by Cat Rambo
Karen got off the table and nervously shook his shoulders until his eyes opened and he stared at her, looking perplexed. Before she could ask "What happened? What did you see?" he said to her "What are you?"
Karen jumped up, grabbed some money from her purse, and set it on the massage table. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'd better go. I hope you're okay."
Over the next couple of days she thought she should call Mr. Crow-Talker, but couldn't make herself do it. When her next visit with Dr. Connell came she didn't say anything about the encounter until nearly the end of the hour. Finally she got up her courage and told him what had happened, leaving out only the man's strange question at the end. "Do you think he'll sue me?" she asked.
"I wouldn't think so, Dr. Connell said. "He goes into trances professionally. I would think what happens there is his risk." Karen nodded. "I'm interested in what he said, though. Didn't you tell me you were an only child?"
"I am" Karen said. "I don't know why he said that."
Dr. Connell made that hmm sound they must teach in therapy school. "Maybe you have a shadow-self. A kind of psychic twin, or sister, whom you've hidden away and need to release." He smiled. "Apparently she's very powerful."
"What about the 3:12 thing?"
He shrugged, "Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe once you free the shadow, the sister, the outward symptom will go away and we'll never actually find out. Would that be a problem?"
"I guess not."
Over the next few sessions they looked at possible secret selves, from mythological images of fierce warriors and beloved mother spirits, to high school characters, like cheerleaders and prom queens. Sometimes they were actual pictures Karen was supposed to stare at and see if she reacted. At other times she had to make up stories about an imaginary life. None of it seemed to trigger anything.
Finally, Karen decided that maybe all her problems just came from working too hard. Maybe what was missing from her life was just old-fashioned romance. When she'd first started with Dr. Connell he'd asked about relationships, and she'd just said she didn't have one. Now she admitted she'd been hurt, by someone named Bart, and ever since had avoided even the chance of connecting with anyone.
Only, she could hardly remember Bart's face or anything about him except that he liked model trains. Her memory lapse bothered her, but she didn't tell Dr. Connell.
She went to a singles retreat, in a center that promised romance and spirituality (it sounded safe, she thought). The first apparently came in a cocktail party Friday evening, the second in a chant and drum ceremony late Saturday night. She took the wooden boat with her. Lately, she'd been taking it everywhere, and panicked if she thought she left it behind.
At the retreat a man named Bobby Hand took an interest in her. She liked Bobby, he was funny, and handsome, with black hair and deep eyes, and he knew about books and movies, not just television. Most of all she liked his name, it meant something, it was not just a designation. He joked with her that he was a Secret Master, one of those saints that pretend to be ordinary humans so they can help people in need. "And what help do you give them?" Karen asked.
Bobby smiled. He had a nice slow grin. "I help women. With my hand. Late at night."
Karen laughed, but she was blushing too. "Better not spread that around too much," she said. "The government will investigate you for unlicensed salvation."
"Hey, I've got a license. I just keep it secret. Remember? My sacred mission?" She didn't answer, only looked down, her eyes wet. "What's wrong?" Bobby said. "What'd I say?"
"Nothing. I'm just—I don't know, I'm just being silly." She wiped below her eyes delicately, with her thumb and finger, then tried to smile away her embarrassment.
"Hey," he said, "suppose you discovered you had a secret calling. A spiritual mission of some sort. What name would you choose?"
She said "If my calling is supposed to be secret, wouldn't I have to not tell anyone?" He rolled his eyes, and she laughed. "Okay," she said. "Let me think. Forever."
"What?"
"Karen Forever. That's what I'd call myself."
"Karen Forever" he repeated, his voice soft, almost solemn. Anger flashed in her, she had no idea why, but for a second she wanted to hit him just for saying her name, as if he had no right. But she hid it, and it passed, and when he kissed her she was able to soften her lips into his.
After the retreat they traveled back to the city together. As they left the wooded center and waited for the shuttle to take them to the train station Karen heard a far-off noise, weeping and yells of pain. When she looked around, flashes of darkness seemed to black out pieces of the world. She found herself staring at something very far away, lines and lines of stooped people clutching small packages against their bodies. She made a soft noise, gripped the wooden boat in her jacket pocket. "Are you all right?" Bobby asked. "Is something wrong?" She couldn't think what to say so she said nothing, and then seconds later everything was back to normal.
She told Dr. Connell that Bobby Hand didn't really excite her but she felt comfortable around him. The therapist asked "Is that so bad?" and she said "No, of course not. I guess."
They were dating for seven weeks, and sleeping together for two, when Karen went to a late-season family barbecue at his parents' house. She'd met them before, at an outdoor concert—"safe space," Bobby had called it—so there wasn't a lot of pressure. They made salmon for her, which was thoughtful, because for some reason she could not seem to eat meat, not since that day in the diner. As she later told Dr. Connell, she wasn't expecting any trouble. And then she met Eleanora, Bobby's sister.
Eleanora Hand wasn't trouble, she was exhilaration. Very thin, with long blond hair and delicate quick fingers, and hazel eyes that seemed as large as a child's, she talked about dead poets as if they were friends, and television vampires as if they lived down the block. She tossed salad as if she was creating a new universe, and played volleyball as if she was destroying an old one. Karen laughed with her, and stared at her, and at one point had to take Bobby's hand to stop herself following Eleanora into the bathroom. 3:12 came and passed with only the slightest crackle on her skin. That night she told Bobby she wanted to make an early night, and after he dropped her off she called Eleanora and talked with her for two hours.
"Oh God," she told Dr. Connell, "do you think I'm a lesbian?"
"That's something no one can tell you but yourself. But would it be so terrible if you were?"
"No. No, I don't—I mean, I was never like that. I had friends, you know, but—we talked about boys."
She spent more and more time with El (only Karen called her that, her family called her Nora), and when Bob asked her to marry him her first thought was how she couldn't wait to call Eleanora to ask her to be her maid of honor.
Dr. Connell frowned when she told him. "Are you marrying this man just to get closer to his sister?"
"No, of course not." The doctor said nothing and she added, "Well, maybe a little bit. If I'm married to Bob, then El and I will be sisters."
"What's wrong with just being her friend?"
Karen felt like she was trying to work something out. "I don't know," she said. "It feels like we have to be actual sisters. And like…like someone has to pay a price somehow."
"What kind of price?"
"I don't know."
"And that 'someone' would be Bob?" Karen didn't answer, didn't look at him. Dr. Connell said "Why not just be close to Eleanora and leave Bob out of it? Why use him that way?"
She shook her head, softly. "He's just a man," she said.
Dr. Connell's eyebrows rose. "Now you do sound like a lesbian."
"I don't mean it that way." She was staring at the floor. "He's just a man. A person. A human being." When Dr. Connell didn't answer she said "Sometimes it feels like no one else exists but me and El. Everyone else are just, I don't know, shadows. What does it matter what happens to a shadow?"
She looked at him, suddenly ashamed. "Oh God," she said. "I'm horrible."
&n
bsp; "That's just a label," Dr. Connell said. "A judgment. The thing we all need to do is look beyond that, see who we really are."
Karen knew it was just a platitude but she found herself squinting, as if she actually could see a vision of herself that was far off, or small, or hidden. The office wall, with its tribal masks and paintings, seemed to shimmer, and beyond it—endless gray hills, crowds of people, sullen, slow… She made a noise, like someone startled suddenly from a dream.
"What is it?" Dr. Connell said. "What happened?"
"Nothing," Karen told him. "I was just—I don't know, it was like I fell asleep or something. Sorry."
For their honeymoon plans Bob surprised her with a booking on a cruise ship, and was himself surprised when she recoiled, as if he'd offered her a snake. Karen told herself it was because she'd be out of range of El, whom she called every day, sometimes two or three times. But there was something else—the thought of being on a boat made her queasy, she couldn't say why. Lately, since meeting Bob and Eleanora, her 3:12 "appointment" (as she and Dr. Connell called it) seemed to weaken, but now the feeling came back stronger than ever, and it was only mid-morning.
Bob thought it was fear of seasickness, and told her "Just think of it as a gigantic ferryboat." The spasm of terror that seized her was something Bob had never seen before. He reached out to comfort her but she ran from the room.
Bob canceled the trip and they went to Paris. Karen got a global cell phone and called Eleanora every afternoon, often from the ladies' room in a museum or café, so her new husband wouldn't notice. Sometimes Eleanora called her at night, when Bob was asleep, and Karen would step onto the balcony of their elegant hotel room, talk for an hour or more, and then tell Bob the next morning that she was tired from jet lag.
The day after Karen and Bob returned, Eleanora called Karen at work to tell her she felt dizzy. The next day she felt faint, and the day after that as well. Karen told her to rest, said she'd be over later that day. After they hung up she thought maybe she should insist El go to the doctor. She could go with her to make sure she did it.
She called back and got no answer. Less than five minutes had gone by, had El gone out to the store or something? Karen interrupted her boss in a phone call to tell him she had to take care of an urgent errand. When Eleanora didn't answer the bell, Karen let herself into the apartment. She found her sister-in-law on the floor, unconscious and bleeding from the side of her mouth.
The doctors called it a rare brain parasite, and gave it a name even they couldn't seem to pronounce. Incurable, they said. Waste away, they said. No terrible pain, they said. And, three months, they said.
After the diagnosis came, Karen sat with unconscious Eleanora all night, held her hand long after Bob and El's parents had gone home to rest. When her sister-beyond-all-laws finally opened her eyes, Karen whispered "I love you, El."
"Forever?"
"And ever."
Eleanora's family wanted to make her comfortable. Bob found a hospice called JourneyCare, but Karen refused to give up. She bullied the parents and the doctors to send Eleanora to a clinic where they could try exotic and experimental drugs. She went into debt to bring in doctors from Europe, she found shamans who waved dog bones up and down Eleanora's body, and rubbed her bald head with some sort of animal grease. Bob argued with Karen, said his sister needed peace, not torture by false hope and quack medicine.
"I'm not giving her up" Karen said.
"It's not about you," Bob said. "Who the hell put you in charge of the sick and dying?"
Every day, at 3:12 pm, the queasiness returned. I don't have time for you Karen told it and tried to push it away. One afternoon, just after she'd given Eleanora some juice, the sick feeling hit her so hard she had to sit down on the metal chair at the foot of the bed. Looking through the jumble in her purse for Tums she came across the wooden boat. She held it in her hand, stared at it, then closed her fist around it so hard she could feel it cutting her palm.
"It's okay," Eleanora said. "I'm all right."
"No. You're not. You can't die. There's no point if you die." El didn't answer. Karen kissed her cheek, her forehead, her lips. "Take my body," she said. "I never wanted it. It's all a mistake." She had no idea what she was talking about.
El smiled. "Aren't I the one who's supposed to get delirious?"
The next morning, Dr. Connell emailed her. She'd stopped seeing him when he started talking about acceptance, and stages of grief, and almost didn't read his message. But no, he told her how he'd been cleaning out old magazines from his waiting room when he came across an article about a Healing Tree. There was a sick girl, and she went to a place where three rivers meet, and there people prayed for her, and instead of dying she'd turned into a tree. Now sick people went there to touch the trunk or the branches, and sometimes they were healed. Not always, of course, probably most people went away disappointed, but still…
Karen had to stop reading. It was the first sign of hope, and yet, just the thought of it somehow made her sick, she wanted to trash the email, get El from the nursing home, and just go—somewhere. Instead, she called Bob and told him they needed to arrange for nurses so they could take Eleanora on a trip.
They flew to a newly constructed airport some fifteen miles from the Tree. There they hired a white limousine converted to a hospital room on wheels and traveled straight to the site. Crutches and other aids lined the road, many of them, the driver said, left by people who had not yet been healed, but who wanted to show their commitment. There were long lines of people standing (or sitting in wheelchairs) behind ropes with guards, but the limousines were allowed to pull to the front, for its passengers to mingle with the people who came off the private yachts in the river. No one seemed to mind. Almost everyone had come from far away, and there were performers to tell the Tale of the Tree, and food, and spiritual healers to pray over people and promise them health ("No connection to Tree" their leaflets read, apparently a legal requirement). Everyone seemed to believe they'd come to a place of safety, where sickness just stopped, as if it had given up and now just waited to be destroyed. They believed this even though they could see people faint on line, or cough blood, or worst of all, leave the Tree still covered in sores. Those people, they told themselves, didn't believe. They didn't want to be healed. It wasn't the Tree's fault.
When Eleanora and her family reached the front of the line, men in white nurses' uniforms offered to carry El to the trunk. No, Karen said, she would do it, she didn't need any help. But she just stood and stared at the Tree. It was so much bigger than she had thought it would be. The lilacs were in full bloom even though it was way after the season. The smell made her nauseous.
When Bob suggested they let the nurses do it, Karen lifted El into a tight embrace against her body and walked forward. Karen was wearing a long gray dress, with big pockets for medicine, and something in one of them pressed sharply against her thigh. The boat, she realized. She didn't remember taking it. I have to get rid of it, she thought. She and Eleanora would be safe if she could bury it some place, or just throw it away. But Eleanora felt so empty, if Karen set her down for just a moment a breeze might lift her right out of her body, to drop her in the river.
The river. There was something out there, among the crowded boats, something big, and gray, and patient. Don't look, Karen thought, look only at the Tree.
The branches waved, and a voice seemed to come from the rustling leaves. It spoke softly, only for Karen. "So," it said. "You've come."
Karen didn't know where the sound came from, or if others could hear it, but she didn't care. "Please" she said. "You have to help her. She is my life, my heart."
"You who are called Heartless in every tongue?"
"I don't understand what you mean." But as she spoke the words—or thought them, she wasn't sure—a fear swept through her that she was lying, that she knew exactly what the voice meant. Images came to her, endless mounds of colorless dirt, black stones, crowds and crowds of people with dow
ncast eyes. And boats. Squat ferryboats on a dark river.
Karen turned her head, she couldn't stop herself. There it was, among the yachts and cruise ships, something only she could see, a gray ferryboat, heavy in the water, filled with more people than you would think it could hold yet none of them touching each other. Karen looked away but the image stayed. She could still see the one figure that stood out, a young man with slick black hair and ruby cufflinks.
"Please," Karen said to the Tree. El felt weightless against her now, an origami doll. "Heal her and we'll go away and never bother you again."
"You have a choice," the Tree said.
Hope lifted Karen's heart. "Tell me what to do."
"Either you go on the boat or she does."
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. It's time to return."
The memories came clearer now. The hills, the shadows, the lines and lines of dead shuffling off the boats. She said "I won't go back."
"Then she goes. I will heal her but only if you return. So you see, it is you who is killing her."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"You wanted to be human. To escape. Why shouldn't you suffer what all humans suffer?"
Karen looked away. She could feel her body shift, become longer, freer in some terrible way. She remembered it all now, her sisters, the contest. "It wasn't my idea, I just lost a contest. That's all. And then I forgot."
The Tree said "If you hadn't wanted to run away you would have remembered. You had the reminder, every day." Still holding El against her, Karen took the boat from her pocket, stared at it. The Tree said, "And now you have a choice."
Karen threw the boat at the Tree. It disappeared among the branches. "Choose," the Tree said.
"Why?"
"There is always a price. Choose."
For an instant she could see her life as Karen, everything that would come if she chose herself over Eleanora. El would die, and Karen would create a memorial. She would live a long time—a flicker of a moment, really, but it would feel like forever. She and Bob would entwine together, the memory of Eleanora kept warm between them. And then?
