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“Mama! There are people coming up on the porch!”
Mae jumped out of bed and rushed to the twins’ room to find them standing by the window that looked out on the driveway, peering under the bottom of the shade. She crouched beside them. It was hard to see. The streetlights on Marr were dim, and her driveway was shaded with mesquite trees.
“Don’t wake her up,” said a youthful male voice with what Mae thought of as a reservation accent, not like a first-language Apache speaker, but influenced by growing up around them. Like Bernadette’s speech. “We need to go to bed.”
“We’ve already been in bed,” replied a female voice with the same accent, her words rippling with a suggestive chuckle. “Anyway,” she became serious, “how else am I going to explain a shoe?”
Mae told the girls to go back to bed. “I know them. It’s okay.”
She tucked the children in and went to the door. Misty and Refugio were still quietly arguing over whether to wake Mae up.
“It’s okay. You already did.” She met Misty’s eyes. For close to four months, they had only spoken politely at Misty’s workplace, but not socialized the way they used to. “It’s ... it’s good to see you. Even if it’s whatever time it is.”
Misty kept her hands in her pockets. “Yeah. Jamie said I should get over it and be friends again.”
“And so did I,” Refugio added. “But don't stay all night having a reunion.” He flopped into one of the metal chairs, closed his eyes, dropped his chin, and made snoring noises.
“We’ll get together when he goes back to Mescalero.” Misty handed Mae the shoe. “Jamie says you’ll know what this is about. It’s Sierra’s. He stole it and threw it out the back window of the spa while she was soaking.”
“That was,” either really stupid or really resourceful, “a real Jamie thing to do. Thanks.”
“How come he’s not at your place? Are you guys okay?”
Mae wanted to tell Misty everything, but not now. The girls might be listening. “He’s working at the retreat at the Pelican. He didn’t explain that?”
“A little. He and Ezra told us about Magda Stein.”
Refugio popped out of his caricatured snooze. “Yeah. If it’s this Sierra person’s fault she’s sick, we’re going to be really pissed. She told Ezra she would do a book with Apaches, and we’re waiting on it. Next one in the Afterworld series.”
Misty shot him a scowl. “You make it sound like it’s all about us.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. She’s a really cool lady. Ezra showed me her letter.”
Mae’s curiosity and hope sprang up. “Did he bring it with him?”
“I don’t know. He shared it when I was passing one of the books to him. I give them to him when I’m done.”
“I’ll have to ask him.”
Mae thanked them, promised to call Misty and make plans after the weekend, then watched the couple collect Misty’s skateboard from the driveway and walk off hand in hand. Finally, Mae was getting her friendship with Misty back.
It was the aftermath of Mae’s psychic work for Misty that had made her decide to be a professional and stop using the Sight to do favors for friends. Searching out secrets to help one person almost always hurt another, and yet here she was again, doing the same thing.
No, this was different. Sierra’s followers were risking their lives, or at least their health and their money. What if Jamie had kept on believing?
Sleep beckoned, but Mae knew she wouldn’t be able to relax. Before Misty and Refugio had showed up, she’d been tossing and turning, thinking about Jamie and about her conversation with Hubert. If she was going to be awake, she might as well do the psychic journey.
She settled on the living room floor, leaning back against the couch, with several crystals and Sierra’s shoe. Posey’s calligraphy lay on the coffee table. Should Mae try to see the women together? It would be more focused than seeking only Sierra.
“Mama?” The twins pattered out of their room, wrapped together in a quilt, creating the effect of a four-legged, two-headed being. Brook asked, “Are you being psychic?”
“Yes, sweetie. Go back to bed.”
“Can we watch?”
“All you’ll see is me sitting here with my eyes closed.”
They squirmed onto the couch, rearranging the quilt cocoon. “That’s okay,” Stream said. “You can tell us what you see.”
“Is it my imagination,” Mae asked, “or have you gotten kinda disobedient since you traveled with Jamie?”
“No,” Brook replied with a giggle. “We started that with Jen.”
Stream gave her a small shove inside the quilt. “That’s not funny. We had to disobey Jen. She wasn’t fair to us. We didn’t disobey Jamie.”
“And what about me?” Mae raised her eyebrows.
The girls didn’t move. After a silence, Brook conceded. “We’ll go to bed. But can I ask a question first?”
“Okay.”
“Stealing is wrong, but Mrs. Moo is bad. Does that make it okay that Jamie stole something from Mrs. Moo?”
“That’s a deep question.” Mae turned around and rubbed the girls’ quilt-covered knees. “I hope I can answer it.” She took a moment to think, looking into their eyes, then continued. “Sometimes you have to do something that breaks a law in order to do something bigger that’s right. Like you deciding to disobey Jen when you thought she wasn’t fair to you. And running away. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to get your point across, but you broke a rule because you thought it was the right thing to do.” The girls nodded, and Mae went on. “Jamie needed to get something from Sierra for me. Unless I’m real close to someone, I can’t connect with them as a psychic without holding something that they touched a lot. And I need to find out what she’s doing, like if she’s using sick people in a way that’s going to hurt them. Find out what she does with the money they give her. Once I’ve done that, she’ll get her shoe back.”
The girls murmured a few words of understanding and then wriggled off the couch as a four-legged quilt creature. Mae walked them back to their room and tucked them in. As she returned to the living room, she heard them singing, off-key but sweetly, the goodnight song Jamie loved to sing.
Tears took her by surprise. Jamie. He had so much of what it took to be a good father, but lacked the judgment or stability. What if his illness was as serious as she was starting to fear? How would the girls handle it? How would she cope? She already felt guilty, even though they hadn’t fully broken up, and she didn’t know for sure what was wrong with him. How long would it take them to work things out? Could they succeed?
It looked like Hubert and Jen weren’t going to. Mae and Hubert couldn’t go back and start over, but he’d sounded open to something different. The prospect triggered a downpour of pain and confusion. It was unthinkable to let a possible renewal with Hubert have space in the tiniest corner of her heart while she was worried about Jamie’s health. Nonetheless, it had set up camp, claimed its place without her consciously welcoming it.
Shoving the thought away again, she sat cross-legged at the same spot on the floor as before, picked up the crystals, and struggled to calm her mind as she rested her other hand on Sierra’s shoe and Posey’s calligraphy. You can do this. It’s important. Someone—maybe Bernadette, maybe Ezra’s grandmother—had told her that she had her gift for a reason. That she was a finder of truth.
She hoped she would know what to do with the truth she found.
Focusing on her breathing, the crystals, and the energy from Sierra and Posey, she set an open intention for the journey, trusting the Sight to show her what she needed to know.
The tunnel swept Mae’s vision to a new scene, a kitchen. The off-white appliances were old but clean, the floor red tile, the walls a faded yellow. One wall featured a batik picture that also looked old, a mandala filled with images of what Mae guessed were Buddhist myths or heavens and hells. From outside came a dog’s shrill, persistent barking. Sierra and Posey stood at the counter, Sierra removing a tea strainer from a large mug. Her hair was short, a pale gleam of abundant stubble. “These herbs taste terrible, by the way.” She slid the mug to Posey. “I took them for my arthritis pain for a year.”
Posey nodded and gazed down into the brew. “Can I put honey in it?”
“No. That dilutes it. You have to drink it as it is.”
Posey took a sip and cringed.
“Don’t be a sissy.” Sierra walked away. “This is the easiest part of healing yourself. If you can’t do something as simple as put up with a bad taste, how are you going to be a role model? An inspiration?”
Posey took another sip and her middle convulsed. “I don’t think I can be. I’m weak.”
Sierra grabbed the back of a chair, gripping so hard her knuckles paled. “Then find me someone strong. If you want to be sick, be sick. It’s your life.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try.” Posey gulped the tea, gagging again, and wiped her eyes. “Can I bring Baby in now?”
Sierra’s expression changed from angry to dazed to fascinated, her eyes narrowing and her lips parting as she studied her guest. “A dog,” she whispered.
“What? Of course he’s a dog.”
“You. I meant you. It’s ... it’s in your aura. I can see you as a dog.”
Did Sierra have spontaneous visions? Or was she putting on an act?
Mae lost her concentration and the vision fell away as she began to analyze, but she let her mind keep probing the puzzle. Posey was small like her pet, and like a dog, she was eager to please and would cling to someone who was mean to her. Sierra had seen Kate as a predator, a pink river dolphin that had scary legends linked to it. Kate was formidable, assertive, and independent. Sierra might be a little afraid of her. According to Sierra, Jamie had been a too-worldly monk. He’d called her on it right away, arguing that she’d seen his personality and improvised, not seen a past life. Assuming Sierra intuited past lives in this questionable way, could she be deluding herself when she did it?
The journey had raised so many questions. Mae set Posey’s poem aside and started over with only Sierra’s shoe and the crystals. Before she could figure out what was going on between the two women, she needed to better understand Sierra.
The tunnel moved slowly this time, and the new vision opened on the front steps of a house so decrepit it looked like something from the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression. A woman in a faded denim sundress limped out the front door, leading a little blonde girl of about eight years old clad in a loose-fitting paisley dress. The woman was around thirty, with a sad oval face and long brown hair. She carried scissors, and the child held a framed photograph.
At one side of the stretch of pink-red dirt that was the front yard, chickens strutted and pecked their way through a vegetable garden. The juniper-studded red hills in the middle distance reminded Mae of the empty country roads through Sierra County, outside of T or C. Sierra County. Coincidence?
Before too much thinking could break her trance, Mae refocused.
The woman combed the child’s soft yellow curls, provoking a whine. “Ouch. You’re pulling.”
“That’s the best my hands can do. You know Mommy’s hands hurt.”
Mae sought a closer view of the mother’s hands. Her knuckles were swollen and several of her fingers deformed. Her toes, showing in her sandals, were afflicted the same way. Mae couldn’t see the woman’s knees, hidden by her sundress, but the way she moved suggested pain. She began cutting the child’s hair close to the scalp. “Daddy had beautiful hair, didn’t he?”
The child mumbled something, rubbing at the glass over the photograph, making a smudge worse instead of cleaning it. The picture was of a man with blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white, long and thick and wavy. He smiled, his young face deeply suntanned around his big blue eyes. Except for the tan, he looked like his daughter. Mae was sure she was looking at Sierra and her father.
Sierra sniffled as strands of her hair fell on her father’s picture. “Are we going to do this every year?”
“Of course, honey. Until I can’t do it anymore. We’ll always remember your father.”
The woman continued shearing her daughter’s locks. When Sierra complained, her mother said, “I’m sorry, but you know it's hurting me, too.” She handed Sierra the scissors. “Now you cut mine.” When the little girl had finished, they let their fallen tresses blow away into the yard. Hands together at her heart, the woman intoned a prayer in a language Mae didn’t recognize, and the child answered with a brief, hesitant chant.
After a silence, the woman smoothed her daughter’s stubble. “You did good, honey. Now could you see if there’s any squash? If there is, bring it in and then go look in the root cellar. We need to use up those potatoes.”
The little girl fetched a sunhat and a white long-sleeved shirt from the house and went to the garden, where she dug through a sprawling patch of summer squash. She brought several gourds into the kitchen. On the walls were mandalas, including the batik one that now hung in Sierra’s Santa Fe kitchen, and Buddha statues wearing prayer beads sat on the chipped window sill over the sink. The window was patched with plastic sheeting and duct tape. Glass jars lined the counter, some half full of whole grains and brown pasta and others with sprouts growing in them.
The child Sierra washed the squash, mumbling, “I have to do everything.”
Her mother limped in and sat in a ladder-back chair. “I’ll cook. You don’t have to do everything.”
“Yes, I do. Ever since Daddy died.” Sierra climbed up on a stepstool, slammed a cutting board onto the counter, and began slicing squash. “I milk the goats, I get the eggs, I clean the house—”
“Don’t whine. You had chores before Daddy died. And we have to keep this place going if I’m ever going to get well. You know that. Now stop with the squash and go see if there are any potatoes that are still good. We can’t waste anything.”
Sierra dropped the knife, suddenly in tears. “What if we can’t keep it going? What if you can’t work anymore?”
“Then you’ll have to be our angel when you grow up. Our bodhisattva.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You won’t have to know. Just trust your intuition. Like Daddy taught you.” The mother rose and made her way to the counter, where she patted Sierra’s shoulder and took over slicing the squash. “Now be Mommy’s helper and go get the potatoes.”
The vision ended, dissolving away.
After taking time to brush her aura with snow quartz, resealing her boundaries and removing energy that didn’t belong to her, Mae took her crystals to the kitchen to clean in salt water. The vision troubled her. Sierra had been close to Brook and Stream’s age. The hair-cutting ritual suggested it was an anniversary of Sierra’s father’s death. Some cultures cut off hair in grief, but what if he’d had cancer and lost his hair? He’d been a blond, blue-eyed farmer laboring in the New Mexico sun. Could he have died from melanoma, one of the diseases Sierra claimed to have had?
She also pretended to have cured herself of the disease her mother apparently suffered from. Was this her way of being her parents’ angel or bodhisattva? An attempt at vicarious healing? Or was there some other task they’d expected of her? Had her father taught her the dubious intuitive skills she practiced with her support group? She’d boasted of her self-healing success to Posey, who clung to a sick role though she was healthy.
Mae brewed a mug of herbal tea and wrote an account of the visions, everything she wanted to share with Jamie, Kate, Bernadette, and Don first thing in the morning. She would be going for an early run with her father and could stop by the Pelican on her way, so she sent the four of them texts suggesting a meeting before the retreat got started for the day.
Next, she wrote down questions. She needed help making sense of what she’d learned. Had Sierra started the support group so she could bully sick people in some displaced way of punishing her parents? Or did she really think she could teach them to cure themselves through facing their karma? Nothing Mae had seen explained Sierra’s ideas about Mu or her soul group. Nor had she learned anything about the fund-raising or exactly where Yeshi fit in the picture. Was he the key to the puzzle?
*****
Jamie switched on the bedside lamp. “Let him in, mate.”
Ezra opened the door and Yeshi stepped in, wearing a bathrobe with folded slippers poking out of the pocket. On his feet were sturdy white athletic shoes, unlaced and sockless. He gave Ezra a small bow. “Thank you.”
The boy invited him to sit and added, “But you can’t stay long. Jamie’s sick.”
Yeshi remained standing. “Can I help?”
“Yeah,” Jamie grumbled, stacking his pillows to elevate himself to half-sitting, “you could leave and let me sleep.”
“Of course. I will make this brief. You have your massage tomorrow. Your consultation with me. Perhaps I can help you then.” Yeshi walked to the archway that demarcated the living room from the bedroom-and-kitchen half of the suite. “Sierra thinks spirits are doing things to her.”
“That all? No worries. I get spirits once in a while. They settle down after they get their message across.”
Yeshi blinked as if a bright light had flashed in his eyes. “Spirits bring you messages?”
“Yeah.” No doubt Sierra thought spirits had stolen her shoe, which was fine with Jamie. So far he hadn’t told a lie and might not have to. “They do stuff to get my attention.”
Ezra slipped past Yeshi and sat in the chair he had left beside the bed. “My grandmother says that, too. That spirits show up to remind us of things. Or just to remind us they exist. She says they hide her reading glasses to make her look at things more closely.”
“This is not a joke.” Yeshi ran a hand over his thinning hair and tugged his robe tighter around his square, solid frame. “Sierra is distraught. Did one of you take her shoe from the spa?”
“Like, how distraught?” Jamie asked. “Scared shitless? Climbing the walls? Or just pissed off?”
Yeshi looked at the floor. “She is troubled about spirits.”
“Not like her to send you to talk to me. She’s always been right in my face, y’know? Is she actually so upset that she couldn’t come with you?”
The Tibetan doctor patted the slippers in his pocket and glanced around the room. “I told her I was sure you had played a prank. I don’t know why you would, but it was more logical. Are you telling me you don’t have her shoe?”
Jamie wriggled his shoulders. “Sorry.”
Yeshi paced into the living room and peered under and behind the couch and chair. He disappeared from Jamie’s sightlines, but the sound of the old metal doorknob turning and the hinges creaking told him Yeshi was looking in the living room closet.
“Did you throw it in the dumpster?” Yeshi asked, returning to the archway.
“No. Jeezus. Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. But I must know what you did. She says there are demons here, reborn as humans. I have tried to tell her for years that demons are only symbols of the craving and clinging mind, personifications of delusion, but I’m afraid she was raised in a rather curious version of Buddhism. And now you tell me you do not have her shoe and that spirits give you messages?”
“Not demons, though. Guides.” Jamie pulled Gasser into his lap. It felt cruel to let Sierra’s demons haunt her, bully though she was. “Tell her it was a prank and that I’m sorry. I threw her shoe out the window, dunno where it went.”
“I’ll look for it in the morning,” Ezra offered.
“You should not have done this.” Yeshi’s expression was mournful. “Sierra does not get jokes.” He turned away, his broad shoulders drooping, and let himself out.