Soul Loss
Page 12
After clearing her energy with snow quartz, Mae took the crystals to the kitchen to rebalance their vibrations in a bowl of salt water. Could she really have had a useless vision? She wanted to think there’d been some value to what she’d learned, maybe some subtle hint about Lily’s current life from her past.
What, though? It was highly unlikely that she was selling drugs again. If she didn’t like to take Harold’s money because it made her feel like Naomi—a bum, in Lily’s opinion—she had a better way of prospering without him now as a model. Naomi might want to believe there was some other explanation, some kind of trouble, but the conflict between them might be reason enough for Lily to keep her distance.
Why was Lily ignoring Harold, though? He’d said they always got along well.
Maybe the woman dancing with her was the explanation. Lily could be coming out. From what Mae knew of Harold and Naomi, they wouldn’t object to their daughter being gay, but a relationship with a woman their age might concern them, and if Lily still was Daddy’s little girl, she could care enough what Harold thought to hide it from him. However, she hadn’t seemed attracted to the woman she danced with, or the one sitting at the table.
Admit it. You don’t have an answer.
Mae dried the crystals on a dishtowel. The way they caught the light attracted her attention as it had when she’d first acquired them. She took a moment and held them, feeling their weight, studying the shapes and colors. Funny how she carried them around as if she was still working as a psychic and healer.
While she’d lived in Virginia, she’d put in almost as many hours as Breda Outlaw—the name she’d used as a psychic in Virginia Beach—as she had as Mae Martin, the personal trainer in Norfolk. The two names, the separate roles, had seemed professionally necessary both to her boss at the Healing Balance store at the Beach and to Mae for her reputation in her fitness career. Since she’d moved, she’d retired Breda. The journey for Harold Sunday had been her first in months, and like this one, that vision had been truthful yet useless.
She put the crystals away in the pouch in her purse. What if her mind wasn’t in shape for this anymore? As a beginner psychic, she’d aimed wrong at times, seeing more than she meant to. Maybe her aim was off again, the way it might be if she took up softball after a year of not playing. Like Jamie dancing, she had the skill but was out of condition.
Mae sat on the couch near the sheep sculpture and turned her phone on. Jamie wouldn’t be up yet, but predictably, he’d left her a message in the middle of the night. His diction was a little slurry, but it didn’t trouble her. It wasn’t a sign of anything. Jamie didn’t go out to bars when he was depressed—he holed up and ate like he was getting ready to hibernate. Drinking was just a random impulse, Jamie bouncing off the walls of life.
“Saw Lily Petersen. Jeezus.” A little vocalization of aversion, as if he’d gotten thorns in his hair or seen a spider. “With Fiona and bloody fucking Jill Betts.” He paused. “Can you tell I put on the wobbly boot? Hooroo. Love ya.”
Fiona must be the short-haired woman. Jamie had said she looked like Naomi. She would have looked more like her about fifteen pounds ago. Jill Betts must be the too-much-turquoise woman. Jamie obviously disliked her. He’d described his shaman teacher Gaia as the real thing, not some fake like Jill Betts.
Naomi didn’t think Jill was a fake. She’d wanted Lily to study with her, although Lily despised Naomi’s spiritual beliefs and ceremonies. If she’d changed her mind, wouldn’t she contact her mother? If she hadn’t, what was she doing with Jill? Maybe they were lovers after all.
It was too early to call Jamie back, but it was two hours later in North Carolina. Naomi would be at her bookstore getting ready to open. Mae found the number in the dove-and-dolphin card. She didn’t have any psychic answers, but Naomi deserved to know her daughter looked well and had been seen with Jill Betts.
Naomi gushed when Mae told her. “Oh! That’s what I hoped for. Thank you. I had no idea Jamie knew Jill. How wonderful.”
Not in his opinion. “Reckon now you know Lily’s okay I should send her things back to you.”
“No, Jamie might introduce you to her. I’m surprised she forgot that jewelry when she moved out. She might be happy to have it back.”
“I don’t think he’s gonna introduce us. It’s not like he hangs out with Jill or anything.”
“But he knows her. He could.”
Naomi obviously wanted a lot more to happen than having Mae return Lily’s jewelry. “Okay. But if I don’t meet Lily this weekend, I’ll send it back.”
Mae tucked the dogwood set back into the shipping box with the book. She needed to talk to Jamie about their weekend plans, but she was pretty sure they didn’t include Lily.
Remarkably, she heard nothing from him all day, and he didn’t answer his phone. Since he’d left Sunday, Jamie had called every three to four hours. One of his messages Tuesday had been, “Just calling to apologize for calling so much.” Hah-snort-hah. “Fuck. Shoot me. Catcha.” After which he had called again.
She didn’t reach him until she was walking to her father and Niall’s house for dinner. “Hey sugar. I wanted to check on what we’re doing this weekend. You been busy today.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound happy about it. “Sorry I didn’t call. Do better tomorrow.”
“That’s okay. You don’t need to call five times for me to know you love me.”
“Oh.” A long silence. “Sorry. Too much?”
It was, but how should she put it? She drew into sight of Niall and Marty’s house, with the adobe wall full of broken pottery and other objects around its yard. “It’s okay for me, but I’d like to be able to leave my phone on at night and still sleep. If Niall or Daddy had an emergency they should be able to reach me.”
“Fuck. Of course they should. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I should have, but you can get sensitive sometimes.”
“Jeezus. I’m not that fragile.”
Approaching an enormous cow’s-tongue cactus that had taken over her father’s neighbor’s fence, she stepped off the sidewalk to avoid getting pricked. Time to change the subject. Jamie sounded prickly, too. “I called Naomi. Did you tell Harold you saw Lily?”
“Yeah. With fucking Jill and—bloody hell.” He made a noise like someone trying to fog up glass. “The plague.”
“You calling Jill the plague?”
“No, it’s an actual plague.”
Mae sat at the picnic table in Niall and Marty’s yard and listened to Jamie in one ear, while the window air conditioner rattled and roared in the other. A tiny lizard shot across the red-dirt yard, from one patch of shade to another. Had she heard this story right? The possibility that Lily had some kind of contagious soul problem ruptured reality.
Jamie could be a little dramatic in his worries, though. She asked, “You didn’t tell Naomi or Harold what you think is wrong, did you?”
“Nah. Hate to make parents worry about their kid, y’know?” He paused. “Transference.” A half-laugh. “But what could I say? Your daughter’s a zombie and she scares the crap out of me and I think she caught something that made her that way?”
Marty waved to Mae through the window. She signaled five fingers for five minutes. “She was awful before she got to Santa Fe, sugar. You could just be seeing her true nature.”
“Dunno. Think Fiona tried to heal her and caught it, or the other way around.”
“I’m sorry Fiona’s not doing well. But if it’s really a plague, this other lady, Jill Betts, would have it, too, right?”
“Nah. No power to lose. She’s a fraud. It hits the real people.” His words sped up. “Fuck. It could hit you if you came up here.”
The breeze lifted gray shreds from Niall’s ashtray and scattered them across the table. Mae moved it further away from her. “There have to be lots of people it hasn’t affected. Maybe a healer who doesn’t have it can cure it.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“With Fiona? Weren’t you listening?”
“It wasn’t a plan, sugar. I was just thinking out loud. Is your other teacher okay? Gaia?”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t usually take students.”
“I don’t need her to. I wasn’t asking because of that—”
“She made an exception for me, if you can believe it. Me.” A rustling sound, followed by a pop and loud crunches. He’d opened a bag of snack food. “I could ask her if she’d teach you, but it’s not safe right now. You need to stay away from Santa Fe.”
“But what about—”
“Watch Gaia’s movie. Read Fiona’s book.”
“I will.” It was a good idea, even if she hadn’t meant to come up and study with them. “What about our plans, though? I want to see you. If I don’t come up, can you come here?”
“Dunno. Jeezus. Hope so.” Crunching. Pages flipping. “Thought you’d come to my show Saturday and—y’know ...” He faded off into mumbling, cussing self-talk, stopped, and crunched a while. “Sunday’s free. Sound good? I’ll do it right this time. Cook for you. The works. Romantic masterpiece. The real date. Rock up around—mm—what? Five-ish?”
“Sure, but why so late if you have the whole day off?”
“Fuck, that’s not late.” Crunch. “Not if I sleep ’til noon.”
“Sugar. You’re kidding.” Mae thought eight o’clock was sleeping late.
“Is that weird?”
Yes. “Don’t worry.” Yet. “Sunday at five is fine. We’ll have a real date.”
The next night Mae invited her neighbors to watch Gaia Greene’s documentary and to let her practice on them while she worked from Fiona’s book. It was hard to find a time when both were free, so Mae’s one guest was Kenny. He responded well to her chakra work, but then, Kenny did yoga every day. His chakras were already balanced.
After the energy healing session, she filled the kettle and got herbal tea from a cupboard while Kenny stood in the kitchen doorway reading the cover of the DVD. “Why’d you pick this?”
“Jamie said it’s a good movie. He knows her. She’s a musician as well as a shaman.”
“Wow. That’s cool. I’ve been wishing he’d do another healing album. Not that I don’t like his new stuff, but it’s not as spiritual. Maybe he’ll do some shaman music with Gaia Greene.”
The kettle whistled. Mae poured water for tea and handed Kenny his mug. They went to the living room, put the DVD in to play, and settled on opposite ends of the pointy-legged turquoise sofa.
The movie started with a voiceover and text saying that it was filmed both in Santa Fe and in the Tuvan city of Kyzyl. An introductory montage showed shamans with north Asian features dressed in feathered crowns and long silk and satin coats decorated with bells and crystals. Sometimes alone, sometimes in a group, they beat large, hand-held frame drums and danced in rooms decorated with antlers, skins, feathers, and bundles of herbs. When they sang, they also growled, cawed, yipped, and howled.
Mae almost laughed. “You still want Jamie to do some shaman music?”
Kenny shook his head. “That’s not even music.”
A male shaman wearing massive reindeer antlers rolled his eyes back in his head and trembled, mouth open, bells fluttering. A female shaman bit a young woman she was treating without leaving a mark, and then spat what looked like blood into a spittoon.
“Whoa.” Kenny pulled his feet up to sit cross-legged. “That is bizarre.”
“No kidding.” Mae drew in, too, tucking her heels under her. “I’d like to learn more about healing, but I don’t think I could wear antlers or spit.”
The montage ended and the documentary began. A subtitle identified the place as Gaia’s office in Santa Fe. It was decorated like the rooms in Tuva. An interviewer, a young Latina woman, spoke with a fair-skinned woman of about forty. With light brown hair, a sharp nose, and piercing eyes, Gaia looked like a falcon passing for human.
“Are people here surprised that a shaman has this storefront office?” the interviewer asked.
“A little, but it’s not that strange. They have shaman clinics in Tuva and shamans have offices. People can go to shamans or to doctors, and they often see both.”
“Is what you do here the same as what you learned to do in Tuva?”
“Yes, but you don’t so much learn how to be a shaman as discover. When I went to Russia as a touring dancer and musician four years ago, I wasn’t a healer. I went to a performance by a shaman who’s also a musician, and she went to mine. She said my dancing with my own music—I use bells and drums a lot in my performances—was a sign of my gift. I was stunned. I’d studied some level one Reiki for self-healing, but not for healing others. But as my mentor said, it’s the power in you that chooses and teaches you. If you don’t use it, bad things will happen.”
“Did you believe her?”
Gaia looked around the office, and then brought her eyes back to the interviewer. “Yes. I’d had three miscarriages. The energy in me was too intense, too uncontrolled, to carry a child to term. I’m pregnant now, finally.” She smoothed the satin robe over her stomach, revealing the rounded shape of a six-month pregnancy. “I had to use my gift or it would destroy me—and my children.”
Mae had been struck with bad luck when she refused her calling, though nothing as bad as losing three babies. Would anything bad happen now if she didn’t get back to work as a healer? The tree groaned. Maybe it would fall on her car.
The interviewer asked Gaia, “Has your work been accepted since you came home to Santa Fe?”
“People are very open-minded here, but I still have to prepare my clients. If they weren’t ready, they could get scared of how strange it all is. The ritual looks and sounds wild to Americans, but it’s what calls in the spirits to work through me.”
“They work through you. What does that mean? Do they completely take over?”
Gaia hesitated. “Almost. I’m present, but I’m not in charge.”
Kenny squirmed. “That’s scary. Letting something come in you like that. It sounds like being possessed.”
Mae said, “I don’t think she calls in just any old spirit. She must know who she’s inviting.”
“Then I wish she’d say who they are.”
Gaia didn’t, and the interviewer changed the subject. “What’s the most dramatic healing you ever did? Well, that the spirits did.”
“Cancer.” Gaia looked up to the ceiling. “Total remission. The patient shook and danced with me and we fell into the other world together. We met a raven that pecked the tumors out of his body. It was bloody and ugly in the spirit world, but in the earth world he was healed.”
The sounds of shamanic ceremony filtered in over the end of the interview. Then images of a shaman with a patient ghosted in, replacing Gaia and the interviewer.
Kenny glanced at Mae. “Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know.” Mae hit the pause button. “What I do as a healer is more like helping people move past obstacles. It’s a nudge, not a miracle. I saw cancer once, as a psychic. Lady didn’t know she was sick. But I never cured it for sure.”
“Neither did she. If this really happened.” Kenny frowned and sipped his tea “The spirit cured it. The raven.”
She turned his question back to him. “You don’t believe it?”
“No, I do. It’s awesome. But if spirits can do that, what if someone who didn’t know what she was doing called them in? Like, some amateur shaman reading one of those books Harold’s wife likes.”
“I can’t picture spirits showing up for Naomi’s drum circle. Not from what Jamie said about them. They just play music and have fun. He said the author’s a fake, too. I doubt much could happen.”
Kenny’s expression suggested he wasn’t convinced, but he nodded, and Mae restar
ted the movie.
The shamans in Tuva dealt with problems ranging from jealous girls who cursed each other with acne and bad breath to schizophrenia and other serious disorders. The way they did it was messy and noisy both socially and spiritually. In one scene, several shamans fought with each other in an unembarrassed shouting match. The same group collaborated later in a cacophonous community healing ritual. No wonder Gaia had made an exception and taught Jamie. Dancing, drumming, drama, cussing, making funny noises—he would fit right in.
The film ended with a shot of Gaia in her office in Tuva speaking in Russian with an elderly client, then going into her extraordinary drumming and wild-animal-sounding dance.
Kenny drank the last of his tea and unfolded his legs. “I know Jamie told you to watch this, but I don’t get it. Look at those shamans over there fighting and everything. How could she learn from them?”
“They still heal people. Gaia even said she liked that about them. They’re not ‘holier than thou.’ ”
“Not holy enough, to me. Some of them drink or smoke. Maybe I missed something, but between this stuff and Jill Betts’s book, shamanism doesn’t strike me as being very spiritual except that it’s full of spirits.”
Chapter Twelve
Brushing his teeth after breakfast, Jamie imagined spitting out his responsibilities like Gaia spitting out a patient’s illness. He hadn’t done anything about marketing the fair or touched the web site. He had no idea how. Why hadn’t he admitted that to Kate?
He flossed twice, checked that the gold tooth wasn’t loose, and gargled with peppermint mouthwash. Anxiety moderately reduced, he jogged downstairs to do his dishes. Since he’d unpacked so few he had to wash up after every meal. He washed Gasser’s two matching red bowls, dried them, and refilled the water dish but not the food. Order. Everything was in order. No, it wasn’t. He had to try again to reach Ximena and Fiona. Had to do something about selling the psychic fair without any psychics.