She walked to the end of the street. The sign above her read Blueberry Hill Drive. There was a small park across the street from where she stood, the swing set and slide vaguely outlined in the low light. She crossed the street, and looked at the next street sign.
Mulberry Circle.
The address was so familiar.
Then it came to her. Dr. Andy left countless cards with his home address. 13 Mulberry Circle. He laughed when he told her he got a deep discount on his home because no one wanted to live at number 13. As if a simple number could ruin lives. It had firmly remained in her memory.
She checked a house number. 3 Mulberry Circle. Then 5, 7, 9, 11, and finally, 13. A light glowed behind the golden drapes in the front room. She chuckled to herself as she stood outside the lushly landscaped bungalow of Dr. Andy Stark, the man who for the last two years relentlessly pursued her affections, only for her to rebuff his every advance because romantic relationships with humans was forbidden in the spirit world.
Forbidden until tonight, she thought opening several buttons on her dress until her flowered satin bra was visible.
Time to give the good doctor what he’s ached for.
For a brief moment, her thoughts strayed to Reed. The moment was fleeting. Reed was on his own, and no matter what she felt for him only a few hours earlier, their love, their relationship, their bond, was now broken.
She knocked lightly on the door and waited.
The only man she was concerned with was the warm body on the other side of this door.
There was a rustling noise behind the door, followed by a light flooding above her. A few seconds later, the lock snapped, and the door opened.
Dr. Andy stood barefoot and bare chested, his light hair tousled as if she roused him from bed. A look of disbelief gleamed in his eyes.
“Sara-Kate, what are you...”
Before he could finish the obvious question, she covered his firm lips with her own. His body was warm and inviting. He didn’t resist her advances. One hand caressed her face, and the other pressed against the mall of her back, pulling her closer to him.
As their kiss deepened, Sara-Kate was strangely unfulfilled. She was the in the arms of a beautiful, kind man, and yet she felt nothing, and no real desire.
Finally, their lips parted, and she inched away from his face.
“Sara-Kate, can you give me ten minutes to rearrange a few things, and then I’ll come to you?”
She was dumbstruck by the request. Rearrange what? she wondered.
“Andy, who the hell is at the door this time of night?” A woman’s impatient voice called from inside the house.
Then it all became so crystal clear.
Dr. Andy had a woman in his home, most likely in his bed. Sara-Kate shrank back from his touch.
“I...I’m so sorry,” she stuttered, continuing to back away from him. Her face heated with humiliation.
“Sara-Kate, please don’t leave. I...I love you!”
She turned away and picked up her pace. She stumbled, her ankle turning, and she caught herself before falling onto the ground. Once she regained her balance, she sprinted down the driveway and onto the road. From behind her, she could hear Dr. Andy plead with her to come back.
Her momentum carried her to the next street, and she did not stop until she reached the darkened playground she passed on her way to Dr. Andy’s house. Finally, she allowed herself to slow down, and entered the playground and took a seat on the wooden swing.
Reed, the man she truly loved, hurt her beyond belief, and Dr. Andy, the man who thought he loved her, just humiliated her.
Yet, she couldn’t blame Dr. Andy. What did she expect? That he would wait around, year after year, pining for her love? Of course not. He found himself a lover. Now she probably complicated his relationship. Although she professed to herself that she did not care, she knew she did. She didn’t want to hurt him. He thought he loved her, but she knew in truth, he was attracted to what she was—a spirit, no longer human.
Two tears slipped from her eyes, and she didn’t bother to wipe them away. The pain she felt was so stark, so acute. Before Reed arrived at her home, her life had seemed so settled. Now, her tidy, orderly little life was blown apart.
Now what?
She had no real idea where she was in relation to her own home. There was no one on the street to ask for help. Maybe, if she could wait it out a few hours until daylight, she could find her way back home, or at the very least, catch someone on their way to work and ask for directions.
Somehow, she would put her never-ending life back together.
CHAPTER FOUR
Reed wasn’t sure how many hours passed since Sara delivered the devastating news that he was no longer alive. Not as he knew it, anyway. That somehow after dying in the car accident, he passed through dimensions and ended up in a new world very much like his own, where he was a stranger with nothing, and no one who knew him, or even cared about him.
That wasn’t exactly true.
He had one person—Sara-Kate. The loveliest, most warm and generous soul who accepted him into her world without question or hesitation. The woman he loved more than anything or everything in his past life, or present spirit.
And he destroyed that love.
Now all that remained was an empty, hollow feeling of pain and despair. Where would this new life take him now? He was truly alone, without friends or possessions. Without Sara-Kate. He could accept losing everything else, but not Sara.
It was so cold outside, and even without shoes and socks, he barely felt it. The intense emotional pain burned inside him.
Beneath a street light, something shiny on the ground caught his eye. He bent down and lifted the metal circle into his hand. It was a coin, but unlike any coin he ever seen before. It was all true, everything Sara-Kate told him. Everything had changed.
As he passed house after house, a light suddenly appeared on a porch. He turned toward the sound of a door opening. A woman in her thirties stood shivering in a robe on her front porch. A tiny dog stood off in the distance sniffing at a bush.
He shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, and nodded an acknowledgement to the woman.
“Hello,” she called out.
“Hi,” he answered.
“Cold out tonight, isn’t it?” she asked.
He stopped and turned to her. “It sure is.” He wasn’t in the mood for a conversation with a stranger, but he didn’t want to be rude, either.
“I was just about to make a cup of tea. Would you...would you like to come inside?” she asked.
He was startled by her request. She was inviting a total stranger off the street into her home. Then it dawned on him. Sara-Kate told him that what he was now was extremely attractive to humans. He could use anyone, anytime, for his own gain. This woman was no different. And right now, he was at the depths of his own despair. He wanted to say yes. Go inside, have tea, and see where it would lead. Make a connection.
Still, he couldn’t take advantage of anyone. He would never cheat on Sara-Kate, no matter what happened between them earlier that night, or the fact she wanted nothing to do with him any longer.
“Thank you, but I need to get home.” He turned on as much of a smile as he could muster, and continued his way down the street. He needed to get back to Sara-Kate and apologize to her, beg her forgiveness if needed. Realistically, he knew the chances of her forgiving him were next to none. He said too many nasty things, none of which was true. She was just a convenient target. It was all fear and shock that drove the hateful words from his mouth.
When he reached the end of the street, he stopped to get his bearings. A strange tingle began somewhere deep within his brain.
Sara-Kate was near.
It was impossible, he knew. He was nowhere near her house, and she never left her home. Yet, he felt her. She was so close. It was almost that if he strained hard enough, he would hear her breathe. He picked up his pace. The only sound now was the soft
thudding of his bare feet against the pavement. He stopped again, and listened. This time he heard a strange, stained sound, an almost metallic groan.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed motion. Then he was saw her, even in the darkness. Sara-Kate, swinging back and forth in the children’s playground. Love and relief bubbled to his surface. He hurried toward her.
Once he arrived beside her, it was as if a huge, heavy steel door closed between them. Her anger was so stark and real, he could feel it pulse without her uttering a single word.
The realization of her feelings caused a potent mixture of sadness and devastation. He could no more than sink into the swing beside her.
After a few minutes of nothing but the groan of the chains above them, she finally spoke.
“What do you want, Reed?” Bitterness edged her every word.
“I want you, Sara.”
She let out a sarcastic chuckle.
He should have expected her caustic attitude, but it still stung.
“Okay then, I need...answers. I think I deserve that much.”
After a few minutes, she finally responded. “What do you want to know? I already told you everything.”
“No, you haven’t. I need to understand how I got here. What you are. What we are.”
“Reed, you’re asking me for complicated answers that I don’t even know. I told you, there are dimensions, different worlds, planes of existence. You didn’t really think that your own little world you come from was the only one in this universe, did you?”
“I never gave it much thought,” he answered truthfully.
“Let me explain this the best way I know how to. There are many Reed Thayers that exist. In one world, you died. In another, you’ve never been born. In one world, we’re married. In another, you might have a wife and three kids. There are an infinite number of worlds or dimensions with incarnations of both of us, Reed. We’ll never meet them, but they do exist. Somehow, someway, when you died in one dimension, you managed to travel as a spirit into this one where Reed Thayer never existed...at least as far as I can tell.”
To Reed, her explanation sounded so simple, but so unbelievably mind blowing.
“How?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps the Fates have something special in mind for you. There are no mistakes. You ended up here for a reason, but I don’t know what that reason is. That is for you to figure out.”
“Fates?”
“It’s just my word for them. Whatever they are, supreme beings, gods...I don’t know. All I know is they exist. They reside somewhere on the highest level of all these dimensions.”
He rocked back and forth on the swing trying to absorb her words.
“So this is...what? Heaven, hell?” Even before he said the word hell, he knew it wasn’t true. With Sara-Kate, there was no hell.
“That’s too complicated of a question for tonight, Reed. Let’s just say this is a place very similar to the one you come from, and leave it at that. Oh, and if you’re wondering if you can just return to your own dimension and pick up your life, the answer is no. You’re dead there. Even if you somehow managed a return, no one will recognize you.”
He hadn’t even considered the possibility of returning back to his own dimension...his old world, simply because he didn’t want to leave Sara-Kate—ever. She didn’t want to hear that right now, maybe never again.
“So...what about you?”
“What about me?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Maybe if you could explain your life and how you got here, it might help me to understand. I realize now that you’ve been skirting the truth since we met.”
“So, you think I’ve been lying to you?”
“No, I don’t think that at all,” he stressed.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
He didn’t understand her statement. Did he not matter to her any longer?
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“How old are you?”
She let out a light laugh. “I was born in 1911.”
He sucked in his breath, but didn’t comment. This was all too unreal. Even a few weeks earlier, he would have believed everything Sara-Kate said to be the ramblings of a psychotic woman. Now he knew better.
“I died in the winter of 1929.”
“You were just a baby,” he remarked. No wonder she looked so young.
“I had just turned eighteen. Not a baby in 1929. I was working at a candy shop, wrapping chocolate bars. I was supposed to get married that summer.”
She twisted her hands in her lap. This was distressing for her, he knew. The last thing he wanted was to cause this woman pain, and he was doing just that. Still, he had to know everything. He had to understand.
“How did you die?”
“I was very ill...very high fever, and a relentless pain in my side. My mother insisted I had the flu, and nothing more.”
“But it was something more.”
She turned to him. “Appendicitis. By the time I was taken to the hospital, it had ruptured. They tried surgery, but medicine was unrefined in the twenties. Peritonitis set in. I died a terrible, excruciating death.”
His death had been so simple...so ordinary, compared to hers. Just the thought of how she suffered caused a pain to squeeze his heart. She was such an angel, she didn’t deserve such a horrible death.
“I’m sorry,” he said, at a loss for words.
She shrugged in response. “Any way, I went on to a higher dimension to rest. I couldn’t rest after what happened to me...to members of my family. I think that may be why I’ve had so many problems since.”
This perked his attention. “What...what do you mean?”
“Within a few months of my death, my sister, Alice, married my fiancé, James. He was a firefighter. Four months after they married, he was killed when a burning floor collapsed beneath him while fighting a fire. A few months later, my sister gave birth to a baby boy, and my parents married her off to a respectable widower.”
“So, you couldn’t rest after your death because you were angry?” he ventured a guess.
“Angry!” she snapped. “I was angry, sad, jealous...you name it. My fiancé, who professed to love me, and only me, married my sister! What do you think?”
The emotion in her voice caused him to startle. “Did you look for James after his death...or doesn’t it work that way.”
“I have seen him. He is not the man he once was,” she stated ominously. “He’s just a shell of himself that wanders day after day, year after year. He doesn’t understand that he is dead. I tried to lead him in the right direction, but...” she paused and rubbed her bare arms. “I can do no more for him.”
For a moment, Reed silently wondered if the same fate that James suffered would have been his as well if it hadn’t been for Sara-Kate. Doomed to roam forever in shock and disbelief.
Sometime after, is when I became a spirit guide. I was assigned to watch over Laura, the girl I told you about.”
He remembered. “The girl who committed suicide.”
I tried everything in my powers to help her, to guide her to a better place, but she was just so...”
“Hell bent on killing herself.”
“She was a child, Reed. She didn’t think her life was worth living. I was devastated. I felt like such a failure.”
“Maybe, Sara, this was a lesson for you. That sometimes, no matter what you do, someone’s path in life is already set, and nothing you do will change that.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Anyway, when I understood I could travel from dimension to dimension, and assume a human form, I went to work at an orphanage. I enjoyed my time there so much.”
Although he couldn’t see her face, he could hear a calmness in her voice. “That must have been so fulfilling. You would be a great mother.”
“It’s all I ever wanted was to be a wife and a mother. I guess that’s never going to happen
now.”
Tears pricked his eyes, and he was surprised by the emotion that flooded over his being. He had never been in love before. Infatuated maybe, but never full blown love like he felt for Sara-Kate. Now he may have lost his chance to be with her, to possibly live a forever life with her. A new life, different from the past, but one he could face, if he still had Sara. He didn’t know if they could procreate in their state, but they surely could be married.
“Any way, after some years passed, I knew it was time to move on. That is when I moved to the house, and started Sara-Kate’s Spirit. I just sort of shut myself in, and the months and the years just seemed to blend together. There really isn’t much more to tell.”
There was so much more to tell! Didn’t she understand that? Maybe now wasn’t the right to push. Maybe it was for the best to let it all unfold over time.
“I love you, Sara-Kate.”
For a few moments, nothing but the squeak of the swing chains sounded. Then she spoke.
“You don’t love me, Reed. Perhaps at some point you thought you did. That was just because of what I am. I’ll never know who truly loves me, and who only loves me because I’m different from what they are.”
“That is so untrue...”
“Reed, I would really like to go home now,” she cut him off before he could finish the thought. Obviously, this conversation was over, at least Sara-Kate’s part of it. She wouldn’t believe anything he told her at that moment.
“Okay, let’s go home.”
***
Sara-Kate uttered not one single word the entire walk home. When they reached the house, she disappeared up the stairs, leaving Reed at a loss for how to make things better between them. From her affect, Sara wanted nothing more to do with him. Perhaps in her mind, they were through.
He went to the kitchen and prepared a cup of tea for her. A small gesture for sure, but right now he would do anything to keep her from further closing him out of her life.
Sara-Kate's Spirit Page 7
