Page 40 - WTP VOl. X #6

Spiraling (continued from preceding page)
daughter owns a place like this out in Colorado. Talks to the spirits. This is the closest I can get to her these days.” Mrs. Gallagher smiles. She lifts Maggie’s hand from her shoulder and holds it in both of hers. “I have energy, Maggie. Lots of it.” She laughs. She is only sixty-eight, but the chemo and radiation, the remis- sions and setbacks have lined her face, distorted her features so her eyes have become further apart, her cheeks concave. But today, she looks like a woman who has woken up from a month-long nap, the blue of her eyes glistening, her voice like music, prominent and pleasant, her cheeks flecked with pink.
“You look great. So elegant.” She lets go of Mrs. Gal- lagher’s hand to touch her hat.
“It was my mother’s. I just dug it out.” Maggie remem- bers when the surgeon took Mrs. Gallagher’s first breast—how her hair had grown back in black and grey patches. “So I’ll be ready this time around.”
Maggie catches the scent of heated blueberries. The tapping of rain on the windowpanes calms her, and she takes a deep breath, her body warming up, be- coming still. Mrs. Gallagher leans in, almost whispers. “Have you tried it? I went behind the curtains once, got to talk to my brother, Ralph. The bastard just joked around, though. Wouldn’t be serious, just like when he was alive.”
“A psychic? No.” Maggie sees a flash of her fireplace at home, the curling of the paper, its turning to ash.
“It’s peaceful back there. Helps when you’re at a crossroads,” Mrs. Gallagher says. Maggie feels her face flush. She pulls her hood from her head, and drops of water fall from her coat to the floor. She doesn’t know whether Mrs. Gallagher is talking about Sam, or Pete, or both.
“The hat suits you,” Maggie says.
Mrs. Gallagher turns toward the street, where a taxi with tinted windows has pulled up to the curb. “That’s my ride. It’s been wonderful spending time with you Maggie. Until we meet again.” Mrs. Gallagher pecks her on the cheek.
“Yes, in three weeks,” Maggie laughs, uneasy. The woman seems off. She hopes it isn’t the medication. Or that the chemo and radiation have affected her sensibilities. “For your treatment,” Maggie adds.
Mrs. Gallagher opens her umbrella halfway, then turns back and winks at her.
“Maggie. Don’t let fear be your God. Take it from me. That’s the opposite of living.” Maggie stands frozen, watches through the glass door as the car speeds off into the rainstorm, leaving a trail of exhaust hovering above the wet pavement.
~
Days later, Charese leads Maggie behind the curtain into a room lit only by candles. Sage streams through the air like ash. “We start fresh,” she says. “Clean.” She has a tight smile, dimpled cheeks. She looks years beyond her picture in the brochure. “As we do in life.”
Maggie follows Charese to the card table in the cor- ner, a basket of muffins in the center. “Help yourself.” They sit across from one another, Charese in her long denim skirt and Maggie in her scrubs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. On the walls, there are posters with outlines of bodies mapped with chakras, light illuminating pressure points and organs. A deck of tarot cards on the table. Crystals and hunks of Hima- layan salt on small dressers. Maggie reads the titles adorning the bookshelves: Anatomy of the Spirit; Many Lives Many Masters; We Don’t Die.
“And Maggie, what brings you here today?”
“Curiosity, I guess. Chance? I keep having these dreams.”
In the dark, the beads of Charese’s necklaces glow gold and orange. The chains jangle as she talks. “There is a heavy energy attached to you,” she says, looking past Maggie. “I can see it... sense its grip. You are here to communicate with a loved one?”
“Yes.”
“And death is all around you, at your job?”
Maggie smoothes the hair from her ponytail. “I sup- pose so.”
“But this is your...”
“Son. Pete.”
“Pete, yes.” Maggie shifts in her seat. She can’t re- member the last time she heard his name spoken aloud by someone other than herself or Sam.
“And this is not the only loss you are experiencing.”
She imagines what Sam might think if he knew she were here—he’d want to send her to the nut house,
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