by Nancy Adams
“It looks beautiful, Momma,” David remarked as they sat eating sandwiches that they’d prepared earlier.
“It sure is,” she replied without turning from the view. “But something’s different,” she added, squinting her eyes as if it would help her to remember, or at least spot what she was looking for. “I seem to remember a white stupa at the top of one of those hills.”
“A stupa!?” Jules remarked with a confused expression. “Why would you expect to see that on a hill in Mexico?”
“What’s a stupa, Pa?” David inquired.
Turning to his son and holding a cheese and salami sandwich in his hand, Jules answered, “It’s a dome-shaped tower that Buddhists build for ceremonies. But they’re mostly in Asia where the Buddha originated from.”
“But I’m sure that across the water, atop one of those little mountains,” Juliette claimed, “was a white tower that you could see from all around. We even went to it one time. You drove your motorbike to it along that terrible dirt road that spiraled up. I had to get off several times while you got it up the steep, muddy hills. Remember?”
Jules squinted his eyes, almost pulling a frown as he thought about it. And it was then that it hit him.
“That was Nepal,” he let out. “We were in Pokhara. You were seeing it across the big lake there.”
“Are you sure? I was certain that it was here that I saw it.”
“It wasn’t here, my love. To get to those islands there, you need to take a boat across, and there aren’t any roads on any of them, muddy or nothing, just paths to walk on. I could never have taken you anywhere on a bike there. Only a few people live on them; either in shacks on the beach or in gated mansions. I assure you that it was in Nepal that it happened. It was called the Peace Pagoda and it was for Hindus and Buddhists.”
Juliette thought for a moment. Tried to recall Nepal. Tried to find another memory of that place except the one she’d told Jules about a moment ago, thinking it had been here in Mexico. But instead, all she got was the fog, and the harder she attempted to guide herself through her own mind, the thicker it got, until she could see no more and think no more.
She shook her head and said in a low voice that it must have been like that, but she couldn’t recall it outright. Jules looked at her with worry for a moment before shaking it off and turning to David.
“Hey, Davey?” he let out with a grin. “How do you feel about us going across this big river here and visiting a couple of those islands today?”
The boy’s face lit up with excitement and he burst out, “For real, Pa?”
“Yep. A little further up the beach there’s a guy who hires out boats with motors. It doesn’t take any longer than half an hour or so to reach the other side.”
“But what about the big ships we seen coming along? Won’t they crush us?”
The boy was right; the river delta in front of them was busy with the traffic of the local harbor and every twenty minutes or so they would see a large container vessel amble past.
“Well, I guess we try to avoid them,” Jules answered.
“But what if they’re too big?”
“Then we hope that they’re just as concerned to avoid us as we are of them.”
This appeared to appease the boy and he went back to eating chips and sandwiches and gazing at out the islands. Jules, meanwhile, went back to studying his wife with a peculiar look of consternation on his face.
“You gonna be alright going to the islands, my love?” he asked her.
She didn’t turn to him, didn’t even appear to hear him, and simply said, “Do you remember why we drove up to that stupa?”
A little confused, Jules answered, “Yeah. We went there after Danny died. You’d heard about this famous Buddhist temple in Nepal that could bring back the dead through reincarnation. Return them to you in another form.”
“We burned his photograph and lay the ashes alongside an offering at the foot of the tower,” she continued for her husband.
“Yes, we did.”
“I been thinking about that a lot lately. It’s been so it’s all I think about.”
“About what? The trip to the tower?”
“No, about him coming back.”
“I don’t get what you mean?”
“They said that he would be reincarnated into a different form. That at some stage his soul would emerge from the great cosmos and resume its journey on Earth in some bodily form. They said that we were calling Danny out. They said that people can take centuries to emerge from the cosmos and that we were calling to him so that he would return to us in our lifetime.”
Jules looked at her with an odd look. She sounded like she was talking with all her faculties, but what she said confused him. Was it the illness that was mixing everything up so much? Or was it her taste for spiritualism and a belief in the unseen forces that she claimed always guided us that was making her talk this way?
“Well, they were right,” she went on in a serious tone. “He did come back to us. And he is with us.”
Jules could do nothing except look at her strangely.
“Look at him,” she said in a whisper, nodding at David who happily ate and watched the islands, oblivious to his mother’s sudden theory.
“You saying that you think David is Danny reincarnate?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Remember what your uncle Eszmo used to say about the spirit world: how the spirits escape the body during death and join each other once again in the great flowing slipstream of souls that travels unseen around, a whole ocean of souls that fill the entire cosmos; the living and the dead side by side, but also so separate…unaware of each other…always trading places.”
“Eszmo said a lot of things, my love. He also allowed himself to be bitten by rattlesnakes during certain ceremonies, and the last time I saw him before his death he was half-mad and fully blind.”
“But it could happen, couldn’t it? That we called to Danny up on that hill and he came to us through David?”
“You taken your meds this morning?” was all he had for her in reply.
An annoyance had taken hold of him, one rooted in this theory of hers. It wasn’t the first time that he’d heard it. First it had been when some hippy had told her about the supposedly supernatural powers of the stupa. It had immediately put her into a frenzy, Danny only dead a year by then. She had to go and wouldn’t listen to a word Jules had to say in rejection of the idea. So off to Asia they went in search of the mythical stupa that could summon the souls of the dead and have them return to you in some other form.
And once they’d been to the stupa and performed the rites, it didn’t end there. After that Jules had had to deal with Juliette seeing their dead son in everything. A bird that flew into their apartment in Peru was him, and Juliette had almost gone out of her mind as she’d demanded Jules catch it carefully. Eventually the bird had died in a cage when it refused to eat what they offered it, and Danny was once again dead. Then there were the string of street dogs who seemed to recognize, as only animal senses ever pick up on, that the strange lady was looking for something, and that they may be able to offer it to her with their sad eyes and wagging tails. Heck, she saw Danny in everything back then and Jules had simply been forced into allowing his love to follow the whims of her folly. Because disagreeing with her would throw Juliette into deep despair, as opposed to keeping her happy and busy by allowing her to think that the stray mutt that had just infested their bed with fleas was the reincarnation of her dead son.
Jules shrugged and realized—as he had all those years ago—that it was just better to go along with her. So what if she thought that David was the reincarnation of Danny. Would it make her love him or care for him any worse or better? Of course not. She loved them both. And if she could love them as one, then Jules didn’t mind squat for that.
“He sure is,” Jules said to her with a smile and, having been reassured, Juliette once again settled her gaze back on the islands.
&
nbsp; Once they’d finished off their picnic, the three got up and went over to a piece of grassland that stuck out from the beach and into the sea, the strip of land surrounded by little boats all moored up at its edges. In the center sat a small wooden hut with a tin roof, a little old Mexican man fast asleep inside, wearing naught but a filthy vest and red soccer shorts, a straw hat pulled over his sleeping face to shade it from the sun. Written on the front of the shack in white paint was: Boat Hire.
Reaching the hut, Jules popped his head into the open door of the shack and roused the man. When the boatman had finally sat up, he adjusted his hat, rubbed his eyes and then continued to gaze incredulously at Jules for a moment or two before he realized that the gringo wanted a boat. It was off season and the man hadn’t seen such light skin for several months now, only the occasional Mexican wishing to hire a boat for fishing or to get somewhere. In fact, these last three days he had spent his time sleeping all day without so much as a peep of interruption, and this had allowed him to spend his nights in the local bars doing other, more precious things with his energies. He even appeared slightly put out by the sudden interruption of custom as he grouchily took them to the boats and talked about the price, even bemoaning in Spanish when Jules requested three life jackets for them, because it meant having to go back to the hut for something other than sleep.
Soon Jules was at the back of a boat guiding the little skiff across the bay toward one of the larger islands that he had visited many years ago with Juliette. On the island there was a beautiful walk that took you easily from the beach into the jungle interior and to the basin of a small, inactive volcano that was all grown over with the same bright green vegetation that covered all the islands there. They were leaving Topolobampo that night, having spent the previous evening there, and Jules wanted his two loves to see this wonderful spot before they left. Juliette had enjoyed it so much the first time they’d been there many years ago, and he hoped that before she was lost to him forever, as well as to herself, she would once again get to feel that same excitement she felt that day, but this time alongside himself and David.
At the front of the boat sat Juliette and David, the boy huddled up in his mother’s arms, a worried look on his face as he scanned the area for the large cargo ships that he was sure they’d run into. However, they made it across without coming anywhere near one, and David was relieved at this. At the island, Jules dragged the boat up onto the beach, David doing his best to help and Juliette standing back, smiling at the boy’s efforts. Jules then hammered a stake into the sand and tied the boat to it.
“What if the tide comes in and the boat drifts away?” David asked his father worriedly.
“Then we swim across!”
“I hope not.”
“Me too,” Jules replied, ruffling the boy’s hair, before standing up, placing the hammer back in the boot and walking up the beach toward Juliette.
“You all set?” he asked her.
Like on the other side, her eyes looked out across the bay, confused, like she was searching for something that she was sure should be there, but wasn’t. When Jules was right by her, Juliette remained still and didn’t say a word in answer to his earlier question.
“Juliette?” he let out, grabbing her arm gently and giving it a tender squeeze.
She turned her eyes sharply to him and he saw fright in them.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“Yeah. I just…Oh! It don’t matter. Where’re we going?…I mean, let’s go.”
Jules gave her a weak smile and ran his thumb down the inside of her forearm. He then turned to David, who was still standing beside the boat, and called him over. Once they were all together, they ventured up the beach and then into an opening of jungle that started with a wide path through the vegetation, large stones placed on the ground to mark it out and to keep it from being so easily reclaimed by the plants, but which narrowed the further they got, until it was merely a dirt track running up the side of a steep hill. At times, the three would have to climb over or up rocks and boulders in order to reach the next stage. And parts of it were particularly dangerous, and David would panic a little as his mother handed him up to his father, who’d struggled himself to reach the top of the rocks.
Once they reached their destination, however, a full three hours after mooring the boat up on the beach, they were rewarded for their effort by the wondrous sight of a bright green crater about a couple of hundred meters wide that looked so beautiful under the clear blue sky. The three of them stood at its edge and looked down into this mini world of vines and trees, cut off from the rest of the forest by the walls of the dead volcano.
“Can we go down into it?” David asked Jules.
“If we’re real careful. I remember there being a track that the Mexicans showed us last time. Do you remember, Juliette, how the—”
But he stopped short when he turned to his wife and saw how terrified she looked.
“Where is this place?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“We’re in Topolobampo. At the volcano we went and saw on the island. Remember?”
“I know. I know it from somewhere,” she said. “I can feel it like a shadow. But I can’t envision it fully; can’t recall what we did here or any of it. I can’t remember specifically. And I keep forgetting now. The whole time we were walking, I kept forgetting why we were here, where we were going, why I was following you. Even in the boat on the way over, I kept losing the thread of what we were doing.”
“It’s okay, my love,” Jules said, shuffling over to her and placing a tender hand around her shoulders. “You don’t have to remember. In fact, I’m jealous of you!”
“Why?” she inquired in a trembling voice.
“Because like David, you get to see it all for the first time!”
She smiled and leaned toward him and they kissed, little David sitting in front of them on a rock, goggling the whole place with his inquisitive little eyes. Juliette smiled, and so did Jules.
“Just every day,” he whispered into her ear as they held each other. “Just take every day as it comes, my love, and don’t let the rest of it bother you. I’ll be with you to hold your hand through all of it. They’ll need the sharpest knife in the world to cut me away from you.”
Tears began to fall from Juliette’s eyes. Not tears of melancholy, though, but tears of joy.
Pure joy.
CHAPTER NINE
John Ryan noted the decayed and haggard condition of the hanging sign announcing Miller’s Trailer Park as he drove underneath it. He also noted the decayed and haggard look of some of the trailers, covered in graffiti, yards full of junk, scrapped cars on blocks, boarded-up windows. It wasn't all of them; some of them did display the proud natures of the inhabitants and were kept in a homely fashion, but a lot of them appeared to be inhabited by people that had simply given up on decency all together. At least some people can still allow themselves some pride living in such places, he thought to himself as he searched out the address he was looking for.
Eventually, he found it and was alarmed to find that it was surrounded with police tape and most of the trailer had burned down. He parked the car up down the street and went to investigate the mess that was once the Lee residence. When he’d started checking the family out that day, he’d sent off for any police reports on the Lees, but nothing had come back yet. So he was surprised to say the least when he found that their home was now derelict.
Taking his phone, he dialed an old friend of his in the LAPD.
“Reece,” Ryan said, “what happened? You never got back on the Lee family.”
“I was just about to, but, as you know, I do have another job other than chasing information for your sorry ass!”
“Okay, cut the bull. What’ve you got?”
“Well, recently their house burned down and they’re currently residing across the street with a neighbor at 87.”
“That makes sense.”
“Why?”
“
Because I’m standing in front of the remains of their trailer. What was the cause of the fire?”
“Mrs. Lee left the stove on. She was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the family are under the eye of the state social services. Because of the fire they had a hearing set up at the local courthouse over the female’s suitability to be around the boy. Looks like the state was about to take either her or the child into custody. That was booked for yesterday. However, it didn’t happen, because the family never showed.”
“Where are they now?”
“Supposedly still at the neighbor’s place, but they haven’t made contact yet. There’s no warrant out for either her or the male’s arrest just yet. It wasn’t a criminal hearing and only if they repeatedly go against the court will it become so. My guess is that social services will send someone out to the family pretty soon, if they haven’t already, and inform them of the court’s decision. Once that’s been delivered, they’ll have to return to court or face criminal charges. Until then, my hands are tied to directly assist you in this.”
As they talked, John glanced across the street and quickly found no. 87. A neat place, he remarked to himself. While he gazed at it, a car pulled up outside and out got a plump-looking woman with a leather folder under one arm. She immediately marched up to the door of 87, her nose pointed to the sky as her buxom figure waddled up to the porch.
“They got cars, registrations, etc.?” Ryan said as he watched Jill Phillips knock on the door.
“There’s a car and a pickup truck in the name of Jules Lee. Although the pickup is also licensed to his business partner, one Jose Hernandez. I’ll text you the details of both vehicles.”
“That all you got?”
“Pretty much—oh! And one other thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“You asked about any previous that either of them have.”
“Yeah.”
