by Lois Duncan
There will first be this sense of an impact and then a moving around of the head and an uplifting that will hold her to this left side, above which there will be a light at the point of an opening. The light is like a veil behind which Kaitlyn waits. There is a sense of her pushing back this light like a drape, and then she will appear in an agitated state and very angry. She is angry that she will not have been more angry before and that she will have been influenced by certain people to withhold her anger and that then she will have known that anger in the body might have saved her anger now.
There will be in this time this which she would say to Robin, and it will have to do with the manner in which she will have had information and did not understand the information and yet she will have handed it over and that will have been what will have stirred up a controversy. There is a sense in this then that this information will have been given over to someone who will have misinterpreted it. There will have been the sense that she knew more than she really did. There will be this which she will have done just that night and she will have held back this information so as to serve and assist another and indeed it did not and she will therefore have been used and betrayed, thus her anger now.
This is the intrigue in this event and she will know now the series of the events in which she will not fully have realized her involvement. There will have been in Kaitlyn this desire to give benefits and trust to those who will not have understood her ways and the methods of this system. There is this desire in her now to correct the anger and to allow that there will come the unfoldment so that all may know the series of events and her involvement in them.
There is much more to be revealed, and it will be for Robin to have a certain contact in a place in which there will be a certain advantage in the media system. There is this one who will be as a kind of undercover person and there will be in this then the ultimate knowing in this case. There is in Kaitlyn this energy which she has still which desires to be transferred with the knowledge she will have, and that can come to Robin in a transference of energy and truth. In this time this will show an affinity beyond sisterhood. They are more than sisters, they are soul twins, and this cannot be erased.
Robin paused to give us a chance to digest this.
“Betty said soul twins have spent many lifetimes together in lots of different relationships. For instance, there might have been a time when Kait and I were mother and daughter, and another when we were best friends, and another when we were cousins. Between those lifetimes we were together in the spirit world. Betty said Kait’s still easy to reach, because she hasn’t moved into that realm yet, which isn’t unusual when people die violently. The soul goes into shock and won’t accept what’s happened. It keeps turning back and trying to continue to communicate.”
When she saw Don and I were too shaken to comment, she continued reading:
QUESTION: WHAT MAY WE KNOW ABOUT KAIT’S RELATIONSHIP WITH DUNG—ABOUT HIS SITUATION AT THIS TIME AND OUR CONTINUING RELATIONSHIP TO HIM—ABOUT HIS INVOLVEMENT IN KAITLYN’S DEATH, IF ANY, AND ABOUT THE INVOLVEMENT OF HIS COMMUNITY, IF ANY?
ANSWER: There will be this which will show that Dung will be in a sense the instigator of this event. There will have been anger in this time and it will have stemmed from something very serious about which Kaitlyn will have been trying to urge him to take a certain action. He will have resisted strongly, and he will have been encouraged in his resistance by others who will also have been involved. He will have tried to gain some assistance from her by telling her certain things, and she will have urged him to do other than he expected of her, and then he felt betrayed by her. There will have been this matter of right and wrong and it will have involved also the matter of cross cultures. Kaitlyn will have had something to do with an action not truly against the law but which interfered with the law, and there will have been much fear all around.
“That might be referring to Kait’s letting Dung use your credit card to rent the car,” Robin said.
“She did more than that,” Don said.
We both turned to stare at him.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this unless I had to, but yesterday when I was over at Kait’s apartment draining her aquarium, Detective Gallegos stopped by. He said he’d followed up on the things we’d told him and had gotten the accident report from California. Kait didn’t just rent the car for Dung, she was the driver.”
“She wouldn’t have done that!” I exclaimed.
“I don’t think so either,” Robin said. “She’d have covered for Dung, but she wouldn’t have crashed a car. Besides, the reading explicitly says she didn’t ‘break’ the law, what she did was something that ‘interfered’ with it.”
“That’s quibbling,” Don said.
“The subtleties are important, Daddy.”
She continued with the reading:
ANSWER: There is in the relationship of Kaitlyn and Dung that which shows that both feel a sense of betrayal. A sense of hiding information will still be prevalent, but the ultimate cause will not be that serious. Thus the anger in Kaitlyn again and the confusion in Dung as to why this had to happen over something which was not that serious.
The situation in which Dung now finds himself is born out of misunderstanding and confusion. It is not as if he will have been the one to do this, but he will seem to know who did it. There is something he is in denial of at this time, and he will know that this does not involve something so serious that this should have happened. His remorse is around that, not some prior argument or disagreement with Kaitlyn. There is a golden light on the right side of his head, which has to do with a form of devotion involved in this relationship. Yet his love for Kaitlyn was also tied to his image of his manhood, and some of the misunderstanding stems from that source.
“Betty says mature, well-balanced people have a spiritual light or ‘aura’ that’s centered above their heads,” Robin said. “Dung’s aura is off to the right like the aura of a child. Betty said men like that have a little-boy quality that appeals to insecure young girls and maternal women because it makes them feel needed. Kait felt that she was the superior one in their relationship, and Dung resented that.”
She continued to read:
ANSWER: There will be this that pushes the head down, and it will be as if there is a shame in this now for the Vietnamese community and there will be this which has many of them fearful and closed off. Many of them do not understand what took place, and thus then the potential for more misunderstanding is evident.
There will be those in that community who would want to come forth and tell what they know, and this would have to do with the feminine aspect. There will be this energy which they, the feminine aspect, will seem to deplore, and they will still feel that they are in the grips of their old world energy pattern. There will be this which is causing much fear and this fear blocks any cooperation. There is in this beginning evidence of something which was not done right and in which there will have been the instigating energy in all this. There will have been that which will be known by only a few and this event grew out of all proportions and thus one more reason why this is all so elusive.
“Betty says there are at least one or two women who know what happened,” Robin said. “They liked Kait and want to come forward, but they’re afraid to do it because the men in their lives don’t want them to.”
QUESTION: WHAT DO WE, THE FAMILY, NEED TO KNOW IN ORDER TO BEST UNDERSTAND THIS SITUATION?
ANSWER: It is for this family to take pity on Dung. There is this they can do in so far as his relationship to Kaitlyn is concerned and that is to forgive him his guilt in her name. She has not yet indicated any forgiveness from the other side, but if she were injured and in her body she would have forgiven him already and so must the family.
There is anger and sorrow in Kaitlyn and this cannot be denied. This need not be taken on by the family. There will be ways in which to make contact with her in which then each member of the family can assist her to change her pa
ttern so that she will be able to release this personality of Kaitlyn and seek to move within the dimension in which she is to reside now. There will be assistance on the other side, but for now the assistance still must come from the family in the manner of not giving in to anger and sorrow. For now this deed is done and it will be that there will come the unveiling of the truth. It will be found out, and then all the more sorrow at the seeming uselessness of it.
Kaitlyn was one who walked the cutting edge of life, but her purpose is not lost in this time. If it were it would lend all the more to the sorrow. She will have been true to herself to the end and this she also must accept. She will not have been one to give false encouragement to another, and thus then this event out of misunderstanding of cross cultures, and thus then the knowing of how there has to be much understanding in the mixing of cultures. The hidden fears and resentments come forth even in the love affairs of the people such as in this event, and thus it will take time to unravel.
For this time the family can seek to light white candles in the name of Kaitlyn to bring light to her spirit and to allow the hierarchy to find her and guide her within. They can proceed in the manner they have, with gentle understanding, so that the remorse is more quickly laid aside and they will pursue their own purposes in that time.
Robin folded the transcript and laid it aside. Neither Don nor I said anything.
After a moment Robin said hesitantly, “Betty thinks what this means is that we have to forgive Dung in Kait’s name for anything he did that might have led to her death.”
“We’re supposed to forgive him when we don’t even know what he did?”
“And it has to be done in Kait’s name or it doesn’t count.”
To my astonishment Don got up and went to the telephone.
“I’m going to find out if Dung can have visitors,” he said. He dialed and spoke for a moment to several different people and then held the phone out to me. “Nobody gets to see him unless he okays it. He doesn’t want to see me, but I’ve got him on the line.”
I took the receiver from his hand.
“Dung?” I said. “This is Mom. I’m worried about you, and I want to come see you. Would that be all right?”
Dung started to cry.
“Mom, come,” he said. “Please, I want you to come!”
We drove to the hospital, left the car in the now familiar parking lot, and took the elevator up to one of the higher floors. To our relief we didn’t have to face the trauma ward. Dung was in a private room, and the door stood open to the corridor. From the doorway we could see him in bed, lying on his back with his eyes closed. An Oriental orderly seated next to him was engrossed in a paperback.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Don asked me, having second thoughts about what we’d gotten ourselves into.
“I want to go through with it.”
“Remember, it has to be in Kait’s name,” Robin reminded me.
“I can do that,” I said, and went into the room.
Dung sensed my presence immediately and opened his eyes.
I bent over the bed, and he put his arms around my neck. He was obviously heavily sedated.
“I’d like to talk to him in private, please,” I told the orderly.
“I’m not supposed to leave him alone,” he said.
“He won’t be alone, and I promise I won’t stay long.”
“It’s okay,” Dung told him groggily. “This is my girlfriend’s mom.”
The orderly left reluctantly and positioned himself just outside the door where he could keep a watchful eye on what was going on. I sat down in the chair he had vacated and took both Dung’s hands. I knew what I had to say, but I didn’t know how to word it. The language barrier made a full explanation impossible, so I tried to reduce the message to its simplest form.
“Brett told me you had a dream about Kait,” I said. “I had one too. In my dream Kait said she forgives you. She didn’t explain what she meant, but she said you’d know. She wants you to know you’re forgiven and she still loves you.”
Dung’s eyes were huge in his pallid face. For a moment I didn’t think he had understood me.
“You do know what she means?” I asked, and he slowly nodded. I decided to go one step further. “Kait isn’t in heaven yet. She can’t get to God. You know what she said in your dream about being alone in the dark? She can’t get out of the dark unless you tell us what happened to her.”
“I didn’t shoot her,” Dung murmured, tightening his grip on my hands.
“I know you didn’t,” I said, “but you know who did. You have to decide if you love her enough to tell.”
He sighed and closed his eyes.
“I know. I am deciding.”
“I’m going to have to go now,” I said. It was evident further questioning would be useless. “Don’t hurt yourself again. It won’t bring Kait back or make anything better for anybody.”
I left the room, and the orderly returned to his station. Don and Robin were waiting outside in the hall for me.
“Did you do it?” Robin asked.
“I forgave him for Kait, not for us.”
“Do you think he knows who killed her?”
“He knows something,” I said.
I phoned Gallegos and told him what Dung had said to me.
“That’s almost as good as a confession!” he exclaimed.
When Dung was discharged from the hospital, Gallegos asked me to come down to the police station to interrogate him. I asked if there was anything I needed to know to help me ask the right things, and he said, “No, just do the same thing you did in the hospital.” He put me in a room by myself and sent Dung into me. This time he denied knowing anything about what had happened to Kait.
The next day a sister and brother-in-law came to get him and drove him back to recuperate in their home in Kansas City.
We had not been aware this set of relatives existed.
6
GRIEF PROGRESSES THROUGH PREDICTABLE stages. The first of these is shock. Shock produces a blessed state of numbness that works like an anesthetic to dull the senses and make it possible for people to bear the unbearable.
I remained in that stupefied state quite a while. One month after Kait’s death I still had not cried. On the surface I appeared to be functioning amazingly well. Friends marveled aloud at my “strength and resilience.” I continued to perform my routine duties in a normal way, doing the grocery shopping, fixing meals, running laundry, handling business correspondence, taking the pets to the vet for their inoculations, although I routinely made a detour to avoid the intersection where Kait had been shot.
What I could not do was write fiction. My energy level was so low that I couldn’t be creative, and my mind would not focus on anything other than Kait.
So, instead of writing suspense novels, I wrote unrhymed poetry that had no meaning for anyone but myself:
August 20:
I cannot look at it fully, straight on. Not yet. Tiny sideways glances are all I can manage.
One image at a time. Her graduation picture.
Her record collection. Her lonely black cat.
A schedule of college classes spanning the next four years.
The posters from her bedroom—a jigsaw puzzle, half completed—
A romance novel with a bookmark at page 57.
A brown rose, carefully pressed—who gave her the rose?
Lyrics from a love song, copied in a notebook.
Did somebody sing that song to her, or was she waiting,
Dreaming away the years until she would hear it?
I cannot look at it fully, straight on. Not yet. I focus on each small chore as a separate entity.
Clothes are sent to a cousin in California. Teddy bears go to the children she used to baby-sit.
A metal vase for flowers is installed at the grave site
So she may have roses in summer, poinsettias in winter.
Maybe in the springtime I can bring he
r a hyacinth
If the frost doesn’t kill it.
If I widen my eyes to take in the whole of it I will shatter like aluminum foil in a microwave,
Taking the house down with me.
I was worried about the fact that I was experiencing blackouts of memory. When I thought back upon Kait’s funeral service the only part I could remember was the minister’s recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, and I had no memory at all of the interment afterward. I had trouble recalling the content of conversations and had totally blocked out the name of the homicide detective who had accompanied Detective Gallegos to our home on the night we called him over to tell him about the car wrecks.
Fearing that something important was going to slip past me, I started keeping notes about everything that happened. Then every night after dinner I would sit down at my office computer and transcribe that day’s journal entries onto a disc.
Don and I divided up the after-death chores. He retrieved the Ford from the holding yard where APD had had it towed and sold it to a salvage company.
“I probably could have fixed it,” he said. “The engine wasn’t damaged, but I didn’t think I could stomach cleaning the inside of it.”
For my part I dealt with the paperwork. The desk in Kait’s apartment held a lot of correspondence, including letters to Dung written in Vietnamese and postmarked Orange County. I loaded everything into a sack and took it down to the police station. I told Detective Gallegos that if the police couldn’t get the letters translated, we would have it done ourselves, but he said a man on the force was fluent in Vietnamese and would translate the letters and give us copies.
“Would you believe there are people in this department who still insist your daughter’s shooting was ‘random’!” he said, shaking his head incredulously.
“Was it?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
On August 20 I was scheduled to fly to Craigville, Massachusetts, to teach for a week at the Cape Cod Writers Conference. I had committed to this engagement a year in advance, and the people who registered for the conference had done so under the assumption that I would be teaching the juvenile writing course.