Soulmates

by Jessica Grose

  “That seems like something you could work on here,” I said, trying to sound supportive.

  “But what’s good about this combination is that as long as we call on Mercury to help us communicate, we can learn a lot from each other.” She smiled, looking more secure now that she had me figured out. Then she closed the book and folded up her chart. “I’m going to do some solo energy work before I get ready for bed. I am going to need the bathroom for forty-five minutes, because that’s where the energy is most positive in this room.” She got up and walked briskly to the bathroom before I could ask to brush my teeth first.

  I took out my phone to see if I had any messages. There weren’t any, and for a second I was hurt. Where were Beth’s creative insults? Why hadn’t she told me she was going to “cooter stomp” me if I didn’t text her back? Why hadn’t Katie left another nervous voice mail? Didn’t anyone in the real world care about me?

  But then I looked at my phone more closely and realized I didn’t have any bars. I went to the settings and tried to see if my phone could pick up a Wi-Fi network, but there weren’t any. I only had 10 percent charge left, so I looked around the room in case there was a place to plug it in. But there wasn’t an outlet anywhere.

  I started feeling hot all over, and my trusty left armpit sprang a leak. If I needed to reach Ray or Beth, I simply couldn’t. If I wanted to talk to Sheriff Lewis, my best bet would probably be finding my way back to the main road and hitching a ride into Ranchero with some potentially methed-out local loner.

  I lay down on my bed and started to take deep breaths to calm myself. “You’re okay,” I said quietly, over and over again. “It’s only a month. People survive torture in third-world prisons for years. I can survive a creepy guru and essential oils for a few weeks.” I breathed in and out, in and out, in and out, until my pulse stopped racing and my armpit dried.

  Once I was calm, I realized the other downside to having no phone. I had no distractions. There was no Internet or prattling of local newscasters or bitching of the Real Housewives. I had to sit with my thoughts.

  It was painful at first. I couldn’t stop my mind from racing. How was I going to find out more about Ethan and Amaya? I’d have to learn how to speak these people’s language a little better before broaching the subject. I also had to reconnect with Lo as soon as possible. She saw something special in me, or else she wouldn’t have invited me to this place.

  What I tried not to think about was how I was trapped here, miles away from anything or anyone I knew, with a bunch of gullible, stunted freaks. And I really couldn’t think about what the fuck I was going to do with my life after all this was over. Was I really going to go back to my old job? Working ninety-hour weeks with zero balance, in an emotionally bereft atmosphere? It didn’t really seem possible.

  But I didn’t think I was done with law entirely. I had worked so hard to get my degree and build a career. Maybe I would go into family law and save children from situations like the one Ethan would have been trapped in had Rosemary not fled the commune decades ago.

  I took one more deep breath. For the time being, I just had to stay positive and in the moment, put on some mask of warm energy like everyone else here. And who knew, I might as well try to benefit from some of these woo-woo classes. It couldn’t be all bad—the people here seemed happy, and they certainly looked great. Maybe if I just circumvented Yoni’s evil and took the parts that were positive, I could emerge from this experience not just having cleared Ethan’s name, but in a better place and with super-toned shoulders.

  The whole place woke with the sun. I wondered if someone looked at the almanac to see when the sun was supposed to rise, because it seemed like the minute it peeked above the horizon, I opened my eyes to a whirring sound and saw the bamboo shades gathering and the light streaming in. The shades must have been set with a timer.

  Willow got out of bed. I knew by this point not to speak first, and to follow her lead. So I got out of bed, too. She got dressed, so I did, too. Then she pulled out a yoga mat from under her bed. I looked under my bed and found an identical mat. She positioned her mat facing the window and sat with her legs crossed, her mouth open, her eyes closed, and her hands resting palm up on her knees. I placed my mat right behind her and did the same.

  For a while—what felt like fifteen minutes, but who knows—I hated sitting there. I kept opening one eye to see if Willow was stirring, but she remained still. So I tried to lean into the silence.

  Though I didn’t want to be thinking about Ethan, it was impossible not to do so here, surrounded by all the stuff he had believed in when he left me. It occurred to me as I sat there that I still loved him. Reading his book and going on this journey had helped me make sense of that residual love. I’d numbed myself out when he left, but now that he was back in the forefront of my mind, I realized that I didn’t love him like a man anymore. I loved him like a relic, an immovable piece of the past that was still dear to me, that still mattered in a historical sense.

  My mind flitted to one particular moment, shortly after we’d graduated from college. We had no money, but we wanted to take a vacation. So we took a camping trip out to Glacier National Park in Montana. Ethan knew it well because he’d hiked there so much as a kid, and because he spent so much of his childhood poring over nature books. He knew that there were sixty different kinds of ferns in Glacier, and could tell me which ones were moonworts and which ones were horsetails.

  One morning we went on a very early hike. We didn’t see a single soul while we were walking, and we found a little waterfall with a small pool below it. We stripped off our clothes and jumped in. I remembered the chill of the water on my skin—so cold that we shrieked and gasped. After we swam, we found a flat rock near the pool and lay down on it. The smooth rock caught the July sun. We held hands and touched feet and giggled. I remembered thinking, This is just the beginning of our beautiful life together.

  Before Ethan died, I thought of that moment as a tragic memory, because our marriage ended the way it did. But as I sat there I began to realize the memory was actually beautiful in its own way. It could stand alone as a perfect moment, because we really felt that happy at that time. What came afterward didn’t have to mar what was real and true.

  I was so deeply inside the memory that Willow had to tap me on the shoulder to snap me out of it. She beckoned for me to follow her to breakfast. She sat in the same place she had the previous evening, so I did, too. A vat of porridge went around and was slopped into our bowls. It seemed to be made of quinoa and tasted like sawdust.

  We were finishing up our gruel when rough brown pieces of recycled paper were handed to each of us. I looked down at mine and saw that it was a class schedule. My morning class was called Inner Child Workshop, it was in the Owl Lodge, and the instructor was Lo.

  I wandered around the grounds looking for the classroom. Every time I saw someone new, I would follow them, in hopes that they’d bring me to the Owl Lodge. After several fruitless follows, I arrived at a building with a giant golden-winged owl statue out front—I figured this was the place. I worried I’d be late, but since there were no clocks anywhere, I also wondered what late meant.

  When I walked by other classrooms en route to Lo’s, I saw rooms filled with five or ten students and a teacher. But when I arrived at the classroom I’d been assigned, I saw Lo there alone. I couldn’t tell whether it was good or bad that I seemed to be getting individual attention, but before I could complete the thought, Lo embraced me. She was wearing a Peruvian woven poncho over her purple robe. The poncho was red with purple stripes and fraying fringe, and it smelled grandmotherly, a particular nose-twitching combination of decay and perfume. It was the first time I’d thought of Lo as old.

  “I’m so happy you came back,” Lo said. “Inner child work is such an essential building block to making spiritual progress. I’m not surprised that this is what they’ve assigned you to do. Not that I had a hand in that decision.” She winked at me, and I smiled back
. Her earnestness was contagious.

  “I am in serious need of some progress,” I said confidently.

  “Good. Normally inner child work goes better in a group setting, but since it’s just us we will have to muddle through. The upside is you will get one-on-one counseling.”

  I shifted and felt the warm wooden floor with the balls of my feet. There must have been some heating system under the floorboards. Lo took off the poncho and folded it before placing it gently next to her. She offered me a fringed pillow to sit on and put another pillow on the floor a few feet away from it. “We’re going to start off by facing each other and connecting through eye contact and matching breaths. I want you to follow my lead as we take deep, soothing breaths together. I don’t want shallow breaths, I want these to come from here.” She reached over and grabbed my diaphragm. I giggled like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  “That’s good!” Lo said. “That sounds like your inner child is ready to come out to play. Now breathe in . . . out . . . in . . . out.” We breathed together. I settled into the pillow. By the time she told me we were finished with our breathing exercises, I did feel really calm.

  “I think of this as an ongoing process,” Lo explained. “There’s always a lot to unpack, even if you had a happy childhood. I want to tell you a story from my past. I think this process only works when spiritual communication is a two-way street. Even though I have been here a long time, I have so much to learn from you.” She smiled at me warmly.

  “I like to begin with our first memory, which says a lot about how much work needs to be done. My first memory is of ringing a stranger’s doorbell.” The ease with which she launched into this narrative suggested that she’d told the story many times before. “I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and I went door-to-door with my family starting when I was six weeks old.

  “When I was seven, my mother sent me out on my own to proselytize. I had six brothers and sisters, and it was too hard to bring all of us with her when she went door-to-door, so she sent us off on our own as soon as she thought we’d be able to find our way home. I don’t remember who answered the door at the first house I approached. It must have been a housewife. I just remember the feeling of abandonment. For me, the first step in my healing process was to live in that feeling of abandonment for a fortnight, and then let it go with a special ceremony in which I released a dove into the heavens. It is pretty difficult to get doves around here—believe me, I tried—but we can find other ceremonies to help you shed unwanted baggage during your journey.”

  “Wow. That must have been hard for you, growing up like that.” I was genuinely moved by Lo’s story. How coddled I was as a child by comparison! My mother didn’t even let me walk to a friend’s house alone until I was in high school.

  Lo shook her head. “It was just how I was raised. I have made my peace with it through years of energy work. Now, you go. What is your earliest memory? Take your time, dear. We have all the time in the world.” Lo reached out and patted my hand.

  I closed my eyes and tried to go back. Something I had never thought about before flashed into my head. “I was sitting in the backseat of the family station wagon,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth uncontrollably. “It was the way, way back, so I was looking out at the road. I must have been in the first grade. I had been fighting with my sister, and my mom had had it. So she said I had to sit back there, even though I hated it. It didn’t have any seat belts, and when my mom would make a turn, I’d go flying. I remember she said she didn’t want to look at my face.” Tears welled up in my eyes. What was happening to me?

  “How did that make you feel?” Lo asked, not breaking eye contact.

  “Scared. Alone,” I said, really starting to blubber. Where was this even coming from? It felt like this story was being excavated from underneath layers and layers of detritus. But I couldn’t stop. “Uh, ugly. Because she didn’t want to see my face.”

  “There, there,” Lo said, reaching forward to pull me into a hug. We were still sitting down, so the position was awkward. I cried into her shoulder anyway. She smelled like clay and clean skin when the poncho was off.

  When I pulled away, a string of drool trailed from my mouth. I had left three distinct wet spots on Lo’s purple robe where my mouth and face had rested. “I’m so sorry,” I said, wiping my nose with my sleeve and trying to collect myself. “I have no idea where that came from!”

  “There is no need to apologize. You should actually feel very proud. It is rare to have a breakthrough during your first session of inner child work,” Lo said warmly. “Usually these things are not so close to the surface, and we must dig to get at them.” She paused and examined my face. I could feel red blotches appearing on my cheeks and my eyes getting puffy. “I’m sensing that you’re still processing the trauma of your husband’s abandoning you.”

  I sniffed the tears up and nodded pitifully.

  “When you were at Zuni, I understood you were hurt by your husband, but I couldn’t fathom the depths of it until just now. When you arrived this morning, the energy field fractured around me. That only happens when someone has suffered a profound trauma,” Lo told me.

  “I’m really fine,” I said.

  Lo gave me a sympathetic look. “It’s quite all right, dear. You shouldn’t unburden yourself all at once. That’s a way to overwhelm the work we do. It’s better to go through it piecemeal. The idea is that every time you visit me, you will mature. Today, I think your emotional and spiritual age is around six. That is when your first memory took place, and that is where you have to grow from.”

  I nodded. I was still catching my breath. I was angry at myself for losing control. I would never get to the bottom of what happened to Ethan if I let my emotions get the better of me. But all the same, Lo had tugged at something that I didn’t even know existed, and that was terrifying. How could I let myself be so affected by what I knew was babble?

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Lo said, bowing a little to me. When she leaned down, I saw a flash of her blue asterisk necklace again, and it sobered me. Lo must have known Rosemary. How could I get her to talk about it, let her know I knew Yoni’s past?

  For now, I just chirped, “Great!” I’d figure out a way in by my next session with her.

  “Good. The next time you’re here I want to try something a little different. We will spend part of the time working through our memories, but I also want to do some aromatherapy work, because I think that will help unlock a little of what’s closed off here.” She pointed to my sacral chakra—just where Gaia had done her energy work.

  “How can you tell I’m blocked there?” I asked.

  “Honey, it’s written all over your face. Any experienced practitioner could tell within minutes that was what ailed you. And then your inner child confirmed it.”

  “Oh.” Again I had that sinking feeling that I had failed a test. I wanted to get good marks, even in a class I’d call bullshit spiritual theory. I hated when things didn’t come easily to me. This was something that had bothered Ethan a lot. I would refuse to try any new activity if I thought I wasn’t going to be good at it right off the bat. This kept us from cross-country skiing, beach volleyball, and salsa dancing. In the grand scheme of things, these weren’t great losses. But I was starting to see how my bad attitude had worn him down over the years. Maybe that was part of what drew him to Amaya. She was game.

  “Don’t worry. You’re here for a reason,” Lo said.

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “I will be here tomorrow. Same place?”

  “Always,” Lo said. “I never leave.”

  Everyone seemed to have yoga classes in the afternoon. Mine was a beginners’ class, and I got a lot of personal instruction from a man in his fifties named Karma, who had a pleasantly ruined face. After, when Willow and I were back in our room preparing for dinner, I told Willow that Lo was my morning teacher. She smirked, then sighed with false sympathy.

  “What?” I asked, insulted. I felt prot
ective and fond of Lo.

  Willow stopped braiding her hair and looked at me. “Lo isn’t really considered to be one of the premier teachers here. Her methods are seen as . . . How should I put this? Outmoded. I don’t understand why she even bothers anymore. I think the other women her age here just sleep and gossip all day. I heard Yoni only keeps them around out of loyalty, because they’ve been with him for so long.”

  “Do you know how long Lo’s been here?” I asked.

  Willow shook her head. “Not exactly. But it seems like she’s furniture here, a real fixture.”

  “Have you ever been assigned to her workshops?”

  Willow smirked. “No way.”

  “Then how do you know her methods are outmoded?” In addition to hating being belittled by Willow, I hated older women being dismissed because of their age.

  “Word of mouth is very powerful at the Homestead,” Willow said. “You’ll learn that once you’ve been here a little longer.” She smiled condescendingly.

  She had no idea what she was talking about. Hearing her disparage Lo and talk down to me had a perverse effect—it loosened my tongue. I wanted to wipe that arrogant grin off her face, and I knew just how to do it. “Speaking of word of mouth, I keep meaning to ask you about this thing I heard about before I got here. I don’t really read the newspaper, but I saw something about some death or something that happened near here? I can’t really remember the details.”

  Willow’s face darkened. Her eyes narrowed to slits and her mouth puckered. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” she said. She got up from her bed. “Excuse me. I feel I really need to do some energy work right now.” She disappeared into the bathroom.

  Message received, I thought as I sat on my bed.