ONCE UPON ANOTHER TIME

by McQuestion, Rosary

  The furrow between her brows deepened. She leaned forward. “I’m certain of two things. Your boyfriend does not have psychic abilities and he had at one time, or another, met your husband. Let’s read the rest of the cards and see if answers surface.”

  I became anxious. Seven years was a long time. If Gavin met Matt through an acquaintance, it could account for him not remembering they’d met and it would explain why Gavin thought he’d known me. However, I’d seen Gavin in a dream before I’d met him and like Mother Paula, I’d seen Gavin and Matt as the same person.

  Mother Paula turned over another card. “Wheel of fortune,” she said as she gazed at the card. “Sometimes things are beyond our control and fate takes over.”

  She paused, raised a hand to her forehead, and squeezed her eyes shut. Her expression was intense, as if she were trying to get her emotions under control, when her eyes popped back open.

  “It’s nothing you’ve done wrong, but the other man, good-looking with a boyish grin, green eyes and blonde spiked hair, shouldn’t be trusted,” she said in a motherly toned voice.

  I was totally confused. Was I going to meet someone other than Gavin and what about Matt?

  “I’m sorry I don’t know anyone who fits that description.”

  Laura cleared her throat. “I do.”

  “Who?”

  “David.”

  Mother Paul put the cards down and threw up her hands. “This is what I had tried to explain when you touched the table. However, I must admit, I’d never seen the crossover so strong,” she said while staring at Laura.

  Laura looked at Mother Paula sheepishly. “I was bored. So when you two had closed your eyes, I…um laid my palm on top of the deck. Sorry, I didn’t think it would actually work.”

  “Laura, how could you?”

  She waved her hand at me dismissively. So,” she said, as she scooted her chair forward and leaned over the table in Mother Paula’s direction. “What was that you said about David being dishonest and that he shouldn’t be trusted?”

  “Excuse me. This is my reading. I need to know about Matt.”

  “Yeah, but right now she sees something fishy about David.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who called her a quack!”

  Mother Paula cleared her throat.

  I glanced at her apologetically.

  “With the melding of both your karmas I can’t pick up on which man is being dishonest.”

  “Now look what you’ve done,” I said.

  “It was your idea to make me stay in the first place. I offered to go.”

  “Oh, so this is all my fault!”

  “Please stop your arguing,” said Mother Paula, as she raised a palm and lowered her head. “I’m beginning to get a vision, but I must have total silence while I call on my Indian spirit guide for help.”

  Laura looked puzzled, but I quickly motioned for her to zip it up.

  Mother Paula sat quietly, while the sound of gentle tinkling wind chimes mingled with the fragrant aroma in the air. A sudden draft swept into the room, bending the flames and extinguishing a few of the candles.

  Laura grabbed onto my wrist. “This better be some kind of parlor trick,” she said with eyes as big as saucers.

  “Shush,” I said, as Mother Paula raised her chin skyward with eyes still closed. A tender smile softened the harsh gash of her lips, while nodding as if she were silently communing with someone. I guessed it was her Indian spirit guide.

  With palms lying flat on the table, her eyelids opened slowly like blooming pedals on a flower. A mysterious faraway look settled in her unblinking, deep brown eyes, before they rolled to the back of her head. A hum rattled up in her throat.

  “Ohmmmmmmmmm… Do you know what Moon River means?” Her voice took on a low monotone.

  My heart began to flutter as I thought about my music box. It’d play that tune each time Matt’s spirit was in my room. “Yes,” I said, barely talking above a whisper.

  “What do you know about a bracelet with a heart-shaped pendant?”

  I gasped and cupped my hand to my mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Laura asked.

  I stared dumbfounded at Mother Paula. “It’s the bracelet Matt gave me, and at the cemetery, someone gave the same bracelet to Nicholas.”

  “Bracelet, cemetery,” Laura blurted out. “What are you talking about?”

  I shot Laura a shut-the-hell-up look.

  “I see two men,” said Mother Paula, “one with sandy hair and amber eyes, and the other tall with the blue eyes.”

  “Yes, Matt and Gavin,” I said, while sitting on the edge of my seat.

  “I see two sunrises and one butterfly.”

  My heart quickened. “What does that mean?”

  “Sunrise is the dawning of a new beginning.” Her words slowed and her voice became as raspy as an old man with a polyp-lined throat. “The butterfly is a symbol of transformation. Great legends say it is connected to the soul of the dead in search of reincarnation.

  “Soul in search of reincarnation?” I parroted, while feeling as if a rope was tightening itself around my lungs.

  “I feel a kindly presence...very caring,” said Mother Paula. She paused in her speaking. Her expression changed from a cold pancake that’s never known the love of syrup to sweet strawberries drenched in whipped cream.

  “I’ll admit I could be difficult at times,” she said, “but I always had my heart in the right place.”

  I glanced at Laura. The puzzled expression on her face mimicked the question in my mind of why Mother Paula was speaking in first person. And why had her voice that sounded like a foghorn on a dark, dreary morning, suddenly taken on the warmth of the morning sun settling over a field of yellow daisies?

  “The huge body of water below me seems miles away… I’m afraid of heights… I don’t want to lose my balance… I’m scared.”

  Matt had a fear of heights. Was she reliving his last moments before he’d fallen from Mohegan Bluffs?

  I didn’t want to hear that he’d been scared, that he knew what was happening. I wanted to believe he’d fallen to his death not knowing he was going to die and then simply opened his eyes to find he was in heaven.

  “My mom called my outfit trashy hippie clothes,” Mother Paula said, in a voice that took on a girlish tone. “I’m glad I wore my favorite tunic top and long flowered skirt. Mom always hated my long, blonde wildly wavy hair, too.”

  Laura leaned over and whispered in my ear. “I’m confused. Who in the hell is talking?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “The crown of blue sage I’d twined together that morning sat on my head like a crown of sparkling jewels shooting out into the beautiful universe,” said Mother Paula in a soft tone.

  “I feel as if I have the wings of a bird who wants to take flight.”

  Mother Paula’s eyelids began to flutter, while her body twitched like a hopped up junkie going through withdrawal. “Who are you?” she finally blurted out in the familiar raspy voice, which I took to mean the Indian spirit guide was again in control. Shadowed flames danced on the edge of her hardened face, when all at once a broad smile softened her expression.

  “If I was superwoman,” she said, while giggling, “I could let go of the steel girder and fly, but my head is beginning to spin. The warm summer breeze is swirling around my body.”

  Mother Paula looked as if she were struggling to shake loose from something.

  “What is your name?” she demanded, in her raspy voice.

  “I see the Brooklyn Bridge above me,” said the girlish voice.

  “Why are you here?” asked Mother Paula sternly.

  Listening to the two different voices and seeing the varied expressions made me feel as if I were watching the three faces of Eve.

  “How could I be fast approaching the water below that had once seemed like miles away?” asked the cheerful voice.

  Mother Paula began to hum softly singing the words, “Love is but a song we si
ng, fear’s the way we die…you can make the mountains ring or make the angels cry… Some may come and some may go…he will surely pass, when the one that left us here returns for us at last…”

  At first, I didn’t know what it all meant, but then it finally struck me, Moon River, Brooklyn Bridge, young hippy girl…

  Aunt Millie?

  Mother Paula began to mumble, her words were inaudible. I practically leapt over the table to hear what she was saying.

  “When the one that left us here returns for us at last,” she sang softy.

  “Aunt Millie, is that you?” I felt my heart pounding in my ears.

  “Who’s Aunt Millie?” asked Laura.

  “I’ll tell you later.” My conclusion was that, Aunt Millie had never intended to die. She didn’t commit suicide like everyone had thought. She was just higher than a kite and lost her balance.

  “That’s right,” Mother Paula, blurted.

  Did she just read my mind and how in the heck did Aunt Millie’s spirit connect with Mother Paula?

  “Aunt Millie, if it’s really you what does Moon River mean?” Reflections of the burning candles danced on the walls, as I waited for an answer.

  Mother Paula let out a loud gasp. She breathed heavily as if she were trying to inhale the answer from the aromatic air. “Music box, you have my music box,” she said.

  I placed a palm to my chest feeling the rapid-firing beat of my heart, as I thought back to three days before my grandmother died. She had placed the music box in my small hands and told me she’d once given the music box to a special little girl, but that she had died. She told me that I, too, was special and that she wanted me to have it. Growing up I knew it was Aunt Millie’s music box.

  “Aunt Millie, it really is you!”

  “When the one that left us here returns for us at last,” sang Mother Paula in Millie’s girlish voice. “Matt has returned to you.”

  What was that about Matt?

  Mother Paula’s head collapsed to her chest and her arms fell limp at her sides. Laura grabbed hold of my arm, her eyelids fluttered as if she were about to faint.

  Was this the answer I’d been looking for? Could it be that Matt never did find his way toward the light? What did Aunt Millie mean when she said he’d returned to me? Exactly, where was he?

  Twenty-three

  Headlights dazzled and horns blared, as a sea of cars jammed up on Washington Street downtown. The night fell around us like a magic illusion of time as Gavin and I stood outside Providence’s hottest new upscale nightclub. In one way, my life was like the full clear moon above, a life I’d felt was beginning to make a full circle.

  During the two weeks that I’d last seen Mother Paula, I’d asked myself day after day if it were possible for Matt to have actually crossed back over into the world of the living. From all I’d researched, I knew that seeing and communicating with spirits was certainly not out of the realm of possibility; there’d been scientific proof of that.

  As for people coming back from the dead, there’d been several documented cases. However, they were people who were dead for minutes to a couple hours when unexpectedly they began breathing and miraculously resumed a normal life.

  What I couldn’t find was one single fact that backed the theory of reincarnation. I was inclined to believe that Matt walking the streets of Providence was as crazy as the existence of vampires. Still, something gnawed at my subconscious.

  I’d dreamt that Gavin and Matt were the same person, just how Mother Paula had envisioned them to be. In a roundabout way, I’d questioned Gavin about whether Matt rang a bell with him or if he’d hung around the Tiverton Yacht Club where Matt used to meet up with his sailing buddies. Gavin admitted to being afraid of water, while Matt practically lived on the water. However, both had a fear of heights. Although Gavin had classic traits of being like Matt, there were also distinct differences.

  One thing did stand out in my mind. I couldn’t place a finger on when exactly it was that I’d lost my mind reading ability. However, I distinctly recalled that the last day I’d communicated with Matt had been the day before my first date with Gavin.

  On a fantasy level of thinking, if Matt and Gavin were one in the same, there would be no need for Matt’s spirit to communicate with me through passages in a novel. Still, if Gavin were to have said something that gave me solid proof that Matt and he were sharing one body, I still wouldn’t have been able to figure out how it would have been possible. By all accounts, believers in reincarnation claim a dead person is reincarnated into the body of a newborn. Gavin was almost the same age as Matt and they were both alive at the same time. Therefore, even if I believed in such things, reincarnation would not be possible.

  I was convinced Aunt Millie had spoken through Mother Paula, as there’d been no way she could have possibly known about the music box. I vowed that one day when finally I’d figured it all out, I’d tell my parents and hope it’d bring comfort to my father to know his sister didn’t purposely kill herself.

  Everything was far from making sense at that point in time. However, although Laura had passed out cold from fright at Mother Paula’s revelation about Aunt Millie, I convinced her not to fret over the prediction about David or Gavin being dishonest. Although our karmas mixed, I’d explained what Cacey had told me about Mother Paula’s ten percent average for error, like Gavin not having a birthmark.

  Under pops of light from the scattered street lamps, I examined Gavin’s face that night outside the nightclub. I tried hard to pull any detail from his physical self that would remind me of Matt. However, there wasn’t the slightest resemblance.

  “Hey beautiful,” Gavin said, as we stood in the noisy line that snaked down the block. He pinched my cheek playfully. “You look so delicate and delicious in your sexy skirt.”

  “Delicate?” I asked, trying to imagine what could possibly be delicate about a five-foot eight-inch, wide-shouldered woman wearing size eleven sandals.

  Gavin held his fingers under my chin and canvassed my face. “Yeah, delicate, flawless translucent skin, a tiny spray of endearing freckles across your nose, and gorgeous eyes,” he said as he brushed his thumb lightly over my lips. “You’re perfect.”

  “Oh, stop,” I said, as a reflection from the streetlight shone in his cosmic blue eyes. Gavin with his Christopher Reeves Superman good looks had a way of making me feel like the most beautiful woman on the planet.

  “No, really,” he said, as he slid his arm around my waist.

  Maybe it was the three pounds I’d lost that week, but I did feel good in my sleeveless silky white blouse, butt hugging black pencil skirt and high-heeled dressy sandals.

  I brushed a lock of black hair off Gavin’s forehead and kissed him softly. That week I’d taught him how to use a wallpaper steamer and he taught me how to play pool. I’d signed him up for Crate & Barrel’s mailing list and he shared his white bean chili recipe with me. Evenings, we’d stroll along Fogland Beach under our very own umbrella of stars.

  That day, we’d spent the entire day in bed. We watched old black and white movies, made love, ordered Chinese take-out, made more love, and snuggled together reading quietly, him John Grisham, me Nicholas Sparks. Nothing in my life had ever felt as perfect as that day.

  “Looks like there must be fifty people ahead of us,” Gavin mentioned, as he kissed my forehead.

  “Can you see where David and Laura are?”

  Gavin stepped to the side of the line. “They’re right there, about twenty feet ahead of us standing on the curb under the canopy.

  I peeked out from the crowd and glimpsed Laura’s mass of long, platinum hair, tall lean body in a see-through blouse, short steely blue silk skirt, and strappy silver sandals. “Looks like they’re next in line for valet service.”

  A bouncer wearing a black dress shirt and pants who looked to be the size of Andre the Giant, ten pounds of gold chains around his neck, scanned the crowd of people waiting in line ahead of us. Giggles emanated from a gro
up of women dressed in what looked like Porn Clam Chic, as Andre pulled back the red velvet rope to let them into the club.

  While ruminating over whether my outfit might be a bit dressy for the club, I heard Laura bellow God’s Son’s name, “Jesus Christ!” She certainly wasn’t praying for spiritual guidance.

  “There’s some kind of scuffle going on,” Gavin said, as we stepped out from the line.

  A wild-eyed, blonde-headed woman dressed in a blue sequin dress who looked like a Mini Me version of Jenny McCarthy, was whapping David in the knees with a purse the size of New York. When suddenly the three-foot tall mini Jenny threw her purse to the ground and two fistedly beat on David, while Laura screamed for her to stop.

  “Has the woman escaped from an institution?” I said, as Gavin and I rushed to rescue David.

  However, we stopped short of two feet from him as the miniature Jenny shrieked, “And to think I actually trusted you enough to marry you, you cheating, lying bastard!”

  She charged at David and clamped her canine-like teeth into his thigh. He let out a howl. Strangely enough, the deep grunting noises she made were reminiscent of a documentary I once saw on the Discovery channel featuring the wildebeest.

  The mini three-foot tall Jenny resembled a dog wrestling a chew toy from its master, while Gavin tried to separate her from David’s leg. It was like watching a video of little people gone wild.

  Although Laura’s pain of finding out about David’s infidelity--with his own wife--wasn’t even close to the pain Jesus went through on the cross, you’d think it was for as many times as she kept calling out to Him. Perhaps she was calling out for His divine strength and intervention to keep her from killing David.

  As the keys to David’s Porsche flew from his hand, Laura quickly scooped them up from the sidewalk. “C’mon,” she said, as she grabbed my arm and forced me into the passenger side of the car. My tush underestimated that the seat practically dropped to ground level.

  Laura hopped in the driver’s side, shifted into first gear and took off, laying a twenty-foot strip of burning rubber.

  “That no good, dirty f...”