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“I do not feel like doing this,” Kate muttered, looking out the car window toward the small adobe house at the dead end of Quintana Street while her boyfriend Tim, a big Nordic-looking man, unloaded her wheelchair and her bag of trash from the trunk of his car. “If she gives me that bullshit again about being invested in having a disability, I’ll probably blow up at her and leave.”
“You can handle it,” Tim said, unfolding the chair. “It’s worth doing.”
“I know. She just pisses me off.”
Mae had made a strong case for Kate attending. Though Kate found Jamie irritating, she didn’t want him plagued by some wacko doomsayer, and Sierra had been heartless to tell Mae’s children he might die.
Bernadette had urged Kate to explore the support group, too, as part of her effort to sort out authenticity from fraud in alternative healing. Kate personally had no objection to harmless fakery—it made up a good portion of the psychic fair that she’d founded—but Sierra might not be harmless.
Kate transferred into her chair and put the bag of trash in her lap. Tim let her service dog, Lobo, out of the back seat. Kate didn’t attempt to approach the house. The pavement on the front walk was uneven, and the door had to be reached via a small porch. “What is she thinking? A support group for chronic illness and it’s not accessible?”
Tim said, “I know you hate it, but I can bring you up if I have to.”
“Not yet. I need to see if she has an accessible back door.” Kate found Sierra’s number on her phone. “You should go before I call her. Now that I’ve seen this entrance, I want her to think I took the bus. Not everyone who uses a chair has a big strong boyfriend. Come back for me in an hour. Or I’ll call if I need to leave sooner.”
Tim gave her a kiss and a warning about watching her tongue, and left. Kate called Sierra. “I can’t get in the front. Is your back door at ground level?”
“It is, but we’d like to carry you in.”
They would like to? That was weird. “No, thank you. I don’t care to be carried by strangers.” Kate hung up.
After a few minutes, Sierra appeared in the doorway, wearing fitted knit pants and a clingy top. “I talked about it with the group. You should trust us. It would help with your vulnerability to the process, all of our hands and arms embracing you.”
A group of sick people, lifting her? Kate nodded toward the classic New Mexican fence around the back yard, the kind that was often called a coyote fence, made up of uneven poles with the bark still on. “I’ll come in through the back.” She headed across the bare dirt of the yard toward the gate. A single loud woof came from behind it, followed by a growl. “After you do something with your dog.”
“Mitzi is a good dog. She won’t hurt you.”
“Good or not, she’s growling. Can you control her?”
Sierra sighed, traipsed down the steps, and opened the gate. A large brown-and-white pit bull met her with eager energy, barking and ready to explode through the opening. Sierra grabbed the dog’s collar and guided her to the far side of the yard and called, barely audible over the uproar, “Okay, come on through.”
Mitzi looked as though she might win the wrestling match, and Kate was nervous, but Lobo remained unruffled as he and Kate headed for the house. Mitzi kept up her ruckus until the Asian man who had been with Sierra at Bandstand came out the back door and gave a stern command. The pit bull dropped to her haunches, silent, and the man praised her. Mitzi knows who’s the alpha in this house.
With smooth, golden-tan skin, a receding hairline and a square face, the man who held the door open for Kate might have been around forty, but it was hard to tell. He said, “You need help, yes.” It wasn’t a question. Kate wondered if that was because his native language was tonal and affected his English inflection, or if he was such an in-charge guy that he didn’t ask questions.
“Not much. Just tip the chair back enough to bump me up the step.”
“Of course.” He gave the assistance she had asked for.
Kate found herself in a small kitchen where a covered pot simmered on the stove and bundles of dried herbs hung from ribbons tacked to the ceiling. The furniture looked like it had been made from a kit. A large batik mandala filled with Buddhas, demons, and clouds dominated one wall, and posters of similar images decorated the space across from it.
“This way,” said the man, and parted an orange-and-yellow plastic-beaded curtain to let Kate through to the next room. She thanked him, and he acknowledged it with a nod and padded back into the kitchen. The sound of chopping and the smell of onions followed.
Sierra had come back indoors through the front and took a seat in a circle of metal folding chairs. The sofa and armchairs had been pushed up against the walls, making room for the ten people gathered with Sierra to sit almost knee-to-knee in the middle of the room, allowing just enough of a gap for Kate to wedge herself into the circle. She sent Lobo ahead and once she was in her place, he lay at her feet, his front paws on the bag of trash. Someone in the group wore too much cologne. Was it to compensate for having to smell garbage?
“Usually,” Sierra said, “the newcomer sits on the floor in the middle, but we’ll make an exception for you, unless you’d like us to help you to the floor.”
Clueless. That was like asking an able-bodied person if they’d like to have their legs tied up. Kate gritted her teeth. “No, thank you.”
“Okay, but it’s really powerful to be down low like that when you first open up to us, and to be enveloped by the group energy.” Sierra waited. Kate shook her head, not trusting what might come out of her mouth if she opened it to decline. Sierra glanced at the woman beside her. “Let’s start with introductions. I’m sorry more members aren’t here today. Magda, why don’t you go first?”
Magda was about fifty, with a lined face, a full bosom and long, slim legs. Her hair, gray with a few threads of brown, was swept back in a chignon. “I’m Magda, I’m an author, and I have lupus. I’m in stage one of my self-healing.”
Each person introduced himself or herself in this way: first name, occupation, disease, and stage of self-healing. All were in stage one or two of self-healing, until Sierra spoke. “I’m Sierra, I’m a healer and a seer and I’m in stage nine of my self-healing. I healed my cancer and brought my arthritis into remission.” A silence followed, during which the group regarded her with too much reverence. Kate’s lip started to curl in disgust and she restrained the expression. Sierra said, “Kate, we need your full name for the first introduction, and please tell us what brought you here.”
“My name is Katelina Radescu. I’m a sign language interpreter, a psychic, and the founder and director of Spirit World Fair, what used to be called the Spirit Music Fest and Psychic Fair. And it’s pretty obvious that I’m paraplegic, but my other problem is alcoholism. I’ve been sober for a couple of years. I go to AA so I can stay that way. I don’t call myself cured, but my recovery has a solid foundation.” Now for the lie. Kate hoped her hesitancy came across as anxious hope rather than deception. “I’m here because I wondered how my past lives might have brought me the one I have. And if there’s anything I can do to heal myself.”
Sierra replied, “Anything is possible. However, some people want to hang onto their obstacles. We’ll get a sense of how much work it will be for you after I read your Akashic records. I can read them on my own, but they come to me more clearly if a loving community concentrates on the person whose records I seek.” She directed the group, “You know what to do. Use a soft but intentional focus and invoke her name.”
All eyes on her, they repeated, “Katelina Radescu, Katelina Radescu,” in chaotically overlapping whispers, while Sierra chanted a soft soprano Om. The hypnotic and other-worldly effect made Kate feel she had been kidnapped by bad fairies. What would it be like to be on the floor at these people’s feet while they did this? If you had come to them with faith and hope, it might not be so creepy. It might be magical. And that in itself was creepy.
Sierra ceased chanting. Her eyes bright and blank, she swayed and stared at Kate, her lips moving as if she might be literally reading the Akashic records.
Kate wondered what would come up. Back in June, past life astrologer Geoff Johnson had done a chart for her when they’d had some slow time at their neighboring booths during Spirit World Fair. He’d asked for the date, time, and location of her birth, and about her unexplained affinities, talents, and aversions, and then run a computer program he had designed. He said she had been, among other things, a Jewish stock trader in early eighteenth-century London and a black hairdresser in mid-twentieth-century Louisiana. How he drew those conclusions, Kate had no idea, but he said they were influential lives. He probably read a lot of history books and made up credible characters affected by the planets that dominated her current-life astrological charts. It had been good entertainment, and Kate had admired his skill in making it seem plausible.
Sierra snapped out of her apparent trance. “This is going to be very difficult for you. The work with us will be demanding, requiring you to break down deeply held beliefs and self-stories.”
“Hard work doesn’t scare me.” Was it supposed to? Sierra should have noticed that Kate liked a challenge, juggling two jobs and running the fair, and that she had done it despite two conditions that might have held another person back. She’d been an overachiever even when she was drinking. “What exactly is ‘the work?’ And why is it going to be so hard for me?”
Magda patted Kate’s hand. “Don’t worry. I had dreadful layers of self-stories. It’s taken me a while to get where I am.”
To stage one. Did anyone besides Sierra ever reach stage nine?
Sierra said, “This group is more than emotional support. The work is the process of self-healing.”
“I’ve been doing the work of staying sober for a while. I don’t think I’m so ill-equipped for self-healing.”
Sierra’s pitying gaze took in Kate’s legs, Lobo, and the chair. “Your alcoholism is only one symptom of your pattern of self-limitation. Your karmic baggage is so heavy, you haven’t walked for three lifetimes. You almost got stuck as a fresh-water dolphin.”
Startled, Kate covered a poorly suppressed laugh with a fake sneeze. “I did?” She pulled herself together. “Someone else told me I’d been an able-bodied human. A hairdresser in Baton Rouge named Nadine Belanger, to be specific.”
“No. That’s not even a co-life, or a weak parallel life.” Kate started to ask what those were, but Sierra ignored her and kept talking. “The records are clear. A pink river dolphin, three times. A bad cycle. The tribes along the Orinoco and the Amazon see them as shape-shifters, even demons. It’s only the traces of another’s life’s karma that pulled you free.”
A petite woman with pale, brittle shoulder-length hair, teased and curled into big puffy waves, spoke up. Kate reviewed the introductions. This was Posey, an artist and former hairstylist with fibromyalgia. “I was an animal once, too.” Posey looked as if she’d gotten stuck in the eighties. It wasn’t only the big hair, but the blue eyeshadow and the fitted dress with the miniature flowers on its long, flared skirt. She was about Magda’s age, but her voice was small and breathy as if she were trying to sound like a child. With her head tilted to the side, a head that looked too large for her body, she clasped her hands in her lap. “Not the immediate past life, but two incarnations ago. I took refuge as a dog. It was lazy of me, spiritually. I didn’t want to move forward. I can see that now.”
Kate turned away from Posey and toward Sierra with what she hoped passed for an expression of admiration. “I’m impressed that you healed yourself so completely. Did you do it on your own or did you also use medicine?”
Sierra took her time to answer. “Sometimes, the vibrations of pharmaceuticals interfere with the final stages of spiritual-cellular coherence. It depends on the drug and the person. I stopped my arthritis medications, but I completed my cancer treatment. To make it less toxic, however, I accelerated its effectiveness so I needed much less, and then took some herbal medicines.”
“None of us would like to be on medicines,” said Leon, a tall, thin, gray-haired shop owner who had Parkinson’s. Murmurs of agreement rippled through the circle. “My medication helps me, but the side effects are bad. It can turn you into a gambling addict, so now I fight that. Medicine.” He shook his head. “It’s as bad as the disease. Of course, I asked for it. It’s my karmic load.”
Kate had heard of that side effect of some Parkinson’s meds from one of her AA friends who also went to Gambler’s Anonymous, and wondered if Leon used GA for support. If so, he should know what a real support group was like. Other than a somewhat contracted posture, he showed no significant symptoms, but Kate suspected that was due to his treatment, not Sierra. If he, or anyone in her group, made little progress in self-healing, Sierra had a good fallback position. She could remind them about their karmic cowardice or say their medications were slowing their vibrations. It would be their fault, not hers, if her self-healing program didn’t work.
At least, so far, it didn’t seem to be doing any harm. Maybe it made Leon feel better to think that his illness and his medication side effects related to his karma and thus made sense of his bad luck. As long as he still got the treatment he needed, it was possible this nonsense gave him comfort. If he gave up on his doctors, though, or paid Sierra a lot of money, he could be in trouble.
Kate asked, “Is all of this free? The readings? And the self-healing instruction?”
“Yes,” Sierra replied. “We accept donations toward buying our retreat center, but no one is obliged to give. It’s part of our final karmic healing that we offer our gifts to those in need. But it’s also part of the fullness of our process that others give to us.”
Kate noticed that Sierra’s boyfriend was standing close behind the beaded curtain. How long had he been there? Was he eavesdropping? Waiting for a chance to grab a word with Sierra? Kate asked, “But if I didn’t donate, I could still participate?”
“It’s entirely up to you.” Sierra indicated the bag of trash at Kate’s feet. “Are you ready for the first step in self-healing?”
The man behind the curtain faded back into the kitchen.
“Of course.” Kate asked Lobo to lift the bag to her, and he put its knotted end in her hand. “Now what?”
“Reach in. Show us the first thing you find. Don’t choose, don’t hunt. Let the truth emerge.”
Kate took out a plastic bag, the packaging for frozen edamame. “How is this the truth?”
“You eat frozen food that comes in a plastic bag. What does that say? And it’s not just any frozen food, is it? It’s fancy, special. Talk to us about it. Be honest with your garbage.”
Kate bit her tongue so she wouldn’t laugh again. When she’d gotten a grip, she said, “My boyfriend likes edamame. I don’t. I keep these in the freezer in case he wants some.”
“And?”
“That’s it.”
“Talk about the bag. It has a story. Everything you throw away is part of your pattern, your karma, your footprint in the world.”
“If you mean my ecological footprint, it’s as small as I can keep it without being a fanatic. You can’t make a guilt trip out of a plastic bag. Or if you want to, maybe you should show me your garbage.”
The beaded curtain moved. Sierra’s boyfriend stepped through. “Would anyone care for tea?”
Sierra let out a breath, still staring at Kate. “Thank you, yes. A pot for all of us.”
He disappeared. Was he stage-managing? Making sure Sierra kept her cool? Tim often helped Kate that way with looks and touches, when she was about to lose her all-too-easily triggered temper. She needed him now, because she was getting disgusted with the ritual and struggling to play the role of a seeker.
Sierra smiled at Kate. “Keep digging. We’ve only gotten started.”
Kate yanked a fragment of a broken coffee mug from the bag. “Okay. Tell me what this means about my soul and my karma.”
“What does it mean to you?”
“It means I dropped a mug.”
“Was it valuable? Were you upset? Attached to it? Why did you lose your grip? Does that mean something to you?”
Kate clenched her free hand on the arm of her chair. “Would you like to show me your license as a psychotherapist? It was a dollar-store mug. I don’t know why I dropped it.”
Sierra’s tone softened in an apparent attempt to sound nurturing. “Your defensiveness is getting in the way. You won’t be able to find your source.”
“How is it being defensive to have nothing to say about my garbage? I’m being honest.”
“Are you? I hear resistance.” Sierra held out open hands. “Drop your guard and share.”
“Share? Okay.” On an impulse, Kate tossed the piece of ceramic to Sierra. “Now it’s your garbage. You talk about it.”
Posey gasped and Magda frowned. The others looked at the floor. They couldn’t recognize a joke? Sierra’s expression of pity deepened, as if Kate had done something shameful.
Somehow, that was the last straw. These foolish people deserved each other. There was nothing more to investigate, no further reason to stay. They were idiots believing idiocy, but it was free and it was their choice. Kate roused Lobo and backed her chair out of the circle. She aimed toward the beaded curtain. As it rattled shut behind her she heard Sierra sigh, “This is so sad. You can see the river dolphin surfacing.”
Sierra’s boyfriend, who was scooping loose tea into a ceramic teapot, finished the task, closed the tea canister, and walked with Kate to the door. He helped her roll her chair down the step and gave Mitzi a preemptive order. Kate thanked him. He seemed so normal, she couldn’t help asking, “Do you believe that stuff she says? Do you support what she does?”
“Sierra,” he said, gazing more at Mitzi than at Kate, “is a diamond in the rough. Her methods are ... immature. But she’s more gifted than you realize. You should give her another chance.”
He gave Kate a questioning look. She didn’t know what to say. Did he expect her to commit to this foolishness? With a smile and a nod, he closed the door.
Before Mitzi could recover from the man’s influence, Kate and Lobo hurried out the gate. When she reached the front of the house, she started to call Tim, then saw Posey standing at the end of the walk, her head angled sideways, her arms reaching out. “Come here, dear. It’ll be all right.”
Kate glanced around to see if Posey might be speaking to someone else. The dead-end street was quiet, the yard empty except for Kate, Lobo, and Posey, and a few butterflies in the wildflower border. Though Posey was ditzy enough to talk to the butterflies, she had to be cooing to Kate. As Posey floated to her and touched her shoulders, Kate’s spine braced with aversion, and Lobo moved between them.
Posey backed off. “It’s always hard, breaking down your barriers. I cried and cried during my ceremony. We all do, if we really go through it. Don’t give up. You can open up and heal.”
“Through psychoanalyzing my garbage?”
“It’s not analytical, it’s emotional. It’s the truth of your dirt and your refusals and your rejections and your karmic patterns. I had thrown away my last box of tampons, knowing I would never use them again, and, oh, that was crushing. It brought up everything.”
“Excuse me. I don’t need to know that.”
“But don’t you see? All my lifetimes as a mother, and then one in which I’m not?”
No, Kate did not see, nor did she want to. “I should be getting home. I’m not going to hang around and cry over my broken coffee mug.”
She rolled past Posey, who held out her frail little arms again, her head still sideways, bleating, “Please? Don’t give up. Sierra wants you to come back.”
I bet she does. She wants me back so she can change my mind. Not a chance.
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The next day Kate had a job sign interpreting a small conference at Eight Northern Pueblos Tribal College. Afterward, she stopped by Bernadette’s office. The professor listened to Kate’s account, taking notes on her computer. When Kate finished, Bernadette mused, “I only review businesses, and this doesn’t seem to be one. And bizarre as it is, it sounds voluntary, not coercive.” She turned from her monitor and faced Kate. “Advice about something as unquantifiable as dealing with your past life karma is a fuzzy area, so she’s not treading in any health professionals’ scope of practice. Are you sure she wasn’t suggesting actions that would harm anyone?”
“She didn’t directly say to go off medications, and she didn’t promise cures, but she hinted it was possible and said she’d done it for herself.”
“Did she say how? Diet, or imagery, or herbs?”
“Not diet. She mentioned taking herbs, but I got the impression that was the frosting on the cake, not the main thing. I’m not sure how she claims she did the self-healing, but it sounds like it’s supposed to be a psychological and spiritual process she puts them through. I doubt they ever finish, since they’re all in stage one or two and she says she’s in nine.”
“What about collecting money for this retreat center? Who’s behind it?” Bernadette glanced back at her notes. “You quoted her saying, ‘We accept donations.’ ”
“I didn’t think to ask about it. I took it to mean her support group, but it could be her royal-we plural self, or some partnership she has with someone else.”
“Or her soul group?”
“Maybe. I didn’t get as far as soul groups, either.”
“If you think you could stand to go back, maybe you could find out about the timeline. How close this is to a serious plan. If she opens a retreat center, that would be something I could review.”
“She has ten people meeting in her living room. She said a few members were missing, but I don’t think she’s anywhere near being able to fund a project like that.”
Bernadette typed another note. “You sound like you’re not going back.”
“No, but they want me to. I don’t think they like having someone come through without being converted. There’s no chance of that, though. They’re all anti-medicine, and I trust my doctors.”
“Do you think that’s the only reason she’d want you back? Ego? The need to persuade you?”
“I mentioned I’m the director of Spirit World Fair. If I joined her group, I could give her publicity.”
“That could explain her claiming a connection with Jamie, too. She might want to use him for fund-raisers or to make her more visible.”
“After what she did to him at Bandstand? He’ll never help her out.”
Kate looked out the window across the now-empty quad of the small campus, remembering what it had looked like during the fair, with the music stage at one end and the booths on all sides. It was primarily the musicians like Jamie who drew the crowds, though the talks by famous authors in campus lecture halls had been popular, and the booths of well-known psychics and spiritual artists had been important attractions. Otherwise, the participants were relatively unknown, and compared to most of them, Sierra was even more of a nobody. How could she expect to raise money and start a retreat center? She wouldn’t interest nearly as many people as Geoff Johnson did. His work was upbeat and entertaining. Kate had taken pleasure in the possibility she had been Nadine. The story Geoff had given her illustrated resilience and entrepreneurial spirit, traits Kate was proud of.
Sierra’s approach, on the other hand, was designed to make people miserable and guilty. The absurd pink dolphin scenario had been aimed at making Kate see herself as limited and negative, a karmic failure. That didn’t seem like a recipe for making money.
Bernadette thanked Kate for enduring the support group and reporting on it. “I’ll tell Mae and Jamie what you found out. I’m sorry it wasn’t anything that I could write about, though.”
“So am I. I hate to see people getting sucked into her bullshit, even if they aren’t paying for it.”
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Later that evening, when she and Tim were leaving an AA meeting, Kate turned her phone back on to find she had a message from Jamie. She would rather have heard from Mae, but after spending time with Sierra, Kate probably shouldn’t classify Jamie as annoying anymore, at least not by comparison. She listened to his message, hoping he hadn’t called to insist that she check out the support group again, and burst out laughing.
Tim looked down at her. “What?”
She replayed the message on speaker. A squeaky, beeping dolphin voice said, “I knew you when you weren’t you ...” On the next line, Jamie had managed to sound like both a cow and a dolphin: “And I’m Mrs. Moooooo!”