Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  Kate stared after her departing colleagues in shock. She felt betrayed. How could they spring this on her?

  Something had distressed them. Kate replayed their unhappy exits in her mind. It had been the guild. Jamie propped his elbows on his thighs and put his head in his hands. She nudged him. “Something is seriously wrong. What you said about being members and verifying set it off.”

  He rubbed his head under his hat, pressed his fingers to his eyes, and sat up. “Sorry. Didn’t think they’d mind, if they’re good, y’know?”

  “Neither did I. I’d like to get credentialed.”

  “But you’re not famous. Might insult them. Y’know? Be like asking Harold Petersen to audition.”

  “Ximena isn’t famous like that.”

  “Nah, not like Azure. To her community she is, though. And she shares a lot with academics. She’s got a good reputation. I should have thought of that.”

  “We need to apologize to them.”

  “I will.” He looked down into his coffee, drank, sloshed it around, drank, and set the empty paper cup on the table with a hollow knock. “Fuck. Hate making people cry.”

  “It was just a misstep. We can back out of it.”

  “Nah, we have to explain it. Not back out.”

  “You’ll back out if you have to. I need them on the board and in the fair, to draw a crowd—unless your father knows some people who can step in.”

  “Nah. Except for Ximena, none of the curanderas would do that. Anyway, most of his studies are with Apache medicine people down in Mescalero. They wouldn’t touch a thing like this—sorry. But they wouldn’t.”

  “Then I need my stars. Especially Azure.”

  “I’ll get ’em back. Isn’t Gaia Greene still on? She’s kind of a star. Thought we were doing some drumming and dancing.”

  “She’s on as a musician and dancer, yes, but she won’t do shamanic work at the fair. I really may need to ask Jill.”

  “Do that and I’m off the fucking board. Out of the whole bloody show.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve signed a contract as a performer.”

  “Then sue me. Jesus. I’ll crawl to Azure and Ximena. I’ll lick their toes. Just don’t ask Jill.”

  “This is ridiculous. You have to explain what you’ve got against her.”

  He stood, adjusted his hat, and took his wheel from its place against the wall. “Don’t owe you that.” He started for the door.

  “Jamie!”

  “Catcha.”

  Kate glared at his loud floral shirt disappearing out the door. Great. Her only active board member drove the others off and hated her last best hope for the psychic fair. She hadn’t gotten rid of any work at all.

  Chapter Seven

  Jamie reattached the quick-release front wheel and rode home. Guilt hung on him like a backpack full of wet fog. He’d made the women cry, with what had felt like such a good idea. If only he could explain it better. Azure and Ximena would be role models if they joined the guild, setting a standard. A standard that would keep Jill out.

  His father could help him. Stan knew Ximena and might know what was wrong with her. Maybe he could figure out the assessment part of setting up the guild, too, and a way to talk about it without upsetting people. Jamie took his phone from his pocket and called while he parked his bike behind the drab stucco duplex. After the usual father-son bonding chat, he asked, “I was wondering about Ximena Castillo. Is she all right? Saw her today and she didn’t seem like herself. Like she didn’t care how she looked.”

  “I have no idea.” Stan sounded worried. “I haven’t seen her for a while. Bernadette asked her to be a guest speaker in her class on alternative medicine and Ximena told her she wasn’t working. Suggested a curandero in Espanola that she’s sending clients to.”

  Not working. Sending clients away. Not wanting to be assessed. Crying. Maybe she wasn’t offended but depressed. Too much coincidence, though. It might take two people to fill the void in cosmic misery Jamie had vacated, but two people on the board wouldn’t be having matching breakdowns.

  Before going inside, he stopped to check his garden for flowers. It was too early for lavender to bloom, but he kept looking anyway. The flagstone spiral lined with sage and lavender transformed the patch of ant-crawling pink-brown dirt into art. He was proud of it. In spite of wind and ant bites and painful squatting with his bad hip, he had finished the project.

  He still had to get the rest of the place ready, though. The need to paint had justified his delay in buying furniture and unpacking, but the painting was done. Finally. Now he had board crap to do, though, as well as his music and therapy and yoga and voice lessons. He’d probably end up unpacking the night before Mae came up. Jesus—I’ve got one week.

  Stan broke into Jamie’s thoughts. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Drifting.”

  “Where did you see Ximena?”

  As he went inside through the back door to the kitchen, Jamie explained about joining the board for the fair. “The director, Kate Radescu, liked this idea I had to verify the healers. No bloody idea how to do that crap, but she wanted to go with it. Anyway, it upset Azure and Ximena. They said they couldn’t do it, and left.”

  His obese orange cat, Gasser, woke from a nap on the linoleum floor and struggled to haul his weight onto his big white feet, mewing with what Jamie heard as joy. He knelt and gave his cat a hug and a kiss on the head. Gasser purred, a deep bass rumble.

  Stan said, “If you’re on the board together, I should think you would call them and ask them what was wrong.”

  “Yeah. Going to.” As soon as Jamie got up, his cat began the hungry cry, a pathetic peep alternating with operatic despair. “You’re a manipulative bastard, mate. You know that.” Jamie reached into the cat food bag, crouched, and hand-fed Gasser a single morsel. “I hate fucking diets, too. But you’re a bloody pig.”

  “I assume you’re talking to your cat.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Trying to slim him, y’know? It’s not working.”

  Jamie petted Gasser again, fed him one more kibble, and straightened up. “Fuck. I’m in over my head. Thought all I’d have to do was be the token music bloke. I like my idea, though, getting evidence that the healers and psychics can really do what they say they can. Do some kind of test on Jill Betts, y’know? Put her out of business.”

  “I’d like that as much as you would, but if you could design a test like that, she’d never agree to it.”

  Jamie began to sit on a box. It crushed, and he popped back up. Jesus. These are not furniture. An image of Mae’s worried, motherly reaction if she saw the mess filled his mind. Appalled, he hurried upstairs. The bedroom. There could not be boxes in the bedroom. “Guess not. None of the fakes would.”

  Jamie peeled back the dried-out tape on the largest box and wadded it into a ball. What was he doing? He couldn’t unpack without furniture. Better just to clear the bedroom. He shoved the box along the floor into the closet in the spare room. “Still,” he said, “it’d be good for the fair and for the people who are genuine, to have that little stamp of approval. Mae could pass a test like that. She could be the gold standard.”

  “We’re looking forward to meeting her. Why don’t you invite her to stay for your birthday, bring her here for dinner? Make it a three-day weekend.”

  Four if she stayed through to Monday. His birthday was Sunday. “Yeah. Good plan.”

  He’d have to call Mae—for the fourth time today—and remind her that his parents didn’t know about his March suicide attempt. Unavoidably, they knew about the one in January with the pain meds. His landlady had called them when Gasser’s distressed squalling had summoned her to find him, but he hadn’t told Mae, since it didn’t have to do with getting the soul vision back. Meanwhile, the oldies didn’t know about that because if he told them they’d ask who died. Secrets. Like another bloody stack of boxes. It was hard work, keeping people from worrying about him.

  The top flap of the box popp
ed loose as Jamie bumped it past another into the closet. Fuck. I’m like a kid who hates peas, moving ’em around on the plate. A planner book lay in the open box. Was it for this year? Yes. What was left of it. Wendy had tried teaching him to use the planner function on his phone but it had driven him crazy. Short drive.

  Jamie looked around for a pen. He had the calendar and needed to use it. “Where was I?”

  “Verifying healers.” Stan’s voice held a hint of amusement at the fact that his son had spaced out and left him waiting again. “Measurements like that aren’t really my forte. You should talk to Bernadette. She’s been doing research on credentialing in alternative medicine.”

  Jamie thanked his father, ended the call, and went downstairs in search of a pen, slapping the planner book against his thigh to remind himself that he had to write something in it. Call Bernadette Pena.

  Gasser met him with the hungry cry again, circling his food bowl. Guilt took an encore. Jamie let himself eat what he wanted when he wanted, and here he was starving his cat. But Gasser was double his healthy weight, the feline equivalent of Jamie weighing three hundred and fifty pounds, a condition he couldn’t imagine. Azure was built like that, twice the woman she should be. He wondered if she was uncomfortable in her body.

  Ximena’s and Azure’s tearful eyes haunted him as he wrote his reminders to call them and Dr. Pena in his planner.

  After listing all his other Tuesday responsibilities, he added unpack. No, too much for one day. He crossed it off and moved it to Friday. He’d be motivated then. What else was on Friday, though? Would he have time? He started to fill in what he knew he had to do each day. Lists kept him on balance if they were short ones—they made him feel safe—but when they got too long he felt like he was being tailgated by a double-trailer truck.

  He shut the planner with his lists unfinished. The pen rolled to the floor. Gasser batted at it once and lay down, his paw on it, staring as if he had caught a mouse too easily to be believed.

  After a rollicking dance with a jolly fat girl, Jamie thanked her and returned to the bar. He had to change partners regularly to make sure no one thought he was interested in more than dancing. She might have been the sixth or seventh, and he might have had the same number of beers. Maybe more. He’d lost count, but he was in the right zone. Not quite drunk, but not fully coherent either. Free of his lists and worries.

  You’d make a fine spiritual healer, Ellerbee, healing yourself with spirits. What would Fiona and Gaia think of him? Good thing he didn’t plan on using what they’d taught him.

  A tall, pale young woman approached him. He felt he should know her, and sensed behind the veil of alcohol that he didn’t like her. Her eyes were violet, her hair deep brown and rippling down to her hips. She laid a limp hand on his arm and sat on a bar stool beside him. Her voice, low and flat, landed on him like a cold wet cloth. “I’d love to dance with you.”

  “Nah. Taking a break.”

  He turned to the bartender and ordered another beer. The girl put her forearms on the bar, shifting to the edge of her stool. She looked too young to drink, and white as the dead. No expression. Only her mouth smiled. Even though she was pretty for such a long thin snaky creature, she was unappealing. What did she remind him of? Was it some zombie movie, or had he seen her before?

  “I know who you are.” Her voice slapped him again with its cool dampness. “Jangarrai. The name is like your Aboriginal tribe thing, right? Warlpiri?” She moved her lips into what might have been the beginning of a smile, but there was no feeling behind it. “You play didgeridoo.”

  “Play with my fucking donger, too.” Aboriginal tribe thing. Jangarrai was his Warlpiri skin name, something the girl apparently didn’t quite understand. He didn’t bother to explain it. Jamie hated being collected as an exotic specimen. He paid for the beer, took a long swallow, and didn’t bother to stifle the belch. His offensive behavior had no effect on the girl. The uneasy sense of recognition crept up again. “Have we met?”

  “I’m Dahlia.” Wrong flower. She was Lily. The scary-soul girl. She nodded toward two women a few tables away in the shadows. “I’m over there with my friends.”

  Jamie glanced toward them. Bloody hell. Fiona? The energy healer’s blunt-cut gray hair was practically the only aspect of her appearance that hadn’t changed. She’d lost weight, her face was pale, and her shoulders slumped. Jamie wondered if she was ill. Strange that she should be here if she was. Beside her, he recognized the long gleaming silver hair, wide-spaced brown eyes, and strangely unlined face of Jill Betts.

  Jamie gripped his beer mug. He hadn’t spoken to Jill for years. He’d only seen her in passing at crowded events like Pancakes on the Plaza or Indian Market, where they hadn’t even had to meet each other’s eyes. Straight, trim, and confident, like a cowgirl in the saddle, she sipped wine and cast a look at Jamie that rolled down his body with contempt, and then smiled, displaying a small gap between her front teeth. Jill, no doubt, had given Dahlia the exotic specimen introduction to his identity.

  What was Fiona doing with her—and this zombie?

  The band announced a break and the room shifted into the odd moment of noise when people had not yet lowered their talking-over-music voices. “Fuck,” Jamie said too loudly. “Jill Betts. You hang out with her?”

  Jill’s tight jaw and frown suggested she’d overheard.

  “I might.” Dahlia glanced back at Jill and Fiona. “Why do you ask?”

  Because there was something terribly wrong with Harold’s estranged Lily, and she might be seeking healing from Jill. “She could be bad for you.”

  “I doubt it.” Dahlia linked her bony yet soft arm through Jamie’s. “Come on.”

  He felt another chill and disengaged from her, but went with her nonetheless. Fiona’s appearance concerned him and he needed to see how she was doing.

  “Quite the dancer,” Jill said in her New England old-money contralto, as Jamie took the seat across from her. Dahlia sat close to him, turning her glass of something clear and bubbly without drinking, her eyes on Jill. Fiona offered a quick, tired smile that deepened the new wrinkles in her formerly round cheeks. Jill said, “We told Dahlia a little bit about you.”

  Jamie muttered, “Yeah. Read her the fucking ingredients.”

  Jill’s expression bordered on a smirk. “How are your healing studies going? And yoga?”

  He’d told Fiona everything he was studying, and she must have told Jill. Jill had to be asking just to mock him. “More into yoga lately.” Jill eyed his gut and raised an eyebrow. With anyone else, Jamie would have joked about the comedy of a man of his build getting into those poses, but not Jill. He gripped his thighs with both hands, trying to control his rising anger. “How’s the shaman business?”

  “Much better than I suppose the Ellerbees might wish.” She narrowed her eyes. She’d obviously heard the word business the way he meant it. “Which reminds me. I can see you would love the Tuvan drumming with Gaia. It’s so pure. But I’ve been wondering why you chose such a cultureless practice as Fiona’s teachings, being Stan Ellerbee’s son.”

  “Because I’m a half-caste fucking cultural orphan. Is that what you want to hear? Make up your mind how you’d like to stereotype me. You told Dahlia about me like I’m some fucking breed of dog, but you wouldn’t know a Warlpiri from a Miriwoong.”

  He took a swallow of beer to stop his runaway words, but his brakes didn’t work. Maybe he was off his face after all, past the zone. He turned to Dahlia. “Jill only values fifty percent of me. She’s got the brown bias. Talks about brown people. Likes to wear them as ornaments. Steals their ideas and sells them, without the culture.”

  Jill stared. “Are you done yet?”

  “Nah. How about the tragedy of the half-caste?” In spite of his intoxication, he was shaking. “Then you value both halves.” He faced Dahlia again. The girl looked as blank as usual, but if she’d read Jill’s books she had to know what he was talking about. He kept going. “She can sell tha
t, too, when it suits her better. Even if she’s bloody ignorant about all of it.”

  “Don’t mind him, dear,” Jill said. “Like I was telling you, the indigenous Australians didn’t have any recreational intoxicants—”

  He slammed his bottle down. “Pig’s arse. I can give you the fucking recipe.”

  Fiona, who until now had been silent and withdrawn, straightened up as if she had finally noticed the argument and was trying to follow the action. Jill frowned. Dahlia, cool and possibly amused, propped herself on her elbows and inclined toward Jamie.

  He ignored her, focused on Jill. “So, to make Aboriginal grog, you start with fruit or flower tops—What’s the matter?” He took a huge gulp of beer. An angry, anxious laugh rattled him. “S’pose that blows your image of the spiritual purity of the darker races. You want to keep telling the world the poor natives can’t hold their liquor. The tragic vulnerability of indigenous people to alcohol.”

  Jill’s jaw hardened. She placed her hands flat on the table. “Dahlia made a courteous invitation to you, and you’ve answered it by being a drunken, aggressive, and inappropriate fool.”

  Fiona caressed Jill’s forearm. Not just a calming touch but an intimacy. Jill did swing both ways. Rumor had it she changed annually. This year she must have swung to Fiona. The energy healer looked worried and bewildered. Neither she nor Dahlia would know what this fight was really about. Jill had probably never told them about Kandy Kahee.

  For Fiona’s sake, Jamie struggled to pull in a little. After all, she was the reason he’d joined them. He drank again. He didn’t need to get into this with Jill. It would only make him think about Kandy. He’d spent four years not thinking about her. She was buried deep in a sediment of regret that would cloud his mind forever if he stirred it.

  He searched his brain for something to talk about with Fiona, without saying she looked sick or that her partner was an evil bitch. “Heard what the Psychic Fair’s doing? Great new stuff.”