by Hunter Shea
“You wear your suffering on your face,” he’d said. “It runs deep, so deep you can no longer hold it inside.”
She’d cried, right there in the middle of the place for everyone to gawk at. The horror. Jessica didn’t cry in private, much less amidst a packed diner that smelled like burned coffee and fried food. She paid the check for both of them, offering him a ride to his home, which he accepted on one condition. She was to return the next day to his meditation center, a small storefront flanked by a hardware store and a nail salon, and meditate with him.
It seemed a harmless thing to ask, so she did it. She never quieted the noise in her head to enter anything closely resembling a meditative state. She made her frustration apparent. “If it came easy, we wouldn’t need to dedicate lifetimes to the practice,” he said, cushioning her irritation.
She used to employ breathing exercises, though at the time she didn’t equate it with Buddhism and meditation, when she was alone on paranormal investigations. It was a way to clear her mind of clutter, to pace herself, and most of all, to fight the need for flight in the face of the unknown. It had worked back then. But that was when there were far less demons and doubts waiting in the dark of corners of her conscious mind. Noise - noise and constant movement kept them there, unseen, unheard and therefore, unable to hurt her.
The monk thanked her for trying, with the hope she would establish a practice routine. “Unless of course, you have grown attached to your suffering,” he said with a small, knowing smile. “Give it time, Jessica. As much time as it needs.”
She had the time, in fact, all the time in the world. After meeting the monk, she realized she also had the means to abandon her suffering, offering it up—or drowning it out—with good intentions.
Habitat for Humanity was overwhelmed by her offer to pay for all the materials for the five houses just outside Green Bay city limits. They were even more shocked when she told them she wanted to help build every one. A few months later, she discovered she was pretty good with a saw and enjoyed building something with her own hands. Writing a check and leaving would never have given her the satisfaction and peace of mind the actual work had provided.
As an added benefit, her skin was like polished bronze. She’d never been in better shape. When she met Angela at the airport last week, her best friend had exclaimed, “Holy crap, girl, your muscles have muscles. Have you been taking PEDs?”
If Angela only knew how different a person she’d become since leaving Long Island.
Nothing was the same. No going back now.
It wasn’t all bad. She was, after all, doing some damn good work, charitable work, life-affirming work. The smell of sawdust had become intoxicating to her. Even now, she breathed as deep as she could, savoring the sweet scent of freshly shorn wood.
She jumped when someone tapped her shoulder.
“Jesus!”
Angela smiled. “Yes, we know he loves you. Break time. You can feel free to take me to that awesome hot dog truck you keep telling me about. I’ve been dreaming of a slaw dog with mustard and chili dog with cheese and red pepper relish ever since I got here.”
Jessica pulled off her work gloves. Her friend’s arms and cheeks were beet red from the sun. She poked her in the belly. It had been a few months since she’d last seen her, but she couldn’t remember Angela being so soft in the middle before.
“You sure you can handle it?” Jessica joked.
“We can’t all be human vacuums with hummingbird metabolisms. You’re such a hard body right now, if you tuck all your hair under that bandana and keep that tool belt on, people will think I’m out with a construction dude.”
Jessica winced. “Ouch. I call a foul on that one.”
“Tit for tat, bitch,” Angela said, a laugh sputtering over her lips.
Jessica’s Jeep roared to life, crunching gravel as she pulled away from the construction zone. The hot dog truck, which was actually a converted Winnebago, was just a mile down the road. A line of blue and white collar people of every age queued up for the delicious dogs. Twenty minutes later, they sat in the Jeep’s open rear compartment, eating and people watching.
“Oh my God, these are even better than you said,” Angela cooed. Shreds of coleslaw clung to the sides of her mouth.
“Told you they were worth the trip.” A bus whizzed by, casting a hard breeze over them.
Angela placed a hand on her knee. “You are what’s worth the trip. I miss you. Your aunt misses you. Hell, I even heard Liam say he wished you were around.”
Jessica’s Aunt Eve had become her adopted mother when her father died in Alaska during a paranormal investigation that went horribly wrong. She was six at the time. Her mother had passed away in her sleep when she was just a baby. Eve was really the only parent she knew—though she did have spotty communication with her deceased father through EVP sessions for a few years. Until Eddie…
“Hello. You disappeared again,” Angela said, snapping her fingers in her face.
Jessica sighed, took a bite of her hot dog and pulled the bandana from her head. It felt good to get out from under the sweaty rag.
“I still can’t get over the whole blond hair thing,” Angela said. “Did you go into witness protection without telling me?”
“It’s a girl’s prerogative to change her hair color.” She shook her flaxen locks in Angela’s face. “Part of the new me.”
“And who is this new me? Other than little Miss Home-Builder who travels from town to town like that guy who turns into the Hulk.”
Jessica shrugged, ignoring the stares from a couple of young guys in discount business suits. “I guess you can say I’m a traveling Good Samaritan. What’s the point of having money if you can’t do something nice with it?”
Her phone chimed out the chorus to Metallica’s One. She turned it face down, pushing it aside.
“And what’s the point of avoiding your family?” Angela asked.
“Did they coach you to talk me into coming back?”
Angela rolled her eyes. “Far be it from me to think I could talk you into anything. I love you. We all love you. It makes us nervous, knowing you’re all over the place, on your own.”
“With my track record, I don’t need to be alone to have bad shit go down. In fact, it seems just the opposite. The less around me, the easier things are.”
How could she explain her fear of talking to Eve and succumbing to her desperate request for her to come home? She needed to be out, on her own. Whenever she spoke to Eve, she felt her will dissolve. She wasn’t ready to go back. Not yet.
There was a long silence. Their hot dogs went as cold as their appetites.
“Just talk to Eve, please,” Angela said softly. “That woman is a rock star. She’d do anything for you. You’re getting too old to play the petulant kid.”
Jessica playfully slapped her arm. “Hey, twenty-two isn’t old.”
“For boys, no. For us lady-folk, this is our time to flower.” She made melodramatic hand gestures, pantomiming the blooming of a rose.
That sent them both into hysterics.
“All right, all right. I promise I’ll call her later, after we’re done for the day.” She bent close to her friend, their foreheads touching. “Thank you for coming out here and helping out. I didn’t realize how much I missed you until I saw you get off that plane.”
Angela smirked. “Who am I to turn down an all expenses paid trip to Wisconsin? I mean, what’s next, a cruise to Hoboken?”
They dumped their remaining food, plates and napkins in the trash. While Jessica turned to head back to the construction site, she dialed her voicemail with the speaker phone on as a way to show Angela she was making the effort to get back in the family orbit.
It started with the last message.
“Jessica, honey, it’s Eve. I’m getting tired to talking to myself. I really need you
to call me. First, I love you and miss you like crazy. Your going off the grid makes me worry more than usual. I hope you’re having a great time with Angela. Did she tell you the news yet? Another thing—I’ve been getting calls from Eddie. I know you said not to give him your number, so I’ve just been taking messages. He sounds as desperate as I am to talk to you. If you decide to finally call me back, you should give him a ring too. There’s something about the tone in his voice that tells me you two should speak. Here’s the number…”
Chapter Four
Nina D’Arcangela’s eyes snapped open, their golden flecks sparkling with the pulse of kinetic energy that bled from her like lightning in a heat storm. She drew deep, hungry breaths, startling everyone in the room. The screeching of chairs pushing back against the hardwood floor caromed around the bare walls.
“A pen, I need a pen!” Nina shouted, her hands trembling.
Someone, it was impossible to tell who in the dark, pushed a legal pad across the table, another placing a pen in her hand.
She closed her eyes again.
She could feel the weight of held breath around her.
Suddenly, she began to write. Her hand jerked across the page, spelling words she couldn’t see. A dull flare of illumination flashed across her closed lids like a projector’s light seen from the other side of a screen.
There was a gasp, then murmurs of excitement.
Nina felt the burst of power bleed from her, dragging her into the quiet, comforting darkness. Her hand went numb, and in the distance, she thought she heard the pen bounce as it left her nimble fingers.
Jessica’s body was exhausted but her mind wasn’t going to let her shut it down for the night. After lunch, she and Angela double-timed it, sucking in the clean air and warm sun, funneling it into hard work. While she worked, her brain mercifully switched off. It stayed that way all through dinner and at the bar afterward. She was grateful Angela volunteered to be the designated driver. Three hours of telling old stories over bottles of Milwaukee’s Best—when in Rome—then moving on to gin and tonics, had her head in a nice spin.
This is the first time the stick has been removed from your ass in months, she’d said to herself, hand riding the wind outside the passenger window. She had a hard time instructing Angela how to get to the newly constructed hotel, but they finally made it, giggling down the halls, disturbing the peace.
She’d made it a point to book her long-term stay in this particular hotel. It’d had its grand opening just weeks before her arrival. It had been built on an empty lot. New building, new space. No history.
Avoiding history was important, especially when it came to places to lay her head at night. “It’s goddamnfucking crucial,” she’d said to Angela. “You know how dangerous it can get.”
Angela knew.
So did Eve. And Liam.
Fuck, and Eddie.
He of the Psychic Friends Network—No Bullshit Chapter. Pay your money there and you might not like what you hear. If that happened, you were good and screwed because shit was going down whether you liked it or not.
She took a steaming hot shower, changed into a T-shirt and boxer shorts and turned on her laptop. Before she knew what she was doing, her fingers typed fearnone.com.
Nothing. That was good. When she made the decision three years ago to shut down her paranormal website, a repository for stories, photos and videos of EBs—or energy beings (what other people called ghosts or spirits)—she worried that somehow the great and powerful internet gods would snatch bits here and there, dragging them, and her, back into the light of day. Swedey, her European web developer, was damn good at his job. He erased every single trace of the website. It made her feel better to check every now and again.
What does Eddie want with me?
Jessica tugged at her hair, twisting the strands and chewing on the ends. They tasted like the cheap hotel shampoo, a mix of coconut and chemicals.
You were pretty clear that it was best you stayed away from each other.
“I was,” she said aloud, her eyes focused on the laptop’s screen but seeing nothing.
But did he agree with you?
“It doesn’t matter. This is my life. I’ll live it the way I choose. And I chose to get away from him, from everything.”
Because you were afraid.
“That’s one thing I’ve never been, sister.” She snapped the laptop closed and hit the remote to turn the TV on. A truck commercial blared from the tinny speakers.
That’s what you like everyone to think. I know it scared you.
She tried to lose herself in reruns of horrible sitcoms. Twice she got up to get a glass of water, the second time washing a couple of Tylenol down. The fuzzy edges of an early hangover crept across her skull like a mass of determined spiders.
Call them.
This time, the voice in her head wasn’t her own. She bolted upright in bed, tossing a pillow aside.
“Who was that?” she whispered, heart hammering.
In her previous life, seeking EBs day and night, she’d heard many voices, quite a few of them calling to her from beyond the veil of death.
She’d never heard this one before. It was male. Forceful, yet somehow tired. There was a familiar tone, but she couldn’t place it. She tried so hard to hang a name on it, succeeding only in detonating a skull buster of a headache.
The red digital numbers on the bedside clock burned 11:56.
Too late to call.
Tomorrow.
“I promise, I’ll call tomorrow,” she said to the voice.
Fumbling in the drawer for her eye mask, she stuffed her ears with earplugs and settled into the bed. She left the TV and lights on.
Something skittered through the leaves.
No. Someone.
Roused from a long, dreamless slumber, all attention was drawn to the figure walking through the trees, whistling, blissful.
Another figure emerged from behind a pair of gnarled oak trees. A boy.
He joined the other. A girl.
While they walked, both now whistling a tuneless song, the air electrified in their wake, a low, rippling current that kissed the bark of the trees, traveling down to the roots, through the moldy earth.
Wake up! Wake up! Look!
I can see them! Can you?
Yes!
Where are we?
A man’s voice cried out. The boy and girl stopped, smiling. They yelled a reply, running away.
Home.
Jessica woke up at eight feeling like seven shades of hell. Groggily looking at her phone, she saw a text from Angela saying she’d knock on her door to go down for breakfast at nine. One hour to regain some form of stasis. She chucked her eye mask and earplugs on the bed, stumbling into the bathroom. The full-length mirror that was the width of one of the walls did little to lift her spirits.
Even she didn’t recognize herself, and it had little to do with the visible scars of her hangover. Not only had her hair changed. Her physique, skin tone, and if possible, even the structure of her face had transformed her into a different person. She was all sharp angles and well-defined muscle, a bottle blond with haunted eyes that kept men at bay.
She scraped the gunk from her tongue against her teeth, spitting into the sink. “Morning beauty queen.”
The shower helped clear the fog in her brain. Changing into clothes that weren’t designed for heavy duty work helped regain a sense of femininity that had been fading bit by bit as she traversed the country.
With twenty minutes to kill, she eyed the phone on the night table.
Who do I call first?
If she called her Aunt Eve, she was sure to be on the phone for an hour, at least. Even she had to admit she owed Eve that much.
Eddie it was. At least it would be short. She’d see to that.
His number was
programmed in her phone, even though she’d forbidden him from knowing her own. It rang four times before he picked up.
“Jess?”
Christ, he sounded like he was in even worse shape.
“Why are you calling my aunt?” she said, hiding zippo of her displeasure.
He coughed on the other end, holding the phone away from his mouth. It sounded like he swatted a twelve pack of empty cans around the room.
“It’s nice to hear your voice too,” he said. Well, at least he hadn’t lost his sarcasm.
“I told you to stay the fuck away. Some people might construe your calls as harassment.” She sat on the edge of the bed, one leg crossed over the other, bobbing to a death metal beat.
“You know, you hold on to anger like other people cherish fond memories.”
“Did you get that from a song?”
He breathed heavily into the phone.
“I was only trying to help,” he said, softly, hoarsely.
“Obviously I didn’t want it,” she said.
“Obviously.”
He groaned. Sheets ruffled in the background as if he was shifting in bed.
“Look, I haven’t got all day. What do you want?”
Eddie cleared his throat. “It’s not what I want. It’s what someone else will want.”
She pulled the phone from her ear, glowering at the display, wondering if she should just tap the End Call icon. “I’m not in the mood for riddles. Say what you have to say and let me live my life.”
“I have your father to thank for thrusting me into your life,” he said sharply.
“Hey, asshole, leave my father out of it.”
He immediately sounded apologetic. “Stop taking everything I say the wrong way. I’m the one who has never felt like my choices are my own. I’m the one who should be pissed off.”
Hearing him mention her deceased father made her cheeks and ears grow hot. She’d watched the man give his up life to save her and an entire cabin full of strangers. Years later, through Eddie’s incredible medium abilities, he’d connected with Jessica’s father seemingly out of the ether. In fact, her father was the one to initiate contact, pointing the gifted Duke grad that had overwhelmed The Rhine Center’s greatest expectations in Jessica’s direction. Hers and Eddie’s brief partnership sent them into the heart of a maelstrom that made her question everything she’d done with her life up until that moment. The fact that Eddie hadn’t been able to get her in contact with her father following those events was the first crack in their paranormal inspired union.
