The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  Callie pulled over when she saw the street vendor outside the gate of Greenlawn Cemetery. White chrysanthemums. The perfect flower. She used them in her meditation classes to stimulate the heart chakra.

  She bought four of them, placing one on each of the graves: for Susan, Cheryl, and Olivia. She’d bring the last to Rose. The markers were simple. Just unpolished granite with each of the women’s names carved into the stone. The nuns at the group home had told her that Catholic Charities had paid for the gravestones but wouldn’t bury the Goddesses in the Catholic cemetery, choosing the town one instead. They’d said it was because the Goddesses weren’t Catholic—another lie, since Olivia had been. Callie didn’t know about the others. All she knew was that, at Rose’s insistence, each of the Goddesses had learned the Catholic Lord’s Prayer, the one without “the kingdom, the power, and the glory” at the end.

  Given what she’d learned recently, she suspected there was more to the story than she had been told, probably something to do with the “hubris”—that’s what the nuns called it—of the women thinking they were qualified to perform the blessing at the site of the execution. “Only a priest can consecrate the ground of the Salem witches,” one of the older nuns at the children’s home in Northampton had declared, “although I don’t think any priest would agree to do it.”

  Callie looked at the chrysanthemum she’d saved for Rose, her eyes tearing up. She recalled Halloween nights when the same old-school nun had locked the doors to the home against “evil spirits.” The children hadn’t been allowed to trick-or-treat. The doors weren’t unlocked until the following morning, All Saints’ Day, when “God opened the gates of Heaven, and all the souls came down to rid the earth of darkness from the night before.”

  This morning, standing at her mother’s grave, Callie felt the kind of aching loss she’d had little time to feel as a child. She let the tears fall until they stopped. Callie said her own kind of prayer, not to any almighty power but to the women whose graves she was visiting. “Please help me bring Rose back,” she said. “I need her as much as she needs me.”

  She’d tried music therapy with Rose, just basic stuff played on her cell phone. It had no effect. Today, she’d talked herself into a corner after she arrived at the hospital, telling Rose stories about grad school and even her apartment in Amherst. She was quickly running out of material.

  By the time she remembered to put the last white chrysanthemum in water, she’d waited too long; one of the petals had dropped and drifted to the bottom of the glass. A single petal. That had meaning, didn’t it? What was it? If you dropped a single chrysanthemum petal into a glass of wine, it would yield a long and happy life. A life of ease. Someone had told her that, maybe it was Rose herself. Callie took a long look at Rose’s blank expression. Her life had been anything but one of ease. Callie said a silent prayer that this would change for the better.

  She walked to the window. With the trees bare, she could see the ocean. Just a hint of horizon that stretched taut, then disappeared behind a far hill.

  What could she say to Rose that would make her better? Every story she’d started this morning led to a horrible dead end she couldn’t share, a reminder of that night on the hill. The white chrysanthemum was a symbol of truth, yet she couldn’t tell the truth to Rose, not all of it. It was so hard to stay positive when she talked about her life. The only solution was to talk about something wholly different. But what?

  Looking down, Callie was surprised to see Rose’s Book of Trees on the windowsill. She was certain it hadn’t been there yesterday. She had seen it on an earlier visit in an unlocked cabinet with the rest of Rose’s belongings, but apparently someone had taken it out, and now it sat open to where Rose had drawn a winter branch, its bare spines extending across two pages. Callie flipped through, seeing more of the same. The journal was all drawings, pencil sketches of trees in different seasonal stages: fully leafed, then sparser, then bare branches covered with snow.

  Realizing how invasive she was being, Callie closed the journal. Pissed off that someone else had been looking through Rose’s things, she approached the nurses’ desk. “Someone has been looking through Rose’s belongings. Do you know who?” Callie demanded.

  “Don’t accuse me,” the nurse said.

  “Well, it was somebody.” An aide? The guard at the door?

  The nurse turned back to her computer monitor. “Take it up with her doctor,” she advised.

  Callie realized she should have been more diplomatic. But seeing Rose’s belongings disturbed, her privacy invaded, had plugged into an old issue.

  The same thing had happened at the children’s home. Periodically, the nuns rifled through the children’s belongings, searching for contraband: candy when they were little, drugs later on. Callie’s first foster father had searched her belongings the same way. For what? she’d always wondered.

  Callie went back to Rose’s room and opened the cabinet to see if anything else had been taken. Rose’s beat-up down jacket and her black pants were neatly hung, her battered running shoes lined up on the floor. Her little grocery cart with the wheels was half folded and stuffed into the back of the narrow closet with her other meager belongings still inside. Nothing appeared to be missing. Callie buried the book in Rose’s cart, covering it with a ratty sweater that needed cleaning and both of Rose’s shoes. Then she locked the cabinet, pocketing the key. If—when—Rose woke up, Callie would unlock it, but, for now at least, Rose’s private belongings were protected.

  She couldn’t talk any more. Not today.

  Instead, she decided to meditate. When she was working with a difficult client, she often led her patient in a guided meditation. She wished she felt confident enough to lead Rose this way, but she didn’t.

  So Callie closed her eyes and began a silent meditation, sitting at Rose’s bedside and picturing her own body filling with water and then slowly draining from her head downward. Others she knew complained that clearing their minds was difficult, but Callie could slip into the meditative state like a second skin. She sometimes taught meditation to students from the university, in addition to sound healing. Truth be told, she preferred this state to real life. Here, there were no barriers for her, and it was easy to travel, to merge with others and see what they saw, to understand what they were going through. Here, all beings were one, something that was difficult to explain to students. It had to do with openness and intention. But first you had to rid yourself of impediments and create an emptiness that would allow you to accept such a merger.

  She allowed her focus to linger on every area where she felt a blockage: the crick in her neck from sleeping on Rose’s mattress through the tightening of her throat and chest muscles from swallowing tears. When she imagined the water streaming down her arms and out her fingertips, movement slowed from a steady flow to a drip. She could feel the scar on her left palm. And then through closed eyelids she saw a shadow darken the room and felt a chill wind creep through the dying leaves of a nearby tree and move close, jolting her. She opened her eyes.

  Too-bright hospital lights. Outside the window, it was no darker than before. The lone oak on the hill across the parking lot was the same.

  That was weird.

  Callie closed her eyes again and resumed her meditation, taking things back a step, to the elbows. She imagined the liquid draining downward and out through her fingers. This time there was flow, and the rest of the exercise went smoothly. There were no more blockages, no shadows, no further impediments to the meditative state.

  She rubbed her hands together and placed them on top of Rose’s.

  She opened her mouth but didn’t sing. Instead she breathed a silent Om. Her intention was to merge herself with Rose and to discover Rose’s home tone, the frequency her body was most comfortable with, the one that would become her healing modality. Everyone had one note of the scale that was home for them; sometimes Callie had to listen hard to discover it. When she was able to merge through meditation, the tone often
played through her, moving through her fingers, then upward and out her mouth, expressed in a clear healthy tone as if in song.

  She’d accomplished this type of bond before—she had a talent for emptying herself of herself when someone was very ill or when she sensed a misdiagnosis, and then joining with them. Empathetic healing sometimes accompanied this type of embodiment.

  But today nothing happened.

  Rose wasn’t easy to inhabit. Callie kept stopping and starting, completing a series of deep breathing exercises before she felt the familiar falling feeling and recognized the scent of oranges that always accompanied a merging.

  For Callie, the sound she heard when she meditated—she dubbed it “the music of the spheres”—was akin to a gentle sea breeze. As she went deeper, the sound grew more complex, revealing additional layers. On particularly successful days, it became a series of harmonics in which she could hear all the sounds of nature in gentle concert.

  Today, she heard nothing. Instead, as she approached the place Rose inhabited, all sounds ceased. It wasn’t silence so much as it was nothingness. The visuals she experienced changed as well, moving from a brightness that lit from within to a darkness that surrounded everything. In the space Rose inhabited, it wasn’t frightening. Or painful. It was simply empty.

  Empty.

  All the time Callie had been telling Rose her life story, she’d feared that the negativity of the narrative would be upsetting. She’d even worried that the simple shock of hearing her voice for the first time in twenty-five years might be making Rose worse. But now she knew that this wasn’t the case. Despite what Zee Finch had said, it was clear to Callie, as she released herself from her trance, that in the days Callie had been talking, Rose hadn’t heard a single word.

  Callie climbed the steps to Towner’s house. It was late afternoon and the tearoom was closed, but Towner was there as usual. Callie was surprised to see Zee still sitting at one of the tables, sharing a pot of tea.

  “Join us,” Towner said with a smile when she saw Callie. She took a cup and saucer from one of the other tables and set a place.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “It’s called Difficult-Tea,” Towner said.

  “It was named for Towner when she was a teenager,” Zee explained, grinning.

  “Very appropriately, I might add,” Towner said. “It’s a blend my grandmother, Eva, used to make: black tea with cayenne and cinnamon, and just a hint of cilantro.”

  “Sounds terrible,” Callie couldn’t help saying as she collapsed into a chair. Her hands were shaky. She placed both of them palms down on the cool table in front of her.

  Towner laughed. “It was meant to be.”

  “I think it’s pretty good,” Zee said. “But people either love it or hate it.”

  “How about something herbal? To calm your nerves,” Towner suggested, already heading over to the pantry, where the canisters of tea were stored.

  “Am I that obvious?”

  “You just came from the hospital?” Zee asked.

  “I did.” Callie picked up a spoon and turned it over in her hands, looking at it instead of Zee. “Nothing’s working.” She sighed. “And someone has been going through Rose’s things. I found her Book of Trees on the windowsill. It wasn’t you, was it?” She put down the spoon and looked at Zee.

  “It wasn’t me,” Zee said. “But I’ll certainly speak to the nursing staff about it.”

  “I spoke to the nurse at the desk,” Callie said. “I’m afraid I annoyed the hell out of her.”

  “Was anything missing?” Towner asked.

  “I don’t know,” Callie said. “I put the book away and I locked the cabinet.” Callie showed her the key she had pocketed.

  “Good idea.”

  Towner came back to the table with another teapot, smaller this time and covered with painted roses. “Let it steep for a minute,” she said, setting it down in front of Callie.

  Callie put her hands around the teapot to warm them.

  Zee looked at Towner and then back at Callie, passing the plate of scones that had been on the other side of the table. Callie waved them away.

  “Not hungry for sweets? That’s never a good sign,” Towner said.

  “I’m frustrated. I don’t see any improvement, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s nothing to be done, besides what you’re already doing,” Zee said. “The idea is to bring her back, to form a connection of some kind. And you are doing that—you are talking to her every day. You won’t really know it’s working until she wakes up.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t think she’s hearing me.”

  “What makes you say that?” Zee asked.

  Callie shrugged. Something kept her from revealing the darkness she’d felt inside Rose during her meditation. “I’m a music therapist. I’m supposed to be a healer,” she said instead.

  “Supposed to be? You sound doubtful,” Towner said.

  I’ve always been doubtful about my healing abilities, Callie thought. Despite many positive results, her embrace of New Age methods was undercut by a small seed of doubt instilled by the nuns she’d grown up among. They had hired her to work with their patients at the nursing home, and even though in her worst moments she worried it may have been only because they felt bad for her, she knew it meant they had a base level of confidence in her abilities, at least some of them did. Even they’d had to acknowledge there were healers in the Bible; Jesus himself was the best example. But Callie’s “gifts” were always spoken of as if the word were in quotes, as if they had a dark origin and might end up doing more harm than good. This doubt was the reason she never moved beyond the nursing home and a few private clients. People at the end of life were safe. She could usually help them, and if she couldn’t…Well, then at least she could ease their way.

  Towner was still looking at her, waiting for comment.

  “Being a healer is an odd thing to announce, especially in front of Rose’s real doctor.”

  Zee looked at her curiously. “It hasn’t been long enough to know whether or not you’re helping.” She stood and began to gather her belongings. “I’ve got to get out to Yellow Dog. I missed them this morning,” she said, looking at her watch. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “The other time Rose was in this state, she was this way for a year,” Towner said.

  “I know. I’m already out of stories,” Callie admitted. “I can’t possibly do this for a year.”

  “No one expects you to,” Zee said.

  Towner lifted the lid of the teapot and checked the brew, then poured a cup.

  There was a long pause as Callie sipped. “Thanks,” she said. Then, looking toward the pantry, she asked, “Towner?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I borrow that salad bowl of yours?” Sound itself didn’t seem to have any impact on Rose, but vibration pulled in another sense entirely. It could be felt. It was worth a shot.

  “You mean the singing bowl?” Towner asked. “Would you like the rubber spatula, too?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Zee looked confused. “Are you planning to cook something up for Rose?”

  “With your permission.”

  In the community that made up Salem, nineteen people were executed, as well as two dogs. Samuel Sewall, a judge for the Court of Oyer and Terminer, was known to have kept a diary for forty years. The diary is blank for the summer of 1692. One popular conclusion among researchers has been that Sewall’s omission was due to “willful amnesia brought about by the collective guilt from which the entire city of Salem still suffers.”

  —ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem

  Callie was unfazed by the looks on the faces of the nurses at the psych ward desk when she passed by carrying the bowl and spatula. The officer guarding Rose’s room looked up at her suspiciously. “What are you planning to do with that?”

  The nurses had not passed him the word. “I’m going to make some music,” she said
. “I have permission.”

  He looked doubtful but let her pass.

  Callie did a quick scan of the room: Nothing was out of place; no one had interfered with Rose’s things. Good. She set the bowl on Rose’s bedside table and then moved the table to the middle of the room, to center it as best she could within the four walls.

  After striking the bowl to create a vibration, she slowly drew the spatula around the rim until the sound built and the bowl began to sing. She kept circling until the ringing grew loud enough to ripple the surface of the water in the pitcher by Rose’s bedside. She could see the tiny waves in the half-empty IV bag that hung by Rose’s bed, and she could feel the rolling sensation as the ellipse formed and began to move around the room. There was only one window. It was a small one and high up, barely interrupting the expanse of wall. With the door closed, the sound was contained by the four walls of this square room, playing off their smooth surfaces, creating what felt like an eternity of sound. She imagined she could see the sound moving, see the colors it created as it passed over and through Rose’s still body. For just a moment, she thought she saw Rose shiver, and then, as quickly as a blink, Rose’s body went still again as the door opened. Standing there were the day nurse and the aide. Behind them, the officer stood tentatively.

  “Come in or go out,” Callie said to them as the sound began dissipating. The nurse and the aide stepped inside, but the policeman went back to his post, closing the door behind him.

  Callie once again pulled the spatula around the rim, and this time the bowl was primed. The newcomers watched openmouthed as the sound built until it was almost unbearable, then circled the room once more. Callie put down the spatula and watched Rose. She could feel the scar on her palm begin to throb where she had held the tool. Unconsciously, she rubbed it, never taking her eyes off Rose.

  The shiver she had seen earlier, if that was what it had been, did not return. But the vibration continued for a long time, longer than Callie imagined it could, and far longer than the first time, before the door had been opened. Neither the aide nor the nurse moved until the sound had faded and disappeared.