Part 24 (1/2)
It's early Sunday morning, and Beth is sitting on Petra's living-room couch, waiting for her to return from the kitchen with herbal tea. She pulls a speck of black fuzz off the couch cus.h.i.+on and flicks it to the floor. Petra's couch is white and many years old, but it still looks brand-new without a single stain, only one of many signs in the room of a woman who lives without a husband or children.
Opposite the couch sits Petra's meditation chair, a low, espresso-colored rattan seat with a high back and a white cus.h.i.+on (again, no stains). A beautiful, handwoven pink-and-gray blanket is curled around the seat, revealing the shape of where Petra was sitting only moments before. A lavender candle burns on the low, round coffee table next to a copy of Cook's magazine and a deck of tarot cards. The room is spa.r.s.ely decorated-a black-and-white photograph of Petra with her siblings and parents, a painting of a sunrise over the ocean, a wooden carving of a sperm whale, a jade plant in a large, blue ceramic pot on the floor, its branches decorated with tiny gold-ball Christmas ornaments, a gla.s.s bowl filled with colored sea gla.s.s. There is no TV.
Petra walks into the room, still in pajamas, barefoot, toenails painted bright pink, and hands Beth a steaming-hot mug. She sits cross-legged on her chair, wraps the blanket around her, sips her tea, and leans forward, directing herself toward Beth.
”So this is incredibly cool,” Petra says.
”This is crazy, not cool.”
”Well, it's kind of mind-bending cool, but I think it's cool.”
”Petra, this is unbelievable, impossible.”
”It's a lot to process,” Petra says.
”It's pure coincidence.”
”Or not.”
”It has to be.”
”Why does it have to be?”
”So you believe in this kind of stuff?”
”What stuff is that?” asks Petra, knowing full well what Beth is referring to.
”You know, channeling dead people. Talking to ghosts.”
Petra laughs and tucks her hair behind her ear.
”I believe in divine beings and spirituality.”
”But what does that mean?”
”I believe that we're more than flesh and bone, that we are all spirits living here on Earth for a spiritual purpose.”
Beth sighs and sips her tea. Her own experience with religion, with concepts and beliefs about spirituality and life after death, is extremely limited. Her mother wasn't a churchgoer. Beth's not even sure what denomination her mother might have belonged to. For a while when Beth was a teenager, she and her mother went to different churches on the weekends, sometimes even to other towns, with the purpose of at least exposing Beth to organized religion.
She remembers little about any of them. There were strange choral songs that she didn't know the words to and statues of Jesus nailed to the cross that gave her nightmares. That's about all. They usually went for jelly doughnuts after. She remembers the doughnuts. Then one weekend the church field trips stopped, and her mother left it up to Beth to choose. She was about sixteen. She chose to sleep in on Sundays.
When her mother died, Beth wished she hadn't made that choice. She a.s.sumed her mother was in heaven, but she had no religion to help her believe in heaven as a real place. She could only imagine heaven as a part of the sky filled with puffy, white clouds and chubby, naked babies with wings. And it was hard to include her mother in that image. It still is.
”Okay, what about what Olivia believes?” asks Beth. ”Do you believe that's even possible?”
”Yeah, I do. I sometimes experience the presence of spiritual energy when I meditate.”
”So do you hear actual voices?”
”No, but some people do, and some people see images, visual flashes. For me, it's not like hearing or seeing, it's more a sudden knowing, but the knowledge doesn't come from me.”
”That's what we call thinking, Petra.”
”It's not. It's different, it's information I wouldn't normally think, or it's communicated to me in a style that's not mine. It doesn't come from me, it comes to me or through me. It's hard to explain.”
”Okay, but even if I believed in this, why would this boy's spirit choose me? I mean, why not communicate directly with his mother?”
”I don't know. Maybe his mother wasn't open to receiving him. Too much grief blocking the channel.”
Beth looks around Petra's living room-the tarot cards, the rose quartz crystal in the shape of a heart hanging from a string, sparkling in one of the windows, the meditation chair. If the spirit of a boy named Anthony was looking to channel his story through a woman on Nantucket, why not use Petra? Why not choose someone who believes in this stuff?
”Yeah, but why me? Before writing this book, I had no connection to him or autism.”
”We're all connected, even if we don't know how. Maybe his communicating through you gives you something that you need in this lifetime.”
”Me? Like what?”
”I don't know. Maybe the chance at a new life, a creative life. Maybe it's a lesson, something in the story you've written that you need to learn.”
Writing this book has given Beth access to a part of herself that she'd forgotten about, the creative dreamer she stored away in the attic so many years ago. But a lesson for her? Her book is about autism. It's not about her. She shakes her head.
”Did you ever feel like you were tapping into something or someone else while you were writing?” asks Petra.
”Not exactly.”
Hearing the obvious uncertainty in her own voice surprises Beth. She never heard any voices. She didn't. But at times when she'd write, hours would go by, a whole morning and afternoon, and it'd feel like only a few minutes. And sometimes she'd read back what she wrote and think, How did I come up with this? How did I know how to write this? And there were the dreams. Those full and vivid dreams about Anthony.
”But, Petra, I wrote this book.”
”I know you did, but maybe his spirit provided you with inspiration, guidance toward an intended path, some necessary truth.”
Beth chews on her thumbnail and concentrates hard on what Petra just said. ”Okay, but if I was going to be a conduit for someone's spiritual message, why would it be for this boy and not my own mother or my grandmother or my grandfather? Why this boy?”
”I don't know. Again, maybe there's a reason you're connected. Maybe there's something in what he's saying for you to learn. Or maybe Olivia's just a mother who really loves and misses her son, and there's something unresolved with him.”
Beth sips her tea and thinks for a minute.
”She wants to know what purpose his life served.”
”There it is. And your book reminds her so much of him, she sees the story you've written as her chance to understand why he was here and heal. What about that?”
Beth nods.