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Maysun had no memories of a good night’s rest. Over the past few centuries, she’d used time deep in meditation to catalog people’s lives, deciding whose troubles she needed to put right or complicate. While she rested, her mind surveyed thousands of potential issues, and she’d choose the most pressing ones. She grouped occurrences and lifelines like a defragmenting computer and categorized them by significance, from “Most Likely to Intervene” to “Worth Monitoring.”
Often, she’d forgo sleep, passing the hours with people who lived most of their lives in the dark. She wasn’t a regular human in need of recovery.
Until now.
After Eoghan left that morning, she realized how human she was. Although her body longed for rest, she thought her mind might never shut off.
The pain of her love for Eoghan was multiplied by losing him the same day she realized how potent that love could have been. The result was a combination of exhaustion and sleeplessness, an aching heart, and a restless mind.
As the sun reached its crest, she wandered down to the beach, watching the choppy waves as they lapped on the shore, occasionally glimpsing blue in the iron-gray sky. The chill of the air was new to her, and she reveled in her newly restored senses. She reveled in thoughts unburdened by constant insights into people’s lives, but part of her missed the hectic pace her mind used to keep.
You’ve prepared for a relaxing retirement, but you’ve spent most of your life in a frenzy. You can’t change that in one morning.
She strolled down a wide sidewalk on a lonely stretch of shore and studied the rocks and sea below. The Isle of Arran loomed in the distance, a blue-gray mountain surrounded by mists.
A happy-looking middle-aged couple passed, heading the other direction. She was plump and dark-haired, with a touch of gray in her wavy locks; he was slightly older, with gray hair but a face nearly unmarked by time. Maysun thought of Eoghan and his newly rejuvenated face. The couple passed her holding hands, smiling, chatting. Maysun nodded in their direction and longed for the familiarity they shared.
At lunchtime, she discovered to her delight that she was genuinely hungry. She headed for a pub on the coast and ordered the daily special—a sloppy roast beef sandwich on an enormous hoagie coupled with chips—from a man with kind eyes and a friendly grin. As she took her paper-wrapped goods to one of a handful of empty metal tables, a flash of percipience struck her. She froze, arms outstretched to catch her balance as she braced herself for the flood of information that came with the onslaught of a mental news bulletin.
Nothing came. It was gone as soon as it struck.
An echo, maybe? Perhaps I’m still adjusting. The thought nearly made her laugh. No doubt it’d take months to grow used to the banality of humanity.
“All right?” the man behind the counter asked. He sounded ready to rush to her aid if need be. Maysun hesitated, waited until she’d settled to answer, and smiled.
“Yes,” she said with sincerity, “I’m fine.”
She took a seat at the table and fought the urge to laugh again as reality set in. It was no echo of her former power coming to haunt her. Her flash of “intuition” was nothing more than the flash of a dream she’d had during her hasty nap, a strange sequence of events that unraveled in discombobulated bits and pieces. A man in a brown suit, a gray room with a table much like where she now sat. The feeling that she was being interrogated. A young man who made her confused and aroused at the same time.
She shoveled a chip in her mouth; its salty, vinegary goodness amused her.
I guess getting worked up over a dream is a little strange, but it’s probably normal to have visions of accusations or imprisonment after the acts I’ve done to keep the earth in Balance.
Her armchair psychoanalysis done, she found herself pleased to have found the answer to her problem in a minute’s worth of pop psychology.
She spent the day shopping and reacquainting herself with life among humankind. After returning home, she treated herself with a cool glass of chardonnay before pulling the last of her satchels from the car and piling them in the entry of her seaside flat. Exhausted, she eyed the bags for a moment and then shook her head.
Unpack tomorrow. Take the rest of the night off. Don’t do a damn thing—except maybe a bath. With more wine. And bubbles.
Turning her back on the bursting bags, she sat on the couch with a book she’d picked up on Sauchiehall Street, but it couldn’t hold her attention. Frustrated, she set the book down, lifted the remote, and spent ten minutes randomly flipping from station to mind-numbing station, only to discover they didn’t numb her mind nearly as much as she’d hoped.
For, try as she might—and she’d spent the whole day trying—she couldn’t shake the notion that something was wrong. And she didn’t need the power of the Balance to know she was right.
––––––––
“MRS. HUETT, YOU UNDERSTAND my problem,” the detective said, flipping a corner of his notes in a gesture Amara assumed was supposed to make him look vulnerable, the kind of guy in whom she’d want to confide her secrets. Under any other circumstances, she would have found Detective Jewell cuddly; the man looked like a basset hound in a cheap brown suit. Droopy, coffee-colored eyes, sagging jowls, a mouth that looked as though it wanted to smile but couldn’t.
As it stood, several hours into an interrogation, he looked more like a bloodhound out to tree her.
He sat up and cocked his head—another dog-like gesture. “Your husband is brutally murdered in your home, and you can’t account for what you were doing when it happened.”
Amara fidgeted. When the cops arrived, she’d readily answered their questions. The idea of calling a lawyer hadn’t crossed her mind; her only concern was helping them to catch whoever had killed Thom. The problem was, although she’d never budged from her story—her true story—it sounded too convenient to be factual. Now, as it neared evening, she was tired of defending herself against a man skilled in the art of twisting words into evidence, especially when there was no way to confirm an intruder that only she knew existed. She was not just the most likely suspect—she was the only suspect. And that was part of her problem.
“I told you, I was asleep.”
“While your home was broken into and your husband tied to a chair and killed.” He leaned back in his chair, started to put his hands behind his head, stopped. A bewildered expression crossed his face. “Mrs. Huett, there was no sign of forced entry. All the doors were locked and dead bolted. You said it yourself.”
Amara had no reply to that. The lack of break-in evidence mystified her as much as anyone else, as did every other facet of that strange, horrible morning, which had drawn out until the late afternoon. Dragged in for her “statement,” with Thom’s body, they soon inundated her with questions and ultimately herded her into an interrogation room. Left alone at first in the chilly, drab room, Amara had wondered what she’d done wrong, what she’d said, how she transformed from bereaved wife to murder suspect.
The questions had started simply enough. Did Thom have any enemies? Not that she knew. Had he made any drastic changes in his lifestyle lately, any new friends? No. Hell, Thom never had friends, only a handful of work colleagues he golfed with a couple of Sundays a month. He had friends when they first married, but that stopped after a few of his contemporaries had eyed Amara too appreciatively for Thom’s comfort. Would anyone at work have a reason to be angry with him? Thom had never discussed his job with her. He didn’t mind spending his money on her, but he never let her hold the checkbook. She didn’t care. Thom was all business, and she was all art, and they’d both preferred it that way. She had a credit card with a generous spending limit, and he never questioned her when she used it. It had been a suitable arrangement.
“You’re pretty well-off financially, am I correct?” Detective Jewell had asked.
“We do all right, I guess,” she replied warily. “I don’t handle the finances.”
“Why not?”
“I’m an artist,” she said with a dismissive wave, as if that answered the question.
“Do you bring in much money?” he’d asked, struggling to sound casual, but failing miserably.
“My painting is mostly a hobby, but I’ve sold a couple of pieces.”
“But you’d like to,” Jewell had said, “Maybe open a studio one day?”
Seeing this as an opportunity to prove her willingness to contribute to the household, she’d jumped in readily. “Well, I think every artist has a dream of opening a studio one day.”
“Does your husband have any life insurance?”
Understanding now where this was heading, Amara’s face fell. Better tell him and get it over with, she thought. Otherwise, he’ll assume you’re covering up when he finds out later. And you know he’ll find out.
“Yes, we both do.”
“Can I ask how much?”
Her protective posture wilted under the detective’s scrutiny. If she lied, he’d sense it. He was too good at his job for her to bluff. She might as well continue being honest.
“A million and a half dollars,” she admitted.
Jewell was trying so hard to appear the good guy, Amara wanted to scream.
“You don’t handle the finances, but you know how much life insurance your husband has?”
This guy’s too good, Amara thought. He’s building a case where there shouldn’t be one. And he’s right; it is weird that I remember about Thom’s insurance. How do I prove it wasn’t me?
“Thom said he wanted to make sure there was enough to pay off the house and all of our bills and enough to live off for a while until I got on my feet. And we recently had the amount changed. It used to be less, but Thom said he wanted to be sure I had enough to pay off the house in case...” She found herself not sure if she wanted to cry or scream, but either way, it was hard to push syllables around the tightness in her throat. “He had me sign a bunch of papers, and I saw the amount.”
“Hmm,” Jewell said, placing his hand on his chin. Amara, who’d never had a sincere homicidal urge, now wanted to strangle him. Not to death, just enough to vent her frustration.
At around five-thirty in the evening, the door popped open. A young Latino police officer stuck his head in the room with an apologetic expression.
“Detective Jewell?” he said. “Phone call.”
Jewell pushed the chair back onto all four legs with a screech that jangled Amara’s already frazzled nerves. Jewell muttered a hasty word in exit and left.
Alone, at last, Amara washed her face with dry hands. She covered her mouth and blinked back tears. Catching her reflection in a mirror she suspected hid more cops behind it, she saw a stressed-out woman whose day had gone from a living nightmare to one more terrible than a Fuseli painting. Her long, dark hair was lank, and her face looked sunken.
What had happened? She had awoken feeling phenomenal. But during her rejuvenating slumber, someone had broken into her home and killed her husband without her awareness. Now she almost believed she was guilty. How had she remained oblivious?
Why didn’t he scream? Or had he? She might not have loved Thom, but her heart broke with the thought that she’d allowed him to die without trying to stop it.
Pulling her stare from her disheveled reflection, she realized for the first time in hours, since the moment the police had asked her those first innocuous questions at the station house, she was finally alone.
She laid her arms on the cold table, placed her head down on them, and cried.
