Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  He’d imagined he’d be some kind of normal person. Thin, fit, sane, successful, strong. Not someone who saw souls and leaked energy. The only part he’d managed was successful—moderately. Lately he’d let go of thin, accepted the pace of his emotional progress, controlled his spiritual anomalies as well as possible, and had been almost content with himself, bordering on confident—until he was alone with her. A deep, unsteady breath came out on the edge of a laugh. “Wanted to do it like some love scene in a movie and I can’t. I’m still me.”

  Mae stroked his hair and kissed his forehead. “I should hope so.”

  She unlocked the house. The interior was around a hundred degrees even with the thermal blinds closed. Along the wall across from the pointy-legged fifties couch and chair stood two of Niall’s smaller sculptures, a javelin thrower made of rusted metal rings and bars, and a grazing sheep, curly with old springs and horseshoes. The sculptures made Jamie feel momentarily at home, the work of an old family friend welcoming him. Mae turned on the air conditioner. Jamie put the chile products in the kitchen and scurried toward the bathroom to brush his teeth, patting the sheep on his way through the living room. It was hot. He winced and shook his fingers. “Ow.”

  Mae had that trying-not-to-laugh look again. Something hummed overhead. The ceiling fan began to turn, dislodging a spider on a thread. It spun like a passenger on a fair ride. Jamie swallowed an unmanly squeak and almost ran into the bathroom.

  He closed the door. Fuck. What else could go wrong? Two phobic freak outs, burning his fingers on the sheep, and now the fan. Mae hadn’t touched the switch. Neither had he. She would ask more questions. Like she had on the drive.

  Tell me about your life. He’d tried, but he’d sounded like the publicity on his web site. Come on, sugar, that can’t be all. So he told her that he’d painted his apartment and put in a flower garden. That sounded healthy. Didn’t tell her he hadn’t unpacked or bought furniture yet. Of course, she asked again what he’d done with Cara.

  The answer was too complicated. He’d dodged it. Always good with cats.

  And lamps? The lamp went on when you did that.

  Fuck. Yeah, I heal appliances. Home improvement Reiki.

  There was a fine line between lying and keeping secrets, and he’d been walking that tightrope for ten weeks now. No wonder he was so anxious. It wasn’t just his insecurity. He should have asked Mae to heal Cara, not done it himself. Poor cat got to him, though. He hadn’t been thinking. If he told Mae how the gift had come back, he’d have to tell her everything. He hadn’t even told his therapist everything. He wasn’t sure he’d even told himself.

  He brushed his teeth and used some of Mae’s mouthwash. The clean feeling and the sense of control calmed him, but then he looked in the mirror. Sweat and thorns and wind had made his hair look like ... what was Mae’s weird Southern phrase? A hoo-rah’s nest. He probably stank, too. She wouldn’t want to make love with him all smelly.

  His unsteady fingers struggled with his shirt buttons and stopped. Idiot. He couldn’t just jump in her shower in his first five minutes in her house. What in bloody hell was the matter with him? He opened the door and grasped the doorframe. “Fuck. That wouldn’t be sexy. It’d be bloody stupid.”

  Mae strolled down the hall, talking on her phone. She turned her head away from it to speak to him. “What would be stupid, sugar?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. Jeezus.”

  She resumed her phone conversation. “It fixed itself?” A pause. “Reckon I can’t thank you, then. ’Bye. I gotta go. Jamie’s here.” She ended her call, frowning. “That’s so strange. Niall’s been promising to fix that fan since I moved in and now it just turned itself on.”

  She looked at Jamie, apparently waiting for an explanation. He shrugged right-left. Her gaze dropped to the gap in his shirt, and her little smile came back. Embarrassment crawled over him like ants. “Need a shower.”

  “So do I, but we can wait.”

  Did she mean what he thought she meant? Shower together later? Like foreplay?

  Mae said, “Come on. Sit down with me. Relax a while.”

  He made a show of softly beating his head against the door and followed her back to the living room. Collapsing on the couch, he knocked his skull against the wall behind him, this time by accident, hard. “Jeezus.” The humiliation was suddenly funny. He snorted a loud laugh. “Bloody fucking hell.”

  She sat beside him, tucking her feet under her, facing him. “What?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Been so long it’s ...” Like being a virgin again.

  He clasped her hand and leaned back more carefully. She shifted her position to cuddle up side by side, resting her head on his shoulder. His body responded with a subtle erotic stirring. Yes, they could wait. Get comfortable, be quiet for a while, no pressure, no questions.

  As they held each other in silence, his nerves almost stopped buzzing. He began to sing to her quietly, an old love ballad. Mae snuggled and slid her hand inside his open shirt.

  Something in her energy changed, a hesitancy and lightness in her touch as if she wasn’t sure how hard to squeeze a soft person. He squirmed. “You’re hugging my fat.”

  “I’m hugging you.”

  “But it bothers you. I can tell.”

  “Only a little. More like, you’re different, that’s all.” She moved her arm up higher, to his chest. “If you’re happy at this weight, I’ll get used to you. It’s okay.”

  “Happy.” He kissed her head and sat up, making her let go of him, and buttoned his shirt. “Dunno about that. More like ... mmm ... just how things are, y’know?”

  “Relax, sugar. This is not a big deal. Sing to me again. It was sweet.”

  “Nah. Can’t. Keep bouncing out of it, y’know? The mood. Got to have clean clothes. Flowers. Fix dinner. We’ll have to plan a date. Do it right.”

  “You don’t have to do anything right. Just having you with me is right.” She scooted close again and began rubbing his back and his neck. “I’ll like the date with the flowers and dinner. It’ll be romantic, but you don’t have to do it to impress me. You already have.”

  “How? Getting attacked by a tree? Smacking my head into the wall?”

  She put her arm around his shoulders and drew his hair back from his face. “Look at me, sugar.” He met her eyes. They seemed darker and greener, with little gold flecks like light in a forest. “Last time I saw you, you were so broken. There wasn’t a day went by I didn’t think about you. I worried for months. I was afraid you’d kill yourself.” She stroked her palm over his cheek. “But you didn’t do that. You held on. That’s how you impressed me. I’m so proud of you.”

  He hugged her so close he felt he could pull her through his skin, molecule by vibrating molecule. The pomegranate heart burst, seeds falling everywhere inside him. The tightrope shook. He was only half as well as she thought, and nowhere near as strong. He couldn’t even explain why he was alive, and she was so impressed with that achievement.

  The strong, brave man she thought he was would tell her. The man he was could hardly breathe.

  He let the screen door close behind him. It bounced ajar and he tried to force it shut, but it stuck. Like the door to the spirit world.

  The groaning tree dropped a pod at his feet. Click. The wind blew it across the boards of the porch. Shhh. A dog barked across the street, and others for blocks around took up the alarm. Jamie breathed against the fears. Dogs. Truth. Rejection. The tree. Lily’s soul.

  Mae’s voice startled him. “You okay, sugar?”

  “Yeah. Will be in a bit.”

  She opened the door, gave it a shove at the base with her foot so it closed, and sat on the paint-peeling railing, her back to the tree. “You need some space, I can go in the bedroom, but I don’t want you sitting out here when it’s this hot and we danced so much.”

  “Jeezus. You think I’ll calm down if I know you’re in the bedroom?”

  She smiled. “The guest room, then. Or th
e kitchen. Come on back in. The house is cooling off.” Her head tilted to the side, she studied him for a moment. “Especially now that the fan is working.”

  “Fuck. You know that was me, don’t you?”

  “Home improvement Reiki? You been playing dodgeball all day. You healed Cara and the light went on, we get here and the fan fixes itself—and all you’ll tell me is what I can find out on your website. Or little stuff. You painted your apartment. You made yourself a flower garden—”

  “Jeezus. That’s not little. You’ve never been depressed. You have no idea. That was fucking huge. Took a whole fucking month of therapy to get that far.”

  “You said you just did it last month. Haven’t you been in therapy since December?”

  He squirmed his shoulders, looked at her feet. They were as big as his, country-girl feet. Her legs swung, then stilled.

  “You’re holding back,” Mae said. “I can tell. And it bothers me. I want us to get closer, not have some kind of wall up. I have to know you again.”

  “You know me. Jeezus. Better than anybody.”

  A sharp intake of breath, a light in her eyes. “I do.” Two happy syllables. Do-oo. She snapped her fingers. “You’re right. I know what’ll calm you down. A swim.”

  It was part of his anti-anxiety strategy, had been for years. If she’d suggested the town pool it might have worked. But she wanted to go to the lake.

  Mae changed into her swimsuit, and Jamie stopped at the thrift store for shorts that would do for swim trunks. They didn’t talk much on the drive to Elephant Butte. While they waited behind a truck with a boat trailer, the electronic sign over the gate to the park scrolled through a series of announcements, including an upcoming triathlon.

  “Me and Daddy are doing that race,” Mae said, bubbling with enthusiasm. “We been training up here. Water’s a little chilly, but it makes me go fast.”

  Fuck. If he’d died, some piece of him could have floated up at her. She and Marty could have looked down and seen a bloated corpse, a blond-haired black man, unmistakably Jamie even in decay. He felt sick.

  The sign changed. Lake elevation: 4,313 feet. Air temperature: 99. Water temperature: 76. What had it been in March? Fifty? Colder? He should have died of hypothermia even without the rocks.

  The sign changed to promote recycling. The truck and boat moved on. Mae hung her annual pass on the rearview mirror and Jamie drove to the same campsite he’d used for his death trip. Someone else was camping there now. He started to park across the street at the playground.

  Mae said, “This is a good spot to reach the running trail, but the swimming’s better further in. It drops off kinda deep here.”

  “I know.”

  She looked surprised. “You’ve been in the water here?”

  His voice came out weak and tight. “Yeah.”

  He’d been on the verge of trying to tell her. Delay came as a relief. He steered back onto the road and followed Mae’s directions to the safer place to swim. The lake was blue and cheerful and full of boats. Like the life he’d made since his survival, it didn’t look like a place where death met miracles.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised you’ve been here,” Mae said. “Guess I think of you camping for rock climbing and stuff, not at a lake.”

  “Can’t climb anymore.” He flexed his right fingers. Residual effects of his accident in December tingled along his last two fingers. “Nerve’s still fucked. No grip strength.”

  “Still? You can play flutes again, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, took about two months, but I got the agility back. It’s the ...” He crossed his thumb inside his palm. “That part.”

  “Oh—yeah. Your ulnar nerve does do that.”

  “You had that stuff in school already?”

  She blushed. “No, I’m not that far along. I looked it up. Trying to picture how you were healing, what you’d have to do for rehab.”

  “Jeezus.” He was touched. Mae’s way of missing him. Trying to imagine what exercises he’d have to do. He reached past the roo and squeezed her hand with what strength he had.

  Chapter Five

  Mae took a break from swimming and floated, looking for Jamie. A couple of minutes ago, he’d been backstroking out toward the middle of the lake, slow and peaceful looking. She’d thought nothing of it, knowing Jamie was a good swimmer, but now he’d vanished. He couldn’t have gotten to shore that fast, and the island was too steep to climb onto.

  Don’t panic. You can’t help him if you panic. She looked for movement. Bubbles. Something. She called his name as loudly as she could.

  He popped up. No answer. Just staring like a seal that had come up for air through an ice hole. What was the matter with him? He ducked back down.

  “Jamie!”

  He stayed under longer than seemed humanly possible. If he was playing with her, she was going to be seriously pissed off, but she didn’t think this was a game. Jamie didn’t tease. He was too sensitive to think it was fun to scare her. She called to him again, got no response, and started toward him, swimming underwater every few strokes to be sure she found him.

  He hung vertically several feet below the surface, eyes open, barely exhaling a thin stream of bubbles. The bubbles stopped. She expected him to head upward on that exhalation to empty but he stayed under, drifting lower. Alarmed, she shot to him, ready to grab him and bring him up. How she would haul a two-hundred-pound man ashore if he was in trouble, she didn’t know, but there was no time to think about that.

  Their eyes met through the blur of water. Like a sleepwalker awakened, Jamie snapped to attention before she reached him. He swam upward. Mae followed and gasped for air. “What were you doing? You scared me half to death. I thought you were drowning.”

  “Sorry.” He treaded water with hardly any motion. “Didn’t think you’d notice.”

  “That you disappeared? Sugar. You seriously underestimate me.”

  They swam ashore in silence. Jamie flopped on a beach towel and put his hat over his face. Mae dried off, applied sunscreen, put on her sunglasses and lay beside him, propped on her elbow.

  “You know that was weird, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What were you doing?”

  He tipped his hat back a fraction of an inch, just enough that she could see his lips move in the shadow underneath it. “What’s the water temperature here in the winter?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “People go in it?”

  “For about a minute. Niall started that Polar Bare Plunge thing for the Arts Council. He spells it b-a-r-e. Folks pledge money if you run in the lake in some skimpy little suit in January. Raises a ton of money. Some folks say they’d pay not to see Niall in a leopard print speedo, but it motivates people. He says if some skinny old fart who smokes a pack a day can do it, anybody can.”

  “You do it? Little bikini?”

  “Not too little.”

  “Fuck. January? Water must be what? Forty?”

  “I don’t know. We run in and out and holler like the dickens and dance around a fire and— What’s with the water temperature? You thinking of swimming here in the winter?”

  “Already did. In March.” He wrapped his fingers around hers, slowly and gently. “Trying to figure out why I didn’t die.”

  “No kidding. You really could have. That was crazy.” But not out of character. His scarred body was a biography of bad decisions, ranging from rock climbing accidents to suicide attempts to a run-in with an armed drunk. “How far out did you go?”

  “Where I was. Where you found me.”

  The ninety-second fund-raising plunge had made her scream once she got her breath. In March, the lake would have been a little warmer, but still dangerously cold. How could he have swum out that far and back? If anyone could have survived it was Jamie—he had better breath control than most people, he swam well, and he had a little extra body fat—but the odds had still been against him.

/>   “You’re lucky you made it ashore,” she said. “A person could get hypothermia even in water like today after a couple of hours. In March it would have taken ...” She tried to remember the information from her first aid class, guessing at fifty-degree water. “Maybe twenty or thirty minutes.”

  “Can you still swim if it happens?”

  “Sort of, but you get disoriented. Sometimes people swim down, or in the wrong direction.”

  “Don’t think I did that.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You got back to your camp, didn’t you?” He had to have. It was the only way he could have warmed up enough to survive.

  “Yeah. Dunno how, though.” He brought her hand to his lips and held it there a while, pressing so firmly she could feel the hardness of his teeth, then kissed her fingers. “Last thing I remember in the water is going under, out deep.” He released her hand and moved his hat back so she could see his eyes. “Next thing I know, I’m freezing my arse off on the shore. Right where I went in. Same spot. No idea how I got there.”

  “Is that why you went out there, under the water? Were you trying to remember?”

  “Yeah. Feels like some piece of me knows, but it’s like I’m chasing it around a corner. See its tail but I can’t catch it.”

  “It must be too traumatic. Don’t push yourself. Maybe you should wait for therapy to try to bring it back.”

  “Tried already.” He moved the hat again, shading his eyes more but not quite hiding them. “Think I died.”

  Died? “You couldn’t have. You didn’t take in any water.”

  “But I still died.” He reached up to her shoulder and dusted off some windblown sand that had stuck in her sunscreen. “Got as far as remembering a light. Not the moon, some other light, a beam of it, coming at me sideways. Like the near-death tunnel thing.”

  “Sugar, you couldn’t have had a near-death experience—”

  “Jeezus.” He sat up, losing the hat, and jammed it back onto his head. “It’s my fucking death. I saw a fucking light. Think I even heard a voice.” His voice was ragged, as if he was going to cry. “I almost remembered. You interrupted me.”