With a sad smile, Ellie shook her head. “No, less.”
The waitress came over and they gave their orders. Mac had a million questions to ask Ellie, but he tried not to appear too eager for fear of making her retreat once again.
“Is it common for a husband or wife to take pieces from each other?”
“Oh, yes,” Ellie said, leaning back, her hands around the warm cup. “Even in the most positive of marriages, partners usually take from one another. They can’t help themselves, sometimes, and it’s usually done unconsciously.”
“Can you give me an example?”
Ellie smiled at him. Mac was desperately trying to understand her world. The discovery touched her deeply, and yet she wasn’t sure why he was so interested. Was he hoping she would drop her guard, so he could take advantage of her? No, her heart told her, he’s sincere. Ellie would have been less scared if Mac had been like a couple of other men she’d known who had simply wanted her body. But he wasn’t talking with her at length just for that—although she knew he was drawn to her. She could see the thoughtfulness in his dark, questioning eyes, and could hear it in the tenor of his deep voice. And she could see him struggling to put all this varied information together.
“I can cite my own marriage. I was so head over heels in love with Brian that I ignored his lack of tolerance. I thought I’d be excluded from that, but I was wrong. When I went on the first journey in his behalf, I found out I’d taken a piece of him, too. I was horrified that I’d done that, knowing what I do about the process. But, as my spirit guide explained to me, when we’re needy, we take—whether it’s right or wrong. We do it because we’re human beings. Because we’re imperfect.”
“I must have a whole bunch of pieces of my ex-wife, Johanna,” Mac said grimly.
“What makes you think so?” Ellie desperately wanted to know about him as a man, and how he was in relationships.
“I loved her and I didn’t want the divorce,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “She accused me of loving flying more than her.”
“Did you?”
“I…don’t know.” Mac shrugged almost painfully. “I was angry and upset with her when she accused me of that. I denied it. Later, when I got some distance on it, I could see her side of it. Anyway, I didn’t want to lose Johanna, and I made it tough on her during the divorce hearing. I kept wanting us to try again, to try to patch it up. Eventually, she wore me down and I gave up. I got the message.”
“That you loved your job more than her?”
“Yes. At least, that’s the way she saw it.”
“You probably have a couple of pieces of her,” Ellie murmured.
Mac studied her for a long moment. “Could you give them back to her?”
She sat very still. “Are you asking me to do this out of your own curiosity about what I do, or are you asking because you care about Johanna?”
With a sigh, Mac said, “Both, to be honest.”
“So, if I journey on your ex-wife’s behalf, you want to test out what I do?”
“Yes, but only if it will help Johanna. She hasn’t been well since the divorce, and I feel like I have something to do with that. Maybe I don’t.” He smiled sourly. “Maybe I’m crazy.”
“No,” Ellie said softly, “you aren’t. Very frequently, when major pieces are taken from a person, they become ill. The more that’s taken, the more chronic the condition.”
“She contracted allergies after our divorce,” he said unhappily, “and she’s gone to a string of allergists. All they do is give her shots, and she’s more miserable.”
“Stress from a divorce is enough to make any immune system become depressed, and allergies could certainly develop as a result,” Ellie said. “I’ll journey for her, Mac, but understand I’ll only help if I’m given permission to help her.”
“Isn’t my asking you to help enough?”
“No, because on that shamanistic level, I’m dealing with the lifelong karma of an individual. If I go in and ‘fix’ something that shouldn’t be fixed—because the soul is supposed to learn from that situation in this lifetime—I’m in trouble. I can wind up with the karma that person was trying to work through, and I have no desire to handle any more than my own.” Her mouth tugged into a grimace. “I have plenty.”
The waitress came and delivered their breakfast orders. Mac thanked her and dug into his Mexican omelet. He saw Ellie roll her eyes.
“You must have a cast-iron stomach,” she muttered as she cut into her own breakfast.
“I just like hot things.”
“Yes,” Ellie said, “hot cars, hot jets and probably hot women, not necessarily in that order.”
Grinning, Mac said, “You cut me to the quick. It’s true, I have a fast car—”
“And you fly a fast jet.”
“My taste in women,” he informed her, raising one eyebrow, “is different.”
“Really?” Ellie wanted to ask him bluntly what kind of women he liked. She found it difficult to believe Mac was interested in her. He could probably have his pick of women—why would he single out someone so different from himself.
Mac knew what Ellie was implying, and he could see that her curiosity was getting the better of her. “What?” he asked. “You think I only date carbon copies of myself?”
“Not necessarily,” Ellie hedged defensively.
“Actually, Johanna was a bit like you,” he said dryly. “She liked gardening and was on the quiet side.” But that was where the similarities ended. Johanna constantly worried about her weight; Ellie did not. Johanna was tall and modellike; Ellie was shorter and wonderfully rounded in all the right places. Johanna had always been extremely dependent; Ellie had a full, happy life of her own. “But,” he teased, taking another bite of omelet, “Johanna had short hair and I like long hair. Very long, dark hair…”
Blushing, Ellie avoided his dancing, amused look. “Well,” she whispered, spearing at her eggs, “let’s just stick to the business at hand, Major. I’ll do a journey for your wife today, when I get home. I’ll call you tomorrow morning with the results. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” Mac murmured, wanting to reach out and touch her flaming cheek. There was no pretense with Ellie, and he found that admirable. She made no apologies for who she was and what she felt.
Mac was at his office at 0730 the next morning. Most of the air force would be starting work at 0800. His office door was shut and he was catching up on some paperwork when his phone rang.
“Major Stanford,” he answered.
“Mac? It’s Ellie.”
He smiled and sat back in his chair. “Good morning.” Yesterday, after they’d shared breakfast at the O Club, Mac had wanted to kiss her goodbye, but his head and his heart had warned him not to overstep his bounds with her. At least, not yet. But she’d been in his thoughts ever since.
“You sound chipper this morning,” Ellie said, a smile in her voice.
“I am, as a matter of fact.”
“Is that a normal condition for you at this hour?”
“Not exactly.” He gripped his mug of coffee and took a sip. “Usually, for the first hour I’m a bear, and no one dares talk to me. I need three cups of coffee to wake up. This morning, I bounded out of bed at 0600 and was at the office working an hour later.”
“Sounds as if my journey worked. I received permission to get pieces for you as well as Johanna.”
“Oh?” He sat up, suddenly at full attention. “What exactly happened?”
“When I went into the journey, my guide told me you both had pieces of each other, which is normal. He gave me permission to help both of you. I’ll tell you what I saw, if you’d like.”
“Sure, go ahead.” Curiosity was eating Mac up. He had attributed his atypical burst of energy this morning to the time he’d spent with Ellie. Could there possibly be a more mystical explanation?
“The first place I went was the real world. You see, in the journeying mode, there are three places I can go—the li
ght world, the real world and the dark world. These are just names for various dimensions, so don’t get hung up on the wording. It’s just how I perceive them when I’m in an altered state.”
“So far, so good.”
“My guide took me to a house. I saw you and Johanna in the kitchen, and you were arguing with each other. I want to describe her to you because it will help me double-check my own work.”
“Okay…”
“The woman was about five feet ten inches tall and was built like a stick.”
Mac chuckled. “Johanna is six feet tall and weighs exactly one hundred and thirty pounds. I guess you might call that a stick.”
“She had short red hair and a lot of freckles across her nose and cheeks.”
Dumbfounded, Mac nodded. “Yes, that’s right.” He was amazed at her accuracy. Could something have really happened? How else could she know so much? “What else?” he urged.
“She has blue eyes, and at the time of your argument, she was wearing long, beaded earrings. They were gold.”
“Johanna had a favorite pair of gold beaded earrings,” Mac confirmed. “This is amazing.”
“Let’s just see if I’m correct about the rest,” she warned him seriously. “I don’t know what the fight was about, but I saw you coming at her—not attacking her, exactly, but you did grip her by the shoulders. She didn’t like your manhandling her that way, and she pulled away and slapped you in the face.”
Mac shook his head, the memory of that particular fight coming back to him.
“Mac? Are you still there?”
“Uh, yes. Go on, Ellie.”
“Did it happen as I described it?”
“Yes,” he said heavily. “It was the first—and only—time in our marriage that I ever laid a hand on her. The divorce hearing was the next day, and I was desperate. I had just come back from Desert Storm, and the divorce papers had been sent to me over in Saudi Arabia. I was going out of my mind. Johanna wouldn’t talk to me on the phone the few times I could get to one, and she wouldn’t answer my letters. So this was my only chance. I was trying to talk her into waiting for at least a couple of months before she went through with the divorce. I wanted her to give us—me—one more chance. I know I shouldn’t have grabbed her. I guess I just lost it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ellie whispered. “I saw a piece of you split off when she slapped you, and that was the one I retrieved from her to give back to you.”
Rubbing his brow, Mac said, “This is incredible. I never told anyone about that fight. Not anyone.”
“And I’ll never tell another living soul,” Ellie promised. “Your privacy is safe with me, Mac. I keep all my clients’ business confidential—just as a doctor or lawyer would.”
He smiled slightly through the haze of pain he was experiencing. “That’s funny.”
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“I had a dream about Johanna. That’s why I woke up at 0600.”
“What was the dream about? Can you tell me?”
“I dreamed I went to her and told her she could live her life in peace, that I forgave her and myself for the way I’d screwed up the marriage. I wished her well, and I meant it.”
“How beautiful. Sometimes, when people get pieces back, they have dreams the night they’re brought back, or a week or so later. That kind of confirms that I did my job.”
“What did I have of Johanna?”
“I was taken to the real world again for you, and I saw Johanna in this beautiful, Victorian-decorated room.”
“That was our bedroom,” he said. “She decorated it herself.”
“It was beautiful….” Ellie sighed. “I saw Johanna take off her wedding ring and a fairly large diamond solitaire, and put them in a jewelry box. When I came in and told Johanna who I was and why I was there, I asked her if she had anything that belonged to you. She gave me a very sad smile, opened the jewelry box and handed me the set of rings. She said they had always belonged to you. I brought the rings back and blew them into your heart and the top of your head.”
“I’ll be damned.” Mac sat there in stunned silence. He wiped his mouth with his hand. “No one knew this, but Johanna sent back the rings after the divorce became final. Usually, the woman keeps them, but she didn’t want any part of me, not even the rings.”
Ellie hurt for Mac. “At least now you are both free of each other. The feeling you had when you woke up will continue, Mac.”
“This happiness?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that was just because of you.”
She laughed shyly. “Don’t be surprised if you hear from Johanna very soon. Often when a person gets a missing piece back, she’ll get the urge to contact the other party, without realizing why. Subconsciously, she knows something is different.”
“This is fascinating,” Mac said. “And I can’t thank you enough for doing it—for both of us.”
“You mean you believe me?”
“How could I not? You gave me two pieces of information no one else in the world knew.”
“You sound a little amazed.”
“I’m amazed at you, at your talent.”
She smiled a little. “Now you see why I do it, Mac. Recovering soul pieces is a miracle. It’s real, and it works. But I never try to make someone believe me. I let my work speak for me. In your case, you’ll continue to get validation. If Johanna calls, let me know.”
Mac shook his head. “If she calls, that will be a miracle in itself.”
“Why?”
“Because when she moved out of Phoenix a year ago and went back East, she refused to give me her forwarding address. I guess she thought I was going to pursue her or something.”
“Were you going to?”
“No. The day she slapped me in the kitchen, I knew it was over. Really over. We went to divorce court and I didn’t fight it or her.”
“I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time since to think about what you did wrong or could have done better?”
“Years.” He laughed, suddenly lighter and happier than he could ever recall. He glanced up and saw his master sergeant, Gus Calhoon, heading for his door. “Listen, I’ve got to go, but I want to thank you. Can I pay you for this journey?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Remember, I work for small donations only. In your case, I’m treating you as I would a friend. I would never accept anything, Mac. It’s just my way of helping out, that’s all.”
Frowning, Mac said, “You deserve something.”
“Just say thank you,” she told him with a laugh.
“Thank you, and you haven’t heard the last of this—or me.”
And as Mac turned his attention to the papers Gus presented for his signature, he couldn’t decide which was more amazing—the story Ellie had just related, or the fact that he could accept her story as the absolute truth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mac jerked awake to the sound of the phone ringing next to his bed. Blearily, he looked at the digital clock. It was 5:30. Who would be calling at this time of morning? He rolled over, taking most of the covers with him as he reached for the phone. Through his haze, he prayed there were no more problems at Hangar 13.
“Major Stanford,” he mumbled, easing into a sitting position.
“Sorry to call you so early, Mac, but I wanted to catch you before you went to work.”
Mac’s eyes widened; his hand tightened around the phone. “Johanna?”
Her laughter was light and soft. “I see you haven’t forgotten me.”
Rubbing his eyes quickly with his hand, he forced himself fully awake. “I never will. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Again, Johanna laughed. “I’m fine. Better than fine, actually. I’m getting married. Anyway, I decided enough time had elapsed since we’d spoken—I wanted to see how you were doing, plus share my good news with you.”
“I’m fine, fine.” He blinked, trying to absorb it all. “And c
ongratulations on the marriage.” His heart gave a twinge, but he really did wish her the best.
“Bill is a stockbroker, Mac. He’s got two young children. His wife, Sally, died of breast cancer two years ago. We met at a Greenpeace meeting about six months ago and—” she sighed “—things just sort of fell into place. For some reason, you popped into my mind recently, and I decided that I wanted to share the news with you. I hope you don’t mind. I know we haven’t been in touch since I left Phoenix, but I thought it was time to let bygones be bygones.”
His heart beat a little harder and he smiled slightly. “I’m glad you called, and I’m glad you’ve found the right man.” Johanna had always wanted a man who had a nice, steady job—the kind of job Mac would never have.
“He’s very nice, Mac. Like you in some ways—driven.”
“But he’s a nine-to-fiver.”
With a laugh, Johanna said, “Yes. Plus, he has two beautiful daughters, age four and six. They’re wonderful, Mac. I’m just so happy. You know how badly I’ve always wanted children.”
“I know,” he whispered, his voice choking. Johanna had been unable to conceive, and it had been a great sorrow to both of them. “I’m happy for you, Johanna. I really am.” Mac felt tears sting the backs of his eyes, but he didn’t care. Johanna was a good woman; he’d loved her with all he had to give, but it just hadn’t been enough. He hoped her second marriage would be a strong one.
“I didn’t call to gloat, Mac. I just wanted to let you know I was doing okay.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“I’m sorry I left the way I did. Looking back on it, I realize I could have been more understanding…kinder.”
“Look,” he rasped, “neither of us was very good toward the end, especially me.”
“I know….” Johanna brightened. “Tell me there’s a special woman in your life?”
He smiled a little and looked out the window toward the East. The sun had yet to rise; the sky was a gentle, pale pink color. That was how he felt right now—fragile, and a little emotional. “There is a lady….”
“Wonderful! What’s she like, Mac?”
“A lot different from you in some ways,” he said with a smile, “but in other ways, a bit the same. She likes gardening.”
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