Page 41 - WTP VOl. X #6

think she was losing it, like his mother. Or perhaps he’d want to be here too. Now she doesn’t know. What she also doesn’t know is whether he would have stood in front of a train for Pete. Whether he’d be tormented by the image of their only son spinning in circles, meandering through clouds, twisting and twirling and spiraling through the sky.
Charese stands up and places one hand on the nearby bed, which looks like a massage table; in
the other hand she holds a large white crystal. The flames of candles tremble in the windless room. “Is there something you’d like to ask Pete? Or tell him?” Maggie is silent. Glints of light speckle the walls. After six months of questions and prayers and waves of shock mingled with harsh, unbearable truth, moments when she talked to herself incessantly— whether in the shower, on the phone to her cousin, at his grave, asking for forgiveness for not protecting him—she suddenly has nothing to say.
“Can you describe these dreams for me?”
“He’s in his basketball, his game uniform, and he’s just swirling through the air, tumbling down from the sky. There can be snow or rain or sun, but either way he’s just falling... and smiling. And sometimes he’s a little kid, fishing with his dad or sitting on his grandpa’s lap. But then he starts falling again. I keep waiting for him to say something, but he never does.”
Charese moves to stand behind Maggie. Her desk is piled with paper—cursive, handwritten notes. Baskets of fresh daisies and empty vases. Maggie stretches her neck back, and looks upward; Charese’s eyes are closed. She presses her fingers into the
crux of Maggie’s neck, massaging along her tendons, upward and around her ears to meet her temples.
“I think I’d just like to see him. For someone to see him. To know he’s okay. To make sure he’s not stuck somewhere... or trying to hold on.”
“I understand. But if you can think of a question, or a message, the session will be more productive. That’s usually how I can get an entity to enter the room.
To interact.” Charese guides Maggie to the massage table. “Please, lie down. I want you to visualize Pete. As he was at the age he died.”
Maggie reclines and closes her eyes, but all she sees is black. The blur of years before Pete—she and Sam getting married, rows of friends and relatives gawk- ing at her, ripping up old shag carpet and painting the walls and ceilings in their first house, her swollen
(continued on page 65)
“I
n art she found a free-
dom, an inexplicable relief that nothing, perhaps not even being a mother, allowed her. But now that Pete is gone, she cannot allow her mind to focus
the way painting demands, even though she desper- ately needs a break from wrestling with what went wrong, with how she might have prevented it.”
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