Between Now and Forever

by Margaret Duarte

  Squinted looks of confusion from his classmates.

  “Apparently, you geniuses haven’t heard of the guy. His experiments with water show the high likelihood that our thoughts aren’t locked inside our heads and can actually change physical matter.”

  “Jason already proved that,” Codi quipped. No votive candles on the table to help her de-stress today, though she didn’t seem to notice. Twisting the skull ring on her right hand appeared to serve as her current fidgeting tool.

  “Yeah, well, we need to prove it scientifically,” Luke said, “or remain a laughing-stock.”

  “Scientific proof is a myth,” Shawn mumbled.

  The blades of Luke’s thin shoulders rose and fell beneath his jersey T-shirt. “Okay then, at least we need to support the theory with evidence we can measure and observe, if not outright prove.”

  “Sorry to pop your bubble,” Codi said, “but there’s no convincing the skeptics. They’re not ready to believe what we say or do. It freaks them out. They’d rather think of our gifts as misbehavior, mental illness, even scams. Sure, we got some positive vibes going during Spring Faire because of Luke’s marketing skills. You know, lights and music and colorful props. And Jason gets by with pretending to be a trickster—”

  “Magician,” Jason inserted.

  “Harry Potter, Harry Houdini, con artist, whatever. You know what I mean. And that gives people permission to clap for what you do like mindless rock fans instead of thinking you’re one weird, crazy duck.”

  Luke’s face reddened, and I wondered why. Then I remembered he’d chosen the duck mold to pour the slip of his thoughts into. The duck, symbolizing persistence and patience, a reminder to release one’s intellect and embrace one’s intuition, something difficult for Luke to do. “Maybe being considered a magician works for Jason,” he admitted. “But, like Codi said, what we do…and I’m talking real magic here…scares the bejesus out of most people, including our parents. So, we need to explore it from an evidence-based, scientific perspective. Eyewitness testimony counts for zilch until measured in controlled experiments. What we see and do is taken no more seriously than an exaggerated good story.”

  “Lots of people think what we’re doing here is evil,” Ethan said.

  “And dangerous,” Tessa added from the seat to my right that she’d claimed in Angelina’s absence.

  Codi glared at Jason. “Which it can be, if treated like a joke.”

  “I hate the word evil.” Ethan said. The heavy, soporific light entering the room through the windows behind him made him appear gray and out of focus, one more strike against a kid whose smoky white aura already cast him in shadow.

  “I’m with Luke,” Codi said, “if only to make ourselves feel less like freaks. So, what’s the plan?”

  Luke shoved his glasses back to the bridge of his nose, a gesture as distinctive as Codi’s eye rolls. “We’ll start by thinking in a focused way as a team.”

  Codi chuckled. “You mean, like the beam of a laser, powerful enough to—”

  “Are we going to shoot laser beams from our eyes like Superman?” Jason asked.

  “Quit messing around,” Luke said. “This is serious. We’ll all think the same thought at the same time and direct it toward water. And before you bombard me with more questions and wise-cracks, let me explain.”

  “Are you talking about how my thoughts find their way into other people’s heads?” Codi asked, staring at the skull ring on her finger with the intensity of someone expecting it to speak.

  Luke looked relieved that at least someone was taking him seriously. “Not just find their way in, but influence.”

  “Influence water. Cool,” Jason said. “Like Moses parting the Red—”

  “We’re going to start with a simple test,” Luke interjected. “We’ll need matched controls of tap water. One to treat with our thoughts, the other to leave untreated.”

  “How do you prove the water has been affected by our thoughts?” Jason asked, getting serious at last.

  “I’ll explain tomorrow—”

  Codi shifted in her seat in a way that suggested she was warming up to Luke’s ideas and had input of her own. “Why not focus on something bigger, like a plant, and see how it reacts to our thoughts? Or seeds. Focus on seeds, then plant them and see what happens?”

  Luke shot her a stern look like the ones I’d directed at him on many an occasion. “One experiment at a time, Codi. Anyway, I was thinking of calling our experimentation ‘To the Eighth Power.’”

  “But there are only six of us without Angelina,” Tessa pointed out.

  “You’re not counting Ms. Veil and Granny Max,” Luke said.

  “But Granny Max doesn’t have psychic abilities.”

  “We’re all psychic to a degree. Plus, she’s a mathematician, specializing in statistics. We can’t just base our beliefs on anecdotes and personal experience.”

  “Are you saying, we’re going to prove the power of prayer?” Tessa asked.

  “In a way, except I’d rather call it the power of focused attention.”

  “Have you already talked to Granny Max about this?” Codi asked from her seat next to Tessa.

  “No, but I’ll bet she’s in once I explain what we’re doing.”

  “Shouldn’t we okay this with Dr. Matt first?” she persisted, suddenly Miss-Play-By-The-Rules.

  “Get real, Codi. We’re talking about experimenting with water. Do you really think we need Dr. Matt’s permission for that?”

  The way things had been going, Dr. Matt would probably say no regardless of what we were doing, so I mentally sided with Luke. It was the students’ turn to lead and time for well-intentioned outsiders like Dr. Matt and me to stop meddling and start practicing what we preached.

  Luke turned to me with a small triumphant smile. “What do you say, Ms. Veil?”

  “I say, go for it, with one stipulation…” I gave Ethan a warning look. And this includes you. “That we keep what we’re doing in this classroom to ourselves for now. Depending on the outcome, you risk becoming sought-after school celebrities or shunned as wackos. And neither case scenario is something we should encourage or seek.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  OKAY, SO WE AS a class already knew our thoughts weren’t locked inside our heads. Thoughts, according to our experience, were trespassers, capable of traversing other people’s minds and objects, even influencing them in some way. So, what if, as Luke had suggested, we sent our collective healing thoughts to a targeted substance? If a group of people thought the same thought at the same time, would that magnify the effect?

  On Tuesday, Luke staged an experiment as a trial run to discover just that. He’d purchased a box of pH test strips, and, within minutes of everyone’s arrival (minus Granny Max, who hadn’t yet been pulled into the fray), he poured two glasses of water from the kitchen tap and labeled them “A” and “B.” He selected the glass labeled “A” as the target for our group and the one marked “B” as the control. Then he dipped pH strips into both glasses and, after a few seconds, pulled them out and compared the color changes to the chart on the box. He recorded the results into a journal titled To the Eighth Power and placed the control glass of water in the kitchen.

  “The pH of a liquid has to do with the concentration of hydrogen ions in water compared to a universal standard,” Luke explained. “It measures the sample’s acidity or alkalinity. The lower the pH measures below seven, the more acidic the substance; the higher, the more alkaline. The normal range for tap water is between six and eight-point-five. The water samples in both glasses I just tested registered seven-point-zero. So, our intention for this experiment is to raise the pH of the water by one full pH, to eight-point-zero. Remember, this is only a quick test to see if we’re onto something. We’ll get to more complicated tests later. Got it?”

  “Got it,” we said in unison, undaunted that Luke had commandeered us into his investigative experimentation like sev
en docile test rats.

  Luke placed the target glass of water on the floor and had us form a loose circle around it. “Consider this our power circle,” he said, “held together by our purpose and intention.”

  The mention of a power circle reminded me of something I’d shared during our lesson on shifters. “When I feel the need to conquer some critical self-attacks or seek answers to seemingly unanswerable questions, I construct a big circle, sit inside, and meditate.”

  “A magic circle?” Luke had asked.

  “Only if by magic circle you mean a place to bring about desired changes,” was my reply.

  Now, following Luke’s lead, we breathed in and out as we’d done during our previous meditation sessions. “Focus your mind on the water,” he directed, “then repeat after me: ‘I’ll do everything in my power to raise the water’s pH by one full unit on the pH scale.’”

  We focused and repeated as instructed.

  “A full unit on the pH scale is a huge shift,” Luke said, “so concentrate hard. If your body’s pH went up that much, you’d be dead.”

  Jeez, Luke. Thanks for that vital piece of information.

  “Okay,” he said. “Keep your eyes on the water and visualize the pH rising to a darker green color on the test strip. Hold that thought for ten minutes. Believe in the desired outcome.”

  A stream of energy coursed over my arms and neck to the top of my head, producing a hair-standing-on-end sensation, as if I were part of a giant force field. I tore my gaze from our target long enough to glance at the students. They appeared relaxed, eyes focused on the glass of water in the center of our circle.

  Just as my head started to ache and my limbs to feel heavy, Luke called an end to our session. We waited, eyes blinking, as if re-entering the classroom from a distance. Luke picked up the glass from the center of the circle and placed it on the counter below the wall of windows. He then headed for the kitchen to retrieve the control labeled “B.” On his return, he placed the control water next to the target water and dipped a test strip into each.

  One second, two seconds, three, four, five…

  I felt a surge of excitement, as if waiting for the outcome of a Powerball lottery, where, considering the remote chance of winning, reason and logic are abandoned in favor of hope.

  Luke lifted the test strips out of the solution— “A” in his right hand, “B” in his left—and waved them in the air to shake off excess moisture. Then he compared them to the color chart on the back of the pH strip package. “Only one of the test strips shows a marked change in color,” he said. “The one dipped into glass ‘A.’ Not exactly a full unit rise in pH, but close.”

  Fist pumps all around. “Yes!”

  ***

  “Now, don’t get all excited,” Luke warned as we gathered in the classroom the following afternoon. “Lots of people use pH strips to measure the chemistry of their pools and their body fluids, so we’re not talking rocket science here. It was just a quick way to warm up our engines. We need to move on to more serious stuff, like making a prediction based on the hypothesis that our thoughts aren’t locked inside our heads and can actually change physical matter. Then we need to test the prediction. Using lima bean seeds.”

  “Lima bean seeds?” Jason smirked. “Don’t they have high levels of cyanogen?”

  A small burst of air through Luke’s nose. “We’re going to experiment with them, not eat them.”

  “Good,” Codi said. “I don’t do the lima bean thing. They make me gag.”

  “We want to see if sending them our healing intention will affect their growth and health. The prediction being that the answer will be yes.”

  “Instead of making them shrivel up and die, you mean,” Jason said.

  Luke ignored him. “We’ll start with four sets of ten seeds. One for our target and three for our controls.” He poured seeds from a paper bag onto the table in front of him and sorted them into four groups of ten. “I nabbed these from Mom’s stash in what Dad calls her ‘Fallout Shelter Pantry.’ It’s stocked full of canned food, powdered milk, jerky, and vacuum bags full of whatever else she thinks we’ll need in case of a nuclear war. As far as I’m concerned, her hoarding is useless. If we don’t get cremated by the initial blast, we probably won’t survive the radioactive fallout.”

  Tessa shuddered. “So much violence. Can’t we just make the world a better place?”

  Luke paused from his monologue long enough to say, “Maybe someday. In the meantime, how about you choose one group of seeds so we can get started?”

  Luke put the ten seeds Tessa had selected into a plastic bag and labeled it “A” with a black marker. The rest of the seeds went into three control bags, labeled “B,” “C,” and “D,” which he placed in the kitchen.

  On his return, Luke set bag “A” on the floor and instructed us to form a circle around it. “Now, close your eyes and do your meditative breathing. Clear your minds and hold the intention that the seeds will sprout and grow at least three centimeters by Monday. Picture them healthy and thriving. Connect with each other along with the target, like a psychic Internet, and hold the intention for ten minutes. Believe that these seeds will grow faster and be healthier than the untreated controls.”

  I found his instructions easier to follow this time around than during our previous experiment, as if I were improving with practice.

  “Time’s up,” Luke said after what seemed like seconds instead of minutes. “Tomorrow, we’re going to repeat what we did today and give the seeds another jolt of good intentions. Granny Max has agreed to be our lab technician. I won’t tell her which set of seeds we selected as our target and which our controls. She’ll plant and water the forty seeds tomorrow after we leave class. On Monday she’ll harvest and measure them.

  “I’ll choose four more sets of seeds as a second-tier control. I’ll label one set as our target, even though we won’t be sending it our intention. I’ll plant and water the seeds under the same conditions Granny Max uses. Then I’ll harvest and measure them on Monday and have Granny Max record the results. Any questions?”

  Chapter Forty-three

  “BETTER GET USED TO it,” Linda, my future sister-in-law, warned over coffee and scones at the ranch-house kitchen table. Carla was getting groceries at the local supermarket, the boys practicing hockey on a roll-up shooting pad in the back yard, and the men prepping equipment for spring harvest. “Privacy doesn’t come easily on a family farm. Everyone, mother, father, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, cats, dogs, becomes part of your family. And your life. Which, let me tell you, takes some getting used to.” She laughed and took a long, appreciative sip of coffee. “We van Dykes band together when times get tough. That’s what we’re good at, joining forces, protecting our own.”

  Protecting, or confining? I’d been there, done that, with Cliff and my mother—my protectors, my jailors. Would marrying into Morgan’s family rob me of the freedom I sought so desperately? Would it mean surrendering my sense of worth, my newfound individuality? I didn’t know Linda well enough to voice my concerns, so I kept silent.

  “It’s the small stuff that gets irritating,” she said. “And frustrating. Small stuff that can take on monstrous proportions if you let it. Petty jealousies, grouchiness, bad crops, the constant need to pinch pennies. God, I get tired of hearing ‘Next year things will be better.’”

  Linda’s sharing was personal. Another reason not to interrupt. Sometimes it’s best to listen and allow things to play out. My students had taught me that at least. Plus, she was saying what I needed to hear. Morgan and I still had to set a wedding date. A double wedding with Veronica and Ben. I couldn’t just leave them all hanging.

  “Weigh the pluses and minuses before you opt in,” Linda continued, as if I hadn’t been doing that for months. “And when Pop and his two sons argue, stay clear.”

  I wiped my forehead with the back of my wrist. Carla wasn’t the type to leave the thermostat set high,
so the surge of heat I felt must have been coming from within.

  “When he yells and calls his sons lazy asses, don’t get pulled into the fray. They’ll iron out their differences in no time and defend each other to the death. And you’ll be glad you kept your ears plugged and mouth shut.”

  My coffee and blueberry scone stood untouched as I hung on to Linda’s every word.

  “Love Morgan, love his family with all its foibles, and expect us to do the same. But set your boundaries. I mean, from day one. You’re marrying Morgan, not the whole clan, though at times it may feel like it. The van Dykes can drive you nuts, especially ‘Old Leo,’ whose bark is worse than his bite. But his bite still hurts. As it’s meant to. It’s his way of making sure we’ll be ready to take over the reins when he’s gone. Which, according to his calculation for the last five years, is ‘any day now.’”

  Linda halted and grabbed my mug. “You haven’t even taken a sip.” She emptied it in the sink and poured a refill. “Drink. You look like you could use the caffeine.”

  The warmth of the mug brought comfort as did the warmth in Linda’s eyes. “Thanks.”

  “Drink,” she said.

  I took a sip. Hot and strong, just as I liked it. But getting the advice-laced liquid past the lump in my throat proved difficult. The family Linda described sounded formidable, though it was as clear as the untouched scone on my plate that she hadn’t been brow beaten by joining their forces. Quite the opposite. She exuded confidence in the certainty that she’d found her place in the world. And liked it just fine. Was there hope for me?

  “Momma Carla will smother you with love if you allow it, and so will my kids. I, on the other hand, will irritate you in ways yet unknown. My husband will be the first to testify that I’m infuriating as hell, a regular slave driver.”

  “Ha.” I felt my spirits rise. “Someone I can learn from.”

  She chuckled. “And I from you.”

  I topped my scone with blueberry jam and took a bite, followed by another sip of coffee, both going down smoothly this time.