Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “So before I was Cruella De Vil. Now I’m Mother Teresa?”

  Maddie snickered.

  “Okay, scratch the Mother Teresa reference.”

  “You’re just different, Tesso. From the instant you came out of that coma, there was something in your eyes that said everything had changed.”

  Really? From the moment she had returned to the world, her dominant emotion was deep appreciation that she was alive.

  She pulled up in front of the main building on campus and her niece swung her long legs out the door and pointed her index finger and thumb at Tess, like a gun. “Go show that shrink how Tesso rocks. I’ll get a ride home.”

  The drive to Miami was fine for the first forty minutes, relaxing, slow, minimal traffic. Not many tourists in June. She stopped twice to snap pictures of wading birds that filled the shoals where the waves had receded. She counted six osprey nests, better than she expected, and caught sight of a pod of dolphins working their way out to sea.

  A part of her desperately craved to lie low here in the Keys, to find a simpler, more satisfying life—tour guide, clerk, lifeguard, fisherwoman, dolphin trainer. The pay would suck, but so what? Let the hospital sue her. Let the insurance bastards come after her. Let the IRS garnish her wages. She didn’t own anything that could possibly make a dent in her medical bills.

  But she couldn’t just shirk all responsibility. Even if she didn’t want to continue investigating homicides and drug deals and partnering with Dan Hernandez, her other options were limited. Private practice as a defense attorney with a firm in Miami or working for the Florida state attorney’s office. Neither appealed to her.

  As U.S. 1 melted into the turnpike, traffic swelled and moved more quickly. She sat up straighter, both hands gripping the wheel as though she were some decrepit old woman with vision and reflex issues. Cars cut her off, whizzed past her, squeezed her out. Suddenly, it all came to a grinding, screeching conflagration of metal against metal, tires shrieking against hot pavement, glass shattering.

  Tess swerved to the shoulder to avoid crashing into the car in front of her. She slammed on the brakes, the engine died, ticking impotently in the silence. For moments she gripped the steering wheel, heart hammering, eyes glued to the sunlit chaos in front of her. Three cars lay on their sides in a twisted, smoking heap of metal and broken glass, a fourth car lay on its roof in the grassy gulley that separated the north and south lanes. An SUV stood in the middle of the road, the driver’s door smashed in, windows shattered, tires flat, gnarled front fender on the ground in front of it.

  Tess scrambled from her car, punched out 911 on her cell, spat out her approximate location to the emergency operator. “Five car pileup, northbound lane, definite injuries.”

  Even as she said this, a teenage girl stumbled from the SUV, shrieking and sobbing, “My mom, someone help my mom, please, oh God, help my mom . . . ” Blood streamed down her face, she clutched her bloody left arm, and weaved toward the driver’s door and struggled to open it.

  “I’ll get your mom,” Tess said gently, touching the girl’s shoulder. “But I’d like you to go sit down by the side of the road. An ambulance is on the way.”

  “I’m a doctor,” said a man who hurried over, medical bag hanging from his shoulder, and immediately took charge of the girl.

  Other people came forward to help and Tess suddenly found herself in charge. Two off-duty firemen with paramedical experience helped remove a child from the overturned car in the gulley, several women rescued injured children wandering around, a skinny guy in stained coveralls had tools to pry open crumpled doors and went to work on the SUV.

  As soon as the door fell off, Tess got a close look at the woman inside, trapped against the seat by the airbag. She nearly vomited, the man beside her wrenched back. Large pieces of glass and metal protruded from the woman’s shoulder, arrows of glass stuck out of her right eyebrow, the left side of her face was torn open from her chin to her ear. Barely conscious, she somehow turned her head slightly, terrified eyes begging Tess to help her.

  “Can’t . . . feel my legs,” she murmured. “My . . . daughter . . . where?”

  “She’s fine,” Tess told her. “She got out. And we’re going to get you out of here.” To the man, she said, “You have a knife that will puncture the airbag?”

  “Right here.”

  Tess slipped her arm around the woman’s chest so she wouldn’t flop forward as the air rushed from the bag. The pressure eased, the woman sobbed, then passed out. The man said he’d get the doctor and sprinted off.

  The airbag puddled in a bloody heap across the woman’s thighs, Tess’s hands and arms were slick with her blood, her clothes were stained with it. The stink of impending death suffused her nostrils. “You hold on, okay? The doc’s on the way, your daughter is fine, the—”

  Suddenly, the woman was standing next to Tess, khaki Capri pants and turquoise blouse no longer torn and bloody, her pretty face clean, dark hair brushed back behind her ears. “It looks bad,” she said with strange detachment. “Do you think I’ll make it?”

  Jesus, she’s a ghost. Yet, Tess felt the woman’s heart beating beneath her hands. So she wasn’t dead, just . . . out of her body. “Do you want to make it?”

  The woman stared at her bleeding body. “I think my back is broken,” the woman said finally. “That’s why I can’t feel my legs. I don’t want to be a burden to my husband and daughter. But . . . I’m . . . afraid to die.”

  It’s real. She hears me, I hear her. “Is that fear greater than your fear of pain?”

  “I don’t know. But suppose there isn’t anything after death?”

  Something stirred within Tess that she knew she should explore. She sensed it was connected to her disappointment about the lack of hummingbirds in her mother’s yard, her ambivalence about the Bureau, to the emotional vacuum she’d experienced since emerging from a coma six weeks ago. “Death might be even grander than any of us imagine,” Tess said. “But I think the decision about staying or moving on is up to each of us.”

  The doctor appeared, Tess moved aside. The woman’s spirit was gone. Tess glanced quickly around, but didn’t see her anywhere. She heard sirens now, closing in, and ran toward the three tangled cars.

  Several men struggled to open doors crushed like tin cans. The off-duty firemen turned fire extinguishers on the thickening gray smoke that rose from the hoods of the cars. The air stank of fire, scorched metal, blood, death. The hot sunlight that beat down against the pavement exacerbated the stench. Tess’s growing nausea prompted her to move to the shoulder of the road, where she could breathe more easily. Here, the injured were being tended to by the doctor or his surrogates, who had set up a makeshift first-aid center that looked to be well supplied now with bottled water, blankets, rudimentary treatments.

  Tess’s cell rang, and when she answered it, the woman on the other end said, “This is Dr. Yates’s office. May I speak to Tess Livingston, please?”

  Yates, who the hell was Yates? “Speaking.”

  “You had an appointment with Dr. Yates today at noon?”

  Shit. Her ticket back to work. “There was a five-car pileup on the turnpike and traffic is blocked for miles. May I reschedule for later today?”

  She was transferred to the netherworld of hold. Tess squeezed the bridge of her nose and turned toward the tall, lovely pines that blanketed the land beyond the road. A young boy and a dog stood in the shadows, watching the chaos. The boy was eight or nine, his hand rested on the back of a collie Neither the boy nor the dog showed any obvious signs of blood or trauma, but their bodies vacillated between solidity and a transparency that allowed her to see through them, into the woods.

  Christ. Tess moved toward them with the cell still pressed to her ear. The receptionist returned. “Ms. Livingston, the doctor said she’ll be here till six this evening and we’ll get you in whenever you arrive.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.” Tess slipped her cell down into the back pocket of her jeans
, her gaze never straying from the boy and dog. When she reached them, the kid regarded her with a kind of implacable interest, like an employer sizing her up for a job.

  “Wow, I love collies,” Tess said, and held out her hand so the dog could sniff it. She felt the warmth of the dog’s breath. If she tried to stroke the collie, would her hand slip through the dog’s body? “What’s her name?”

  “Jessie. And I’m Josh. Do you know where my mom is?”

  “Which car were you in?”

  “That . . . silver VW.”

  One of the three in the tangled heap. “I’m sure she’s okay. How do you and Jessie feel?”

  “We’re okay now. But before, when we were in the car, I was hurting a lot right here.” He brought his hand to his chest. “And I think Jess was hurting all over.”

  A woman ran toward Josh and the dog, flung her arms around them. Then she looked at Tess, eyes bright with tears. “What happens now?”

  I’m not sure. “I, uh, think you have a choice. You can return to your bodies or you can move on.”

  The woman gestured out at the road, where paramedics now removed bodies from the wrecked cars. “Our bodies are beyond repair.”

  “We just want to be together,” Josh said.

  Tess had no idea what to say, what to advise. It wasn’t like she could call someone to ask what these three spirits should do to get to wherever they were going. “If I were you, I’d walk down into the trees, away from this ugliness out here, and ask for help from anyone you know who has passed on.”

  The woman tightened her hold on her son’s hand, combed her fingers through Jessie’s fur. “That sounds like a really good idea. Thank you so much. Ready, gang?”

  They turned away from Tess and moved swiftly toward the trees, Josh’s voice echoing. “Dad, hey Dad, we need some help.”

  Tess watched until they faded into the shadows, then sat in a patch of sunlight, hugging her thighs to her chest, and wondered what the hell was happening to her.

  “Ma’am, are you hurt?”

  She looked up at a cop. “No.” But it wasn’t surprising that he mistook her for one of the accident victims. Her clothes and body were covered in blood. She would have to stop at a gas station to clean up and change before seeing the shrink. She always carried a set of clothing in her trunk, a habit she’d learned from Dan. Tess got to her feet, dug out her Bureau badge, held it up. “How many fatalities?”

  “At least five, Agent Livingston.” He handed her a bottle of water and an old towel. “Here, use this to wash off the blood.”

  “Thanks.” She poured the water over her hands and arms and rubbed with the towel. “What about the woman from the SUV?”

  “Gone. But her daughter made it out okay. A woman and boy from the mangled VW died before they were freed and their dog was already dead. And two elderly men from the other cars.”

  So it’s true, I spoke to the dying and the dead.

  “I’m trying to clear this area of people so we can direct traffic out along the shoulder.”

  “I’d better get moving then.”

  Her mother had advised her to just tell the shrink the truth. But Tess suspected the truth might result in unemployment and a straitjacket.

  Here’s how it is, Doc. I see ghosts now. I talk to them, they talk to me, and they apparently think I know how they’re supposed to get to wherever they’re going.

  She desperately wanted to turn around and go home, but if she didn’t get this over with today, she might never show up for her mental health review. That would mean she couldn’t return to work. No paycheck. So at five on the nose, she swung into an old residential neighborhood in Coral Gables, where tremendous banyan trees loomed on either side of the road, branches braiding together overhead to create a tunnel of green.

  She parked and followed a shaded mulch path through an explosive jungle of tropical plants to a charming wooden porch where a pair of cats sunned themselves on the banister. A black and white tuxedo cat regarded her with such cool detachment that she was surprised when he jumped down and rubbed up against her legs, purring. As Tess stroked his soft, thick fur, he gazed up at her with beautiful celery-green eyes, meowed, then darted past her to the door. He slipped into the waiting room with her. No one chased him out. The receptionist leaned over the counter and snapped her fingers. “C’mon, Whiskers, up here, boy.”

  Whiskers. I know that name. But she’d never had a pet named Whiskers. As the cat leaped gracefully onto the counter and preened himself, an image popped into her head of a tuxedo cat curled up on a hotel desk, purring as she petted it. What hotel? Where? When?

  She signed the patient sheet and Whiskers nudged her hand with his head, then licked the back of her hand, his sandpaper tongue warm and moist.

  “That’s amazing,” the receptionist said. “I’ve never seen Whiskers do that with anyone. He likes you.”

  “The kitty seal of approval. I’m Tess Livingston.”

  “I heard about that accident. Five fatalities. Sounds just awful.” The woman handed her a clipboard. “Fill out the top three boxes, then we’ll get you right in to see Dr. Yates.”

  Tess carried the clipboard over to a chair and the cat followed her, jumped into a chair beside her, and curled up. “You’re my familiar now?” she asked.

  Whiskers turned those gorgeous eyes on her, yawned, and curled up. When she was admitted to the inner sanctum, the cat accompanied her down the hall, into the office, and claimed one of the two vacant chairs in front of the desk. Valerie Yates, an attractive brunette in her early forties, greeted Tess, then told Whiskers he wasn’t on her schedule today.

  “He seems to have adopted me,” Tess remarked, sitting in the other chair.

  “He’s our mascot. Back in early January, I was coming into work one morning and saw him lying in the middle of the road. He’d been hit by a car. He was still breathing, so I rushed him over to the vet. During surgery, he died. They resuscitated him, but the prognosis wasn’t good. A couple weeks later, he really started to rally, so I brought him home and he has been with me ever since.”

  A strange feeling swept over Tess, as though she were sinking into quicksand and had only seconds to pull herself free before it covered her face and head and suffocated her. Another image popped into her head, of a tuxedo cat following her, a man, and a black dog through a beautiful courtyard somewhere, a place she was sure she had never been.

  “So Whiskers and I have something in common,” Tess said. “We both died and came back.”

  “I was struck by that coincidence while I was reading through your file. You two were injured and died just a day apart—January third for Whiskers, the fourth for you.”

  Tess knew enough about Jung and synchronicities so that the information troubled her. Throughout her years in the Bureau, she had learned that if you didn’t pay attention to seemingly random coincidences—synchronicities—you often missed the very thing that cracked the case. What were the odds, after all, that the Bureau shrink—an independent contractor—would have a cat that she, Tess, seemed to recall?

  Dr. Yates sat forward, hands folded on top of the file. “What’s your last memory from the day you were shot, Ms. Livingston?”

  “My partner and I were in the middle of a counterfeiting bust in a neighborhood in west Miami. We had just gone into the warehouse with six other agents and . . . and someone opened fire. I remember a blazing agony in my leg, saw blood spurting out of it, and then . . . nothing.”

  “It says in your file that you were clinically dead for six minutes and you slipped into a coma three days later.”

  “Six minutes? I didn’t realize it was that long.”

  “Any time an agent is clinically dead, there’s a mental health review before you can return to work.” Yates scribbled some notes. “Do you feel you’re ready to go back to work?”

  “I’ve used up most of my leave. I need my paycheck. Physically, I feel fine, just a few twinges in my leg now and then.”

  “An
d emotionally?”

  “Not going back to work would be more stressful than the alternative.”

  “I understand completely.” She slipped a scrap of paper from Tess’s file. “I’m not sure how this got in here, but it was stapled to some other papers. It appears to be a dream you had on March nineteenth.” She started reading: “ ‘. . . am in mountains with Ian and Nomad. Hummingbirds everywhere. We’re looking for way out of Esperanza. Scene switches to underground bunker of some kind. Brujos outside, trying to get in.’ ” Yates paused. “Do you have any idea who Ian and Nomad are? What Esperanza is? What brujos are?”

  That strange and unsettling feeling rushed through Tess again, but this time it was like standing at the precipice of a high cliff, staring down hundreds of feet to juts of sharp rocks and a raging ocean. If she took another step forward, she would be in a freefall, an Acapulco diver plunging headfirst into a cosmic river. Her head started pounding, she felt nauseated, and wanted nothing more than to leave.

  “I . . . don’t remember having that dream. Or writing it down.”

  “In mid-March you were still on heavy-duty meds, so it’s not surprising you don’t remember.”

  “May I see the piece of paper?”

  Dr. Yates passed it to her.

  Definitely her handwriting. But the names—Ian, Nomad, Esperanza—meant nothing to her. Yet, as she read the words, an overwhelming grief welled up inside of her, and to her utter horror, she began to cry, then sob. Dr. Yates handed her pieces of tissue and Tess pressed them against her eyes and struggled to regain control of herself. What’s happening to me? The waves of heartbreak just kept rolling over her, unaccompanied by any images that might explain why she felt so bereft. Whiskers climbed into her lap and settled down, purring loudly as if to comfort her. Tess’s fingers slid through his fur, her sobs started to subside, she blew her nose.

  “I’m sorry . . . I . . . don’t know why I’m crying.”

  “You’ve been through a lot and this dream apparently triggered something in you. Look, I’m going to recommend that you’re ready to return to work. But I think this dream is key to understanding some internal shift you’re experiencing.”