A New Leash on Life (12 page)

When I teased Melanie about this she said his love for Snowball won over her heart. She adored that he loved Snowball. So, not only did Snowball get a great home, but the shelter also got some great repairs, Phil’s brother-in-law’s dogs got vaccines for life, and my best friend got some much-needed happiness back in her life. Soon, she’d be collecting her belongings and moving them into his raised ranch. Time would tell whether she’d be moving into his bedroom or not. I surmised from the way he cradled her hand that the bottom level would be reserved entirely for a new treatment facility.

~ ~

I focused all of my attention on business as usual. The others followed suit, even volunteering to stay later and come in earlier so we could properly care for the full house. Trevor and Natalie loved these animals just as much as I did. One day, I’d repay them for the hundreds of hours over the past three years during which they sacrificed time with their families and friends to care after our sick and injured, our lonely and scared, our matted and dirty furry friends.

“It’s an honor,” Melanie would say over and over again through the years. Since opening, Melanie volunteered her reiki services for almost every animal at the shelter. For the ones who were most needy, she’d perform her techniques until positive healing results surfaced. “Animals are my best patients,” she’d say. “They don’t fight the energy flow. They ease into it. That’s when the real progress happens.” She’d direct this to me with a smirk because I always resisted her treatments. If my neck ached, she’d get me to lie down and she’d start by waving her silly sage stick around my body, and then instruct me to breathe and enjoy the energy flow. I’d always end on a laugh too deep to contain. How could I take her seriously?

Eventually I did. My doctor ordered me an ultrasound and mammogram because she discovered a mass under my left breast.

With four weeks until my scheduled testing, Melanie had cleared her calendar every morning at six thirty for an hour to work on the area with me. Too scared to laugh anymore, I simply closed my eyes, inhaled the mint and sage, and let her do her magic. At some point, I even joined in, visualizing the pink and healthy breast cells dismantling the mass. I wouldn’t admit it at the time, but one day my skin twitched and contracted at the mass site. Two days later, I arrived to the appointment, stuck my boob in the machine and sucked in my breath while they took digital images. And, later, when they had smeared warm jelly on my left breast and swirled that ultrasound wand round and round, clicking, beeping in the area of my mass, I imagined only pink, vibrant breast tissue. Sure enough, the radiologist later revealed I had a set of healthy breasts with no signs of the mass as reported by my doctor.

I trusted Melanie and relied heavily on her gift to heal precious animals who took up residence in my shelter waiting for their new families to meet them and bring them home. She explained to me that all living beings had life energy flowing through them and when life energy rose high, health and balance did, too. When life energy sunk to negative levels, stress barreled down on us and brought on illness.

Melanie never said no when Natalie, or Trevor, or I asked for help. So, when she called us to ask if we could help her pack up her house, we dropped everything else and lent a hand. She divvied days up between us. I arrived at her house first one Sunday mid-morning, leaving the shelter in the capable hands of Trevor and Michael.

I pulled into Melanie’s driveway and admired the single room attic that sat on her Victorian house like a top hat. I imagined in the early nineteen hundreds an author up there with her typewriter punching out the words of a fabulous novel. I pictured the sun beaming in on her through the wall of windows, shrouding her in a veil of comfort and light as she wrote scenes wrought with relentless conflict.

I climbed out of my car bearing two cups of coffee and a bag of bagels.

She answered wearing a colorful green and purple sari wrapped around her waist and the other end draped over her shoulder. She swept me in to her foyer and I cried out at the boxes she had piled up at the foot of the staircase. “So many.”

“I figure, we’ll start up in the attic and I’ll work my way down to the basement eventually.”

I handed her a coffee and I followed her lead through the front foyer, which bore the heavy scent of sage. “Recent treatment?”

“On myself.”

I pictured her waving her sage stick, chanting some mantra about peace and love and slipping into a meditative stance, drawing the negative out and welcoming in the positive with grand waving. I loved my friend and all her hippy, flower-child innocence.

She pulled out the steps from the ceiling and we ascended into the depths of her spooky attic, complete with cobwebs laced around objects like white veils. The space smelled sheltered, like a wet towel that hadn’t quite dried enough.

Each step creaked, sounding as if the floor would cave in. I feared I’d fall through and land two floors down in a pile of towels in the kitchen’s pantry. Boxes were piled up everywhere, zigzagged with no purpose, no sense of order, just haphazard afterthoughts to a move that had gone unplanned. Melanie led me over to the right hand corner nearest the window. I peeked out on the old maple and smiled at the song of birds chirping their joy in the branches. The perfect backdrop to an afternoon sifting through my friend’s belongings.

We explored box after box. Each one she refused to trash.
This one is from my grandma. This one is from kindergarten.
About two hours into the ordeal she tore open the lid to a box stuffed in between a rocking horse statue and a scary life-sized doll she called Beth. “Oh, this box is going to bring in some provocative memories.” I peeked over her shoulder and surveyed a pretty lacy towel. She plucked it up. It smelled like an antique shop. I burrowed in closer to get a better look and discovered piles and piles of letters addressed to Melanie from a Ms. Jacqueline LaFleur from Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I loved this girl.”

I picked up a stack of letters and thumbed through the envelopes that contained beautiful handwriting, pretty flower stamps, colorful envelopes with smiley faces and hearts. “What happened?”

“NOH8 didn’t exist back in the seventies, that’s what happened.”

“So you just walked away from each other?”

“Haven’t spoken to her since she walked out of my life many years ago. I did learn she married some dweeb who went to our high school. He used to stroll around like a king in charge of the social landscape of the school, robbing everyone of happiness with his stuck-up attitude and bulging muscles. I don’t hate too many people. I hated him.”

“How did you find out she married?”

“My sister styled her hair on the most perfect summer day in June 1986. I spent the day bawling at the park.”

“Why didn’t you just tell her how you felt?”

“Oh, she knew, sweetheart. She loved me, too. But, back then society shunned homosexuality, and both of our parents forbade us to be together. Being of strict Catholic backgrounds, the two of us complied with their wishes. So she married the captain of the football team and from what I understand gave birth to a set of twins, and I married Henry.”

“Can I read one?”

“Be my guest.”

I read letter after letter and each one carried the weight of two broken hearts who lost out on love because of other people’s phobias and close-mindedness. Jacqueline revealed her ups and her downs, her anguish and suffering at the hands of a marriage she didn’t want to be in, her disappointment in caving in to others who had no clue about true love.

“We listened to our parents condemn our love, and we ran away from it instead of facing it like two brave women in love should’ve done. I didn’t trust in the love. It scared me. People’s judgment scared me. I was pathetic. I’d never let someone talk me out of something I wanted now.”

“People must have said some pretty bad things to you for you to just walk away from each other.”

“I regret that I listened to them. I pretty much drove her into the arms of her husband.”

“I take it you don’t still write to each other?”

“Once she had her children, the letters stopped.”

“That must have torn you up, huh?”

“I broke it off. I wanted her to embrace her motherhood without me standing in the way. Besides I had started learning about reiki and the importance of channeling positive energy. Sneaking love letters to a married woman didn’t exactly follow the proper reiki methods.”

“Have you thought about reconnecting?”

She traced a letter with her finger. “It’s been over twenty years.”

“Times have changed.”

“We’ve changed. I’m sure she’s got a giant family now and would in no way want me barging back into her life.”

I flipped through to another letter, swelling at the sweetness of her words. “She’s the one who got away from you.”

“We all have one of those.”

I shrugged.

“She wrote a novel you know,” Melanie said.

“Oh? A seedy romance novel?”

“She wrote our story.” Melanie dug to the bottom of the box and pulled out a book called
Soul Mates
. The cover bore an image of two hands entwined. “She mailed this to me.”

I took the book from her and opened it. “Dear Melanie, may you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.”

“Written by J.L.,” I said, running my fingers over the cover again. “Wow, she wrote a book for you.”

“Not too many people can claim that.” She stared at the cover with pride, a sense of peace emitting from her.

“How did it end?”

“Idealistically.”

I opened to the last page and read the last sentence.
She whispered into her ear, “I won’t ever say goodbye. So, my love, until we meet again.” Then, she turned to her husband and two children and walked towards them, fulfilling her commitment to them as a wife and a mother.

“We should Google her,” I said.

“I’m not reopening the past.”

“But what if she’s divorced and single? You can still have your life together.”

“I’m not interested in that anymore. I like to come and go as I please. I like to eat tuna fish out of a can when I don’t feel like cooking. I like leaving my bed ruffled after waking. I like treating reiki patients whenever I please. I like the option of meditating in the middle of the day. I like being free.”

“Aren’t you at least a little curious?”

She placed the book back in its nest under the pile of letters, and then closed the lid. “Fuck yeah.” She smiled sweetly, stood up and strolled away, calm and demure. “Let’s go eat our bagels before we tackle this place any further.”

I followed her across the creaky floorboards and down the skinny, steep staircase. “Let me Google her for you.”

“I don’t live in the past. I live in the here and now.” She walked past the dining room and into her kitchen where we dug out our bagels.

I blocked her from picking up the cutting board. “Well, in the here and the now we have Google.” I wanted nothing to get in the way of this conversation.

She turned to face me. Her cheeks flushed. “Of course I wonder. She crosses my mind all the time, still. Not a day goes by that I don’t see her handsome face. Sometimes, I laugh out loud at the wacky things she used to say and do.”

“It’ll take two seconds,” I pleaded, wanting to learn all about this girl who possessed Melanie’s heart.

She twitched her mouth to the side, biting her inside cheek. “I’m not interested.” She opened up a drawer and pulled out two knives. “Now, be quiet and butter your bagel.”

I reached out for my knife. “Fine.”

“And, don’t you dare come by later and tell me you Googled her,” she said, pointing her knife up in the air.

“You’ve got no sense of adventure.”

“You’re lowering my energy level.”

Chapter Eight

My energy level dropped drastically a few weeks after rummaging through Melanie’s attic. Natalie and I were enjoying a bowl of chicken soup that she had cooked that morning when Trevor came out from the back and told me the bad news from the day before. “I ran into Howie, the handler at the Clyde’s City Shelter. He told me that they turned away a litter of kittens the other day because of overcrowding.”

I dropped my spoon in the soup, which then splattered all over the paperwork I had started for a modification loan to the shelter building. “Why didn’t they call us?”

He rounded the corner and patted my shoulder. “They figured we didn’t have any room, either.”

“We’d never turn any animals away.” I wiped my spilt soup. “We need to get out there and educate more people about spaying and neutering.”

“We really don’t have much space in the cat room, Olivia,” Natalie said.

I thought about the kittens surviving alone in the woods, curled up to one another, hungry and unable to satisfy their basic needs. My shelter would never become one that turned desperate animals away. We needed more room.

I called Melanie to see if she could ask Phil to rig up something.

“I have no idea where he is,” Melanie said.

“Can you have him call me when you see him?”

“He just left here a couple of hours ago and said he’s heading to his mother’s for a couple of weeks. I guess she’s sick with her heart valve. I’ve already started on remote therapy for her.”

Of course she had. “How’s the packing?”

“I’m not making much of a dent. I’m looking after Snowball for him, and that little girl is keeping me on edge with all of her barking. She barks at leaves, you know. She is going to give my kitties heart attacks. I’m about to dive into a treatment with her.”

“Pet her for me.”

“I will. She’s a great companion, even with all of her barking. This morning as I reread those letters again, she snuggled up to me and buried that cute little nose of hers in my tummy. She’s wonderful.”

“You were reading the letters again?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s it? Yeah?”

“They bring back some good feelings. Right now, I need them.”

Melanie never lacked good feeling. “Are you okay?”