Never Again

by Heather Starsong

  I never regretted the choice I had made.

  There had been a story in the paper about my being struck by lightning on the mountain. When I got home there was a phone message from a reporter wanting an interview. I turned him down. The less said about the whole business the better, I thought.

  Anne came, very concerned, and gave me a massage. She was full of questions. As I lay on the table, she drew out of me the story of the hike up the mountain on my eightieth birthday. I kept hoping as I spoke that she would remember I had told her all that before. But she didn’t seem to. All the details were still vivid to me, even though it had been more than a year ago. I told her again how my knees had hurt and my heart had raced, how I had been overwhelmed by memories, how I had dipped in the stream to set intentions. She understood. She had walked that trail with me many times, had shared numerous dips in icy streams. She knew how I felt about my bathing cloth and commiserated with me over its loss.

  “I’ll give you a new one. I know it won’t be the same, but I got some pretty ones when I was in Bali last year. You can have one of those.”

  I thought of the one she had already given me, the one I had used all summer but was no longer in my pack. I did not speak of it.

  I went on to tell her about the lightning, the cold night in which I thought I was dying. Then I paused. Waiting.

  “Everyone’s amazed that you survived the night,” she said. “You’re tougher than you seem.” Her skillful hands began working with my neck. “I’m glad. I’m not ready to have you disappear from my life. There. That’s better. That should help the headache.”

  Clearly she didn’t remember.

  A few weeks later I began taking walks again, short walks at first with many rests, then longer ones as I grew stronger. One afternoon Anne came and we walked together around the lake. We’d visited several times since she’d massaged me. It felt odd being with her, knowing she didn’t remember all we’d shared in the last year. That afternoon she was excited about a new psychic she’d consulted and what he had told her regarding the big shift that was to take place on December 21, 2012.

  “Only three months from now,” I said.

  “No.” Anne stopped on the trail and looked at me sharply. “A year and three months. You’ve done that before, getting mixed up about what year we’re in. Is it the lightning?”

  I stopped, too. “Anne,” I blurted out, “what would you think if I told you that between the lightning strike and the time they brought me down the mountain, I lived a whole year? That’s why I’m mixed up. I keep forgetting that they folded… ” I couldn’t go on.

  “What?”

  “I need to rest. Can we sit down?”

  “Sure.”

  We went a little further to a place where some big rocks jutted out at the water’s edge. The lake was still, reflecting the clouds, the hills, the trees just beginning to turn.

  “What do you mean, you lived a year?” Anne asked as we settled.

  I slipped off my sandals and put my feet in the water. Cool and soothing. “Just that. And you and I shared a lot in that year. It’s so strange you don’t remember.”

  She shifted so that she could sit looking into my face. “I was with you in that year?”

  “Yes. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes were kind and concerned. “I’ve heard accounts,” she went on, speaking slowly, “that people near death can move into some kind of parallel time. They come back and tell about having been taken to other places and having experiences that would take far longer than the two or three minutes they were actually gone. Like with dreams. A dream can last only a few minutes, yet a long story unfolds for the dreamer. You were alone there all night. You must have walked far on the bardo path.”

  “I wasn’t alone. I would have died if they hadn’t come.”

  “They?”

  I was silent. It was ridiculous, but I felt betrayed that she didn’t remember all I had told her of the Elirians.

  She must have seen the shadow on my face because she touched my hand where it rested on the rock beside me. “I don’t know how such things work, what they mean, but I’m curious. What did you experience? How did it change you? I’ve felt ever since you came back that you are changed. And I’ve been noticing there’s something different about your eyes. Please tell me.”

  So once again I told her how the Elirians had rescued me and about the year that followed. She listened attentively, compassionately, interrupting from time to time to question and marvel, but as I continued my story, I could tell that she didn’t believe it had happened in real time. I turned my face away to hide my disappointment. I had hoped that she of all people would believe me, even if my own children hadn’t. She did understand the experience was real for me and had changed me. In the times that followed I could speak with her about it, and she would know what I was talking about. That at least was a comfort.

  The autumn unfolded with an uncanny confluence of two autumns that were both the autumn of 2011. Outer events happened exactly as they had in the fold in time, but my personal relationship to them was vastly different.

  Heavy snow came in October, just as it had before, and the trees, still leafed out, bent under its weight. Only this October it was a struggle for me to get out to shake my maple tree. I staggered in the deep snow, got dizzy looking up, and had to hold onto the trunk to keep from falling. Finally I retreated to the porch and threw snowballs at the weighted branches. My aim was lousy.

  When I felt stronger, I went to the Avalon for an evening of tango. All the same people were there that had been there the first time I went after becoming young. I realized that, without planning to, I had come on the same date. This time I created no stir. I sat and chatted with Sally, danced with Tim and Steve and Roberto. Marco didn’t ask me. My dancing was better than it had been before. The skill I had gained taking classes and especially dancing with Zachary almost every night for four months was still with me. But soon my knees began to ache and I was tired. I sat and watched a while, then went home before ten.

  By the end of October I felt able to start practicing massage. Martha came for a session. She said nothing about the young woman who had massaged her for a year. As before, she referred her friend, and soon the other clients I had worked with in the fold in time contacted me. My hands ached after a session and I was only able to see two or three clients a week, but I was glad to be able to do my work again.

  One day in November, walking on the mall, I passed the kite shop. There in the window was the dragon kite. I had forgotten how beautiful it was. Of course I would buy it. The children had loved it so last year.

  On the following Sunday when I went to visit Robin’s family, I gave them the dragon kite—just as I had before. I opened it up and spread it out on the dining room table for the children to see.

  Colin jumped with excitement. “Look at his teeth!”

  Katie stroked the long golden tail. A misty look came into her eyes. “I had a dream about a kite like this.”

  I caught my breath, alert.

  “When did you dream that?” Alice asked

  Katie tilted her head. “A while ago.” Her face lit up. “It went really high and its golden tail flew on the wind.”

  There was a strange pause. My heart was beating fast.

  “Let’s go,” Colin burst in. “Let’s go fly it.”

  “Are you up to taking a short walk to the park?” Alice asked me.

  “Yes, I’m walking much better now.”

  “Okay, kids,” Robin said, “get your shoes on and we’ll go.” I rolled the kite up as the children scrambled for shoes and jackets.

  In the park Robin unfurled the kite. I watched, remembering how I’d raced along the creek with its string in my hand a year ago—was it the same day as this, the same sunny afternoon in November?

  This yea
r I sat on the bank by the creek, resting my legs while Robin and the children ran with the kite. I bought that kite, I puzzled, last fall when I was young, and bought it again now that I’m old, a year later, but not a year. My head ached as I tried for the umpteenth time to figure it out. Only the now is real, Kiria had sung. So I sat in the now, the afternoon sun warm on my back, the kite flying above, the children’s shouts.

  Lenny had a hard time that fall. Not long after he got home from rehab, he went out for groceries and picked up a flu. Soon he was back in the hospital with viral pneumonia. I sent him a card and flowers but wasn’t allowed to visit because of contagion. For a week or so he hung in the balance. I was terribly worried about him. I checked with the hospital every day, but, since I wasn’t kin, they would give me only general information.

  Then one evening, to my great relief, he called, well enough to talk and needing to bitch. He still had his sense of humor, but when we got to laughing it set him coughing and our call ended abruptly. The next time he called he was at his daughter Bette’s house, being cared for and irritated by all the noise and confusion created by her teenage sons. Then he was home.

  “My apartment’s not a fancy place,” he said, “but it’s quiet. I can have my own way again, and don’t have to spend all my strength restraining myself from yelling at those kids.”

  He began calling every evening again, and I realized how much I had missed our daily connection. Then one night he said, “I’m feeling like stepping out. How about dinner?”

  I was delighted. It was refreshing that everything about Lenny was new, not shadowed with images, like and yet unlike, from folded time.

  “That would be lovely,” I replied. “You know we talk every day, but we haven’t seen each other since that one day in the hospital. Do you think we’ll recognize each other without our bathrobes?”

  He chuckled. “For you,” he said, “I’ll wear something different.”

  He picked me up at my house two evenings later. He was standing straighter than when I had last seen him, definitely thinner, looking quite dapper, dressed in a black suit and tie, a black beret set at an angle. His eyebrows were as formidable as ever. I, too, had dressed with care in some of my more modest tango attire—a close-fitting gray lace top, a purple velvet skirt, and long purple earrings. With some help from uplifting underwear I still had a good figure, although a little fuller than young Clara’s had been.

  “Wow!” he exclaimed, looking at me over from head to foot. “You’re gorgeous. This is even better than the green silk robe.”

  “You look nice, too,” I said, feeling suddenly shy, but pleased with his appreciation.

  As I took my coat out of the closet, he looked around my living room. I’d had the wood stove going that afternoon, and the coals still glowed through the glass door. “Nice little place you’ve got. I love a wood stove.”

  He helped me on with my coat, gave me his arm as we went down the front steps, and opened the car door for me.

  An old-fashioned gentleman, I noted inwardly as he went around to the driver’s side. I loved it.

  We went to John’s, a small, fine restaurant in a little old house out on east Pearl Street. There were no shadows. I had never been there with Zachary.

  Lenny ordered wine and we toasted our healing bodies.

  “It’s so good to get out,” he said. “It’s taken me a while. And what a treat to sit across the table from such a beautiful woman.”

  “I’m happy to be with you. So glad you’re finally getting well.”

  “Believe me, me too.”

  Our conversation flowed easily. Although in our phone conversations we had usually spoken of daily events and the latest with our bodies, over time we had come to learn a good deal about each other.

  As we ate, he regaled me with stories of his journalism career. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to watch his eyebrows as he talked. He began his career in New York City, but at the end of the sixties moved to San Francisco to report on the human potential movement. Dan and I were also in California at that time with our young children, though further south. I taught dance and yoga at a growth center just east of San Diego and sampled all the New Age modalities that came through. Lenny and I had known many of the same charismatic leaders of that period and we had lots of fun swapping tales about them. Later he moved to Washington, D.C. and covered the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years. It was columns from that period that I remembered reading and enjoying. He was solidly liberal, with a trenchant wit.

  “When the second Bush got elected for the second time, I quit,” he said. “I just couldn’t stomach the insanity anymore. Now I play chess.”

  It was a delightful dinner. We laughed a lot and lingered over dessert and tea until we both realized at the same time that we were tired.

  After our dinner, we began meeting each other every week or so, for an afternoon movie, a walk around the lake, or tea by my wood stove. I appreciated his intelligence, his thoughtfulness, his perspective. And he was always gallant, gracious, and fun.

  The days shortened and Christmas drew near. Robin came and helped me hang the lights. I bought a small Christmas tree, created a wreath for the front door, and set candles and greens around the living room.

  That year, Lisa had no trouble recognizing me when I picked her and her family up from the bus. Robin and his family came over, and soon the house was full of talk and laughter and racing children. I loved having them all there, but they wore me out. As we moved through the Christmas rituals, I often needed to retreat to my rocking chair, thinking wistfully of the year before when I’d had boundless energy. Sometimes Colin came and snuggled in my lap.

  Lenny spent Christmas with his daughter and grandsons but called me Christmas night. When I got off the phone, Lisa asked, “Who was that?”

  “Lenny. A friend of mine.”

  “Is that the guy you met in the hospital? Greg told me you were wandering around the corridors picking up old men.”

  “Greg exaggerates. It was just one man. Lenny. And I did not pick him up. We met and conversed.”

  “And now he’s calling you. Is it a romance, Mother?”

  “No, not a romance. A good friendship.”

  When at last the celebrations were over, when Lisa and Phil and Jocelyn had gone on to visit Phil’s mother, when Robin and Alice and the children had returned to their usual lives, I wandered aimlessly around the empty house, exhausted, picking up a stray bit of wrapping paper, a hair tie left behind by Jocelyn. I opened the refrigerator, surveyed the crowded shelves, and wondered what to do with all that food. I’ll ask Lenny to come for a feast of leftovers, I decided.

  When New Year’s Eve came I was not the least tempted to go to Denver to dance. I spent the evening in my rocking chair by the wood stove, looking over my journal for the last year. It flowed smoothly form January 2011 when I was still seventy-nine to the entry the night before my eightieth birthday. After that it became a hodge-podge.

  When I picked up my journal for the first time after I came down the mountain an old woman, I found to my dismay that all I’d written of my thoughts, feelings, and experiences during the year I was young had been erased. In the four months that followed, I had described events and feelings as they occurred and also tried to recapture what I had written during the fold in time. Back and forth. As I read, my head spun. One year? Two years? Would I ever comprehend?

  I laid my journal aside, tilted my head back, and shut my eyes, gathering in the whole year, from birthday to birthday, putting all the details and emotions in order.

  My thoughts lingered over the summer in the mountains, cherishing the images of that magic time. Whatever else happens in my life, I thought, I had that summer—that magnificence, that strength to go high and far.

  Finally I picked up my journal, and, skipping the flashbacks, read again of the months just passed as I slowly healed and a
dapted to being an old woman, the puzzle of the fold in time, the friendship with Lenny. Is it romance? I asked myself. I don’t know.

  I thought of the Elirians and wondered if they had returned to their planet by now and sunk in to be renewed. I remembered their soft fur, their luminous eyes, their gentle hands, their love, lost again in the wonder of them and how they had changed my life. They told me to write my story, I remembered. I must start while the details are still fresh. Much of it is here in my journal, but I’ll have to unscramble it.

  At last I sighed and looked at my watch. Ten thirty. Past my bedtime. But I should think of at least one intention for the new year. I’ll start writing my story tomorrow, I decided. I’m ready now. Even if I don’t know the ending, I can begin.

  I wrote my intention, closed my journal, and went to bed. I was sound asleep when the phone rang at midnight.

  “Happy New Year!” It was Lenny.

  “Happy New Year,” I responded sleepily.

  “Sounds like I woke you up. I called to tell you my new year’s resolution. I want to see more of you. Will you come to tea at my place tomorrow?”

  New Year’s Day was the first time I visited Lenny in his apartment. The smell of fresh baking greeted me when he opened the door.

  His place was neat and spare—and dark. His door opened off a corridor, there were apartments on either side, and only one window in the single bedroom in the back. A tiny kitchenette in one corner opened into a main room which was living room, dining room, and office in one. A big desk with a computer took up another corner. There was a worn lounge chair with a leg rest and an end table beside it piled with books and papers. A television. A small table with two straight chairs pushed up against the counter that separated the kitchenette from the main room. A boom box on the kitchen counter. The only touch of luxury was a tall oak bookcase, filled with books, taking up one whole wall.

  “It’s small,” Lenny said as he took my coat, “but it serves me. I shed most of my stuff when my wife died and I moved out here to Colorado. Stuff’s heavy to move, and in the end, you know, you can’t take it with you.” He cocked his left eyebrow.