing loved ones or heal bruised souls, so soon af
ter she’d been dealing with her own lost connections. She’d found her first visit with the children as a non-custodial stepmother better than she’d thought it might be, though still sad. They’d forgiven her, and missed her. Jim and Sallie had been easier to deal with than expected, since Sallie had nothing to argue about now, with Mae moving out of the town. And yet that, too, was a reminder that what had once been home and family was now a used-to-be. Mae didn’t really want to deal with Charlie on top of all that, but Bernadette had asked.
Once she arrived at the hospital, Mae began to feel more apprehension about just what Charlie wanted. In the elevator on her way to his room, she moved some of the stronger crystals from her purse into the pocket of her skirt, one of Pamela’s floral cast-offs. It would be useful to have protection and focus, dealing with this man, even if all he wanted to do was talk.
Walking down the hallway, Mae encountered Paula coming towards the elevator.
“His family is still there,” Paula said. “You might want to wait. He gets a lot of visitors.”
“Thanks.”
Mae walked slowly and stopped in the hallway outside Charlie’s room. Inside, she could hear a woman’s voice saying, “Try the new meds, Dad. Please. It’s got to be worth getting you out of here.”
“They’ve tried everything. I’m already drugged like a lab rat. I should just go home anyway.”
“I know you want to.” A silence, the small sound of a daughterly kiss on the cheek or forehead. “Goodnight, Dad. Louise, give Grandpa a kiss goodbye.”
After a pause, Charlie’s voice, somewhat forced and cheery. “Goodnight, Louise.”
Mae tried to picture him as a grandfather kissing a child, as someone with a loving family. It jarred her image of him, didn’t fit. A young man’s voice said goodbye, and the people from Charlie’s office door photo gallery walked out, looking tired and strained, the child with a sulky expression. Mae gave Charlie a moment to process his family’s visit, then approached the open room and knocked on the doorframe.
Lying with his eyes closed, his bed propped up to a chair-like position, Charlie looked drained. His face was slightly thinner, and his color was off. Mae felt a moment of sympathy for him. It had to hurt, physically and emotionally, to have had your heart opened up.
He didn’t respond, so she knocked again.
“Maggi?”
He thought his daughter had come back. “Sorry, no. It’s Mae.”
His eyes opened, and their cold blue light flashed at her, then his lids dropped again.
Mae walked in. There were several books on his bedside table, and so many cards they stood like books on a shelf. Pollen from the forest of get-well bouquets coated the granite windowsill. What did all these people see in him?
“Bernadette said you’d asked for me.” Charlie seemed to ignore her. “You want me to go?”
“No.” His voice was commanding, although weakened and lacking its normal resonance. “I need you to get my blood pressure down.”
“Why me?”
He looked at her again. “You heal people, don’t you?”
“I thought you objected to that. And there’s plenty more experienced people.”
He used his arms to push himself up straighter, and winced in pain. “I seem to recall I did you a couple of favors.”
“Fine. Call ’em in. I reckon I can give it a try. Why don’t I heal your knee while I’m at it so you can use ’em up both at once?” Mae set her purse in the aqua-blue plastic chair by his bed and took the pouch of crystals out, considering what she might use on him. “I’ll try not to shock you again.”
Almost imperceptibly, his mouth lifted at the corners.
Nervous about the potential contact, Mae reminded herself that she was more practiced now, and that he was weaker. Still, she felt uneasy and on guard, and delayed getting started. “Why don’t you lower your bed a little so you’re more relaxed?”
He raised one eyebrow, but pressed the button and lowered his head a few inches. “Better?” He sounded as if he were mocking her.
Mae had an uninvited image of Rhoda-Rae coming in as Charlie’s nurse, swishing over to him and flirting, saying, Lay it down, sugar, you can get it back up later, giving him a naughty wink. What a strange thought.
As Mae stepped closer to his bed, he looked at her skirt and blouse, eyes narrowed. “Those are her clothes.”
“Yeah, Pamela gave me a bunch of her old stuff. I hope it doesn’t get your blood pressure up.”
He reached for a glass of water with a bent straw in it, sipped, and set it back on the table. There was a crisp certainty in the way he addressed her. “I hope not, too. You’re supposed to heal me, not give me a stroke.”
“You hate her, don’t you?”
“As I should.”
“This may sound crazy, but maybe your blood pressure would go down if you forgave her. Or your knee would get better. I saw her in you, in your knee. Last time I tried to heal you.”
The silence was like a searchlight on them. Mae wondered if she’d overstepped, talking to him that way. He was older and probably smarter than her, and he’d studied with teachers all over the world—before he got lazy and started faking it.
To her surprise, he wasn’t angry. Instead, his voice softened and his eyes lost their icy glint. “I’d like to be able to paint again. To make pottery again. I can’t seem to do it anymore. I was good, once.”
The sudden change of topic puzzled Mae, but she remembered the beauty of the art he’d made for Paula. “You were, from what I’ve heard. Not just as an artist.”
He nodded, gazed out the window. “I miss him. The artist, the seeker, the Charlie who went to India and China, who sought the great sages and dreamed the great dream.”
The words sounded somewhat staged to Mae, but his melancholy appeared real. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I think Pamela did something to him. It’s like I’m watching a movie or reading a book, when I think about him. I don’t know him anymore.”
Maybe Pamela’s use of his art supplies to insult him had caused the break with his creative self. What if Mae could bring back that lost part of him, the way she’d brought back the lost part of Bernadette? The friend Paula cherished might be more than a memory. Even Charlie’s teaching might become authentic once more, if he got his spiritual and creative self back.
Holding clear quartz points in both hands, Mae untucked the sheet around Charlie’s feet and pressed her palms with the crystals against his soles. Those small, neat feet. Looked like he got pedicures. She closed her eyes and waited. No shock.
“Good so far. Electricity in the human body discharges through the feet.” Charlie sounded impressed. “Then do you move up the chakras?”
“The what?”
“I’m surprised Bernadette hasn’t taught you all that. What do you two talk about? She doesn’t teach you Ayurveda and yoga? Apache medicine?”
“We talk about what we need to talk about. I don’t make her teach me stuff. Do you want me to heal you, or do you want to interrupt me and give me a lecture?”
“I think I want to give you a lecture.” He pressed the button on his bed and raised himself to sitting upright. “If you don’t even know the chakras, then you apparently don’t know the basics of energy systems.”
“First you don’t want me to heal people. Then you want me to heal you. Then you think I’m not good enough. Make up your mind. I don’t have to do this.”
“You owe me, remember? But you don’t have much skill. Power, but no idea how to move it. No training, am I right?”
She didn’t want to agree, but she couldn’t argue. “Close enough to right.”
“Listen, then. I want you to be good, not guessing.” He took a breath. “There are seventy-two thousand nadis, or energy channels, in the body. Bernadette should have taught you some of this. I’m disappointed in her.”
“You’re just disappointed in her in general. But she’s done plenty to help me out. I’ve got no c
omplaint about Bernadette. And neither should you.”
“Not for you to judge.” His piercing eyes locked onto hers as he seemed to wait for Mae to capitulate. When she didn’t, he sipped his water again, made a kind of show of how hard it was to reach and lift it, sighed as he set it back down. “Back to your lesson.” He closed his eyes. “The three main nadis run on either side of the spine and intersect like a caduceus—”
“A what?”
“The snakes around the staff, the doctor’s symbol. The two nadis on either side of the main one, the susumna channels, are the male and female principals, the ida and pingala nadis. Where they intersect with this central channel are the chakras. You can picture them as wheels or flowers, places where energy can open or close. They correspond to major nerve plexuses in the body, but the chakras aren’t purely physical, and the susumna corresponds with the spine but it’s not the spine. Are you with me?”
Mae sensed what Charlie might have been like as a teacher once, back when he studied and practiced spiritually. Was he showing off that he still knew this stuff? “I think so. But do I need to hear all this now?”
“Yes. Each chakra is related to functions in our lives and minds and emotions and bodies. The chakras can be balanced, or too open, or too closed.” He paused, shifted uncomfortably with a pained expression. “I’ve been told by some of your healees that you use crystals now. Get them out. Set them up like a rainbow.”
Now he was getting more practical. Mae chose her grandmother’s ruby, a piece of orange carnelian, a citrine cluster of golden points, the green aventurine, the turquoise, and the amethyst. “Just those six colors?” she asked.
“And white or clear. I’m tired, so I’m going to go fast. I need this done. They hit a nerve and my diaphragm is half-paralyzed. Talking wears me out.”
The complications Bernadette had mentioned sounded serious. No wonder his voice was so weak, that rich, buttery voice he’d once had faded and struggling. With a surge of sympathy, Mae added a large clear quartz point to her row of crystals, laying them along the side of his bed. She didn’t like to see anyone in pain, even a man like Charlie. It would be only decent to see if she could ease it a little.