“Take your time.” Megan headed for the door. Occasionally clients did fall back asleep when she left, but today would not be a good day for that. She’d check back in a few minutes, after she washed her hands.
“Wake me up tomorrow, would you?”
Megan was still soaping the massage cream off her elbows when she heard Barbara open the massage room door and wander down the short hallway. So much for falling asleep. She must have shot off the table the moment Megan left the room. Either that or she was walking around in the nude.
“I’ll be right there,” Megan called out, rinsing off her arms.
Barbara stuck her head in the open door of the bathroom where Megan was washing up. “Hi.”
At least her client was dressed. “I’ll be right there,” Megan repeated. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting in the massage room…”
“Okay.” Barbara left.
Megan reached for a towel and swiped vigorously at herself, trying to hurry, and squeaked at the sharp pain in her chest. Three of her fingers were numb. She abandoned the towel and dashed across the hall.
“Your house has great energy.” Barbara fingered a conch shell she’d plucked from one of Megan’s displays of seashells and crystals arranged on pedestals in each corner of the room. She returned the shell and pulled out her checkbook. “Very welcoming. I love it.”
Megan picked up her appointment book, gritted her teeth at the stab of pain caused by that small movement, and dropped her book onto the massage table.
“Although I’m not crazy about your walls,” Barbara continued obliviously. “I think moss green would look better. My masseuse back in California had moss green walls. Really soothing. I’d be happy to trade you a massage for some house painting.”
“Uh, no thanks.” Barbara didn’t think it was odd to offer to paint her house? Usually it took clients several months before they felt comfortable making suggestions about her personal life. And besides, Megan loved her pale peach walls.
“Suit yourself. Just thought I’d offer.” Barbara looked at her sideways like she couldn’t believe Megan would pass on her offer. “Great massage, by the way. You have great hands.”
“Thanks. Same time next Monday?” Megan flipped open her appointment book and wondered if she would, in fact, be seeing clients at all next week. She kept her doubts to herself. She’d make sure the pain was gone by then.
“I can’t wait to tell my acupuncturist all about you,” Barbara said. “You two should meet. That reminds me, I’m having some friends over for dinner this weekend and I’d love it if you could come. Saturday? Seven o’clock? I’ll give you directions.”
“Sorry, I make it a rule not to socialize with my clients.”
“Oh, come on. Why not?”
“It helps me keep this a safe space for my clients,” Megan explained. “If we tried to be friends, then you might worry about whether I like you or not. I want you to relax into the massage and not worry about keeping me entertained.”
Barbara looked confused. “You don’t like me?”
“Of course I like you.”
“I invite my co-workers to my house all the time.”
“Being friends with a co-worker is not the same thing as being friends with your massage therapist.”
“Sure it is. Heck, people even date their co-workers. Happens all the time. Nothing bad happens.”
Usually nothing bad happens. Megan doubted anything she said would convince her, but she had to try. “Your co-workers don’t see you naked.” At least, she hoped they didn’t. Considering how they’d started their first massage, she could be wrong. She continued before Barbara could contradict her. “What if it was your boss? The therapist/client relationship is very intimate and also very unequal. I want this to be a healing experience for you. That means we have to have rules. The rules protect you. They make this a safe place for you emotionally. And they protect me, too.”
Understanding did not dawn in Barbara’s eyes.
“My boss has seen me naked in the hot tub.”
Perfect.
***
“Let me give you a massage,” Svetlana urged Megan over the phone. “Friday afternoons are cursed, anyway—I never get any appointments. I’ll have hours free to fix your sternum.”
“I appreciate it, but…” Her pectorals were always tight. Bending over a massage table was like doing pushups all day, and all the stretching in the world never seemed to be enough to counter that. And if anyone was going to work on her it was Svetlana. They traded frequently, and she felt safe with her. But anytime anyone, even Svetlana, got close to her chest muscles, her body tensed against the touch and she ended up tighter than before. Obviously, she had issues.
“Why you don’t let me help you?” Svetlana demanded. “I can help. I’m putting you down in my book for three o’clock.”
Megan gave in.
***
Svetlana’s office suite was the perfect space for her and her husband—two treatment rooms, a restroom and a waiting room with utilitarian chairs and a bubbly Zen fountain. Inside the massage room, Megan relaxed on her back while Svetlana leaned over her and tucked her into a navy blue sheet with a race car print.
“Can you believe these sheets?” Svetlana complained. “On sale, Patrick tells me. I now learn it’s not safe to let husband loose at outlet mall.”
“There’s really nothing wrong with—”
“What about solid color, I tell him. What about white? These sheets are for children.”
“At least they’re soft,” Megan said, glad she was in charge of picking out her own supplies.
Svetlana sighed and switched on Megan’s favorite music—a quiet blend of birdsong with wind chimes and flute—and turned the volume down extra low. “So how was your day?”
Megan rotated her wrists, stretching out her forearms. “Someone told another one of my clients I can see angels, and now she wants to know if they have a message for her. I told her I’ve never heard an angel speak, but she doesn’t believe me.”
“What kind of message?”
“You know, a message. Inspirational guidance. Celestial advice.”
“No one ever asks me for divine guidance.”
“Be grateful. People ask me all the time.”
“Why you don’t make something up?”
“You mean, lie?”
Svetlana waved her hands around encouragingly. “Get book of angel messages and pick message that sounds good. If they notice it came from book, tell them you ask angel to guide you to correct page.”
“I’m a massage therapist, not a tarot reader.”
“It make your clients happy.”
Megan shifted uncomfortably on the massage table. “It would be taking advantage of their trust.”
“Why? It’s all a gimmick anyway, no? You can call it angel therapy or what you like, but it’s still massage. It’s still your hands on their muscles, no?”
Yes, it was her hands; yes, it was her intuition. But despite what Svetlana might think, the angels weren’t a gimmick. They were real. With the angels providing extra juice, the healing was more profound than what she could do on her own.
Svetlana positioned one hand on top of the other with the heel of the underneath hand placed firmly on Megan’s breastbone. She sank her weight ever so slowly, deep…deep…deep into her chest until the pain made further conversation impossible. Megan stared at the familiar medical posters illustrating the human musculoskeletal system without seeing them. Svetlana pressed harder.
Wasn’t that deep enough?
Becoming a professional massage therapist had ruined massage for her. She knew too much. She couldn’t stop herself from analyzing Svetlana’s technique, and how could you fully relax when you wanted to micromanage the whole experience? Some days she could shut it out and enjoy being on the massage table, but today was not one of those days.
To be fair, Svetlana was doing everything right—at any hint of defensive clenching in the muscles, she paused
and let up a bit on the pressure. When she sensed Megan was ready to let her back in, she continued pressing.
Exactly what Megan would do herself. The only difference was that Megan preferred to use a lighter, gentler touch with her own clients, while Svetlana prided herself on not doing relaxation massage. With her body weight leveraged onto her arms, she was a lot stronger than she looked, and that was saying something, because Svetlana was built. Clients never fell asleep on her table. Blacked out from pain, maybe, but not sleep.
Megan stayed with the pain as it radiated out along the path of her ribs and seeped into her lungs. It hurt to breathe. The edges of her field of vision turned to gray. She wondered if she was going to pass out, and if Svetlana would notice she was no longer conscious.
In the grayness, a vision of a feral girl gradually came into focus.
The girl was emaciated and wore nothing more than a loincloth. She didn’t look anything like her, but she knew she was looking at herself. Herself in some other lifetime.
She swung an ax at a tree and hit it with a satisfying thunk. She had built this ax herself—sharpened and polished the stone, then lashed it with rawhide to a club—and it was performing well. Her brothers teased her for being slower and weaker than a man, but the fact was, there were plenty of others willing to clear boring vines. She preferred to swing at trees.
The trees and brush would be left to dry in the sun, the elders would predict when the rains would come, and on the augured day, the dry kindling would be set on fire, turning that patch of forest into fertile ash for planting.
The day came, the skies flashed, and the fires were set. But something went wrong.
The rains never came, and now the whole forest was on fire. Deer stampeded downhill toward the river. She followed them, fleeing the wall of heat that chased her through the parched forest, but she wasn’t fast enough, she couldn’t breathe…
Something cracked under Svetlana’s hand.
Megan blinked back to the present. It wasn’t the crack of bone. It was the fascia—the net-like tissue that held all the body’s parts together—softening and stretching under the pressure of Svetlana’s palm. Things were moving in there that hadn’t moved in years. Like the cartilage where her ribs attached to her sternum. Nauseating when you were on the receiving end.
She tried to take a deep breath, but her chest wouldn’t let her. Svetlana let up a little, adjusting the pressure, staying completely present even as tears leaked from the corners of Megan’s eyes. That was the great thing about working with someone who was good at this job—she didn’t have to worry about scaring her off if she got emotional. Her body relaxed. She might bitch to herself about Svetlana’s deep work, but this was what her chest needed. Svetlana waited for her to inhale one more time, then rode her exhale down, sinking to her previous level of pressure. Megan’s heart raced. She stayed with the feeling and waited to see if it would dissipate. It didn’t. It got worse, almost to the verge of panic. Her vision clouded again. There was no sign of the burning forest. Instead, the gray darkened and solidified into the shape of massive stone columns.
The ground shook violently, knocking her to the stone floor beside a blazing hearth. The earth heaved again. Voices shouted to each other to run, but they were not shouting to her. She had to stay. She had been chosen. The goddess would protect her against Poseidon’s temper. The goddess would protect her… She stumbled to her knees and prayed the temple would not collapse, that the sacred flame would not be extinguished, for that would bring down a curse upon the city. If it wasn’t already cursed…
Her vision swam. She found herself in a cobblestone town square in another century, squeezing her eyes shut to block out the sight of the pyre and the excited crowd.
A twig snapped.
Smoke filled her lungs and paralyzed them. She was gasping and she couldn’t…
“That’s too much,” Megan said abruptly.
Svetlana stopped pressing, but kept one hand resting lightly on Megan’s breastbone. Standard procedure; but irrationally, Megan wanted to slap her hand away. Instead she sat up and doubled over, clutching the sheet to her breasts.
Svetlana let go and leaned over her with concern. “Are you all right?”
Megan waved her away. “I guess I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was.”
“It is necessary to work on this scar tissue. You told me you cracked sternum when you were a kid, yes?”
“When I was three.”
Megan pressed her fists, still clutching the sheet, to the center of her chest. She’d had a client once who’d been in a car accident tell her that a cracked sternum could be seriously painful, but Megan didn’t remember any pain. She’d fallen off a jungle gym, and what she did remember, with total clarity, was how time had frozen still. The impact couldn’t have lasted more than a second, but for what seemed like an eternity there was no sound, no people, no movement—just her on the ground in that profound silence, flat on her back with the breath knocked out of her, too stunned to cry, staring into the eyes of an angel.
Just went to show that even the best parenting was no match for the forces of karma that shaped kids’ lives. Most people thought karma was cosmic payback. Cause and effect. It wasn’t. It was cause and effect and effect and effect and effect. A groove in the dirt that got worn down so many times it became a canyon. Leftover habits and memories—any baggage you hadn’t let go of—that became ingrained, forming a blueprint for the shape of your life. Her fall wasn’t a punishment, but it was no accident: It was her karma’s way of re-creating the trauma she carried over from previous lives. Knock her off the jungle gym with a slip of the foot and bingo!—she was all set for a lifetime of blocked energy in her chest. God forbid she should forget what it felt like to suffocate. Oh no, fate made sure her lungs and chest would hurt in this life, even if she couldn’t remember why.
“Will you be able to work?” Svetlana asked.
“I think so.”
Maybe a hot bath would feel good after all the ice she’d been applying to her chest. It was really a horrible place to have to stick an ice pack, but not as horrible as not being able to do her job.
***
Later that night, Megan sat cross-legged and barefoot on a pillow on the floor of her bedroom, gritting her teeth against the jolt of pain that shot through her chest when she shifted position. With every hour, the pain was getting worse. She ignored it and focused on meditating. One way or another she was going to make this pain go away.
Except as soon as her heart rate began to slow, red-orange flames intruded upon her thoughts, engulfing her.
She shook her head in frustration, trying to get rid of the image. What use were these disturbing flashes of intuition? If only they came with a voice that said, “This is how you’re fated to die, so be careful,” or, “This is how you died last time, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.” Even if she knew whether the images were from the past or from the future, what was she supposed to do with the information? Track down the person who killed her and forgive them? Become a firefighter? Learn to flambé? What exactly was the point?
“What!” she shouted at the universe.
If there was some spiritual lesson she was supposed to learn from this, it would be nice to have the teacher’s answer key.
Her doctor had prescribed painkillers, suggested lots of rest, and said if the pain in her chest and the numbness in her arm continued, they could look into other options. The chiropractor wanted to see her again in two days to continue work on freeing the nerves she’d pinched. Svetlana’s massage had helped, but an hour later the pain was back. No one knew exactly what was wrong. Megan could tell what they were thinking, though—that whether it was a pulled muscle or a torn ligament or a wrenched disk, injuries took time to heal.
Weeks.
Maybe months.
Months of not having a job. Months for her clients to abandon her and discover someone else.
Months. Maybe years.
S
he wouldn’t be the first massage therapist to get injured and never make a full recovery, and be forced to change jobs, do something more financially secure—something boring and unfulfilling, like most of humanity. Kira Wagner wanted to offer her a job like that.
She clenched her fists and rammed them into her thighs. She didn’t want to be manager of Kira’s spa. She wasn’t ready to lose her clients and start over. She wasn’t ready to end her career.
And she wasn’t going to.
Because she was going to fix this.
Taking a deep breath, she turned her vision inward, past the flames, and found her inner spark. She felt it glow, and expanded it, flooding herself with its white, sparkling light. She ran the specific energy current that would release her karma and untie the knots that bound her to her past—the past that had created this injury. Flames appeared again, hot against her eyelids. She steadied her breath and continued. No need to react. Karmic patterns were a habit, after all, and habits could be broken. Whatever this karmic memory meant—and perhaps it meant nothing—she could free herself. She could let it go.
She might feel like she was burning, but in reality she was sitting alone in her room in no danger at all, and trying to push away the fear would only make it embed itself more deeply. She had to face it. She had to lower her barriers and let herself feel the screaming pain as she burned.
She would burn until she was dead, and then it would be over.
Chapter Five
“I need to reschedule your appointment,” Megan said over the phone for the eighteenth time, relieved that she was almost done working her way down her list of next week’s clients.
“Why?” Barbara Fenhurst—number eighteen—demanded.
“I injured myself.” The words were a little easier to choke out after so many calls, but they still made her mad.
Meditation had not helped. Even the painkillers didn’t help enough to let her kid herself that she’d be able to work through it. Much as she hated to do it, she’d decided to cancel her appointments for a week and give her body a chance to heal.
Angel's Touch Page 5
