by S. B. Niccum
I think hard about what I’d like to wear—a combination of who I am and what I’d like others to see—but this ends up being tougher than I first imagined. Nothing really comes to mind, though I try and try to think of who I am. Why am I drawing a blank? I know who I was, but I guess I don’t know who I am now. Things have changed for me, I’m not even sure that I belong here anymore. Perhaps once I did, but now? I can still feel the weight of what I’ve done hanging over me like a huge anvil. I’m still carrying the anger and the insidious hate that I picked up back in Spirit Prison. I’m also carrying the worry over what Alex must be thinking of me right now, and the fact that he might hate me now. All of this churns inside of me, leaving an uneasy feeling in the pit of what used to be my stomach. While I roamed the mortal realm, I tried to ignore all of this—I pushed it down and buried it. If I look inwardly at all, I can see that it’s all still there, and part of me now.
Noticing that I’m having a hard time, Irene, my mother, wraps one arm around my shoulder and tells me to give myself some time.
“I don’t have time,” I tell her with unusual bitterness, moving away from her. This hurts her feelings, I can tell. She wants to have a relationship with me, she wants to be closer to me, but senses my apprehension.
“This is where you always go wrong, Tess,” Celeste pipes in, giving me a stern look in the process. “You are always in a hurry. You want to do it all right now, you expect things to happen the moment you want them to happen and are unwilling to wait for the right time.”
“But I’ve wasted decades,” I complain.
“Yes, you have, all because you didn’t want to wait and do things the way they should have been done!” There, she said it. What I knew everyone was thinking, but not saying.
“Okay, okay,” my mother says, trying to defuse the situation. “We are who we are, and we all make mistakes, don’t we Celeste?”
Dorian is looking from one to another with an untroubled look on his face. He almost looks like he’s enjoying our little tiff, but Celeste quickly wipes the grin off his face with a sharp look.
“Why? What have you done?” I ask Celeste with suspicious interest.
She shakes her head like she’s bothered and glides away from us, then sits on a park bench. I follow her and sit next to her, feeling remorseful for my snippy behavior.
Neither one of us says anything for a long time. Then finally she sighs. “She’s right. I’ve been keeping a secret for a long time,” she confesses.
“What?”
“How much do you remember about my life?”
“I remember that you eloped with a priest, Max, and had triplets—Amor, Luz, and Paz. I remember that when he died, you remarried some guy named Ricardo that you knew from before and had my father.”
“Yes,” she nods. “That’s about how it happened, except—” she bites her lips and sighs again. “I don’t know why this is so hard to admit, but okay, here it goes.” She exhales and her shoulders droop. “When Max died, I was devastated and scared. We weren’t rich and he worked two jobs just to keep us going. He tried so hard to provide for me, but he always felt bad that he couldn’t give me the standard of living that I had grown up with.
“When my father found out that I had eloped, he disowned me and gave my inheritance to Ricardo, my cousin, who I was supposed to marry in the first place.”
“You were supposed to marry your cousin?”
“Yes, disgusting, I know. But my father was old school and very prideful. Anyway, being disowned never bothered me. I didn’t care about that money, but Max always felt bad that he was the cause for me losing my inheritance. When he passed, I finally panicked. I didn’t know how I was supposed to provide for myself, the girls, and…and…I had just found out that morning that I was pregnant.”
“What? Are you saying that my dad is Max’s son?”
“Yes.”
“So this whole time…this whole mess…”
“Yes. It’s all my fault,” she admits with a heavy heart.
“Eros was the actual heir, not my father?”
Celeste nods.
“You—you made Ricardo believe that he was the father?”
She nods again, and hangs her head with shame.
“Why didn’t you tell him? When you saw Eros, why didn’t you come clean then? He would have gotten what he wanted and he would have left my father alone. It could have all been different!”
“I know. I couldn’t! I hated him! I hated Ricardo for being who he always had been, a lousy husband, and a poor excuse for a man. Eros reminded me so much of Ricardo, that I couldn’t stand the sight of him. That money, that house, that inheritance was supposed to be mine to begin with! Leo should have had it, and I intended for him to have it.” Celeste sighs again and her shoulders fall. “If I had known though what was to happen, I would have made a different choice.”
I’m speechless. Celeste’s choices changed so many lives, ruined them even! Infuriated, I want to lash out, but Dorian places one hand on my shoulder, silently reminding me of my own colossal mistakes. So I try to calm myself and think logically. Like me, Celeste hadn’t foreseen what her choices would do. I guess we are all guilty of something. I guess we all have major problems to deal with.
“You have to understand!” she pleads. “The love of my life had died! I was pregnant and had three little girls, one with special needs! I needed that money! That’s what I thought then, anyway.”
I sigh. “So what now?” I say, at last composed. “What can we do? It’s all over, it’s done.”
“We deal with it,” Celeste says, venturing a look in my direction.
My mother kneels next to Celeste and gently puts one hand over hers and wraps it tightly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you,” she pleads remorsefully. Here she was, a direct casualty from Celeste’s mistakes. Irene lost her life because of a chain of events that was set off by Celeste herself.
“I know,” Celeste says, placing her other hand over Irene’s. “You’re right though, I still have a long way to go.”
“How do we deal with it? What does that even mean? We can’t undo any of the things we’ve done, we can’t take it back,” I say.
“It’s called, Opening,” Dorian says and stands in front of me. “See? I’m Open and so is Luz. You can see right through us, right?”
“I can see right through everyone,” I say matter-of-factly, and Dorian laughs.
“Yes, yes, but I’m easy to read. You can see my intentions. My thoughts are out in the open for everyone to see and hear, if they want to.”
“Yes…” I say, noticing this for the first time. But it had always been like this with Dorian. Even when we were alive I could always tell what he was thinking. His intentions were always transparent to me.
“That’s because they were both innocents,” Celeste says defensively. “Innocents Open right away, because they have nothing to work out. They’re blameless.”
“She’s right,” Dorian confirms. “It was all part of the deal. All the pre-mortal spirits who agreed to a special mission through mortality knew that a special mission on earth would be hard. We knew we would forget that we agreed to having a disability, so to compensate, we would Open right away so as to understand why we had to endure such difficulties. We’ll also be among the first to resurrect and get our bodies back.”
“And that’s fair,” my mother says. “All innocents deserve these privileges. The first are last, and the last are first.”
“I still don’t know how to Open.”
“You have to go before the High Council and plead your case first. Then you can go to the Opening district and request a Spirit Guide,” Dorian says sagely. It’s still a bit odd to see him like this and I can’t help but smile whenever he speaks.
“Are you Opening, Celeste?” I ask because I see how dejected she looks—a lot like me—actually.
“Yes. Being up front with others and admitting your mistakes to those whom you’ve hurt is part of the
process,” she says miserably.
“Oh mother,” Luz skids to a full stop right in front of Celeste. I’m not even sure where she comes from, or how fast she was just traveling, but not a hair is out of place, every single little strand of her silver-blond locks looks perfect, with all the tiny little silver flowers fastened to the different strands, and her wings fluttering happily behind her. She’s unearthly—like a creature out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—part human, part angel, and part fairy. She hovers before us, looking earnestly into Celeste’s eyes. “You know no one cares. Every single person here is dealing with something.”
“You’re not,” Celeste’s mouth curves into a half smile, as she tucks a flower-laden strand of hair behind Luz’s ear.
Luz responds by making a tsking sound with her tongue. “No one judges you here.”
I look back at Dorian and I can see the love in his eyes. He’s not just smitten, he’s is totally and helplessly in love with her. And I love it! The happiness I feel for them warms a little spot inside of me, like the beginning of a thawing in my soul.
“She’s right, Celeste, no one is judging you,” my mother adds softly. Celeste looks at me to make sure that I wasn’t the exception. She finds that I look so miserable myself that neither one of us is in any position to be judgmental.
“So to Open, you have to go around confessing your sins to everyone?” I sum up in response to Celeste’s pleading eyes.
“No, not necessarily,” Luz says, looking at me now. “You work with your Spirit Guide at remembering all the parts of your life that need to be dealt with. Once you remember, you can deal with it in whatever way is appropriate. It may be that you’ll have to go to all the people that you’ve offended and ask them for forgiveness, other times you’ll have to earn their trust back. Since it’s too late to fix the harm, it can be difficult, but everyone can eventually Open up completely to the point where all thoughts and actions are discernable to everyone—like with Dorian and me.”
“What?” I ask, still not understanding fully what she means.
“It means you make all your thoughts available for all to see,” my mother says, and as she says it, I can feel waves of sadness rippling off of her like heat waves. “It means that you have nothing to hide, that your confidence in the Eternals is absolute and that your desires are one with theirs.”
“You mean ...”
“Yes, all your thoughts,” she assures me.
No wonder it’s hard. I can’t imagine making every single one of my thoughts available for anyone to read.
“It’s really not that odd or hard,” Luz says and reaches her hand toward Dorian. As she does this I can sample what she means. Her thoughts were clear and simple, pure, and undiluted, she loves him and wants nothing more than to resurrect so she can marry him and experience love the way it was meant to be experienced. Her Open thoughts also reveal that she wishes to spend more time alone with him, but they can’t because they are both very busy with their angelic duties. Neither one is upset about this lack of private time, but they very much look forward to the day when they’ll have nothing to do but be together. Simple. Their thoughts are right there in the open, for everyone to see. They are pure thoughts too. Nothing they think is inappropriate or shameful.
In frustration, I sweep one hand over my face as I try to assimilate all of this. It seems so hard and unattainable to me. Opening sounds like being around a bunch of expert discerners—such as myself—all the time. Why? What is the point in going around with all your thoughts out there in the open? Here’s Celeste, working hard to attain some higher plane of living, but looking miserable and ashamed. She can’t change anything, yet she has to go around confessing to everyone! And my mother, she too is carrying around some heavy load that I can see is making her sad. I wonder what it is? What is she working on? What’s keeping her from Opening?
My mother’s dark, piercing eyes are on me, trying to discern, no doubt, what I’m thinking. “You know,” she says. “In life, while growing up, I always thought I was…strange, crazy even. I was always getting startled by feelings that were not my own, and things that weren’t there. In my mind I used to call them the shadows.” She looks at me significantly. “My grandmother was Indian, she would say that I had a rare gift. It never felt like a gift to me though. Then I met your father.” She smiles, relishing the memory. “He was always so full of life, always up to something mischievous. I don’t know what he saw in me, we had little in common, until,” she sighs, “I had one of those episodes. We were at a party, and something dark, something evil, totally paralyzed me with fear. To my amazement, Leo saw what I had felt. There was no denying it.
“We both looked at each other, and that’s when we knew that we had a lot more in common than mere attraction. Leo, with his usual frankness, confessed to the fact that sometimes he saw things that no one else saw. He described what he saw and I told him about the shadows, and the feelings I got now and then.
“I told him of all the instances when I had been sure of feeling different shadows. Good ones, like those of dead relatives, and bad ones like the one we felt at that party. He said that growing up, he had seen things too. He’d seen blurry shadows—some dark and some filled with light. Some zoomed by, while others were still, but flickering like a light bulb that’s about to go out.
“After we confessed this to each other, we became inseparable. We got married a few months later. Ten months after that, you were born.” She smiles tenderly. A shadow passes over her face and the waves of sadness start rippling out again like heat waves.
“I could hear them,” I confess. “The cast-outs and the disembodied spirits. It was like listening to a radio with bad reception.” I look back at Celeste whose attention is riveted on our conversation.
Irene, my mother, nods in agreement. “I know. We often wondered if you would inherit any of our…gifts. The only consolation we had was that we—we,” she chokes up and looks away.
“That you’d be there to help me with it?”
She turns back and looks at me with anxiety on her face. “When I was killed, I—” She shakes her head, indicating how helpless she felt. “I didn’t know what to do. You were five and you could already hear Celeste, your grandmother. We knew because you talked to her all the time and it would always coincide with when I felt her presence. When Leo was around, well…he could see her!” Irene turns toward Celeste and they exchange glances.
“I was told that I could be sent down to be with one or the other. Leo was in prison, wrongly accused for my murder, and you in foster care. Tess you have to believe me,” she pleads. “The decision was impossible! I drove myself half mad trying to figure out what to do and who to be with!
“Then Celeste came up with the idea. We knew that you would be able to hear me, but you no longer remembered us! The shock of that evening had been so great that you shut down completely.”
I look back at Celeste, who was intent on watching my mother. Then I look back at Irene, who looks as if she’s confessing a major sin. “The night you died, I was so scared,” I explain. “I must have blocked it out with all the rest of my memories of you.”
“Yes,” my mother affirms, her face shows all the pain from that hellish night—the night that my father kept reliving in his bubble—the night that took his freedom and changed all our lives forever. “We talked it over, trust me, Tess. I gave it serious consideration and I knew that perhaps one day you would blame me for the decision, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Celeste stands up and comes to stand next to my mother as a sign of support.
“Celeste suggested that we let things be as they were. She would continue to watch over you, while I went to watch over Leo in prison. We also decided that it would be better if no one spoke to you at all, and that we would let you grow up not knowing of your abilities. Celeste assured me that she would keep a watchful eye over you, as she always had, and that she would keep me informed on your life.” Irene’s eyes turn to me wit
h anxiety. “I hope you didn’t think that I didn’t care about you, or that I didn’t want to be part of your life. Please forgive me if you did.” She looks so worried about this that her whole face shows the pain she feels over it. Now I know the source of her pain. Now I see what is keeping my mother from moving forward and Opening.
“I never felt that way, and I never blamed you,” I say truthfully. “Deep inside, I always felt that I had been loved. That was one thing I always knew for certain, it seemed to have been ingrained in me somehow.”
“Really? You mean it?”
I nod. She peers into my eyes, trying to discern my truthfulness. She finds it and believes me. Unexpectedly, her face changes right before my eyes, from worry and doubt, to relief. I can literally see as this feeling makes its way through her, distilling the negativity out of her. A transformation starts to take place right before my eyes as gratefulness, peace, and finally joy begins to fill her. Surprisingly, I can see her! All of her life is exposed right before me. I can see her past fears and how she conquered them, I can see her past mistakes and how she fixed them. I can see her completely!
Suddenly, she starts to shine majestically, illuminating from within in a beautiful soft pink hue that almost blinds me. It’s like watching a flower bloom.
“What is happening?” I ask with awe, shielding my eyes in the process.
“She’s Opening!” Celeste gasps. “Thanks to you, she’s finally Opening.”
Chapter 6
My mother is engulfed in what looks like fire. Flames dance around her, sweeping her hair up into a whirlwind. Her face is turned upward and her mouth is curved into a smile that reflects joy, peace, love, and confidence all at once.
“Thanks to me? How did I do this?” I marvel.
“You were the catalyst. She’s been waiting for your true forgiveness for a long time. In fact, that was the only thing holding her back from Opening and going back in there after your father.”
“But, she’s had it. I mean, I don’t think I ever blamed her. Maybe when I was little…”