The Haunting of the Gemini

by Jackie Barrett

  As she spoke, a light shone behind her like a storm had lifted and the heavens were smiling down. I took a step forward, but my Forever Guardian—my younger self who died on the operating table and has continued to appear to me throughout my life, protecting me always—stopped me and told me not to go. I stood with her and looked at the little girl in the raincoat, who waited there at the end of the tunnel for my decision. I hesitated, and my Forever Guardian yanked me back. I fell into the air, twisting and turning, then landed with a thump in my own office chair. I gasped for breath and held my now-pounding head. I looked down and saw that my feet were covered with mud and slime from my journey. I staggered into the bathroom and threw some water on my face, wiped my feet off, and reached for the ibuprofen.

  That was not how that travel was supposed to have gone. I did not know whom I had found, but it most definitely was not the man I’d been searching for. That family’s father and brother was most definitely not dead. Why would his children and sister ask for this? They certainly had some explaining to do. I sat back down and began to write out my questions for them.

  As I wrote, I looked at the man’s photo again and began to think that I might be able to answer the questions better than his family could. I stopped taking notes and put my hand over his face. “Where are you?” I called out loudly.

  I did this over and over, and slowly the answer came as the story of his life started to unfold. First I saw a little boy in a white shirt and blue short pants held up by suspenders, riding a tricycle. Then an adoring mom standing next to him at his high school graduation. I could smell the gardenia in the corsage she wore pinned to her dress. I knew I was on the right track now. His first kiss to a cute little redhead . . . his dad taking a picture of him standing alongside what I assumed had to be his first car . . . so far, the picture-perfect family life.

  But then it began to change. I saw him slumped over a steering wheel, a syringe and spoon on the seat next to him . . . again and again over the years as the drugs took over . . . his attendance at what must have been a daughter’s wedding, a train wreck of a father bringing no joy . . . a flash of his family, sitting in a kitchen and mourning what they thought was his death . . . and then there he was, sitting on a park bench with some other homeless people. Yes, he was definitely one of them—dirty clothes, ripped sneakers and no socks to cover his swollen ankles, a cigarette butt behind his ear, wrapped in a worn blanket. He showed signs of schizophrenia, which is very common for someone living in those conditions. My heart went out to him. A lost man at rock bottom, huddled in the cold, thinking no one cared anymore.

  I looked at the bench, at the city around him, and sat up straight in astonishment. It was Union Square Park, near Greenwich Village, in the city. It was no more than a thirty-minute train ride from my house. Man, did I have a wonderful belated Christmas gift for this family! Their father and brother was alive, and we could help him. I would gladly give my assistance in reuniting them.

  I put down the pen with which I had furiously been taking notes and pushed the intercom button to speak to my daughter, Joanne. “Get this family on the phone now! I have good news for them!”

  Her voice came back at me. “Are you kidding me? You always change the schedule.” I knew I had other people waiting to see me. “It takes me days to fit people in,” she said.

  I knew that. I knew how I made her work as my assistant much more difficult. I was always changing things up at the last minute. And that wonderful daughter of mine is always my miracle worker, somehow finding a way to make everything still run smoothly. As she did again this time—the family called me within five minutes.

  We greeted each other, and I could tell that I was on speaker phone. Normally, I hate that. I feel a reading is very personal, and I should be talking only to that person, not a whole audience.

  But in this case, everyone on the other end of the phone wanted to know about their dear, “departed” father and brother. I saw them sitting around a kitchen table, passing a box of tissues before the questions started.

  “Does he have a message?”

  “How is he?”

  “Does he know we love him?”

  As I listened to the questions, I closed my eyes and left my body, until I was standing outside a back door and looking into a kitchen. Leaning against a counter was an older man, probably in his eighties but still quite sharp. He looked a little nervous. Ah, that was because he was wanting me—on the other end of the phone line—to prove him right. He was the one who had arranged this reading for his son’s daughters and sister. He wanted me to say some otherworldly gibberish, some kind of hogwash, and confirm that his son was dead. His very much alive and homeless son.

  Well, since I am not a fraud, I was unable to do what he had hoped that I would. I opened my eyes and was back in my office. I stopped the family’s questions with one of my own.

  “Who is the older gentleman standing to the back of you?”

  I could feel them turning around and looking at him as if to say, “How did you know that?” Now that I had their full attention, I began to explain about their son, father, and brother. I described his whereabouts, his drug use, his likely mental illness, his desperate need of help. I could hear the tears falling on the other end of the phone. One daughter said she always had a feeling that he was still alive. They had been told he had died in an accident years ago. I asked why there was no funeral, and they said that their grandfather had taken care of the arrangements and felt it best to just have him quickly cremated.

  There were heavy questions in the air around that kitchen table. The grandfather began to yell. “I don’t need this. I gave you girls everything that deadbeat son of mine couldn’t.” I could feel his pain. In a way, he was right. He gave everything he could, and he couldn’t forgive his son. Instead of the joy I’d expected, I ended the call feeling horrible for everyone involved.

  The grandfather contacted me the next day to instruct me to leave things alone. In his eyes, his son had died a long time ago. I tried to talk to the daughters. They said they were happy to know that their father was not dead, but there was nothing they could do for him alive. And then they hung up. I was left confused by the whole situation. How could they have this new knowledge and not act on it?

  This was such an unusual result for me. I almost never get to deliver the news that there is life instead of death. I don’t often get to tell people that amends can be made now, in this world, before anyone crosses over to the other side. I rarely get to tell clients that they still have time and can do the communicating on their own.

  Maybe that was why I couldn’t let it rest. This poor man needed help, and I felt I’d been brought into his story for a reason. Two days after his family told me to do nothing more, I set out for Union Square Park to do more anyway. I don’t like seeing people in pain. Helping the vulnerable is one of my own vulnerabilities. And unfortunately for me, there were those who knew this.

  I took a pack of smokes and some coffee with me. I know the currency of the streets, and a few cigarettes can usually buy you some information. I walked through the whole area, looking everywhere. I saw crack vials, empty dope bags, tiny specks of blood on the ground. I showed the man’s photograph around, though most of these people wouldn’t have recognized the guy if he were sitting on their laps.

  I kept searching as the winter sun went down and dark clouds moved in. I finally sat down on a bench, about to admit defeat in my search for this nowhere man, when I happened to notice the feet of the person sitting next to me, wearing the same torn sneakers I’d seen in my vision three days earlier. I peeked into the blanket he wore wrapped around himself and got a look at his face. Jackpot! I told myself to remain calm. I did not want to spook him. I slowly pulled out a cigarette and extended it toward him. An aged, soiled hand emerged from the blanket and snatched it from my fingers. I lit it for him and watched the smoke billow from his nose and mouth. />
  “What do you want from me?” he said. “You a cop?”

  “No. I’m no cop,” I said carefully.

  He peered around his blanket at me with a very alert expression in his eyes. “Well, I ain’t going home, and I ain’t going with you. This is no place for you. Go away.”

  Yeah, everyone knows how well that works on me. I knew of a men’s shelter where he could get medical care. “I want to help you. Please, let me get you a warm bed, some food, and a hot shower, and then we can talk.”

  He stood up and flung the half-smoked cigarette away. I stood up quickly, too, and said, “You have a family that loves you. You owe it to your daughters and yourself.”

  He stopped, and I thought for a split second that I’d gotten through to him with the power of remembrance and love. Then he began to chuckle, and in a different voice—one that sounded like a bucket of stones being dumped into the well of my soul—he said, “You couldn’t save your poor, tormented mother and you want to save me. You will always be a slave to salvation, you pitiful idiot.”

  I know the devil talking when I hear it. I yanked the blanket off him and found myself staring not at the son and father I’d been searching for but some man in his thirties with long blond hair and track marks mapping his arms. That sudden movement attracted the attention of the many homeless people, and they began to move toward me. I knew I had to get out of there. I bolted and was almost away when I ran right into a tall man dressed all in black. He had coal-black eyes and hair, short except for a thin ponytail that hung over his shoulder. He grabbed both of my arms. “You could get hurt stalking people,” he said. He pulled me into him, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. He rubbed his lips up my face to my ear.

  “Now we are one,” he whispered. “We are one. Two is one.”

  I wrenched myself free and ran to the subway. The thirty-minute ride back felt like eternity—I had never been so glad to see home. My husband, Will, greeted me at the door and asked me where I’d been.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but something is coming.”

  TWO

  I was working too hard. That was all it was, I kept telling myself. That was why this spirit was tugging at the edges of my brain, slipping past the corner of my eye, following me, and then disappearing as soon as I turned to look. Wrong numbers would appear on my cell phone and come back as disconnected when I called them. My voice mail would fill with incoherent messages. There would be knocks on the front door and no one outside when I answered.

  Food that I loved now turned my stomach. I would awaken in the middle of the night and stare at Will, wondering who he was and how I could get him to leave. My friends started to complain that I was acting differently, talking differently, dressing differently. I ate with my hands in restaurants, even fancy ones, which was a breach of etiquette my Southern upbringing would never, ever allow. I would catch myself in outfits that looked more like hooker-chic than my usual modest dress. I would glimpse myself in a mirror and wonder who had styled my hair or put on my makeup. It certainly wasn’t me.

  Jewelry went missing. Not my everyday stuff but expensive pieces I usually wore only once or twice a year. I would find them stashed far in the back of my armoire, under piles of clothes. When I straightened up the house, I would fluff a throw pillow and put it on the left side of a living room armchair. The second I let go of it, it would lift up and smash down on the right side. If I switched it back, the same thing would happen. Music would suddenly start blasting from the turned-off stereo. My cell phone, which I placed fully charged on my bedside table at night, would be completely drained of power every morning. I finally took it back to the store and was told that there was nothing wrong with it.

  Some nights, I would jolt awake from a dead sleep, consumed with overwhelming fear. I felt like I was being watched very closely, as though something were inches from my face. Other nights, I didn’t wake up at all. But in the morning, instead of pajamas, I would awake to find myself in jeans and a T-shirt that reeked of booze and stale cigarette smoke, my feet covered with mud. Where had I been walking?

  I got messages on my phone from strangers telling me that they’d had fun and asking if we could get together again. They never left names, and I quickly got in the habit of deleting them so my family wouldn’t find out. Many of my appointments—both personal and professional—got canceled, and when I asked about it, the people I had been scheduled to meet with said I was the one who had done it. I never had any memory of doing so.

  I kept trying to work throughout these months. I am a psychic medium, and I interact regularly with people who are grieving or traumatized, so I always take great care to be respectful and kind when I communicate. But now, when I typed out e-mails to my clients, I found myself unconsciously inserting words in the middle of my sentences.

  Help me.

  I’m inside.

  Murder.

  He’s coming.

  Beware.

  Killer.

  I’m stuck in an asylum.

  None of these phrases had anything to do with what I was actually writing. I would stare at a completed e-mail in total confusion. Where was this coming from?

  I slowly began to feel that I was losing control of my own life. Did I still even have one? One day, as I was saying good-bye to my husband as he headed off to work, I looked out our front door. The world outside was black and gray. Maybe I’m dead, and he’s afraid to tell me. I had known spirits who had not yet figured out that they had really died. Was I one of them? The thought turned me cold, and Will stepped back from our hug as though he felt the chill.

  He knew me so well, my big bear of a husband. And he knew other things, too. He was educated in voodoo mysticism, just as I was, and understood the other world that always called to me. He had always been able to tap into my thoughts and emotions telepathically, but now he looked unsure as he stared at me in our foyer.

  I first saw Will when I was in my late teens, as he climbed aboard a streetcar in New Orleans. My eye was immediately caught by the tall, handsome black man with a voodoo protection symbol tattooed on his chest. I would see him occasionally in different places in the city, but I did not learn his name for several years.

  At that point, in my early twenties, I was traveling the world, helping tend to wounded souls. The elders in New Orleans’s small voodoo community began to worry about my safety and thought that having a protector would be smart. So they suggested someone accompany me on my travels, and introduced me to that streetcar passenger I had seen before. And Will Barrett and I became inseparable.

  He watched over me and my daughter, Joanne, as all three of us became seasoned globetrotters.

  He started asking me to marry him after we had been traveling together for about a year. I said no. He kept asking, and I kept saying no. I liked things the way they were. We were best friends, and I knew I could depend on him for my life. I didn’t need a marriage certificate for that. Plus, I didn’t want to put him in danger by linking him to me that way.

  But that man wouldn’t give up. He asked me for about the hundredth time on Saint Valentine’s Day in 1997. It was a cold day in New Orleans, and I felt at that very moment an even colder blast run right through my bones. I knew it was time to make things right. So we got married in a voodoo ceremony that night in the Saint Louis Cemetery on North Rampart Street. He gave me a beautiful snake ring that symbolizes the white serpent of healing. And I gave him a ring that belonged to my father, a Blackfoot medicine man. We’ve been together for more than twenty-five years. He has made my work his work, and with him, I never felt scared or alone.

  Until now. Will looked at me closely as he left for work and told me I was working too hard. I needed a break. Take a few days off. Maybe I was still among the living and not dead after all. As he walked down the path and away, I paused to look around at my front garden, which was slowly returning to color from the black and
gray of minutes before. Even though we lived in New York now, I’d kept my New Orleans green thumb. Green twisting vines with big pink blooms grew up the front wall, and other plants surrounded the double-tiered fountain just outside the front doors. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to enjoy it. A little bit of nature always makes things better.

  And then there was my gate. I had designed it myself and collaborated with an artist and an iron worker to make it. It would have made my father, an iron worker himself, proud. A small cross sat on top of each picket, and the middle came together in a much larger cross—although you would have to walk across the street in order to be far enough away to realize that. There also were voodoo veves—the symbols of protection and love. I guess I’d brought more with me from New Orleans than just my green thumb.

  I walked out into my garden, happy I could now see the pink of the flowers. Could I still feel them? I reached out and grabbed one tightly. Yes, thank goodness. The flower filled my hand, and I could feel every part of it. But when I let go, the bright petals started to fade and shrivel as they fell to the ground. By the time they reached the earth, they were dead. I touched one slightly with my foot, and it sounded like I had just stepped on broken glass.

  “You killed it!”

  I jumped and whirled around. The screech had been full of fury, but there was no one behind me. I looked out the gate. There was no one there, either.

  I went back into the house, my heart racing. My hands were covered with pink from the petals and yellow from the flower’s stamen. I walked into the kitchen to wash them. I soaped up, and the colors began to wash down the drain. Then came the blood. I looked my hands over, but there were no cuts anywhere. Yet the more I rinsed them, the more blood poured forth.