Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  “I’m sorry. Kate thought Jill might have done something to your friend—”

  “Bloody fucking hell.” A surge of rage and pain shot through him. He pitched the bottle into the recycling so hard the bin traveled several inches. Tears burned his eyes. “You didn’t need to dig her up to know that.”

  “But you never told me about her—”

  A sudden clattering sounded like marionettes falling down flights of stairs. His mind shot sideways to it. “What the fuck?”

  “It’s your icemaker.”

  It couldn’t be. He kept it turned off. It wasted water. It clattered again. “Fuck.” He opened the freezer. There was no container under the ice chute, and a deluge of cubes slid off bags of frozen berries onto his bare feet, like penguins off ice floes into the sea. “Ow! Fuck. Bloody hell.”

  He turned off the icemaker, slammed the freezer door, and kicked at the ice. His anger dropped into a heavy pool in his stomach, lava falling back down into the volcano. If the icemaker hadn’t interrupted him, he might have said things to Mae he could never take back. He still might. The truce with his outrage was fragile. “You should go.”

  “No. You’re upset—”

  “Yeah, I’m fucking upset. Jeezus.” He kicked an ice cube across the floor. “You went through my things, you—you touched her.”

  “I’m sorry. Please. Let me explain—”

  “No.” He could hardly breathe, as if thick choking vines had wrapped around his chest. His inhalation made a noise as it dragged past some obstruction. He turned his back. “You stuck a fucking crowbar into my past and broke in. I can’t trust you. Go.”

  “Jamie, sugar, I said I’m sorry.”

  “Get out!” He seized ice cubes from the floor and flung them at the opposite wall, ice shattering and skittering. Throwing ice until his fingers were numb, his arm spent, and his whole body shaking, he shouted get out again and again. Mae’s steps slapped through the living room. A pause, stillness, and then the front door closed behind her.

  The sound of his own crying came to him as if from somewhere else. Gasser padded in and began to lap at an ice puddle.

  Feeling drained and hollow, Jamie shoved the ice out the back door with the dust pan and then carried the cat upstairs. He should have made him walk, but he wanted to hold him. He put him at his feet while he brushed his teeth. Gasser licked at one of the bruises from the ice fall. The vent fan turned itself on. Jamie shut it off.

  In his bedroom, it looked as though Mae had made an altar with the roses, the picture of him and Kandy, and the jewelry. He turned the picture face down. What had gotten into Mae? Did she think she was helping him?

  Fuck. She probably did, as she had with every other kind, misguided thing she’d done. Weight loss tips. Unpacking. She’d fucked up left and right, but she did it because she loved him.

  Regret banging at his heart, he called her. No answer. “I’m sorry,” he told her voicemail. “Come back. I’m sorry.”

  His phone beeped at him, and he saw that Heather had left messages. Too unhappy to listen to them, he deleted them to stop the noises so he could leave his phone on in hopes of a call from Mae. He stared at the jewelry. Unbearable. Apologizing to Kandy as he did it, he took off his shirt and covered the gleaming artifacts of her lost life.

  He shook the rose petals off the top sheet as he lifted it to check for scorpions and spiders. The falling petals reopened his wounds. His hopes lay between those sheets. Getting in alone would be too painful. He got his sleeping bag from the back of the closet and lay on top of it on the floor, cuddling Gasser.

  The lamp Mae had unpacked gave off a soothing light, but it reminded him how much she’d done for him. He lay gazing into his open closet. She’d put away some of his clothes, and repacked others into boxes and marked them, reckon not, and kinda hope not. He got up and looked. Reckon not held clothes that had fit Lisa’s struggling-to-be-perfect fiancé at his untenable slimmest. Kinda hope not held the fat clothes that belonged to Kandy’s Big Buddy.

  Jamie lay back down on top of the sleeping bag. It didn’t seem possible that he had more tears left, but a soft, tired weeping overtook him. Gasser, frisky with the freedom of being on the floor, occasionally deserted his duty of comforting his owner to bat a rose petal around the room instead.

  The quality of the light beyond his eyelids told Jamie it was too early to get up. The Mozart ringtone played near his right ear. Mae? He rolled over enough to reach his phone and then lay back down. As usual, he had finally fallen asleep soundly around sunrise. One of these days no one would call him and he would sleep through an entire rotation of the planet. He answered with a croak, unable to form words yet.

  “Jamie, this is Heather.”

  “Fuck—it’s Saturday. D’you ever take a day off?”

  “Sunday and Monday. Did you get my messages? Can you be at Healing Arts at nine? This is really important. I scheduled you since you didn’t get back and say no—”

  He looked at the clock Mae had placed beside the lamp, and sat upright. Ten minutes. No time to even get an explanation. Had to be something for the fucking fair. “Yeah. Be there.”

  He dressed, gargled with mouthwash, then hurried out and jumped on his bike to race to the healing studio, dodging traffic in a crazy dance. Drivers honked at him for four near-misses. What a fucked-up coward. Scared of unpacking his boxes, but not of riding without the helmet that was lost somewhere in them.

  Mae had probably found it. He’d have to ask her where she put it in case he could get himself to wear the bloody thing. If she would even talk to him.

  Heather looked up from her computer. “Thanks for coming. Sorry I didn’t explain much. This client was really private, and insisted she would only see you. I told her Andrea had studied with Fiona, but—”

  “Client? Fuck—I don’t work here. I don’t do that stuff.” Who would know he took those classes? He hadn’t told Heather. “Who in bloody hell—Why here? Why me?”

  “She called the psychic fair number.”

  “It has a phone number?”

  “Mm-hm. It’s a cell phone. Kate brought it in yesterday for me to keep until the fair’s done. The client doesn’t have your number and she didn’t want to ask too many people. It’s confidential. I won’t talk about it, and she won’t. She’s in room B.”

  “Jeezus.” Disoriented from lack of coffee, depressed from the fight with Mae, Jamie crossed the short hallway and tapped on the pale blue door. Who was in there? “Um—it’s me. Jamie.”

  A woman’s familiar voice said, “Come in.”

  Ximena sat on the edge of the massage table. Still lacking her usual makeup and jewelry, she wore a black dress and shoes, like she was mourning the loss of her role as a healer.

  “I want to keep this private,” she said. Her sharp dark eyes pinned him. “Azure says she told you. But I don’t want everyone knowing.”

  “People have guessed.”

  “Let them. But don’t tell them.” She lowered her gaze, “I trust you not to. You’re a gentleman.”

  It was a word so few would apply to him, he almost laughed. The moment of humor passed. Her sturdy, short legs dangled like a child’s in an adult’s chair, her worn shoes coated with red dust. Seeing this respected elder so vulnerable, waiting for his help, humbled him.

  He rested on the wheeled stool the massage therapists used. His hands felt heavy and empty. “Dunno what I can do for you.”

  “I think you have a calling. Your father has suspected it.”

  “F—” He managed to suppress the word. “Sorry. He never said that.”

  “To you. No. He’d never push you. You have to be ready. I hope you are.”

  “Why me?”

  “I tried a curandero I trusted. But when I told him what was wrong, it frightened him. He wouldn’t even try to heal me.” Smart bloke. “I never knew he was a coward. So I asked people I knew from the fair that were supposed to be the best. I suppose I became a coward, then, because I didn’t sa
y what was wrong, only that I wanted healing. They turned me down. Fiona’s not well. Gaia’s not working, either. They both say you should be.”

  Hope rose. “You talked to Gaia?”

  “Before she left. She told me she was going back to Siberia to see her teachers, and that I should trust you.”

  Hope crashed. Jesus. What a burden. His father saw him as a shaman and never said. Didn’t want to strain his unstable son. Now his teachers were broken and thought he could fill in. If he said no, Ximena would think him a coward.

  Should he be scared? He didn’t like his gift. If he caught the plague, he had little to lose—but he could pass it on to Mae. No, that wasn’t how it spread. That was his old hypothesis. It came from Dahlia, not random contagion. The only thing to fear was his own ineptitude.

  He’d done spirit callings with Gaia, but she had been there. What kind of spirits would come through him alone? Was he grounded enough to handle this without her protection and guidance? He still messed up appliances and didn’t know why. Did spirits creep in to do it? Did he leak energy? Either way, it meant his control was terrible, like a singer who went flat and sharp. Like an overweight beginner taking Level II Yoga.

  Feeling like an imposter yet obligated to help, Jamie asked Ximena to take off her shoes and lie down. He tried to remember the forms Fiona had taught him. Sacred space. Losing self. How to get there? He’d spent the class working the skills backwards. He’d never tried to heal anyone but Gasser and Cara. The cat soul was simple, a melody in C major. Humans were a dissonant symphony in a minor key.

  When he tried to think of something sacred, a whole world of religions crowded in on him. Exposed to so many traditions in his life, he honored them all but didn’t have one to fall back on. The prayer felt false and useless. A breathing exercise from yoga calmed him, but he struggled to draw in healing energy. A spirit helper would have to do the work. Jamie couldn’t. He hoped he brought in the right one.

  Gaia’s calling-in-spirits song might alarm Ximena, so he sang it silently in his mind and tapped the rhythm in a spiral pattern with his fingers in the palm of his other hand. Knocking at the spirit world’s door. Something moved in the air around him, blue whizzing lights and a presence. A sudden force lit up his hands. He touched Ximena’s shoulders.

  Her energy was a sucking dark void, a wind reversed. The shock made him let go of her. Cautiously, he laid a hand on her upper chest, and another on her belly. The void’s suction was even stronger here, tubes of hungry emptiness pulling at him. Was the plague passed this way after all? He released his touch, stepped away, and sang the song again under his breath.

  The vibration of a clear light moved through his back, a spirit coming through him, down through his hands. He hoped it would let him safely heal her, but instead the spirit seemed to feed the void when it reached Ximena.

  A half-solid image of a surgeon, a 1950s white man with a headlamp and crew cut, appeared beside him. What the fuck? Gaia had warned him to expect his guides to be strange, but it still startled him. The surgeon gazed down at Ximena. “Close her up, there’s nothing we can do.”

  The spirit doctor faded. Jamie closed the healing as Fiona had taught him, holding his hands over Ximena’s head, heart, hands, and feet, and then sat on the stool at the end of the table and waited.

  Ximena sat up slowly. Unable to meet her eyes, Jamie bent over, retrieved her shoes, and slipped them onto her feet. Emotion overtook him and he clasped her ankles, something he normally wouldn’t have done to this dignified woman, but he had to touch her. Head still bowed, he said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right. We tried.”

  He helped her down from the table. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I don’t know. Is it about this problem I have?”

  “Yeah. D’you remember the last client, before you couldn’t help the next one? Any weird stuff happen?”

  She frowned. “No. The client before the last one—I didn’t help her either, but she was too troubled, she would need three or four limpias. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t talk about my clients. Just like you won’t talk about me.”

  “If I guessed right, you wouldn’t be talking about her. Like, if I said it was this tall thin white girl with hair down her bum, and you nodded yes—”

  “I don’t discuss who comes to me for healing, or why. Not without their permission.” Ximena gathered her purse from the side table and began to leave. She paused. “But I will tell you that I have met that girl. Dahlia.”

  Alone, Jamie lay on the table and closed his eyes. Spirits circled him like bees. It took effort to close their door, and he hadn’t the strength after the failure with Ximena. Mae could do something with her crystals and make it all balance out, or Gaia could sing them away, but he couldn’t ask either of them. Mae might as well be in Siberia too, after what he’d done. He was on his own.

  He used yogic breathing and imagined the door spiraling down to a purple pinpoint of light. Go away. Please. I can’t handle it. I’m not a real shaman.

  They stopped circling and buzzing, but then the music turned on. Someone had left one of his old albums in the CD player. The chants and drones of Sound Bath filled the room. Healing music, he’d called it back then. Now it made him feel as if the spirits were sticking their tongues out at him. What in bloody hell did he know about healing?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  At the first red light, Mae managed to stop crying long enough to make a call. Bernadette sounded sleepy. She asked no questions when Mae said she was on her way. They already had an understanding that Mae would probably be arriving somewhat late—Plan A—unless she decided to stay at Jamie’s—Plan B. Mae was relieved that the decision not to stay with him could pass for normal and undramatic. The fight was too painful to talk about yet.

  Her phone was beeping a low-battery signal. Mae shut it off and turned right on St. Francis toward 285 North. She didn’t want to be making this drive. Part of her wanted to go back to be with Jamie, but she couldn’t. He’d lost control like a child, throwing things and yelling and sobbing. It broke Mae’s heart to see him suffer that way, but he wouldn’t let her near him, wouldn’t hear her apologies. She’d realized she’d hurt him and had tried to make it right, but he’d been too far gone, yelling at her to leave, to get out of his life and not come back.

  When he’d gotten over the first little hint of a fight, she’d been so proud of him. Sane Jamie had made it to first base. Then crazy Jamie had hit a home run out of the park. What had made either of them think he was ready for a relationship? He’d said he was trying to convince his therapist of it. Mae should have noticed the implied professional opinion, but she’d been so eager for intimacy she hadn’t paid attention.

  Her headlights picked up the stunning blue corn imagery decorating the Tesuque overpass. It was like the gateway to another world, full of beauty and light. She’d thought love would be like that. After two divorces, she should know better. Love was a dark hole, a cave, a labyrinth. A place where she got lost.

  She knocked softly on the door of the second-floor apartment in Pojoaque. To her surprise and embarrassment, she was greeted by Dr. Alan Pacheco clad in an old terrycloth bathrobe. She hardly knew him, and Bernadette hadn’t mentioned that he was spending the night.

  “Oh my god,” Mae whispered. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “It’s all right.” He kept his voice low also. “Hope you don’t mind seeing me instead of Bee. She has a conference this weekend and has to get up early. I don’t.” He closed the door silently and studied her face. She knew she must look like she’d been crying. Alan asked, “How are things with you and Jamie?”

  His eyes were so kind. She tried not to choke up. “We had a fight. A bad one.”

  Alan offered a hug. Mae hesitated, but the need for reassurance won out and she let him hold her. He was short and blocky, a little boulder of a man, so unlike hugging Jamie that the attempt at comfort made her sadder. She dr
ew away.

  He resumed the task her arrival had interrupted, tucking sheets onto the sofa-bed, the same one Mae had slept on in Bernadette’s apartment in Norfolk as a refugee from her second marriage. The room was much the same—the Apache art, the pueblo pottery, the yellow cat playing with his rubber tarantula.

  Alan said, “I’m sorry you fought. It’s part of the package with Jamie, though. I’ve known him a long time, and he fights with everyone. I don’t think he can help it.”

  “This wasn’t just Jamie being moody and fussing. I can handle that. This was worse. I brought up something that made him ...” She didn’t know what to call his behavior. The memory tore a little hole in her. “I never seen a grown man act like that.”

  Alan held still, his brows contracted, and then nodded toward the exit to the deck through the kitchen. “Let’s go outside.”

  The deck of the second-floor apartment looked like a cave, with its rounded brown stucco walls. Mae and Alan sat in plastic lawn chairs, gazing out across the highway into the empty desert. Dim shapes of mountains and mesas on the horizon pressed black against the glittering sky.

  For a while they said nothing, sipping glasses of ice water as occasional cars passed on 285. Alan had the robe tucked carefully around his thick legs, his ankles crossed. The night wind lifted a few strands of his long, gray-streaked hair, blowing it back from his face. He offered a gentle smile, an invitation for Mae to open up.

  Maybe he could help her. Alan was an artist, an art professor, and an art critic. He was from a different pueblo than Kandy and her father, but odds were their professional paths had crossed. She asked, “Did you know Kandy Kahee?”

  Alan took a moment to answer. “Yes. Her father’s my friend.” A shadow of sadness darkened his eyes. “How did you hear about Kandy?”

  “Kind of by accident. I didn’t know she was Jamie’s friend.” Mae explained how her work for the fair had led her to look into Jill’s relationship with Kandy. “I didn’t find what I thought I would, but what I learned seemed like something Jamie ought to know. I didn’t get to tell him anything, though.” She summed up the essence of their fight. “He’s as sensitive as if he’d just lost Kandy today. Has he ever talked about her at all, since she died?”