Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  “We should do yoga,” Stream said. “So you can stretch before you sit.”

  “Taking after your mum, aren’t you?”

  “Mama doesn’t do yoga. Granma Sallie does.”

  “Yeah, but your mum tells me what to do, tells me what’s good for me.” He finished the bite he was chewing. “’Course, you’re right. Should’ve thought of it before I ate. Can’t do downward dog right after breakfast. We’ll have to do poses that stay right-side up.”

  The coffee maker announced the completion of its brewing cycle with a hissing sigh, and Jamie filled three mugs. He served Mae and Don. “Hope you like it black, Doc. And no sugar.”

  “That’s fine.” Don took a sip. “I used to turn mine into candy, but I’ve trained myself. The older I get, the health-nuttier I get. Did you see your doctor? Get things checked out?”

  “Are you sick?” Stream squeaked with concern.

  “Nah. No worries, darl.” Jamie gave her a wink, then said to Don, “Figured I was fine, just sparkly, y’know? Except ...” He shoveled a gob of banana and granola into his mouth, too much even for him to talk through, and continued after he’d chewed and swallowed. “I’ve got a ghost.”

  “What?” Brook sat straighter. “I thought there was no such thing as ghosts. What kind of doctor do you go to for a ghost?”

  “Witch doctor. Kidding. It’s a long story. My cat who died is coming around, came back as a kitten ghost. Think he means well, but it makes me feel like he’s got a message.”

  Mae asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “Dunno. Hoped he’d go away, I guess. Didn’t want to bother you.” Jamie drank coffee and put his empty bowl in the sink. “He could just want to be with me. Like ... like he forgave me for letting him get sick. Jeezus.” He turned his back to them and began to wash the single dish and spoon. “Don’t want to talk about him. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  Stream walked over to Jamie and reached up to pat his back. “I’m sorry your cat died.”

  He looked down at her. “Thanks. I’ll be all right.” He offered her a wet, soapy hand to hold.

  She took it and studied his forearm. “Does the ghost kitty scratch you? Or did Gasser?”

  “Nah. Kitten at the shelter did that. Gasser would never hurt me. He licks my wounds, in fact.” Jamie rinsed the dish, put it in the drainer and dried his hands. “Probably why it looks bad. Cat spit’s not the cleanest stuff. Or maybe it’s only bad for parrots, not people.”

  Mae felt embarrassingly unobservant. She hadn’t noticed the injury. Not that a kitten scratch was a major wound, but still, she’d overlooked it. Don rose and held his hand out to take the arm Stream had been examining.

  He studied Jamie’s skin. “That might be getting infected. Your sparkles could be bacteria after all. Or your immune system fighting them off. I haven’t seen a case for a while, so I can’t say for sure, but that looks like the papule that forms when you get infected with cat scratch disease.”

  “There really is such a thing?” Mae asked.

  She had to get up and look at Jamie’s scratch and so did Brook. He tolerated the inspection for a moment then gestured for space. They stepped back a little, and he asked, “Is it serious?”

  The twins echoed the question.

  “Not usually.” Don sat back down to drink his coffee. “It’s not pleasant, but your body normally clears it out in about a month. The symptoms would show up in a week or two. You’d get swollen glands, aches and pains and a fever, and lose your appetite.”

  “I could stand to do that,” Jamie said. “I mean, the appetite part.”

  “What about pus?” Brook asked. “Will his arm have a lot of pus?”

  “Bloody hell,” Jamie growled. “I just ate. You can’t talk about pus.”

  The children made eye contact with each other, and Stream reminded him quietly, “You said a bad word.”

  Mae slipped an arm around Jamie. “I think we have to let him say bad words today. We can work on it when he gets back. Don, you said he can fight it off, but Jamie can’t be on tour with a fever. Or an infected arm.”

  Jamie gulped his coffee. “I’ll keep it clean. Jeezus. And I won’t let Gasser lick it. I need to get ready to hit the road.” He left the room.

  “Is he mad at us?” Stream asked.

  “Not really. Jamie just gets upset a lot. It’s normal. And he had to go brush his teeth.” If he was very upset, he would take longer about it. She asked Don, “Is there any treatment he should get?”

  The doctor paused before answering. “If he’s definitively diagnosed, it can be treated with an antibiotic. However, it’s not usually necessary. Complications can be serious, but they’re rare. There’s nothing I’d recommend he do right now. If he gets symptoms, he should find a doc somewhere on his tour and have tests done.”

  A hassle Jamie would find stressful, but he could do it if he had to.

  When he didn’t come down within a reasonable dental-hygiene interval, reasonable even for someone who obsessed over it, Mae went upstairs, leaving the girls sitting at the table with Don, asking him questions about cat scratch disease, infections, and pus.

  Jamie stood facing the bathroom mirror, brushing his hair. Another obsessive self-calming behavior. Mae took the brush, ran it through his hair a few times, and tucked it into his overnight bag, which sat open on the toilet lid. “You’ll be fine, sugar. And if you do get sick, Don said you can take antibiotics.”

  “It’s not if. I’m going to get sick. I have a kitten ghost. He’s trying to tell me a kitten made me sick.” Jamie rummaged in the bag, found antibiotic ointment and plastic bandage strips. Mae took them from him and dressed the small but slightly inflamed injury. “Guess it should be funny,” he said. “I mean, Sierra running on about her soul group and serious illnesses and I’ve got cat scratch fever.”

  Mae didn’t think she should mention possible complications that could make it serious. “You don’t have it yet. You might never get it, or you could fight it off. Anyway, stress is the worst thing for your immune system, so don’t fret about it. Just see a doctor if you show signs of it.” She hugged him. “I’m glad Stream noticed your scratch. You must have been worried about William showing up like that.”

  “Mmm...” Jamie frowned, his shoulders squirming in an evasive right-left shrug, and then he broke into a wide grin. “Serious fucking disease. Jeezus.”

  He gave her a long, minty kiss and they went downstairs, Jamie carrying his bag. “All right, Brook, Stream? Three yoga poses and I have to go.”

  Chapter Ten

  “I do not feel like doing this,” Kate muttered, looking out the car window toward the small adobe house at the dead end of Quintana Street while her boyfriend Tim, a big Nordic-looking man, unloaded her wheelchair and her bag of trash from the trunk of his car. “If she gives me that bullshit again about being invested in having a disability, I’ll probably blow up at her and leave.”

  “You can handle it,” Tim said, unfolding the chair. “It’s worth doing.”

  “I know. She just pisses me off.”

  Mae had made a strong case for Kate attending. Though Kate found Jamie irritating, she didn’t want him plagued by some wacko doomsayer, and Sierra had been heartless to tell Mae’s children he might die.

  Bernadette had urged Kate to explore the support group, too, as part of her effort to sort out authenticity from fraud in alternative healing. Kate personally had no objection to harmless fakery—it made up a good portion of the psychic fair that she’d founded—but Sierra might not be harmless.

  Kate transferred into her chair and put the bag of trash in her lap. Tim let her service dog, Lobo, out of the back seat. Kate didn’t attempt to approach the house. The pavement on the front walk was uneven, and the door had to be reached via a small porch. “What is she thinking? A support group for chronic illness and it’s not accessible?”

  Tim said, “I know you hate it, but I can bring you up if I have to.”

>   “Not yet. I need to see if she has an accessible back door.” Kate found Sierra’s number on her phone. “You should go before I call her. Now that I’ve seen this entrance, I want her to think I took the bus. Not everyone who uses a chair has a big strong boyfriend. Come back for me in an hour. Or I’ll call if I need to leave sooner.”

  Tim gave her a kiss and a warning about watching her tongue, and left. Kate called Sierra. “I can’t get in the front. Is your back door at ground level?”

  “It is, but we’d like to carry you in.”

  They would like to? That was weird. “No, thank you. I don’t care to be carried by strangers.” Kate hung up.

  After a few minutes, Sierra appeared in the doorway, wearing fitted knit pants and a clingy top. “I talked about it with the group. You should trust us. It would help with your vulnerability to the process, all of our hands and arms embracing you.”

  A group of sick people, lifting her? Kate nodded toward the classic New Mexican fence around the back yard, the kind that was often called a coyote fence, made up of uneven poles with the bark still on. “I’ll come in through the back.” She headed across the bare dirt of the yard toward the gate. A single loud woof came from behind it, followed by a growl. “After you do something with your dog.”

  “Mitzi is a good dog. She won’t hurt you.”

  “Good or not, she’s growling. Can you control her?”

  Sierra sighed, traipsed down the steps, and opened the gate. A large brown-and-white pit bull met her with eager energy, barking and ready to explode through the opening. Sierra grabbed the dog’s collar and guided her to the far side of the yard and called, barely audible over the uproar, “Okay, come on through.”

  Mitzi looked as though she might win the wrestling match, and Kate was nervous, but Lobo remained unruffled as he and Kate headed for the house. Mitzi kept up her ruckus until the Asian man who had been with Sierra at Bandstand came out the back door and gave a stern command. The pit bull dropped to her haunches, silent, and the man praised her. Mitzi knows who’s the alpha in this house.

  With smooth, golden-tan skin, a receding hairline and a square face, the man who held the door open for Kate might have been around forty, but it was hard to tell. He said, “You need help, yes.” It wasn’t a question. Kate wondered if that was because his native language was tonal and affected his English inflection, or if he was such an in-charge guy that he didn’t ask questions.

  “Not much. Just tip the chair back enough to bump me up the step.”

  “Of course.” He gave the assistance she had asked for.

  Kate found herself in a small kitchen where a covered pot simmered on the stove and bundles of dried herbs hung from ribbons tacked to the ceiling. The furniture looked like it had been made from a kit. A large batik mandala filled with Buddhas, demons, and clouds dominated one wall, and posters of similar images decorated the space across from it.

  “This way,” said the man, and parted an orange-and-yellow plastic-beaded curtain to let Kate through to the next room. She thanked him, and he acknowledged it with a nod and padded back into the kitchen. The sound of chopping and the smell of onions followed.

  Sierra had come back indoors through the front and took a seat in a circle of metal folding chairs. The sofa and armchairs had been pushed up against the walls, making room for the ten people gathered with Sierra to sit almost knee-to-knee in the middle of the room, allowing just enough of a gap for Kate to wedge herself into the circle. She sent Lobo ahead and once she was in her place, he lay at her feet, his front paws on the bag of trash. Someone in the group wore too much cologne. Was it to compensate for having to smell garbage?

  “Usually,” Sierra said, “the newcomer sits on the floor in the middle, but we’ll make an exception for you, unless you’d like us to help you to the floor.”

  Clueless. That was like asking an able-bodied person if they’d like to have their legs tied up. Kate gritted her teeth. “No, thank you.”

  “Okay, but it’s really powerful to be down low like that when you first open up to us, and to be enveloped by the group energy.” Sierra waited. Kate shook her head, not trusting what might come out of her mouth if she opened it to decline. Sierra glanced at the woman beside her. “Let’s start with introductions. I’m sorry more members aren’t here today. Magda, why don’t you go first?”

  Magda was about fifty, with a lined face, a full bosom and long, slim legs. Her hair, gray with a few threads of brown, was swept back in a chignon. “I’m Magda, I’m an author, and I have lupus. I’m in stage one of my self-healing.”

  Each person introduced himself or herself in this way: first name, occupation, disease, and stage of self-healing. All were in stage one or two of self-healing, until Sierra spoke. “I’m Sierra, I’m a healer and a seer and I’m in stage nine of my self-healing. I healed my cancer and brought my arthritis into remission.” A silence followed, during which the group regarded her with too much reverence. Kate’s lip started to curl in disgust and she restrained the expression. Sierra said, “Kate, we need your full name for the first introduction, and please tell us what brought you here.”

  “My name is Katelina Radescu. I’m a sign language interpreter, a psychic, and the founder and director of Spirit World Fair, what used to be called the Spirit Music Fest and Psychic Fair. And it’s pretty obvious that I’m paraplegic, but my other problem is alcoholism. I’ve been sober for a couple of years. I go to AA so I can stay that way. I don’t call myself cured, but my recovery has a solid foundation.” Now for the lie. Kate hoped her hesitancy came across as anxious hope rather than deception. “I’m here because I wondered how my past lives might have brought me the one I have. And if there’s anything I can do to heal myself.”

  Sierra replied, “Anything is possible. However, some people want to hang onto their obstacles. We’ll get a sense of how much work it will be for you after I read your Akashic records. I can read them on my own, but they come to me more clearly if a loving community concentrates on the person whose records I seek.” She directed the group, “You know what to do. Use a soft but intentional focus and invoke her name.”

  All eyes on her, they repeated, “Katelina Radescu, Katelina Radescu,” in chaotically overlapping whispers, while Sierra chanted a soft soprano Om. The hypnotic and other-worldly effect made Kate feel she had been kidnapped by bad fairies. What would it be like to be on the floor at these people’s feet while they did this? If you had come to them with faith and hope, it might not be so creepy. It might be magical. And that in itself was creepy.

  Sierra ceased chanting. Her eyes bright and blank, she swayed and stared at Kate, her lips moving as if she might be literally reading the Akashic records.

  Kate wondered what would come up. Back in June, past life astrologer Geoff Johnson had done a chart for her when they’d had some slow time at their neighboring booths during Spirit World Fair. He’d asked for the date, time, and location of her birth, and about her unexplained affinities, talents, and aversions, and then run a computer program he had designed. He said she had been, among other things, a Jewish stock trader in early eighteenth-century London and a black hairdresser in mid-twentieth-century Louisiana. How he drew those conclusions, Kate had no idea, but he said they were influential lives. He probably read a lot of history books and made up credible characters affected by the planets that dominated her current-life astrological charts. It had been good entertainment, and Kate had admired his skill in making it seem plausible.

  Sierra snapped out of her apparent trance. “This is going to be very difficult for you. The work with us will be demanding, requiring you to break down deeply held beliefs and self-stories.”

  “Hard work doesn’t scare me.” Was it supposed to? Sierra should have noticed that Kate liked a challenge, juggling two jobs and running the fair, and that she had done it despite two conditions that might have held another person back. She’d been an overachiever even when she was drinking. “What exactly is ‘the work?’ And w
hy is it going to be so hard for me?”

  Magda patted Kate’s hand. “Don’t worry. I had dreadful layers of self-stories. It’s taken me a while to get where I am.”

  To stage one. Did anyone besides Sierra ever reach stage nine?

  Sierra said, “This group is more than emotional support. The work is the process of self-healing.”

  “I’ve been doing the work of staying sober for a while. I don’t think I’m so ill-equipped for self-healing.”

  Sierra’s pitying gaze took in Kate’s legs, Lobo, and the chair. “Your alcoholism is only one symptom of your pattern of self-limitation. Your karmic baggage is so heavy, you haven’t walked for three lifetimes. You almost got stuck as a fresh-water dolphin.”

  Startled, Kate covered a poorly suppressed laugh with a fake sneeze. “I did?” She pulled herself together. “Someone else told me I’d been an able-bodied human. A hairdresser in Baton Rouge named Nadine Belanger, to be specific.”

  “No. That’s not even a co-life, or a weak parallel life.” Kate started to ask what those were, but Sierra ignored her and kept talking. “The records are clear. A pink river dolphin, three times. A bad cycle. The tribes along the Orinoco and the Amazon see them as shape-shifters, even demons. It’s only the traces of another’s life’s karma that pulled you free.”

  A petite woman with pale, brittle shoulder-length hair, teased and curled into big puffy waves, spoke up. Kate reviewed the introductions. This was Posey, an artist and former hairstylist with fibromyalgia. “I was an animal once, too.” Posey looked as if she’d gotten stuck in the eighties. It wasn’t only the big hair, but the blue eyeshadow and the fitted dress with the miniature flowers on its long, flared skirt. She was about Magda’s age, but her voice was small and breathy as if she were trying to sound like a child. With her head tilted to the side, a head that looked too large for her body, she clasped her hands in her lap. “Not the immediate past life, but two incarnations ago. I took refuge as a dog. It was lazy of me, spiritually. I didn’t want to move forward. I can see that now.”