Except I remember, too, and it wasn’t a dream.
Every once in a while, though, I bump into a dead someone who is rational, but who decided not to go into the light. The dead have auras, too, just not as strong as the living. I don’t like to get into conversations with the dead. Especially if their color is off.
* * *
Taylor and my mom are at the hospital. They’ve run diagnostic tests, a CAT scan, and blood tests, but there are no tests to diagnose an extraneous soul possessing one’s body. The doctor concludes it’s a concussion, which is
oushikuso,
as Rei would say. Taylor is getting better control over my body. Her speech and movements are still slow, but more normal than they were earlier. She is sent home with my mom, some prescription painkillers, and instructions for my mom to wake her up every few hours.
My mom followed the ambulance to the hospital in her own car, so she drives Taylor home. During the ride, I hover in the backseat, listening to my mom’s worried questions and Taylor’s evasive murmurs. My mom must think Taylor is foggy because of the concussion, but I wonder how she’ll manage later. How will she work around the obvious fact that she knows so little about me? I don’t think she even knows my last name. Does she expect she can just step right into my life and go from there? I try to picture myself in some of Taylor’s outfits and I almost laugh.
Back at home, Mom sits on my bed, stroking my hair and making a huge fuss. Taylor still looks dazed through my eyes. She ignores my mom’s attention. She closes her eyes and wants to sleep. My mom covers her up with the blanket and it’s not long before I hear light snores. Since when do I snore?
My mom looks so worried. If she even knew half of what’s going on, it would freak her out completely! She turns out the light and closes the bedroom door, leaving Taylor and me in relative darkness.
I float over to the bed and watch the dark lump under the covers rise and fall. Now that she’s sleeping, maybe her guard is down and I can get past whatever barrier is keeping me out. I reach out with just one finger and tap gently on her cheek. She grimaces, but doesn’t wake up. I edge my way around her to the other side of the twin bed and sort of lie down, although I’m really floating about an inch off the mattress. I try to roll into her, but I’m met with a solid wall of flesh who grunts irritably.
I lean very close to her ear. “
Taylor Gleason
.” I know she can’t hear me, but I say it anyway. “
GO AWAY!
”
Snore.
I spend the next half hour trying to inch, slide, push, and then force my way back into my own body, but my efforts are for nothing. She is stubbornly impermeable and I am tired. Not physically tired, but I feel like a car running on fumes. There’s something about being here in my house, close to my worried mom and my drunken father, that sucks my energy dry. And since I am one hundred percent energy, this is a problem.
A sudden vibration startles me, until I realize it’s just my cell phone, still stuffed in the pocket of the jeans I’d traded earlier in favor of the gym shorts Taylor now sleeps in. I don’t have to look at the caller ID to know it’s Rei. He said he’d call me tonight, and I doubt anyone was home at his house when the ambulance came, so he probably thinks I’ve just forgotten to charge my phone. The guilt I feel when I think of him drains my spirits even lower.
How can I tell him what’s happened this afternoon? Besides the obvious fact that he can’t hear me from this dimension, how do I tell him that not only did I ignore his advice, but I’m now trapped outside my body because of my own stubbornness?
Even though I am floating here in my bedroom, I feel a terrible homesickness. What I want, what I
need
, is to be near Rei and all the calm that flows from him.
I drift over by his bedroom window to find it wide open on this warm night. The smooth, sweet sound of acoustic guitar music pulls me closer. Could this be his surprise song? Rei plays by ear, listening to a little piece of a song on his iPod, and then working out the notes and chords on his guitar, playing them over and over until he has it memorized. Sometimes he’ll Google the lyrics and sing along, although despite his love for metal music, he realizes his voice is better suited for acoustic. Whatever song he’s teaching himself tonight is beautiful and complicated.
I curl myself into a ball, hovering just inside his window, and the music soothes me like a cup of hot sweet tea on a snowy day. A light breeze blows through me, stirring the wind chimes into gentle motion. Rei is lost in his song. He sits cross-legged on the bed wearing a black T-shirt and gray gym shorts, his hair still wet from the shower.
Slowly, I float down off the sill and linger over the swing chair hanging from the ceiling close to Rei’s bed, careful not to jar the chair into motion. From here, I can watch his fingers work the strings and chords, listen to his clear, quiet voice. The scent of his citrus soap floats all around him, along with a calm, summer sky blue aura.
I hug my knees to my chest and bury my head in my arms so I will concentrate on the music instead of the complex strands of muscles flexing gently in his arms as he plays. Sitting here with Rei, I feel like a sponge soaking up the energy I badly need. When the music stops, I don’t move, I just let myself rest here and recharge. I don’t know how much time passes, but I suddenly realize that Rei isn’t moving. I peek up to see if he’s fallen asleep, and he’s not. He’s still sitting cross-legged; his guitar still rests on his lap, but his bewildered eyes look directly at me.
“Anna?”
CHAPTER 9
My knee-jerk reaction is to bolt out of Rei’s room, so that’s just what I do. I hide myself in the tangle of willow branches and listen to him call my name softly, again and again. Finally, he says the one thing that breaks my resolve. “Are you okay?” he asks. “I tried to call you a couple of times and you never picked up.”
I float back in through the open window and he relaxes when he sees me.
“There you are,” he smiles at me as I hover around the swing chair.
I’m surprised he can see me. Usually, I have to summon up a considerable amount of energy if I want to be seen. Maybe I absorbed enough of Rei’s energy tonight just by sitting with him that I materialized without meaning to.
“Are you sleeping?”
What does he mean by that? I must look confused because now he looks positively amused. “I thought so. So you won’t remember this conversation tomorrow.”
Oh, really! I try not to show the surprise on my face. How does he know this? Have I shown up in his room before and had conversations with Rei that I don’t remember?
I shrug a little. Since I have no voice in this dimension, this conversation will be very one-sided. That’s a small comfort.
“Is your mom home?” he asks as he resumes his spot on the bed and picks up his guitar.
I nod.
“Did she have a good time?” He strums a few random chords, then adjusts one of the pegs a tiny bit. I wait until he looks up to nod.
“Did you follow Seth and Taylor to the falls today?”
I pause, not exactly sure how to answer this. It’s not like I can elaborate, so I nod. He just rolls his eyes.
“I thought so. I tried Seth earlier, but he’s not answering his cell and I don’t think they even have a house phone anymore. Did she give his cell back to him?”
Um, no. I shake my head, keeping my face as impassive as I possibly can.
“That figures. He must be livid.”
Why yes, he is. I nod.
Rei strums one particular string over and over, adjusting the corresponding peg until he gets the sound he wants, then he strums all the strings together. All the lights but his desk lamp are off, and his eyes are half hidden under shadows and dark hair. “So I always wonder what you’re dreaming about on the nights you show up here,” he muses as the sound of the music fades, “but you can’t tell me now and I know you won’t remember the next day.”
He looks up and smiles that slow, wide smile. “Or can you remember and you just don’t want to tell me?”
I have never lied to Rei before tonight. I may not tell him certain truths that I know would lower his opinion of me, but unless the avoidance of a full disclosure is considered a lie, I haven’t deliberately deceived him. Plus, he has been keeping certain truths from me, too. Like the fact that I am one of those people who slips out of their body during a dream and goes gallivanting off to la-la land. And this annoys me almost as much as the fact that I have no freakin’ body!
“Want to hear your surprise song? You won’t remember any of this, so it will still be a surprise when you hear it later.”
It seems there are lots of surprises today. I am starting to realize just how little I know about this dimension, even after a dozen years of wandering in and out of it. How did Taylor get into me? Why can’t I get her out? How could Rei see me earlier and all those times he claims I’ve been here while I’m dreaming? Usually, I have to absorb a considerable amount of energy from around me in order to materialize in front of him. When he does see me, I know I appear solid to him, just as solid as when I’m in my body, but I can’t ever remember anyone else seeing me when I’m out here.
When the song is finished, Rei looks up at me, and I smile and silently clap my hands. I love everything he plays on his acoustic guitar, and he knows this. He smiles a sleepy smile, so I know it’s time to leave. I wave and point to the window.
“Okay, I’ll see you in the morning,” he whispers as he parks his guitar on the stand beside his bed. “Sweet dreams.”
For one crazy moment, I want to tell him what’s happened, that Taylor’s dead body is stuck on a branch downstream, that Seth will probably be blamed for her death, that I can’t dream because I can’t sleep because I’m locked out of my body because Taylor has stolen it. And then I imagine the look that will be on his face, because he’ll think this is his fault, and if he had skipped his aikido class, he could have prevented this entire fiasco. I have to get my body back before he finds out what’s happened.
I spend the night hovering over my bed while Taylor snores, hoping she’ll pop out of my body during a dream so I can get back in. Sometime around one o’clock and then again at four, my mom comes in and shakes Taylor’s shoulder, just like the doctor told her to. Taylor wakes up enough to grouch at her, and then my mom leaves us both in the dark again.
I wonder if Rei considered the danger of someone taking possession of my body if I wasn’t in it. I never really thought of it before, but it makes sense. If there’s an empty shell left lying on the beach, won’t a hermit crab move into it? I’ve encountered spirits in this dimension who are obviously dead and wandering, but I’ve always shied away from talking to them. Maybe my subconscious was smart enough to realize if a dead soul had known I’d left a perfectly good
living
body lying around unguarded, it would just be an invitation for trouble.
* * *
Watching Taylor sleep is like waiting for a pot of water to boil. I need a better plan of action here, and since planning has never been my strength, I consider how Rei would deal with this.
One of Rei’s favorite quotes is from Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War:
“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” It’s a principle of aikido, too, to get inside your enemy’s mind and find out what makes them tick.
In principle, that should work, but know myself? I can’t even get
into
myself right now. But maybe I can learn a little more about Taylor. Really, all I know about her is from what I’ve seen at school. I’ve heard she lived in a big house on Main Street, which makes me wonder how she’ll handle slumming in my crappy little house. What will she think when she wakes up in the morning and has to deal with my hungover father? I wait until first morning light to head over to Main Street and cruise up and down until I find a mailbox with block letters spelling
Gleason
stuck to it. I don’t bother with such formalities as ringing the doorbell. I just slip right through the wall and find myself in a lavish master bathroom that’s bigger than my bedroom.
The girl was loaded. I mean, you can’t even compare apples to oranges; this is more like watermelons and raisins. I drift through a wall into an opulent master bedroom where the king-sized bed is still made, and then another bedroom that has the sterile feel of a guest room. One of the bedrooms is decorated in a sporty boy motif, with a tween-aged boy asleep in the bed. The last room looks like a picture out of a magazine, and the furniture in here easily costs more than all of the furniture in my house combined. Her computer is state-of-the-art, and she has a flat-screen television attached to one wall. On another wall, there’s a floor-to-ceiling bulletin board hosting a rainbow of award ribbons and dozens of photographs. I take a minute to check out all the glamorous shots of Taylor. Nope, she is not going to like living in Anna Rogan’s bony little body.
Three doors lead out of Taylor’s room. It’s pitch-black through one door, so it’s probably a closet; one door leads to the hallway; and the last one leads into her own full bathroom. She has her own bathroom? She
had
her own bathroom … with cushy two-ply toilet paper and everything. Again I wonder: what did a two-ply girl like Taylor see in a one-ply guy like Seth?
And how will this upper-class girl deal with my lower-class life? Maybe after she’s had to clean my father’s puke off the toilet seat a few times, she’ll leave my body of her own free will.
Or maybe she’ll find my life is better than no life at all.
The smell of coffee wafts up the stairs. I follow it downstairs to the kitchen where Taylor’s parents pace around two silent cell phones which sit on a granite countertop. Their auras are a strange mix of anger, sorrow, and hope. If I could appear right here and tell them what’s happened to their daughter, would I? Or would I let them hang on to that little thread of hope just a bit longer?
It’s a ridiculous question because I can’t let these people see me in my astral state, and Taylor is so obviously dead, but still …