Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  “That would be great. Thank you. But I need to have something descriptive as well as some facts.” Mae wondered if she sounded false. Though she was less experienced, Mae had the same gift Mary Kay did, the ability to see illness or injury in people’s bodies. “I might publish somewhere other than a scholarly journal, so I need to make it exciting to readers.”

  “All right, but it’s not very dramatic.” Mary Kay removed her bracelet and set it on the table, and then her necklace and earrings. Mae looked at her quizzically. Mary Kay explained, “I find that metal affects me. It alters my frequency.”

  “That’s interesting. I like getting these details.”

  “I need you to lie on the table.”

  “Sure.” Mae brushed a few leaves and sticks and a scattering of grit off its surface. “Where do you usually work?”

  “Doctor’s offices. Once in a while in a client’s home, but I prefer some medical presence in case I find something serious.”

  “Well, please don’t find anything serious in me. Just fake it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mary Kay said, with a hint of annoyance. “Just close your eyes and I’ll narrate this. So, first I get into a quiet headspace, which would take a few minutes.”

  She became quiet. Mae did the same, attending to her breath and the crystals in the front pocket of her shorts. Mary Kay continued, “Then I float my hands over the patient to read them. I take my time, and don’t try to interpret anything right away. I look for hot spots, cold spots, or places that seem like knots or congestion.”

  As she passed her hands over Mae’s body with a feather-light touch, the intuitive’s palms were portals into a void. Remembering what Granma’s voice had told her to do, Mae visualized her own hands, as careful as her grandmother’s, reaching in through Mary Kay’s, finding the tube, and ever so slowly drawing the spiritual parasite out. It grabbed at Mae like a hungry root.

  Stunned, she drew her energy back. What had she done wrong? Did this mean she couldn’t do the healing without help? Granma—I didn’t learn to do this yet. Can you show me again?

  No voice. No hands. Only the ghost cord, still seeking to attach itself to Mae. Using the energy of a quartz point, Mae cut the connection before the tube could enter her. She checked on Mary Kay. Her hands remained openings into emptiness.

  Mae pulled her energy inward and moved one hand to rest on Mary Kay’s necklace. If she couldn’t heal her, at least she could confirm that the source of this invasion was Dahlia.

  The tunnel led to a medical office. Dahlia lay on the examination table, saying in her flat tones that her heart fluttered and alarmed her, and it was worse since her parents died. Mary Kay said she would look for the problem. She closed her eyes, scanned Dahlia with her hands, and frowned, stopping at her heart. Dahlia wore a fierce little bat-like smile. Mae left the vision.

  Mary Kay completed the pretended scan. She laid her palms on Mae’s shoulders, wrapping fingers around her deltoids. “If I find something, I bring my hands to that spot, or those places, and stay a while, until I start to hear it talk to me.” She conveyed forced confidence over a layer of sadness. “Sometimes it’s like I’m reading words in a medical book, sometimes it’s like I hear a voice telling me. Then I ...” Mary Kay choked a little. “I don’t yet tell the patient what I find. I double-check.”

  She let go, tracing her hands over Mae’s body again. “If I don’t find anything else, I come back to the problem area, if there was one. If there were two or more, I go to the worst one first and back to the secondary.” She grasped Mae’s hands, and let go. “Only then do I tell the patient. If it’s serious, I explain that I want their doctor there first. I end the session by sealing my field and the patient’s so we don’t cross-contaminate each other.”

  Mae did this in her own mind, to protect herself from the parasite in Mary Kay and to separate their fields safely. She would have to find an excuse to step away soon and cleanse herself and her stones to fully close the failed healing.

  “That was fascinating.” Mae sat up. She felt heavy and confused, and found it hard to pretend to be excited. “Could you pick up anything from me, even though you were just talking it through?”

  Hilda’s posture perked up. She leaned in toward Mary Kay. “Could you?”

  Mary Kay shook her head. The lines around her lips deepened. She opened her purse and brought out a business-card case, sorted through cards, and gave Mae those of several physicians. “I work with these practices. For people who don’t want invasive tests or extra screenings, it’s a valuable service. I’m sure they can back up my story for your research”

  “Thanks so much. You’ve helped me a lot.” But I haven’t helped you.

  Hilda led Mae across Paseo to a pale yellow building with few windows. The Secrist Gallery didn’t fit aesthetically with most of Santa Fe, but the Railyard area was different, not all adobe. Hilda opened the glass front door. “You don’t need to play student researcher with me, by the way. Did Kate tell you I was at the meeting where they came up with that role for you?”

  “Yes—she gave me a list of who was there.”

  Mae excused herself to the gallery’s ladies’ room for a private space to fully close the healing. She used snow quartz to clear her energy and rinsed the crystals under the faucet. No salt for the water, but it would have to do.

  She felt like she’d just struck out and was already at bat again. Hilda had sounded so optimistic about Mary Kay’s possible healing. Unless the angels showed up for the artist the way Granma had for Azure, Mae would probably whiff it again. She put the stones back in her pockets and rejoined Hilda.

  “My work is upstairs.” Hilda led Mae past a display of brightly colored abstract metal sculptures and up to a second-floor atrium. A sign on the wall at the head of the stairs read: Hilda Davis: The Angels Series. Speakers brushed the visitor with ethereal, wandering music. Mae sensed it as the vibrations of stars in space, the hum of the spinning of planets.

  “I love this,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  They strolled without talking for a while, stopping every few steps. Each painting was unique, yet all shared the suggestion of something hidden behind a veil. Forms neither human nor plant, with qualities of both, blended into shafts of light that appeared to move. The first painting was cool and delicate, the next flashing with shades of orange and gold and startling bursts of magenta. Another was almost entirely white, yet filled with subtle form. This was an extraordinary body of work, though it bore no resemblance to Mae’s expectations of angels.

  What would Hilda do if Mae couldn’t help her? “Have you had to stop painting?”

  “No. In fact, I started a landscape today. That was what I did before I had the angels. I was already an established artist.” Hilda paused in front of a painting of green forest-like lights. “It amazes me what I did through them—or they did, through me—but Kate thinks I was high on them, like an addiction.”

  The two women sat on a gray vinyl bench, looking across the atrium. Mae said, “I thought she wanted me to heal you.”

  Hilda took off her sunglasses and ran her gaze over the arc of her work along the walls. “She’s afraid of what I’ll do if you don’t. It’s hard, coming back down to the real world.”

  “What was it like when you had the angels?”

  Hilda gestured to the paintings and the speakers.

  “It was literally like that?”

  “Sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, but yes.”

  No wonder Jamie had learned to shut off his gift. Mae finally understood why. Even if the visions were beautiful, it would be terrible to be unable to control them. She marveled that Hilda could miss the experience. It was Mae’s job to try to bring it back, though. “This would be a good place to call ’em to you, if I can do it.”

  “That was what I’d hoped.” Hilda turned to face Mae. “That’s why I brought you here. Do you mind doing your work in a place like this?”

  “No, but I’m sup
posed to be undercover, so we can’t talk about it if anyone comes upstairs. Would it bother you if people saw us holding hands? I have to touch you to do the healing.”

  “No one around here cares about things like that.” Hilda offered her hand, but then drew it back before Mae could take it. “I’m sorry. I ...” She sighed. “I think I should wait. Now that I’m painting on my own again. It’s hard, but I should see what I can do without them.”

  Mae was both disappointed and relieved. It would have reassured her to enlist the angels and succeed again, but there was no guarantee she could have, and she couldn’t help thinking Hilda might be better off without the visions. “You’d probably have to anyway. I couldn’t help Mary Kay, and I tried.”

  “I wish you could have healed her. She doesn’t have anything to fall back on like I do. I’m worried about her. She hasn’t been herself since she lost her abilities.”

  Another approach occurred to Mae. Something more direct. “The best way to heal everyone might be to be to heal Dahlia. I could undo everything she’s done all at once.”

  Hilda shivered. “Don’t.”

  “Because you’d get the angels back after all?”

  “No—I trust they’d let me be if I no longer need them. I said it because of what happened to Mary Kay with Dahlia. She told me it was like looking into dark purple flames, where she should have seen Dahlia’s circulatory system and heart. She thought she was seeing some terrible disease she’d never seen before, and she spent a long time trying to read the imagery. She hasn’t been able to read anyone since.”

  “But she was working on a problem Dahlia doesn’t really have. So were Azure and Gaia, and she told you a lie to get your sympathy, too. I know what’s actually wrong with her.”

  “You’re supposed to heal the healers. If she steals your ability, who’s going to bring theirs back?”

  “I don’t know.” If Granma wouldn’t show up again, maybe no one.

  Mae parked in the strange long gravel driveway that ran parallel to the street and sidewalk along the block of Don Diego where Jamie lived. Before she could think any further about her work, she needed to heal their relationship. As she expected, his car was there, and his bike was propped against the side of the building near the garden. To her dismay, she saw that she’d crushed some of his plants the night before. Stuck between his car and his landlady’s, too hurt to go in and ask him to move the Fiesta, Mae had driven through the yard to reach an exit from the driveway. I should have driven over the curb. Jamie had been so proud of his work on that little garden.

  He didn’t answer when she knocked. She called him. No answer. Even if he was still in bed at noon, he should hear his phone. He only turned it off while he was working or driving. Maybe he’d walked somewhere and forgotten to bring it, but with his bad hip, Jamie didn’t go for long walks, he biked, and if he was walking Gasser, the pocket park at the corner would be about his limit. Gasser couldn’t go far enough to get out of sight of the apartment.

  A stab of worry struck her. That final four a.m. message might not have been accepting but depressed. She could hear Alan in her head. You blame the dead. You blame yourself. How could she have left Jamie, upset as he’d been? Yes, he’d hurt her, but he’d been in pain far worse than hers. Clumsy with anxiety, Mae found the key Fern had loaned her and dropped it twice before she unlocked the front door.

  She felt compelled to close it again immediately, very quietly, without going in. Jamie was in the front room doing yoga, wearing only his jockey shorts. Deeply absorbed in a seated side bend, grunting as he struggled to reach his arm up and toward his head, he hadn’t noticed the door opening. Distractible, mood-swinging Jamie had been so focused he hadn’t heard her knock. If she’d found him suddenly thirty pounds thinner she couldn’t have been more surprised.

  She began to remove the broken plants injured by her drive over the edge of the garden and scooped scattered gravel back onto the spiral path, filling the spaces between the flagstones. Jamie had looked and sounded funny in his yoga practice, but he was coping in a sane, self-healing way. After Mae had unpacked Lisa, Kandy, and his chef’s knives, he hadn’t resorted to self-harm or sunk into depression. She’d underestimated his resilience. It gave her hope that they could sort out this fight and be all right together. Maybe, if Mae was careful and gentle, he would even be able to finally talk about Kandy, or at least to hear what his departed friend seemed to want him to know.

  “What are you doing out here?” Jamie walked out the front door barefoot and shirtless, buttoning his jeans with a little tug to get them to fasten under his belly. It was strange to see him so unselfconscious, not only about his weight but his scars. He used to hide his arms and stomach even when he was slim. “Jesus—you didn’t have to work on this. I’ll redo it.” He stopped a few feet away from her and squeezed pebbles with the toes of one foot, dropped them, and toe-gathered them again. “It’ll be fun.” An effortful smile. “I like gardening.”

  “I feel bad about what I did to it, though.” She stood, brushing dirt off her knees. “Anyway, I didn’t want to bust in on your yoga practice. You were pretty concentrated there.”

  “First time I’ve tried to do it on my own outside of class.” He slid his hands into his jeans pockets and toed another pebble into a fist-like clutch. “Hard. But my hip was killing me. Thought it’d help.”

  “Did it?”

  He wriggled his evasive shrug and dropped his pebbles. “Been a hard day, y’know? Doing what I can.”

  “I think you’re doing great, sugar.”

  Eyebrows drawn down, he pulled his head back like a turtle. “You do?”

  “I do.” She walked up and hugged him.

  He held her hesitantly. “You ... you want to come in, then?”

  “Of course. We still need to talk”

  “Thought you’d say that.” One of his hands drifted to fidget with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “Made you some iced tea.” He looked into her eyes and smoothed her hair. “Southern sweet crap.”

  “Thank you. That was real thoughtful of you.”

  “Seemed right to do something with ice, y’know?” A hint of a laugh, dipped in sadness. “For when you came back to break up with me.”

  He released the embrace. They went into the kitchen. Mae took off her hat and sunglasses and put them on the table. “Talking doesn’t have to mean breaking up, sugar.”

  “Yeah, it does. When the girlfriend says it.”

  Was he joking, or serious? Jamie pulled out the single chair for her, poured a glass of tea and gave it to her, and then opened a beer for himself. He took a drink, almost hid a little belch, and sat at her feet, leaning his head back in her lap and looking up at her. His hair spread in a crinkly tangled mess over her thighs, tickling her skin below the edge of her shorts. He rocked the base of his skull against her muscle in a kind of massage and blinked a few times. “Go ahead. Interrogate.”

  “I don’t want to interrogate you. Just—”

  “It’s all right, y’know. I’m not mad anymore. About the unpacking. Except for trying to do my kitchen. Jeezus.” He raised his head to take a drink. “And I’m taking my fucking suit to the thrift shop.”

  “But it’s such a nice suit. I thought—”

  “Don’t think it.” He stuck a finger in her sock. “Interrogation, allowed. Nagging, banned.”

  “I wasn’t nagging.”

  “Yeah, you are.” His finger probed her arch. “If you say things I don’t want to hear.”

  “I think I’m bound to.”

  He put his head in her lap again and gave her the baby seal eyes. “Might go better if you brushed my hair.”

  “Sugar—”

  “Makes me calm. Malleable.”

  Before she could object, he scrambled to his feet and sped out of the room and up the stairs. Trying to have a serious talk wasn’t as bad as Mae had thought it would be, but it was weirder.

  She got up and looked in a few cabinets. He had moved everything. S
he sat back down as he reappeared, brush in hand, and dropped to his place at her feet. “Thanks, love. Hair got really bad biking in the wind. Did you find my helmet? My lock?”

  He’d been biking already? After being up that late? “They’re in the closet with Gasser’s harness.”

  “We should walk him after this. I carry him across to the Railyard. Lots of things for him to look at there. He likes birds. Think he likes to watch the skateboarders, too.”

  Mae began to brush Jamie’s hair. He stopped chattering and held still. While she untangled a portion of his mane, she tried to figure out the next step. They needed to talk, but about what? It had seemed clear to her earlier, but now it didn’t. Should she start with asking him not to yell and throw things? No, that would be putting it all on him. Maybe she should open the conversation by apologizing again for finding out about Kandy. That was the thing that had pushed him over the edge. Kandy seemed to want him to know her story, though. There was no talking about that fight without bringing up her ghost.

  When Jamie appeared peaceful, Mae asked cautiously, “How would you feel if a spirit wanted to tell you something?”

  “Don’t let ’em. That’s what the spirals are for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The spirals are for sending ’em away.”

  She looked at the swirly pattern on the wall. How bizarre. She’d thought it was a petroglyph theme to go with the southwestern colors, or some kind of symbol at most. “How are those for sending spirits away?”

  “Dunno, but they go in. Like a toilet, flushes ’em. Sort of looks like that, doesn’t it?”

  A spirit toilet? Mae wanted to follow up on this, but if she did they might never get around to what they needed to talk about. She steered out of the skid. “I think I had a spirit show up that wanted me to have a certain vision.”

  He closed his eyes. A pained look crossed his face. Had she already pushed too hard? Did he know what she was leading up to?