Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  Kate turned away from Posey and toward Sierra with what she hoped passed for an expression of admiration. “I’m impressed that you healed yourself so completely. Did you do it on your own or did you also use medicine?”

  Sierra took her time to answer. “Sometimes, the vibrations of pharmaceuticals interfere with the final stages of spiritual-cellular coherence. It depends on the drug and the person. I stopped my arthritis medications, but I completed my cancer treatment. To make it less toxic, however, I accelerated its effectiveness so I needed much less, and then took some herbal medicines.”

  “None of us would like to be on medicines,” said Leon, a tall, thin, gray-haired shop owner who had Parkinson’s. Murmurs of agreement rippled through the circle. “My medication helps me, but the side effects are bad. It can turn you into a gambling addict, so now I fight that. Medicine.” He shook his head. “It’s as bad as the disease. Of course, I asked for it. It’s my karmic load.”

  Kate had heard of that side effect of some Parkinson’s meds from one of her AA friends who also went to Gambler’s Anonymous, and wondered if Leon used GA for support. If so, he should know what a real support group was like. Other than a somewhat contracted posture, he showed no significant symptoms, but Kate suspected that was due to his treatment, not Sierra. If he, or anyone in her group, made little progress in self-healing, Sierra had a good fallback position. She could remind them about their karmic cowardice or say their medications were slowing their vibrations. It would be their fault, not hers, if her self-healing program didn’t work.

  At least, so far, it didn’t seem to be doing any harm. Maybe it made Leon feel better to think that his illness and his medication side effects related to his karma and thus made sense of his bad luck. As long as he still got the treatment he needed, it was possible this nonsense gave him comfort. If he gave up on his doctors, though, or paid Sierra a lot of money, he could be in trouble.

  Kate asked, “Is all of this free? The readings? And the self-healing instruction?”

  “Yes,” Sierra replied. “We accept donations toward buying our retreat center, but no one is obliged to give. It’s part of our final karmic healing that we offer our gifts to those in need. But it’s also part of the fullness of our process that others give to us.”

  Kate noticed that Sierra’s boyfriend was standing close behind the beaded curtain. How long had he been there? Was he eavesdropping? Waiting for a chance to grab a word with Sierra? Kate asked, “But if I didn’t donate, I could still participate?”

  “It’s entirely up to you.” Sierra indicated the bag of trash at Kate’s feet. “Are you ready for the first step in self-healing?”

  The man behind the curtain faded back into the kitchen.

  “Of course.” Kate asked Lobo to lift the bag to her, and he put its knotted end in her hand. “Now what?”

  “Reach in. Show us the first thing you find. Don’t choose, don’t hunt. Let the truth emerge.”

  Kate took out a plastic bag, the packaging for frozen edamame. “How is this the truth?”

  “You eat frozen food that comes in a plastic bag. What does that say? And it’s not just any frozen food, is it? It’s fancy, special. Talk to us about it. Be honest with your garbage.”

  Kate bit her tongue so she wouldn’t laugh again. When she’d gotten a grip, she said, “My boyfriend likes edamame. I don’t. I keep these in the freezer in case he wants some.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Talk about the bag. It has a story. Everything you throw away is part of your pattern, your karma, your footprint in the world.”

  “If you mean my ecological footprint, it’s as small as I can keep it without being a fanatic. You can’t make a guilt trip out of a plastic bag. Or if you want to, maybe you should show me your garbage.”

  The beaded curtain moved. Sierra’s boyfriend stepped through. “Would anyone care for tea?”

  Sierra let out a breath, still staring at Kate. “Thank you, yes. A pot for all of us.”

  He disappeared. Was he stage-managing? Making sure Sierra kept her cool? Tim often helped Kate that way with looks and touches, when she was about to lose her all-too-easily triggered temper. She needed him now, because she was getting disgusted with the ritual and struggling to play the role of a seeker.

  Sierra smiled at Kate. “Keep digging. We’ve only gotten started.”

  Kate yanked a fragment of a broken coffee mug from the bag. “Okay. Tell me what this means about my soul and my karma.”

  “What does it mean to you?”

  “It means I dropped a mug.”

  “Was it valuable? Were you upset? Attached to it? Why did you lose your grip? Does that mean something to you?”

  Kate clenched her free hand on the arm of her chair. “Would you like to show me your license as a psychotherapist? It was a dollar-store mug. I don’t know why I dropped it.”

  Sierra’s tone softened in an apparent attempt to sound nurturing. “Your defensiveness is getting in the way. You won’t be able to find your source.”

  “How is it being defensive to have nothing to say about my garbage? I’m being honest.”

  “Are you? I hear resistance.” Sierra held out open hands. “Drop your guard and share.”

  “Share? Okay.” On an impulse, Kate tossed the piece of ceramic to Sierra. “Now it’s your garbage. You talk about it.”

  Posey gasped and Magda frowned. The others looked at the floor. They couldn’t recognize a joke? Sierra’s expression of pity deepened, as if Kate had done something shameful.

  Somehow, that was the last straw. These foolish people deserved each other. There was nothing more to investigate, no further reason to stay. They were idiots believing idiocy, but it was free and it was their choice. Kate roused Lobo and backed her chair out of the circle. She aimed toward the beaded curtain. As it rattled shut behind her she heard Sierra sigh, “This is so sad. You can see the river dolphin surfacing.”

  Sierra’s boyfriend, who was scooping loose tea into a ceramic teapot, finished the task, closed the tea canister, and walked with Kate to the door. He helped her roll her chair down the step and gave Mitzi a preemptive order. Kate thanked him. He seemed so normal, she couldn’t help asking, “Do you believe that stuff she says? Do you support what she does?”

  “Sierra,” he said, gazing more at Mitzi than at Kate, “is a diamond in the rough. Her methods are ... immature. But she’s more gifted than you realize. You should give her another chance.”

  He gave Kate a questioning look. She didn’t know what to say. Did he expect her to commit to this foolishness? With a smile and a nod, he closed the door.

  Before Mitzi could recover from the man’s influence, Kate and Lobo hurried out the gate. When she reached the front of the house, she started to call Tim, then saw Posey standing at the end of the walk, her head angled sideways, her arms reaching out. “Come here, dear. It’ll be all right.”

  Kate glanced around to see if Posey might be speaking to someone else. The dead-end street was quiet, the yard empty except for Kate, Lobo, and Posey, and a few butterflies in the wildflower border. Though Posey was ditzy enough to talk to the butterflies, she had to be cooing to Kate. As Posey floated to her and touched her shoulders, Kate’s spine braced with aversion, and Lobo moved between them.

  Posey backed off. “It’s always hard, breaking down your barriers. I cried and cried during my ceremony. We all do, if we really go through it. Don’t give up. You can open up and heal.”

  “Through psychoanalyzing my garbage?”

  “It’s not analytical, it’s emotional. It’s the truth of your dirt and your refusals and your rejections and your karmic patterns. I had thrown away my last box of tampons, knowing I would never use them again, and, oh, that was crushing. It brought up everything.”

  “Excuse me. I don’t need to know that.”

  “But don’t you see? All my lifetimes as a mother, and then one in which I’m not?”

  No,
Kate did not see, nor did she want to. “I should be getting home. I’m not going to hang around and cry over my broken coffee mug.”

  She rolled past Posey, who held out her frail little arms again, her head still sideways, bleating, “Please? Don’t give up. Sierra wants you to come back.”

  I bet she does. She wants me back so she can change my mind. Not a chance.

  The next day Kate had a job sign interpreting a small conference at Eight Northern Pueblos Tribal College. Afterward, she stopped by Bernadette’s office. The professor listened to Kate’s account, taking notes on her computer. When Kate finished, Bernadette mused, “I only review businesses, and this doesn’t seem to be one. And bizarre as it is, it sounds voluntary, not coercive.” She turned from her monitor and faced Kate. “Advice about something as unquantifiable as dealing with your past life karma is a fuzzy area, so she’s not treading in any health professionals’ scope of practice. Are you sure she wasn’t suggesting actions that would harm anyone?”

  “She didn’t directly say to go off medications, and she didn’t promise cures, but she hinted it was possible and said she’d done it for herself.”

  “Did she say how? Diet, or imagery, or herbs?”

  “Not diet. She mentioned taking herbs, but I got the impression that was the frosting on the cake, not the main thing. I’m not sure how she claims she did the self-healing, but it sounds like it’s supposed to be a psychological and spiritual process she puts them through. I doubt they ever finish, since they’re all in stage one or two and she says she’s in nine.”

  “What about collecting money for this retreat center? Who’s behind it?” Bernadette glanced back at her notes. “You quoted her saying, ‘We accept donations.’ ”

  “I didn’t think to ask about it. I took it to mean her support group, but it could be her royal-we plural self, or some partnership she has with someone else.”

  “Or her soul group?”

  “Maybe. I didn’t get as far as soul groups, either.”

  “If you think you could stand to go back, maybe you could find out about the timeline. How close this is to a serious plan. If she opens a retreat center, that would be something I could review.”

  “She has ten people meeting in her living room. She said a few members were missing, but I don’t think she’s anywhere near being able to fund a project like that.”

  Bernadette typed another note. “You sound like you’re not going back.”

  “No, but they want me to. I don’t think they like having someone come through without being converted. There’s no chance of that, though. They’re all anti-medicine, and I trust my doctors.”

  “Do you think that’s the only reason she’d want you back? Ego? The need to persuade you?”

  “I mentioned I’m the director of Spirit World Fair. If I joined her group, I could give her publicity.”

  “That could explain her claiming a connection with Jamie, too. She might want to use him for fund-raisers or to make her more visible.”

  “After what she did to him at Bandstand? He’ll never help her out.”

  Kate looked out the window across the now-empty quad of the small campus, remembering what it had looked like during the fair, with the music stage at one end and the booths on all sides. It was primarily the musicians like Jamie who drew the crowds, though the talks by famous authors in campus lecture halls had been popular, and the booths of well-known psychics and spiritual artists had been important attractions. Otherwise, the participants were relatively unknown, and compared to most of them, Sierra was even more of a nobody. How could she expect to raise money and start a retreat center? She wouldn’t interest nearly as many people as Geoff Johnson did. His work was upbeat and entertaining. Kate had taken pleasure in the possibility she had been Nadine. The story Geoff had given her illustrated resilience and entrepreneurial spirit, traits Kate was proud of.

  Sierra’s approach, on the other hand, was designed to make people miserable and guilty. The absurd pink dolphin scenario had been aimed at making Kate see herself as limited and negative, a karmic failure. That didn’t seem like a recipe for making money.

  Bernadette thanked Kate for enduring the support group and reporting on it. “I’ll tell Mae and Jamie what you found out. I’m sorry it wasn’t anything that I could write about, though.”

  “So am I. I hate to see people getting sucked into her bullshit, even if they aren’t paying for it.”

  Later that evening, when she and Tim were leaving an AA meeting, Kate turned her phone back on to find she had a message from Jamie. She would rather have heard from Mae, but after spending time with Sierra, Kate probably shouldn’t classify Jamie as annoying anymore, at least not by comparison. She listened to his message, hoping he hadn’t called to insist that she check out the support group again, and burst out laughing.

  Tim looked down at her. “What?”

  She replayed the message on speaker. A squeaky, beeping dolphin voice said, “I knew you when you weren’t you ...” On the next line, Jamie had managed to sound like both a cow and a dolphin: “And I’m Mrs. Moooooo!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Mae’s phone began ringing in her backpack as she walked from the fitness center to her father’s office on the opposite end of the small campus. In early September, Marty’s schedule was light enough that he and Mae carpooled. After a long day of classes, labs, and work, she looked forward to the quiet, companionable ride home with him, a badly needed chance to unwind. She hoped the call was nothing urgent.

  By the time she managed to dig her phone out, it had stopped ringing, but she could see she’d missed a call from Hubert. Probably about the twins. They’d been acting up since they’d returned home.

  Marty’s office was in an old building that housed the basketball court and the athletic department. As Mae headed up the narrow stairs from the back entrance near the track, she returned Hubert’s call.

  “What’s up? The girls settling down any?”

  “No, they’re not.” There was an edge in his voice, a level of stress Mae seldom heard in him. “The problem’s getting worse. I don’t know if you’re encouraging this whole Jen-is-not-our-mama thing, but we’ve got to put a stop to it. They’re breaking her heart.”

  The accusation stung. “You know darned well I’m not encouraging it. I’ve done everything I can to help them get past it.”

  “Have you? They were fine with her before they went to visit you.”

  “She didn’t live with y’all before they visited me. And they were worried about her moving in by the time they got off the plane. Didn’t Arnie have a talk with them?” Mae had hoped her stepfather could guide them through the adjustment.

  “Yeah, and with us, but I swear spending time with him just makes ’em worse. I don’t know if they need to visit him less, or call you less—seems like they’ve always been on the phone or Skype with you whenever they go to his place.”

  Mae stopped in the hallway outside Marty’s office. His door was open, and so was the door of the head track coach’s office across the hall. She moved to the end of the corridor with a window overlooking the athletic fields. “You wanted them to keep me and Arnie as family. Don’t you dare think of cutting us off.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. But I’m at my wit’s end. My kids aren’t happy, my wife’s not happy, and it just keeps getting worse.”

  Mae was at a loss, too. She took a moment to think.

  Brook and Stream had called daily for the first week when they got home in late August. A full year earlier, Hubert had asked Mae not to call the twins daily anymore, so they would transition to having Jen as the new adult woman in their lives and adapt to Mae’s smaller role. Mae had cut back to five and then four contacts a week, as he’d requested. Normally, she initiated calls or Skype chats at scheduled times, and it was always while Hubert was at home. But since their return from New Mexico, the girls had taken to calling during their after-school time at their grandparents’ house. Complaining about Je
n. Telling Mae how much they missed her.

  Whenever Mae had asked to speak to Jim or Sallie, the girls said their grandparents were busy, and Mae began to suspect Brook and Stream were running up the phone bill on the landline without permission. She confronted them and they confessed. After that, the twins went back to their scheduled calls. They still griped about Jen, but only when they were at Arnie’s house.

  Mae wondered if they’d told Hubert one of the big things that still troubled them. “You know they’re upset that y’all didn’t change bedrooms?”

  “I let Jen decide and then I told them it was settled. The children can’t outvote her. She has to take on some decisions in the family.”

  “I’m sure she should, but they don’t like the way she does it. They say she was okay before you got married, but ... Don’t take this wrong, I’m using their words, okay? They say that now she’s ‘all weird.’ That she’s ‘either gooshy or bossy.’ And that she stopped ‘being normal’ with them.”

  Mae knew what the twins meant. Though Jen was naturally perky and bubbly, she lost her personality when she had to fill a role she was anxious about. She had been Mae’s supervisor at Health Quest and had worn authority with an insecurity that made her fluctuate between rigid rule enforcement and strained artificial warmth.

  Hubert sighed. “I’ve told them to give her a chance to relax and get used to living together.”

  “So did I. And I reminded them they had a bug up their behinds about her moving in before it happened. They probably stopped being normal with her, too. I remember how awful I was to Arnie when Mama married him. It took me a year to come around to liking him. He was so patient. He understood I was missing Daddy. He says the girls probably feel like I did then, like they’d be betraying the parent they lost to divorce by accepting the new one.”

  “Yeah, he told us all that, too. But what good does it do? It’s an explanation, but it’s not a solution.”