I rubbed my eyes. “Yes, but only because you were shouting at me and shaking me like a martini mixer.” I flopped back down on my pillows.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked, bending forward to gape at me, as if I were a peculiar alien from another planet.
“It’s Saturday morning.”
“Do you know who I am?”
Wanting to fall back to sleep, I groaned. “Of course. You’re my mother.”
She rose to her feet and blew out a breath. “Thank God. I was worried when you wouldn’t open your eyes.”
“I was sound asleep, Mom,” I replied. Flinging my arm across my forehead, I lay in silence for a moment or two while my mother stood over my bed. Finally, unable to go back to sleep, I tossed the covers aside and sat up.
“You were talking in your sleep,” Mom said apprehensively. “Were you dreaming?”
I tried to remember, but couldn’t. The past few hours of sleep felt like a black hole. “I don’t know. What was I saying?”
I hadn’t told her about the alternate life that had flashed before my eyes on the mountainside. I’d only told Bailey, because I knew I could trust her to keep a secret. My mother, however…not so much.
“You kept saying ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Over and over.”
Though I remembered nothing from any dream just now, I suspected I was apologizing for my imaginary affair.
I began to wonder if I should return to the hospital and tell someone about all of this. A head injury wasn’t something to mess around with.
“I don’t remember,” I replied, wishing Bailey were here instead, because I knew she would listen with understanding. She wouldn’t panic like my mother would if she thought I was delusional.
Rising to my feet, I reached for my bathrobe. “I just realized I didn’t eat any supper. I think I’ll make some toast.”
Mom followed me into the kitchen, insisting that I sit down and wait at the table while she took care of it.
o0o
Five days later, after my mother returned home to Port Orchard and I returned to work, I found myself feeling increasingly stressed and anxious. I wondered if I should see a psychiatrist or something, because I still couldn’t purge, from my mind, the life I had relived on the mountain, as I flew like a human projectile over the handlebars of my bike.
Thoughts of that other life began to consume me like some sort of teenage obsession, and I couldn’t let go of the desire to reach it somehow. I felt a frustration like nothing I’d ever known. Night after night, I went to sleep praying that I would escape back to that world again, if only in my dreams, to be with the son who needed me.
I felt it deep in my gut—that Logan was waiting for me to be his mother again.
During the day, I wrestled with feelings of longing that led to feelings of hopelessness, which I feared might eventually lead to something darker—perhaps a serious depression that would swallow me up.
After a week of this torture—which I tried to convince myself was not rational—I decided that I needed to understand what, exactly, had happened to me on that mountain, so that I could move on and live the current life I had been given.
I googled “life flashing before your eyes” on the Internet and read all sorts of accounts from people who’d had near-death experiences, but no one described anything that came close to mine. They all, in their brief brush with death, revisited their own lives, which only left me more confused and uneasy.
I was about to call my doctor and make an appointment for an assessment of some kind, when I stumbled across a conspicuous link within the text of someone’s personal account: Memories of Past Lives.
Naturally, I clicked on it.
Chapter Eight
I must have sat in front of the computer for three hours, reading scientific and theological theories about reincarnation, accompanied by actual case studies. From what I read, it appeared that the scientific community placed more value on the reports from young children than adults, for children were less likely to be influenced by what they had seen or learned during their lives.
One case described a child who, at the age of two, told his parents they were not his real parents, and he named the people who were, along with details about where they lived and the names of his brothers and sisters. The boy’s name was Paul, but he insisted it was Derek.
Paul’s mother, understandably disturbed and upset by her son’s emotional state and his insistence that he belonged to someone else, began an investigation and uncovered evidence that there was indeed a family by that name living in the town Paul described. Further investigation revealed that the family’s twenty-three-year-old son had died tragically in a motorcycle accident. The death had occurred shortly before Paul’s birth.
The mother arranged for her and Paul to visit the family, who lived on the opposite side of the country. When the family was introduced to Paul, who was now four, they believed wholeheartedly that he was the reincarnation of their late son, Derek.
Later in life, when Paul reached adulthood, he bore a shocking physical resemblance to Derek. Black-and-white photographs of the two men, both aged twenty-three, were displayed side-by-side on the web page, and they could have been twin brothers. The sight of it sent an unexpected shot of fear and foreboding to my core, for this—at least to me—represented substantive evidence that they could indeed be the same person, living two decades apart.
But was it truly reincarnation? Or some other strange phenomenon no one had yet understood? Or was their report a hoax?
The radiator shuddered in my living room and the heat came on, causing me to jump with alarm. Laying a hand over my heart—now pounding like a drum—I gazed around and realized it was pitch dark everywhere in my house except the corner in the living room where my desk was located. I must have switched on the lamp at dusk, but I didn’t remember doing it.
I checked the time. It was 10:30 p.m. and the house seemed eerily quiet, though the wind was gusting outside and rattling the windowpanes. Shivering a little, I pulled my sweater tighter about myself, feeling rather creeped out by everything I had just read on the Internet. I hadn’t felt that way since I watched The Exorcist on television with Mark, a year before we were married. He went home afterward and left me alone in my apartment. I didn’t sleep a wink that night.
Rising from my chair, I crossed to the kitchen and switched on the overhead light, then went room to room and turned on lights everywhere, as well as the TV, and that was much better. I didn’t feel quite so alone with the reassuring laughter of the audience on The Big Bang Theory.
I then decided to call my mom and check in with her. I asked about her day and she asked about mine, and eventually I made the mistake of letting it slip that I’d had a vision during the accident and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. She asked me about a few details and then I told her about what I’d just read on the reincarnation website.
“Oh, Katlyn. Surely you don’t believe in any of that mumbo jumbo,” she scoffed. “You were unconscious and had a dream. That’s all it was, and you had it because of your divorce and because you still want to be married and have children. That’s a goal you should be focusing on. You shouldn’t be reading about reincarnation and past lives on the Internet. You should be surfing around a dating site. What about that eHarmony place I always see advertised on television? I’m sure you could meet a wonderful man if you just put yourself out there. The clock’s ticking, you know.”
I held the phone away from my ear, because I didn’t want to listen to what she was saying. I wished I’d called Bailey instead.
Later, after I promised not to waste any more precious time reading about reincarnation—only so she’d stop pressuring me about finding a husband—we hung up, but I still couldn’t get all the unsettling ideas out of my head. And still, I had no real understanding about what happened to me.
I’d heard of people undergoing past life regressions through hypnotism, but did I really want to venture into
such a New Age world? Most people I knew would think I’d lost my marbles if I told them I thought I was reincarnated. And there were so many quacks and scam artists out there—trying to take advantage of people like me.
No, Katelyn. This is ridiculous. There’s no such thing as reincarnation and you didn’t have a vision of a past life. It was just a very vivid dream.
Besides, what good would it do to know about a past life? This was my life today—I was Katelyn Roberts, recently divorced television reporter—and if I had been someone else, in another time or parallel universe, what difference would it make to know about that? Wasn’t it more important to live for today and the future, not the past?
In the end, I resolved to do what any sane person would do. I forced myself to stop thinking about that vision on the steep tract of the mountain, focus on the here and now, and investigate eHarmony.com.
One Year Later
Chapter Nine
“I think you should go for it,” Bailey said as we sat down at the crowded bar and ordered two glasses of white wine while we waited for our table. “It’s CNN.”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied, without much enthusiasm.
Bailey touched my hand and spoke compassionately. “I’m sorry. I know you were hoping to get that anchor position at the station, and it sucks that they brought in someone else. So maybe this is your cue that it’s time for a change. This could be your dream job, or it might lead to something else that’s new and different. On top of that, you’d be working in New York City at the Time Warner Center, and I could come and visit you. We could shop and go to shows.”
I shifted my purse on my lap. “It’s on the other side of the country. You know I’m a West Coast girl, born and raised. My parents are here, you’re here, all my friends. And rental prices in New York…” I whistled. “I’d probably have to live in a closet.”
“I’d bet you’d get an adorable apartment,” Bailey replied. “Or you could commute from Brooklyn or—”
“Become a Jersey girl,” I finished for her, more enthusiastically, as the bartender poured our wine and slid both glasses closer.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Bailey picked up her glass and raised it for a toast. “Cake Boss is in New Jersey. His bakery is in a town called Hackensack, which is where John Travolta grew up.”
“Wow.” I raised my glass as well. “You are a lovely and cascading fountain of information.”
We clinked glasses and sipped our wine, then she set hers down on the bar. For a moment, she fingered the stem of her glass, watching me intently, then she raised an eyebrow. “There’s something else on your mind. I can tell.”
“What do you think that is?” I asked. “Because I’m not exactly sure myself.”
“Don’t be coy,” Bailey replied. “I know for a fact that you’ve been biting your tongue these past few months, not wanting to sound like a broken record by bringing up your… What should we call it? Your biking vision. I know you too well, Katelyn. You haven’t stopped thinking about those summers in Maine with your handsome, golden-haired husband and the son you had together. None of the men you’ve gone out with have interested you in the least, though I give you props for trying. Now you have a chance to get a job on the East Coast and I suspect you want to go—just so you can search for Chris and Logan. Because a part of you still thinks they’re real.”
I leaned back on the bar stool and crossed one leg over the other. “That’s not why I want to go there,” I told her, even though I was lying through my teeth, mostly to myself. “I’m over that and we shouldn’t even be talking about it.”
I didn’t want to slide back into anxious like I was in the weeks following my accident when all I’d wanted to do was escape from this life and live another one.
“Why not?” she asked, leaning forward. “You’ve just spent the past year forcing yourself to go out on dates while trying to convince yourself that it was just a dream. Maybe it was a dream, maybe it wasn’t, but either way, something is pulling you there, and because of that, you have no interest in meeting anyone else around here.”
I stared at the ceiling for a few seconds and shook my head at myself before turning my attention back to Bailey. “If you must know, I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t a past life that I saw that day, but a premonition of things to come. Maybe that’s where my future is—out east.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And I think you should follow your gut.”
I thought about that for a moment and frowned. “Do you think Chris actually exists? I don’t even know his last name. That part was never revealed to me.”
“Maybe,” she said, sipping her wine again. “Or maybe not. Maybe they’re just images and representations of the sort of life you want to live.”
“Hmm.” I sat forward, considering that. “Maybe that’s what it was. I don’t know.” I threw up my hands. “All I want is to feel as if I’m fulfilling my true destiny, whatever that might be, and I certainly don’t feel that way here and now—especially after losing the anchor job to the reporter they brought in from a different station. I feel like I’m in limbo, waiting for something to happen, and I want to feel fulfilled, like I’m on the right path.”
“I think we all feel like we’re in limbo until we find our true calling.”
I drew in a deep breath and let it out, taking notice of the lights dimming for dinner in the restaurant and the increasing volume of the mellow jazz playing on the sound system. “Have you found your true calling, Bailey? Or do you still feel like there’s something more out there, just over the horizon?”
She inclined her head with a smile. “I can’t imagine living life with the belief that there’s not something more over the horizon. At least not at our age. We still have so much living to do. I just hope that when I come to the end of the road, I’ll feel like I had a great life and I did all the things I wanted to do. I’d like to feel…satisfied.” She picked up her wine again.
“That sounds very Zenlike, but you still haven’t answered my question. Do you know what your true calling is?”
She glanced down at her hand that rested on the base of her wineglass. “Honestly? No. And maybe that’s the biggest challenge—figuring it out.” Her eyes lifted. “At least I like my job. I have no desire to change careers—only to keep climbing in the current one—but maybe that’s the problem. I’m too content. I haven’t had a glimpse of something else. I’m not really on a quest like you are, searching for something different. Yet, I don’t want to give up the idea that there might be something more out there that will make my life truly complete.”
I leaned forward, intrigued. “Like what?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know. That’s the missing piece of the puzzle. Maybe it’s a husband and kids, but I’d hate to be the sort of woman who needs a man to feel complete.”
“Trust me,” I said, gazing about the restaurant, “a man doesn’t always make you feel complete. He can suck the life right out of you if he’s the wrong sort.”
The waitress arrived just then and led us to our table.
“Do you think you’ll ever forgive Mark for what he did?” Bailey asked as we sat down.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but at least I no longer feel like I want him back as my husband. I haven’t felt that I wanted him that way since the accident. If anything, that vision made me realize that it’s exactly like you said: He wasn’t the one for me. We weren’t meant to be together, and maybe one day I’ll look back on this and realize he did me a favor.”
“I’m sure you will.”
I glanced down at my menu and decided once and for all that it was time I said good-bye to the comfort zone of this familiar life and made a change—because it was entirely possible that my true destiny was waiting for me in New York.
Chapter Ten
Something felt different the following morning when I woke up later than usual—at 10:30 a.m. Maybe it was the sparrow singing a cheerful melody outside my b
edroom window, or it could have been because of the firm decision I’d made the night before—to pursue the job at CNN and move to New York City if I was offered it.
There’s something rejuvenating about new beginnings, and when I rose from bed, feeling inspired for the first time in ages, I realized I had been coasting along on the same dreary road for too long. Suddenly, the idea of living in a new city and making new friends sent a burst of energy into my veins, so I did it. I boogied to the kitchen to make a healthy shake for breakfast and then drove down to the station to put together a submission portfolio of my best interviews and news stories.
When I arrived, I found Gerry, one of the weekend producers, sitting at his desk eating a mess of Mr. Noodles from a Styrofoam tub. Gerry was about my age with a face as perfect as Brad Pitt’s. Even so, he was a computer geek at heart, and he dressed like a slob and lived at home in his mother’s basement.
“Hey,” I said, dropping my oversized purse onto the floor and flopping down on the swivel chair beside him. “I don’t suppose you’d do me a favor.”
“Sure, what do you need?” He leaned back in his chair and raised his feet onto his desk, which was littered with an empty chip bag and a half bottle of Coca-Cola.
Wheeling my chair closer, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and spoke conspiratorially. “Can you keep a secret?”
He gave me a devious look. “Always.”
I paused and checked over my shoulder. Thankfully, because it was Saturday morning, the newsroom was quiet. “I need to create a portfolio of some of my stories and interviews, so I have to get into the archives and pull something together. Would you be able to help me with that?”
“Are you applying for another job?” he asked in a hushed tone, leaning forward as well.
I glanced over my shoulder. “I haven’t told anyone yet, and I don’t want to spread it around unless there’s a good chance I’ll get it, and I have to apply first. Do you have some time this morning?”
The Color of Forever Page 3
