by Amber Foxx
Mae took his hand. He squeezed hard. His story didn’t make sense, yet somehow it fell into place, a weight landing hard in her heart. “Sugar? Did you mean to die?”
He wriggled his fingers against hers. “Winter was hard, y’know? Couldn’t play flutes or drums or didg, couldn’t bike or swim. Lay around in my fucking bathrobe listening to operas. The sad ones. Couldn’t do anything left-handed except eat. When I could finally use my right hand the nerve still hurt so much I couldn’t sleep. And I was already off the deep end before all that.”
He stood, picked up his parrot-print shirt and shook the sand off it. “Fuck. Yeah, I meant to die. Went swimming with rocks. Fucking backpack full of rocks.” He shoved his arms into the sleeves. “Then the bloody visions came back. The energy crap. Everything. Only happens when someone dies. Door gets stuck open. Spirits get through.” He sighed. “Sorry, love. Not what you wanted to hear. But that’s how I know I died.” He reached out, an offer to help her up. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
Mae let him draw her to her feet. She wanted to leave the lake, too. The thought of Jamie being so determined to die shocked her. She’d feared he might do some impulsive thing with his post-surgery pain meds. This level of planning was somehow worse. He was more damaged than she’d realized. The bright, carefree man singing and dancing at Sparky’s turned out to be much darker inside than she’d thought. No wonder he’d been so anxious once they were alone, and so reluctant to explain about healing Cara.
She held his hand as they walked up the tire-track road to where his car was parked on a firm patch of beach. He opened the passenger door and invited her to sit. “Feet outside.” He knelt on his towel. “Give me your leg. Get the sand off.”
He began to brush off her calf, then each of her toes, fingering the sand from in between them. Sweet, affectionate, and a little fussy, like he not only wanted to touch Mae’s leg but also to keep every grain of sand out of the Fiesta. She asked, “You like your new car, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Came back to life in it.”
Mae wasn’t sure if he meant leaving the park after his suicide attempt, or if driving a new car stood for the start of a new life. “How?”
“I was afraid I’d let my keys sink, y’know? Went swimming in my clothes so I’d go down better. Then I was out somehow, right where I’d gone in, no pack of rocks, shaking so bad I could hardly walk. Only way I could think to get warm was my car. Every step, I’m thinking, fuck, where are my keys, where are my keys ... Left ’em on the seat. Left the car unlocked. Brain fog, depression, you forget stuff. Good thing, I guess. Took me what felt like a fucking hour to get my clothes off, my hands were so cold. Got in and cranked up the heat, rolled up in a little ball up with my roo and just shook and shook—and then it hit me. I was glad to be alive.”
Holding her ankle with one hand, he used the other to run his fingers under the curve of her arch, tickling off the layer of sand, and then cupped her heel in his palm and rubbed it clean. “Everything was like a miracle after that. Took all the stuff I’d packed so I’d look like I’d gone camping and went in my tent. Book. Miracle. Headlamp. Miracle. Dry clothes. Double fucking miracle. And the stars. Jeezus. Felt like I fell up into them.”
“So surviving was like a—a cure?”
“For a few hours. Morning was amazing. Everything was like—too much light. Alive, y’ know? The quails and the lizards and the cacti, even the rocks—felt like I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life. But then I got home and it was like bloody fucking doom. Don’t think I’d’ve even gotten out of the car except I missed Gasser.”
“I bet he missed you, too.”
“Other leg, please.”
She obliged. He began systematically with her calf again, then the top of her foot and between her toes. “Poor little bloke. He hates it when I leave. Fern—my landlady—feeds him, but he’s by himself, and he’s very loving. He gets lonely. Felt so fucking guilty. I must have held him and cried for half an hour.” He brushed her toenails one by one. “Thought that was why he had a halo. My eyes were fucked up. Got to yoga class and my teacher had one, too. Still thought it was my eyes, though—crying, juniper pollen, wind, all that—until fucking Lily came in and asked about the Pilates place upstairs and she had—” He shuddered. “The opposite of a halo. This dark spot, like those ads about macular degeneration. Knew it wasn’t my eyes then. And she sent off cold. Like a metal coffin.”
No wonder he’d reacted to her picture the way he had. “It took that long for you to know you were seeing souls again?”
“Yeah. Denial, maybe. Dunno. Fucking Lily scared the crap out of me, though—and I’d gone to yoga to try to hold myself together until therapy.” He met her eyes, looked back down at her foot and brushed off more sand. “Gorman wanted me to do yoga. So did my physical therapist. Yoga and swimming.” He snort-laughed, scrubbing the last of the sand off her heel. “And, y’know, I’d been swimming.”
He set her leg down inside the car and went around to sit in the driver’s seat with his legs out, de-sanding himself. There was something so cheerful and goofy about the view of him from the back, the parrot shirt, the white cowboy hat, the wild fluff of ash-blond hair spraying out from under it, Mae found it hard to reconcile the image with this same man curled naked in this car at night, clutching his roo and shivering his way back to life.
“You should see me in yoga,” he said, and Mae recognized the chatty tone of an avoidance digression. Jamie sped up, animated yet pressurized. “I go all the time now, but that was my second class in my whole life. Wear these funny little shorts like baby pants, only knit, and tight, so you don’t show your parts. Tank top. Teacher wants to see where all your joints are, see your posture, so my whole bloody fucked-up body shows. Want the shirt to have a sign on it right on my gut, like those buildings under renovation, please pardon my mess while—”
“While you make improvements.” She rubbed his back. “You are, sugar. You’re doing great. Tell me about seeing souls.”
He spent some time with his sandy toes before answering. “Hoped I’d never see another after Lily. My teacher, Gwen, hers was all right, like Gasser’s, sort of gold and friendly. Other people in the class, though, when something clicked, something Gwen would teach ’em, I’d fucking see their lights go on, literally. And we do this thing at the end, savasana—means corpse pose,” another snort laugh, “where you’re supposed to relax, but I couldn’t. Bloke next to me, felt like—like the rocks out here in the morning. Woman on the other side, like this ... mmm ... blanket. Velvet blanket. I could fucking feel them relax and meditate, so I couldn’t.”
He turned, pulled his legs inside the car, and closed the door. “Talked to Gwen after and asked if she could teach me something, some kind of breathing exercises or something so I wouldn’t see auras—called it seeing auras so I’d sound more normal—but she said I wasn’t ready for advanced stuff like pranayama, that it could make me more open, not less. Said I shouldn’t be having whatever she called it, some Sanskrit thing—siddhis—after only two classes, either.” He started the car. “That fucked me up. I mean, she’s great, I totally trust her, y’know? Thought a yoga teacher might think it was halfway normal and know what to do with it, but she didn’t. ”
“You didn’t tell her how it started.”
“Fuck, no.” He steered onto the tire-track road, heading up the slope away from the water. “You’re the only person I’ve told.”
“You haven’t told your parents?”
He turned left onto the dirt road. The car was so hot he opened his window and turned the air conditioner up higher. “Nah. They’ve been through enough.” The cheery digression tone came back as he put the roo in Mae’s lap and announced, “He’ll be twenty-six next week.”
Mae cautiously petted its balding red velour body and stroked its head where its missing ear should have been. Damaged, but cuddly. Bet Jamie’s soul looks like his roo. She put the toy back on the center console, its bottom on the
cup holder. “Didn’t you tell your therapist?”
“Told him about my death, but not the other stuff. I never see his soul—he’s so bloody discreet he probably hides it. Not that I should tell him I see things, anyway. I mean, he might not think I’m crazy, he’s Navajo, seems traditional to look at him, but he’s a psychologist, not a medicine man. Dunno what he could do for me besides give me another diagnosis.”
“Do for you? Like, treat you for it? When you healed Cara I thought you’d learned to use your gift. That you were okay with it finally.”
“Not really.”
“Not even the healing part?”
“Nah. That gets weird, too. When I met with Wendy—same day, still my first day back in my skin—her soul was all right, little heat wave thing, I could sort of handle it, but that’s when the other stuff started.”
While he drove out of the park and back down to Truth or Consequences, Jamie described his first meeting with his manager Wendy Huang since the end of his tour in December. Mae remembered Wendy well, a slim young Chinese-American woman with tattoos on every limb and hair arranged in a wild spray like a cockatiel’s crest. She was as grounded and forceful as she was eccentric, and she’d had faith in Jamie even before she’d signed him as her first client.
“I’d ignored most of her calls all winter—had forty-three unanswered messages once—but she didn’t give up. Meant a lot to me when I had the energy to actually listen. Anyway, I walked into her office and she ran over and hugged me, and I felt like this—osmosis. Dunno what else to call it. Like I took all this stress out of her and put something nice back instead. And she felt it, too. Wanted to know what I’d done.”
“That’s not that weird. It sounds pleasant.”
“Mm. Got stranger when I was ready to leave. I was so—fuck—overcome, y’know? She’d been making all these plans for me while I was out of it, people she’d made promises to and kept waiting for me—and then I showed up out of shape and with no new music—and she still went right to work for me. Hugged her again and there was something like liquid light, but it was heavy, like ... like spiritual lava. It filled me up and it just poured into her. Didn’t mean to, but it was huge and I couldn’t stop it.”
“That’s beautiful, sugar. Why would you stop it?”
“Because it was fucking bizarre. The printer on her desk started turning on and off and on again, and spewing pages. She pressed buttons but it didn’t stop, it was spitting out page after page of lines of punctuation marks and symbols like swearing in cartoons, and then lines of hearts and stars. She finally unplugged it and asked if I’d done something in the hug. Energetically. Electrically. Said the printer made that test pattern when the power had gone off and come back on, and that she felt something, like when the healer she went to for Reiki did energy work on her—right when the printer freaked out.”
“Okay. That is peculiar.”
“And I’d only been alive since that morning, y’know? Felt like a baby giraffe.”
Like what? “I did not follow that.”
“Y’know—those newborn animals like that, how they hit the ground first breath, and try to walk? Wobbly. Little stick legs keep folding. Didn’t want to have to deal with being a healer. I could hardly deal with being a singer. Told her I hadn’t done anything.”
“Did she believe you?”
“Nah. Why should she? Wasn’t very convincing.” Jamie groped in his wallet and handed Mae a softened and much handled card. It was pale yellow with green lettering. Fiona McCloud: Reiki, Chakra Healing, Energetic Attunement. “Wendy said she and her partner both went to Fiona for energy work and that Andrea was going to a workshop with her starting later that week. Said that I should go, too. I was thinking, Fuck, Andrea’s a massage therapist. She could be a healer, but I’m a bloody fucked-up musician trying to get my career back on track, again. That’s enough, y’know? But then this spiral pattern started kind of hovering, and there was this buzzing whirring sound like a hummingbird or a bull-roarer coming out of it. Jeezus. Made me dizzy. Let Wendy think I was having a panic attack. Didn’t want her to know I’d seen that.”
“What was it?”
“Spirits.” Jamie glanced at Mae. “Fucking spirits.”
He told her more of his day. After the meeting with Wendy, he’d shopped for new clothes that fit—Wendy’s orders—and it only made him more desperate to get rid of his gift. The salesman in the big and tall store had a tattered, weary soul, hard to look at. When Jamie got home, Gasser was glowing again. The cat’s aura was so deep it saturated his fur, and he had a little teal-blue light at the juncture of his heart and throat. When the obese cat went into the kitchen to eat, which he did all too frequently, a poppy-colored light went on at the juncture of his spine and tail. “I was looking at it like, Jeezus. What’s that? The bloody fat bloke food chakra? If I looked in the mirror, would I have one, some brake light that lit up every time I stopped to eat? It’d burn a fucking hole in my pants.”
Mae handed Fiona McCloud’s card back to him. He stuffed it into his back pocket and turned onto Main Street, T or C. Mae asked, “Did you study with Fiona, or did you try to get ... normal?”
He slowed in front of a coffee shop. “Want to get a coffee? Cookie?”
“They close at three.”
“Fuck.” He slumped. “They can’t be closed.”
“I’ve got coffee. No cookies, but you can make a PBJ.”
He sighed and resumed twenty-five miles per hour. “You need a boyfriend who can bake. So you’ll always have cookies.”
“You’re drifting. Did you study with Fiona?”
“I’m hungry. Y’know what’s sort of like cookies? Pancakes.” He made the left turn onto Marr Street, perking up. “I’ll make you pancakes for supper.”
After a quick grocery run, Jamie made himself at home in Mae’s kitchen, occasionally dancing to the music in his head while cooking. At times a snatch of song leaked out and faded away, as subtle and unconscious as his little dances. She asked, “Can you pick up where you left off?”
“Dunno where I was.” He measured flour, sifted it into a plastic mixing bowl he’d grumbled about—he preferred glass—and made a face at the thin, cheap, nonstick frying pan. “Jeezus. Need cast iron.”
“Fiona McCloud. Taking her workshop.”
“Yeah. Right. She was great. Reminds me of Naomi, y’know? Same type but with short hair. Lesbian version. Not stereotyping—it’s who she is. Anyway. Yeah, she said the same thing Wendy did, that I put out this bloody huge surge, y’know? Andrea didn’t have it come naturally like that. She had to work her arse off to do fucking anything, and then it was just this little buzz.”
He added baking powder, soy milk, and vanilla and stirred. In another bowl, he mixed ripe bananas and pecans. “Can’t overwork the batter. Got to leave some lumps. If you try to mash ’em all out, the pancakes get tough and rubbery.”
“You’re nice to try to teach me, but tell me about the workshop.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Drifty.” He poured coffee for both of them, brought her a mug, and sat across from her, slurping his. “Fuck. Loud. Sorry. Got to let the batter sit, gets more—sorry, never mind. Yeah, Fiona. So. Fuck—you know how to do all this stuff. Right? Make sacred space, raise your energy. Open your channels, read people’s stuff.”
“I don’t see their souls, though. I see their stories.”
“But for healing—you feel the energy.”
“Yeah. I can move it around a little. Open up to it.”
He beamed at her over his mug. “I learned to do it backwards.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, we’d learn how to ...” He took another noisy sip of coffee, set it down and closed his eyes, indicating the sixth and seventh chakras at the forehead and crown. “Open up to the visions.” Opening his eyes again, he slid his mug back and forth, making a little trail of spilled coffee on the yellow Formica table top. “Then we’d work on how the energy comes in through your feet, and out
your hands. Those little chakras. So ...” He looked at his hands as if checking on something and nodded. “I did it all backwards. Got rid of it.”
“No, you didn’t. You healed Harold’s cat.”
“Cats. Yeah. That’s different. I’ll do cats.”
“You mean you heal ’em ... on a regular basis?”
“Fuck, yeah, run an ad in the back pages of The Reporter.” He snort-laughed. “Nah. Just practice on Gasser. Look at his soul. Give him a little tune-up. Think he likes it. Do it with his bath, or when I brush him.”
Jamie had this powerful gift and all he did with it was tune up his cat? He looked so pleased, like this was an achievement. “Sugar—” Mae cut off her protest. He’d only been in regular therapy for about ten weeks. Spiritually and psychologically, he was like the baby giraffe. He might not be steady enough to look at a soul more complicated than a cat’s. Lily Petersen’s had been chilling. Jamie’s choice to keep and control his gift rather than have another healer shut it down for him was courage enough for now. “What about those spirals? And those buzzing spirits? Did this training take care of that, too?”
“Nah. Spirits were harder.” He stood, poked a spoon in the batter, turned the heat on under the frying pan, and drizzled oil in it. “Went to Gaia Greene for that. You should rent Drums in Tuva. Documentary on her work. She’s fucking amazing. You should come up and study with her yourself. She’s the real thing. Not some fake like Jill Betts. Authentic. Culturally grounded. Even if it’s someone else’s culture, she lived it for years, y’know? I loved the work. Jesus. Music. Dancing. Drums.” He plopped batter into the pan, watched, and then poked the spatula at the pancakes, cutting them apart. “Learned calling in spirits.” Still focused on the pancakes, he danced a small side-to-side step, waving the spatula. “Call ’em in, send ’em home.”