Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  *****

  The twins squished together in the armchair in the living room, holding hands, their expressions wary. After lunch, Mae had told them they needed to have a talk.

  “Have we been bad?” Brook asked.

  “Not completely.” Mae sat on her exercise ball, knee to knee with them. “I think there’s hope for you.”

  The girls smiled, but their eyes remained apprehensive.

  Mae continued. “You were real good while Dr. Gross was telling us everything.” They had behaved remarkably well back at the Red Pelican while Don explained the communications he’d had with Yeshi after registering for the retreat. “I appreciate the way you sat quiet and listened.”

  “We were trying to figure it all out. It was confusing,” Stream said. “About Dr. Yeshi and Mrs. Moo. Did they break up?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know. It’s a hard decision.”

  Brook said, “Not if your girlfriend is Mrs. Moo.”

  “Hush. Enough about her. All that matters is that no more sick people get fooled into thinking she can cure them.”

  “Who was Posey? The sick lady the doctors were worried about?”

  “Miss Posey is the lady in the flowered dress. But she’s not sick.”

  “Then how could Mrs. Moo pretend she could cure Miss Posey, if she wasn’t sick?”

  Stream cut in, “The stinky lady? She could smell herself and get sick.”

  “Stream. That is exactly what we need to talk about. You two have got to stop making fun of people. Miss Posey is harmless. She may get on your nerves, but she can’t help it.”

  “Why? If we can help how we act, so can she.”

  “Miss Posey is neurotic. That means she’s not all the way mentally ill, but she’s not thinking straight either. And Mrs. Moo was taking advantage of her being neurotic to get her to do stuff for her. And to make Miss Posey give her money. Dr. Yeshi was glad Dr. Gross could keep an eye on her this weekend, and that he brought people who wouldn’t go along with Mrs. Moo. They both wanted Miss Posey to stop listening to Mrs. Moo.”

  The girls shared a twin-talk moment followed by a couple of signs. Brook said, “We’re sorry we made fun of Miss Posey. We won’t make fun of neurotic people.”

  Stream added, “We never made fun of Jamie, and he’s neurotic, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but you probably shouldn’t call him that. And of course you didn’t make fun of him. It’s harder to be polite to people like Miss Posey or Mrs. Moo, but you still have to try.”

  Brook squirmed, her legs kicking. “Nun-uh. Not with Mrs. Moo. She’s mean.”

  “I’m going to tell you a story. When I was a little older than you, there was a mean boy in my class. One day at recess he pushed my friend Kayla down and made her cry. And I got so mad. I was taller and stronger than just about everybody, so I wasn’t scared of him. I pushed him down, sat on his back, shoved his face in the dirt and told him never to do anything like that again. Of course I got in trouble. I was trying to do the right thing, but my daddy said, ‘You don’t let one make you one.’ There’s better ways to deal with mean people than to be one yourself.”

  “But I like that story, Mama,” Brook said. “You were brave.”

  “I reckon I was. But talking to grown-ups who could handle the problem would have been better.”

  Stream looked puzzled. “Who was the grown-up that could handle the Mrs. Moo problem?”

  “I was trying to be. And so were a lot of other people. Dr. Yeshi should have done something, being her boyfriend, but it’s hard to put someone in their place if you’re real close to ’em.”

  The girls giggled, sputtering as they tried not to. Brook stopped long enough to say, “Jamie and Mr. Rex put her in her place.”

  “But do you think they did the right thing?”

  Stream started to speak, then fell silent. Brook glanced at her, wriggled briefly, and leaned back in the chair, gazing at her knees. After a while, Stream leaned back with her and they looked at each other.

  “It was kinda the right thing,” Brook said.

  “Because they didn’t really make fun of her,” Stream added. “Just stuff she says.”

  Mae was impressed. The children had done some serious ethical reasoning for seven-year-olds. “That was complicated, wasn’t it?”

  The twins nodded.

  “It was hard for me to figure out, too. What they did wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’m still not sure if it was right or wrong.”

  “Are we done now?” Brook asked. “Can we go outside?”

  “No. We have to talk about some other things. Like whining and disobeying. You say you listened to Jamie, but I’m not sure he was strict enough with you.”

  Stream shook her head much too vigorously. “Jamie didn’t spoil us. He made us have vegetables every day and he made us brush our teeth. A lot.”

  “You like vegetables. What if you wanted to stay up late, or eat dessert first, or go out without a jacket?”

  After a pause, Brook said, “If we asked really well, we could do stuff. Like, if we made up a dance as a way to ask.”

  “If we just did it without permission and had fun with it, it was okay, too. Jamie wasn’t like ...” Stream sucked her lips in, making a thinking face. “He wasn’t like you and Daddy. He wasn’t ... I don’t mean bossy. Bossy is like Jen after they got married. He was like Jen before she and Daddy got married. A grown-up kid.”

  Brook corrected her sister. “But he was ... he was like the kid who’s having a sleepover at his house. Kind of in charge, but not exactly.”

  “Well, sweeties, the sleepover is over. Jamie did his best, but he’s never taken care of young’uns before. You picked up some bad habits pretty fast and I need you to get over ’em just as fast.”

  “We didn’t start cussing,” Brook countered.

  Stream nudged her. “We’re supposed to say ‘yes, Mama.’ And mean it.”

  They said it, appeared to mean it, and Mae let them go out in the yard to play. Or to study ants.

  Needing movement to clear her head and calm her mind, she propped her feet on the ball, got into a plank position, and did pushups until she couldn’t finish another, then lay back across the ball, her arms draped at her sides. Jamie as the kid in charge of a sleepover. The girls were sharp. They understood him. They loved him, too. But it was more like their crush on Sekani Chomba than love for a parent. No, it wasn’t quite like that, not like child-to-child friendship. They simply saw Jamie as he was, took care of him, and adored him.

  Mae stood and put one shin behind her on the ball for split squats. How could she break up with Jamie? And yet how could she not? Even the children could see he wasn’t ready to be a father. Jen hadn’t been ready to be a mother, yet she and Hubert had blown right past that in their romance. Mae wasn’t going to make the same mistake. She could be happy with Jamie as a boyfriend, going slowly, no plans for marriage, but that wasn’t the future he wanted.

  Changing legs, she pictured telling the children. It wouldn’t be as bad as telling them she and Hubert were getting divorced, but that memory haunted her. They’d been so angry with her. Blamed her.

  Mae’s nagging doubt about Jamie’s health crept in as she finished the set and stretched her legs. He kept doing his song-and-dance act whenever he mentioned being sick. So many things could cause his symptoms. The most alarming one, HIV, was virtually impossible. Mae was his second partner in his whole life. And if some accidental blood exposure had infected him, he would have told her right away. He cared too much about her to hide anything contagious. Maybe it really was cat scratch fever and he just couldn’t resist the fact there was a song about it. Stream had been worried that Sierra said something about cancer, but that didn’t cause a fever, did it?

  Mae would have to ask outright when they had a chance to be alone. He might be honest then, except he hated being seen as sick or needy. The only way he wanted her to take care of him was to brush his hair.

  Though Marty had
warned her about staying together because Jamie was sick, and she knew in her head he was right, her heart couldn’t agree. Jamie would never leave her if she was sick. He would be there, caring for her, with that extraordinary loving openness that made him such a profound healer. Though he’d gotten angry the night of their fight, told her to go away and not to waste her time on him, that was just Jamie drama. Pain, not rejection.

  The decision was hers, and she didn’t want to make it.

  Voices in the front yard broke into her thoughts. She let the ball roll into a corner and went to the door. Ezra stood on the bottom step, while the twins sat in plastic lawn chairs on either side of the ant colony that had taken over the space under the clothesline. Huge, shiny black ants scurried in and out of the entry hole. Due to the ferocity of their bites, Mae had learned to stand on a chair while hanging clothes near the ant pile.

  “One time a bunch of ’em bit through my socks and they wouldn’t let go,” Stream was saying to Ezra. “And when Mama washed my socks, the ants came out alive!”

  Brook added, “Niall said he knew a guy who got that kind of ants up his pants and they bit his man stuff and he went into—” She looked at Mae. “What’s that called?”

  “Shock.” Mae had meant to do something to drive the ants away, thinking of Jamie’s horror of bugs, especially bugs that could do that, but she’d given in to the girls’ desire to keep them around. “Watch your step if you go down there.” She smiled at Ezra. “Come on in.”

  He bowed his head shyly to the girls and followed Mae inside, then reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, taking out two envelopes. “I’m sorry it took me so long.” He handed them to Mae. “This is the letter Ms. Stein wrote me. And a card Sierra tried to give her. Her daughter wouldn’t let her see it and told us to take it away. I don’t know if you can use it or not.”

  “Thank you. I might be able to. I’ll give it some thought.” Mae offered Ezra something to drink, and they went into the kitchen. She filled a tall glass with iced tea and then remembered Ezra made his strong, without sugar. “I’m sorry, this is sweet tea.”

  “It’s okay. Water will be fine.”

  She gave him water and they sat at the table. Mae opened the get well card. The tarot card was tucked into a little pocket where a photo was supposed to go, and underneath the conventional prayers for a speedy recovery was the message: Look what you’ve brought on yourself and all of us. But you can turn it around. Your support can save our plans. And your life.

  “Oh my god.” Mae recoiled at the message. “That’s heartless.”

  She took the tarot card out to return to Kate and ran her fingers over Sierra’s heavy, half-printed writing. The feelings Sierra had put into it were so strong, the card might bring different psychic information than the shoe had. Using it with Magda’s letter, Mae could probably see the two women together. But did she need to? Sierra had given up, at least for now. It would be nice to know if she had given up for good, but Mae couldn’t access the future. She returned the letter to Ezra and told him what had happened at the Red Pelican.

  “Ms. Stein will be glad to know that,” he said. “She looked really bad, like in my dream, and she’s going to take a long time to get better, but she’s going home and she’s not going to that group anymore. She said she’s not going to do a Preworld book about Mu after all, either.”

  “She was going to write about Mu?” Would the royalties have gone to Sierra’s cult? “I’m glad she’s not.”

  “The next one is the Afterworld book with Apaches in it. She said I can help her get the culture right, but first I have to ask my grandma if it’s okay.”

  “Maybe Sierra was helping her ‘research’ Mu. A seer who claimed to have memories of the place.” Mae opened the plastic tub of cookies on the table and nudged it toward Ezra. “You should refuel if you haven’t eaten after your run. These are those super-healthy Jamie cookies.”

  Ezra took one, spread a paper napkin on the table and ate slowly. He sipped his water. “Will you see Jamie before he leaves town tomorrow?”

  “I hope so. We haven’t made plans yet.”

  “I don’t like to see you break up. I like you together.”

  “I like us together, too. But not as together as Jamie wants us to be. I’m not sure we can work that out.”

  The boy folded the napkin so it captured the crumbs and carried it to the trash. “He needs to talk to you.” He finished his glass of water. “Thank you for the water and the cookie. I have to go.” He brightened. “I have a consultation with Dr. Ngarongsha now.”

  “About what?”

  Ezra frowned and pondered for a while. “My health, I guess. But mostly I want to ask him questions. He knows a lot about his traditions.”

  After Ezra left, Mae debated doing more psychic work. Everything she wanted to know was in the future, but she still could try to discover Sierra’s plans. Would Sierra hold on to the money? Put it into Yeshi’s practice? Set up a practice on her own?

  Mae put the Tarot card near the door with her keys and took the get well card and a quartz crystal out on the back deck. She sat in the shade, gazing at the turtle shape on the crest of the mountain.

  If Sierra had gone straight to Santa Fe, she would be home by now. Her hopes and plans for her soul group had been shattered that morning and her relationship with Yeshi badly damaged, probably beyond repair. She would have had three hours on the road to cry, scream, beat on the steering wheel, whatever she did to let out her pain. After that she might turn to a friend, confide her feelings, and talk about surviving the loss or about the goals she still had left—assuming she had any friends. Sierra could be alone, distressed, and unhealed. What would she do then?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Mae closed her eyes, tuned into her breath and the crystal, and focused on Sierra’s traces in the card, setting a question to guide her journey. Does Sierra have plans for the future? The tunnel that led into a psychic trance was dark and foggy, and an emotional sense of Sierra, frantic and desperate, came through before the vision emerged in a dingy living room with mandala posters on the walls. Old and faded, they looked like they’d come from her childhood home.

  She sat curled in an armchair, crying, a glass of wine held in both hands. Mae didn’t want to intrude on her private troubles. When nothing changed, and all she saw was Sierra sniffling and drinking, Mae almost backed out of the trance, but then Sierra said, “Mom, do you really still believe?”

  Mae quieted her mind and refocused.

  Sierra blew her nose, took a swallow of wine and blew again, speaking loudly as if to someone in another room. “I told this man, Sal Rexrode, that he was in the soul group when I didn’t think he was, because he had money. And I told him he was sicker than he was and that we’d cured him. I wanted him to believe.” After pausing for another gulp, she continued, growing defiant. “I bet Daddy did stuff like that.”

  A toilet flushed, and a shuffling, clumping sound preceded the entrance of an overweight, brown-haired woman in her late middle years, using an aluminum walking frame. “He trusted his insight. Did you trust yours?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  Sierra’s mother lowered herself stiffly onto a sagging couch. “Of course you do. He trained you. You’re gifted. You found the soul group.”

  “I found people with money or talents.” Sierra stood, pacing to a mandala poster, and rapped her knuckles on one of its many circles, this one contained within the belly of a fanged, red-faced demon. “Like our old commune.”

  “Yes. And you can still buy it. You can outbid that offer if you raise more money.”

  “For what?” Sierra turned on her mother. “So you can go there and die with Daddy? I have to give the money back. Magda got worse. The only person who got well was Posey, and I could never see what was wrong with her. For all I know, it was all in her head.” Her voice quavered. “You never got better even as my co-soul.”

  “Then we need to look at our karma again. My heali
ng is still out there.”

  “No.” Sierra ripped the poster from the wall, her volume rising. “I’m tired of letting you tell me what’s true, and watching you get sicker and sicker, expecting a miracle.”

  Sobbing, she attacked the mandala, ripping it, balling up the pieces and stomping on them as if killing insects, ignoring her mother’s demands that she stop.

  “Sierra Mu Carter!” her mother finally shouted. “This is not the way of a spiritual leader.”

  “I’m not one. And I’m not Sierra Mu anymore. Just Sierra Carter.”

  Sierra walked out, slammed the door behind her, and leaned on it, breathless and wide-eyed, no longer weeping. Hands pressed to her temples, she stared across the parking lot of an apartment complex. “Oh my god, my god, this is what it feels like. She didn’t unheal me. She healed me.”

  Stunned, Mae closed the vision. Had her simple crystal grid brought all this out? She had tried to do less, and the effect had been more powerful than if she’d directed the process. But then, Fiona hadn’t told her the healing would be less profound. She’d told Mae to back off and let it take its course. Swept on by a flood of disappointments—the soul group getting sicker, Magda’s rejection, Yeshi’s betrayal, and Rex and Jamie’s satire—its course had become a spiritual landslide.

  *****

  Looking miserable in his little red harness, Gasser plodded into Ralph Edwards Park and stopped, sitting and mewing. Jamie remembered Mae’s medical intuition. She’d said Gasser’s back hurt from carrying so much weight. “Sorry, mate.” Jamie petted him. “But you have to walk. Dunno how else to slim you down.”

  In front of them, a lone skateboarder coasted down one of the ramps. Further into the park, a few people sat at picnic tables eating and talking, and some older children played on the basketball court on the far side away from the river. The water was low, leaving a swath of mud on either side of the bright blue ribbon winding through the desert. Jamie bent down and prodded Gasser softly. The cat walked on and then stopped to sit again.

  Jamie gazed past him to the water. Down the steep, weedy bank, Posey was standing barefoot in the mud, casting papers into the current. They had something written on them that looked like her floral calligraphy. More poems she’d meant to give Rex? With each toss, she uttered a sad “Goodbye, goodbye.”