“Calm down. You’re more upset about it than she was.”
When Lydia got home, she surveyed the damage wearily. “I’m getting too old for this crap,” she said. “Look at this—those morons tagged my wall. And for what? I’m outside their stupid territorial pissing contests.” She picked up her precog certification, which had fallen from its hanger. The frame was out of whack. She pressed it back into alignment, only somewhat successfully, and sighed. “I thought folks on this side of the tracks had a healthier respect for the mystical. If anything, they should be scared of me.”
“Should they?” I wondered. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing.”
Lydia gathered up a plaster Shakti from the floor. Then she retrieved one of Shakti’s six arms. And sighed again.
“Don’t worry,” I said. Snow and diesel exhaust were wafting in from the street. “We’ll figure this out.” Lydia continued to stare at the mess as if she hadn’t even heard me. I glanced down at the bags she’d dropped inside the doorway and recognized the bottle of a certain cake flavored vodka. I grabbed it and hustled her back to the kitchen to give her something to do besides staring at the wreckage. “Sit.” I cracked the seal and poured a shot. “Drink.”
I took one for myself, too. It was no better at ten a.m. than at midnight. I poured her another.
“I got this, okay?” I grabbed her phone out of her pocket, pulled up Pinterest, and handed it back to her. “You just sit back, put your feet up, and get some new decorating ideas. First thing in the morning, we’ll start hitting the thrift shops to put together your new look.”
Back in her waiting room, Drunk Tony was oblivious to my efforts to keep a cool head. “This is bad,” he said. “Really bad.”
“Dude, chill.”
“Next thing you know, it’s not just the property that gets hurt.”
“Not helping.”
“Really bad….” He started pacing through broken glass—crunch, crunch, crunch—mumbling, “This is bad, this is bad, what’re we gonna do?”
“Call the landlord,” I suggested. Not that I thought he’d be much help, but it kept Tony occupied. Meanwhile, I cycled through all the cop friends in my address book, only to find none of them answering their phones. I supposed they were all too busy dealing with life-and-death-and-afterlife situations to worry about a broken window.
Since the police I personally knew were busy snubbing me, I called the general non-emergency line and was told some officers would be around to take a statement. After that, I figured I could at least call an insurance agent, but Lydia was vague about her carrier. I didn’t think she was all that drunk yet, so I let it slide. Tony had no luck tracking down the building’s owner, either.
“At the very least,” Tony said, “we’ve gotta get this window boarded up.”
It was disturbing how many board-up services there were to choose from. Even more disturbing was how much they charged, and Lydia with no insurance company to reimburse her for the expense. “You’ve got a truck,” I said to Tony, “right? Let’s just get some wood and do the damn job ourselves.”
Between the three of us, we scraped together the cost of a few sheets of particleboard. Barely.
By the time the law finally showed, Tony was off on his wood-gathering mission, and I’d put on a pot of coffee while Lydia had drunk herself to a spirit-induced facsimile of calm. I tucked the vodka into the cupboard when a uniformed officer took her statement, and my statement too, since I was the only one to actually see the two creeps. I was dismayed by how little physical description I could dredge up. The only thing that stuck with me was how they felt inside, reckless and arrogant, and disturbingly hardened. I didn’t suppose most cops would find that observation much to go by. Not the ones assigned to petty crime, anyway.
“Doesn’t matter what you saw or didn’t see,” Lydia told me, once the cop was gone. She articulated very clearly, I noticed, but she was speaking just a bit too loud to be sober. “Pig’s gonna write it up, dump it in a file, and that’s as far as things will go.”
Normally, I’d ask if she actually knew that—as a precog—or if she was just feeling pessimistic. But she was obviously in no mood for banter.
“Ever wonder what it would be like to get a do-over?” she asked wistfully.
Part of me thought my life was nothing if not a series of do-overs, disappointing re-takes that left me sadder, older and deeper in debt.
My knowledge of construction workers doesn’t go much beyond hard hats and nudie calendars, but I can drive a nail if someone tells me where to put it. It took us a while, but between Tony and me, we managed to board up the window and clean up the debris. Lydia, meanwhile, worked on her nasty vodka. I can’t blame her—it’s what I would’ve done. But by the time we had everything set to rights, she staggered out from the back looking bleary and haggard, and said, “How am I supposed to sleep with all this noise? Get out of here and give me some fucking peace and quiet.”
Tony shot back with, “Well, that’s the last time I board up your goddamn window,” but I steered him out the door before things escalated beyond the griping stage.
That left the two of us alone. I wanted to give Lydia a hug, but I knew she wouldn’t abide the pity. So I just said, “You pick out some color schemes by the next time we talk, or I’m picking them out for you.”
“You too,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Get the hell out of here and go do something fun. I don’t want you hovering around, treating me like some pathetic old biddy who needs your babysitting.”
Hold on a sec, I was supposed to be the empath, not her. But I put on a brave face and said, “A tough old broad like you? Never.”
Chapter 48
Normally, I don’t get to go to the Saturday afternoon meditation meetups at Rainbow Dharma because I’m too busy trying to keep my store afloat. But no one who came into Sticks and Stones that day was looking for anything other than the juicy gossip of what happened to Lydia’s front window. Bad enough living through the experience once. I wasn’t about to continue feeding the schadenfreude of a bunch of nosy rubberneckers.
Rainbow Dharma meets in the back room of a dilapidated consignment shop called Still Goods. You’d think the brown-on-brown decor of chipped linoleum and oppressive paneling would get depressing, but no. It was intriguing. The meeting room housed the store’s overflow, and it was never the same furniture twice.
The store itself isn’t subject to the laws of physics. It’s been renovated and added on to so many times over the decades that the rooms sprawl into one another endlessly. I mean that literally. I’ve never found the back of the building. I suspect it might actually be a wormhole to another dimension—one that’s never moved past 1975.
Most of the place smelled of mothballs and old wood. But as I made my way through room after room of vintage clothes and antique furniture, the closer I got to the get-together, the grandma’s attic smell gave way to coffee and curry. One good thing about hanging out with Buddhists is that there’s always plenty I can eat. Even the omnivores at the potlucks tended to bust out their very best vegetarian efforts. Unfortunately, not all of them are particularly palatable.
For instance, take Red’s doppelganger, Latrell—the guy whose Facebook picture nearly gave me a freaking coronary the first time I saw it. In person, he felt nothing like Red. Not only did he have dubious taste in music, but he was also phenomenally easygoing…if somewhat vapid. Plus, he’s never once called me Curtis.
I spotted him over by a herd of ancient sewing machine cabinets, lovingly stirring the contents of a crockpot, and I’d bet my last five dollars that thing was brimming with mushy lentils. Unlike Red, Latrell wasn’t even remotely psychic. If he was, he’d realize that no one actually wanted the recipe he continually tried to give out. I’d personally refused his offer at least half a dozen times.
He glanced up from his soupy legumes and said, “Hey, Crash, how you feel?”
> I didn’t really want to get into the whole break-in, but I’m averse to pretending I’m fine when I’m not. “I suppose I’ve had better days.”
“Well, you know what they say. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
I stopped myself, barely, from demanding to know why he bothered asking if he was just going to belittle my experience with an empty platitude. Latrell was harmless. And as much as I love to speak my truth, I sometimes find it’s less destructive to walk away.
I joined my cronies in a room with shelves of dusty knick-knacks on the walls and cushions on the floor, and once all the greetings were exchanged and we’d settled into position, the room went quiet, and together, we sat.
It was as soothing a place as I could expect anywhere to be. I was comfortable with the people and the ritual. Even so, bringing my focus back to my breath was damn near impossible. Sensory flashes of my morning kept replaying in my mind. The feel of the brick shattering the glass. The sound of my combat boots crunching through the broken shards. The brutal triumph of the looters as they scampered away.
Dumb idea, to come and sit when I was too wound up to have any chance of calming down. Calling meditation a practice seemed all too apt. It should have been soothing. But as endeavors went, my search for enlightenment felt repetitive, grueling, and all-around lame.
Time after time, I nudged my attention back toward my breath. And time after time, I failed. From the sighs of the tattooed chick behind me, to the sound of the store’s customers tramping through a distant room, to the smell of Latrell’s mushy lentils, my attention focused everywhere but the place I was aiming. If I’d been at home, I would have given up a long time ago, but here, I was trapped in a bevy of earnest, queer Buddhists. And so I kept my ass glued to the damn cushion.
In the scheme of things, forty-five minutes isn’t long. Enough time for a simple haircut or a satisfying roll in the hay. But a forty-five minute meditation attempt when you’re just not feeling it lasts approximately forever. My nose itched, my ass was asleep, and I was famished enough to knock back a bowl of lentils. But I didn’t. I sat.
I’m not sure when, exactly, things shifted, but I do know this: the moment I surrendered, everything changed. The people around me became so much more than hokey sayings and unpalatable vegetarian cuisine—they hadn’t changed, but my perception of them had.
The group lit up in my mind’s eye like a string of twinkling fairy lights, and their emotions flooded my usual barriers. Not perfect. Here and there, self-consciousness and jealousy and annoyance bled through. But overwhelmingly, the group radiated a sturdy and enveloping calm.
Surrender…I’d always considered it to be a weakness. A lack of determination. A character flaw. As the experience unfolded, though, I understood an entirely new facet of the idea. Surrender wasn’t defeat. In fact, I was welcome to keep right on fighting if I really wanted to. But to voluntarily lay down my struggle and be open to goodness all around me was, in my case, an act not only of strength, but, dare I say, maturity.
Tranquility bloomed around me as my anahata chakra balanced. I personally suffered the curse of so many extroverts: too much fire and not enough fuel. If I cared to visualize, I would have seen the chakra as a green pinwheel turning just behind my breastbone—but I didn’t bother. When it eased into alignment, I felt it, and I trusted that feeling a heck of a lot more than anything that might translate through the visual brain.
The Psych test I’d bombed so long ago was water under the bridge that’s long since dried up. But it was obvious now that I’d expended so much energy pushing against it, there was no possible way I could have scored. And if I took the test again, things would be different. It wasn’t a matter of knowing what I knew, but feeling what I felt. And for an empath, that distinction makes all the difference in the world.
It was tempting to start creeping down the path of “what if?” and daydream about all the ways in which psychic certification could turn my life around, but spinning out fantasies, however pleasant, is not the point of mindfulness practice. I acknowledged the thought, nudged it gently aside, and focused once again on my breath.
The forty-five minutes stretched. Suspended, I felt timeless, but not only was I no longer eager to get up and reinstate my circulation, but I felt preemptively disappointed that at some point, the meditation would come to a close.
Everything changes. Yet another dumb saying…but it really is true. Just as I settled in to the sensation of balance, that serene and open place of allowing, the energy in the room spiked as the Vibe to end all Vibes hit me so hard, it nearly knocked me off my cushion.
Even before the meditation’s leader gave the all-clear, I opened my eyes. Confusion. From across the room, I found Latrell standing there, stark against a backdrop of antique washboards and battered tin road signs—and he was staring at me, Vibing his heart out like I’d just declared his beans were delicious. For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom what was going through his head. We’d never clicked in any meaningful way, so intellectually, we were no great match. And physically? He preferred rugged guys with meat on their bones and hair on their backs. Unless there were lentils involved, it was unlike Latrell to give me more than a passing glance.
Some primitive corner of my brain realized what was going on a heartbeat before what I was really seeing consciously registered. The guy standing there Vibing at me hard enough to rattle the tchotchkes on the wall wasn’t Latrell at all.
It was Red.
I didn’t just see it was him, I felt it. His essence was familiar and foreign all at once, because back when we’d spent forty plus hours per week in one another’s gravitational pulls, I’d lacked confidence that my empathic ability was anything more than a shrewd assessment of small tells. But no way was Red projecting anything physically. Outside, it was exquisite posture and a slight widening of the eyes. But inside, he was scoured by a torrent of emotions. Surprise over finding me here. Joy at the sight of me. Regret from being gone so long. Fear that I’d be angry.
I was.
Not just angry, though, but stunned and elated, baffled and chagrined. Emotion roared through my newly balanced chakras, blowing them wide open. So much for alignment. At the sight of Red, I felt raw. Scorched.
And, indeed…angry.
I sprang up from the cushion and practically vaulted over the folks seated between me and the door. Red backed into the next room. I trapped him between an ugly credenza and a bookshelf full of chipped vases, planted my hands on my hips, and said, “Funny seeing you here.”
“I needed a few things.” He cast around awkwardly as if something useful might appear amidst all the weird tchotchkes. “And I was hoping to see some folks I knew at Rainbow Dharma. I didn’t realize you’d started coming.”
“A lot can change in two years. I’ve expanded my horizons. But you? I thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth. Rumor had it you were on the West Coast, but it looked more like you’d gone into witness protection.”
“I went somewhere I could think.”
“Where? A Siberian bunker?”
He smiled at that, not with amusement, but a hint of sadness. It was a familiar enough expression on him, though I’d never grasped the subtle nuances. Not in any way I was willing to appreciate. When I turned so as not to block the feeble light eking through the glass block windows and got a better look at him, I comprehended several details I’d missed. His mohawk was gone, which was why I’d initially mistaken him for Latrell. Now he wore his hair in a short fade. His cheekbones looked more pronounced, his jawline more chiseled. But the overall bittersweet hint of melancholia was something that I suspected had always been there. I just hadn’t had the capacity to see it.
“Things needed figuring out,” he said. “How I managed to get where I was. Why my intentions didn’t seem to matter. Whether my vocation had any real value.”
Every time I suffered another setback, all those things and more went through my head. And the notion that Red and I th
ought so much alike was baffling.
“I didn’t think you’d understand,” he told me, “but now, finding you here, maybe I’m wrong. After I left, I joined a sangha.”
People tend to think living in community involves putting on funny robes, handing out religious tracts and begging for bread. Not nowadays. I’d never personally had the cash or the time to indulge, but plenty of Rainbow Dharma did. They’d book weekend retreats at ritzy meditation centers, then come back bragging about how they were now so phenomenally in touch with themselves…when obviously they were just in it for the gourmet vegetarian meals and the opportunity to turn off their phones for a day and a half.
“And then what?”
“And then I decided I was ready to leave, and I came here.”
“Why, you wore out your welcome?”
He considered his answer for a pause most people would’ve found uncomfortably long, then said, “I came to a decision.”
Two years. Red has always held himself above the level of us mere mortals. Now, with two years of hardcore spiritual practice under his belt, he was bound to be totally insufferable. The potluck buffet I’d been gearing up for was now as appetizing as the dusty knicknacks on the wall, and I came to a decision myself, turned away from him, and walked out the door.
Chapter 49
It was a maddening walk home. Part of me wished I’d come up with a scathing parting remark, but part of me was relieved I hadn’t. I was leery of that second part, since it was setting its sights on the impossible.
Red Turner had always been just out of reach—and I’m not only talking about those near-miss kisses. All the stolen moments I’d spent gazing at his reflection in the salon mirrors must’ve added up to a significant chunk of time. But it’s phenomenally unsatisfying to fall for a reflection.
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