Chapter 9

Maggie woke in the middle of the night with a raging headache. She moaned and rolled over, recognizing it as what she called a “weather headache.”

It was more accurate than the World Clock. The day before the weather began to change, she usually woke up with one of these headaches. The pain started at the base of her skull and traveled up over her head and settled onto the front of her face. It was excruciating.

“Can I get you something, Margaret?”

She moaned but didn’t bother to open her eyes. Although she’d never experienced voices in the middle of one of the headaches, it didn’t surprise her. While it its throes, time seemed to either speed up or slow down. She could never get to full consciousness, and frankly, she never wanted to. During this time, Maggie’s dreams were far more vivid, and she often woke wondering if a dream had been reality and visa-versa. The fact that she was hearing voices during this time of agony just made her wonder if she were having a vivid dream.

“No,” she whispered, burying her head under the pillows. God, the pain . . .”

“Are you having a ‘weather headache’?”

Finally, someone in her dreams who understood what she was going through. Jerry rarely had sympathy for the headaches, but who did this voice belong to?

“Relax, Margaret,” the voice whispered. “Relax and rest.”

A gentle tune wafted through the air. Whoever was in her dream was humming a slow, soothing melody.

At the deepest recesses of her mind, she recognized the voice and the song, but couldn’t place whom the voice belonged to, or the title of the song. All she knew was that it comforted her.

 

 

The pitter-patter of the rain slowly brought Maggie to consciousness. The pain had dissipated, and as all her senses came online, she suddenly remembered what had happened the day before. She bolted upright and her eyes flew open.

The chair next to the bed was empty. She threw back the covers and ran into the living room and kitchen area, the wood floor chilly on her bare feet.

Nothing.

No one.

She sat down on the couch and put her head in her hands.

What the hell was wrong with her? Why did she feel such utter disappointment and loss for someone who was obviously a hallucination?

She went over the happenings of the day before. All the craziness started on that mine tour, and it only got worse as the day progressed. Obviously, some type of chemical fumes or lack of oxygen in the mine must have overcome her, made her faint, and then affected her brain the rest of the day.

No, she couldn’t explain why no one else was affected, but that had to be it. In the morning light, the truth was too overwhelming, too crazy to contemplate. She simply wasn’t seeing dead people. She wasn’t feeling emotions of love and lust and comfort for someone who didn’t exist.

Yes, it had to be some malfunction in the mining air duct system, or something she ate or . . . something.

Her headache had been very real, but so had the voice who asked if she was having a “weather headache.” In her lucidness, she recognized the voice as belonging to Joseph. He had murmured soothing words through the worst of her pain, humming songs to her, and bringing her relief in knowing that someone actually cared about the pounding in her head.

It had been a long time since someone cared for her well being, and her eyes stung with the concern she remembered from the night before. She swiped at them angrily.

It was time to get out of this town and back to her old life, no matter how depressing it all seemed right now. She needed to live in the present, needed to focus on her future, not this fabricated past she had somehow carefully constructed.

She marched into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As the water heated up, Maggie stared at herself in the full-length mirror. She looked so normal. Her brown eyes stared back at her, and she touched her high cheekbones. She tried to push a year of Jerry’s cruel words aside and study herself without the critical eye. Yes, she was curvy and probably had a little more padding than she should, but overall, if she forgot Jerry’s comments, she was somewhat happy with herself.

The past year had been hard on her, but also therapeutic. Living alone had brought her the silence she needed to get to know herself and learn to like herself again. She had moved in to her condo a broken woman who felt completely unworthy. As she stared at her reflection now, she realized how far she had come. She would describe herself as pretty, and she was somewhat confident in her own skin.

Yes, she had grown a lot in the past year, and she had put herself back together without help from anyone. She still had a way to go, but she was in a much better place than she had been a year ago.

But now it seemed her mind was fracturing with her illusions of ghosts.

Closing her eyes, she wished she were in the comfort of her condominium. If she had just stayed home, she wouldn’t be questioning her sanity and wondering whether Joseph was really a ghost or some fabrication of her needy mind.

She opened her eyes; the mirror was so foggy she couldn’t see her reflection any longer. She wiped the steam away and gasped as she met Joseph’s stare in the mirror.

Terror, love, regret, and surprise mingled in her throat, letting off a sound reminding her of something between a scream and a coyote howl, except it couldn’t quite escape her throat at its full sound.

“Relax, Margaret,” Joseph said, smiling. “It’s just me.”

“Oh shit,” she whispered. Something inside her snapped, and she’d had enough of trying to decide what was reality and what wasn’t. “Leave!” she shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

A wave of hurt and surprise passed over Joseph’s face, but then he showed no emotion. “Of course,” he whispered.

Maggie turned around to face him, but he was gone.

Sinking to the floor, she cried. An extreme feeling of loss overcame her, and she wasn’t sure if it was for the apparition she had kicked out of the bathroom, or for the normalcy she had left behind in Phoenix.

A few minutes later, she got to her feet. The bathroom resembled a sauna, and she stripped off her clothes. She glanced into the mirror and there written in the steam was “Graveyard.”

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “Please help me.”