Spirits in the Material World Read online

  Marc grinned and touched his bottle to mine in a toast.

  I drank. “Anyway, maybe it’s the eternity of the water that gets those thoughts flowing. About how dimensions work. After all, when you look at a ship on the water, you think about the ship moving forward and back. Left or right. But the ship doesn’t go down into the water. It doesn’t lift up off of the surface. So the ship is really just moving in two dimensions.”

  Marc nodded. “It’s aware of the third dimension, of depth, but it’s not physically constructed to handle it. You’d need to switch over to a submarine to go down.”

  “And to a floatplane to go up. Or some sort of a submarine – floatplane hybrid to do both.”

  He laughed.

  I liked how his laugh sounded. It was authentic.

  I pointed again to the water. “But that’s just three dimensions. Now, how about the dimension of time? That’s even trickier. We think of time as solely moving forward. Inexorably, continually forward. There’s no way to dig in your heels. You can’t run more quickly. It just pulls you along like a conveyer belt, and you’re along for the ride.”

  Marc’s eyes lit up. “Aha, but that gets more complicated. If astronauts were in a high-velocity spaceship, zipping along, their perception of time would vary wildly from ours. Let’s say they launched in the year 2030. They could do a loop in space for a year and come back thinking it was 2031.”

  He pointed at the table. “But for us on Earth, at our slower speed, we would have experienced ten long years. It would now be 2040. Those astronauts would have in essence leapt ahead nine years in time.”

  An idea came to him, and he smiled. “But imagine you had a child with some sort of serious disease. Something currently incurable. Scientists felt there’d be a breakthrough in about five years. You just get on this spaceship with your son and keep him alive for that one year in space. You get back, ten years have passed, and now the cure is available. You literally save your child’s life by jumping forward in time.”

  I stared at him in wonder.

  It had been so long since I’d had these kinds of conversations with someone. Not since those long-ago days with Bryane on the beach. I’d sort of put them into a mental storage box. One not to be opened, because with those memories came all of the other painful ones. Bryane with Candy. Bryan with Danielle. I’d forgotten just how wonderful it was to talk about things which fascinated me.

  He tilted his head to one side. “Amber?”

  “It’s … it’s all right,” I assured him. “Just, it’s been a while.”

  He smiled. “Since you had good oysters?”

  My cheeks heated. “Since I’ve enjoyed a discussion like this.”

  “Well, then, maybe we should have them more often.”

  My heart warmed – fluttered –

  I suddenly remembered Alex. I suddenly felt incredibly guilty. What was I doing? Marc was taken. I was supposed to be helping them ease the pain of a lost spirit – not destroying their relationship!

  I fumbled with my beer bottle. “I don’t think –”

  A swooning voice rich in delight came from over my shoulder. “Marc! I didn’t expect to find you here!”

  I turned with a growl.

  Sarong Seductress had changed into a bright crimson outfit with matching heart necklace. Large golden heart-shaped earrings dangled alongside her neck, and her hair was lifted in an elegant blonde updo.

  She purred, “I just happened to be walking along the wharf and spotted you through the window. I knew it was kismet! Serendipity! I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you.”

  I gathered up my bag. “Actually I was just –”

  Marc said to Sarong Siren, “Actually, we are having a private lunch together.”

  Sarong Snake blinked in surprise. “What? I didn’t realize you two were a couple.”

  I snapped, “We aren’t.”

  Marc glanced at me. “That was sharp.”

  I stared at him in fury.

  Was he thinking we could be a couple? That I would consent to being his other woman?

  I threw a twenty dollar bill down on the table. “I have to go.”

  I turned and stalked out, my face burning.

  I strode down the walk, heading out toward the lighthouse as fast as my feet would go. My hands clenched as I went. Of all the stupid, hare-brained, idiotic, self-centered, creepy –

  A hand grabbed me on the arm and turned me. “Amber!”

  I realized he must have been shouting after me for quite a while. His lungs were heaving as if he’d been running. We had reached the squat, white-painted light station. It was nearly square in shape. I wondered how it felt when it got together with its more properly shaped lighthouse friends. Probably inferior. Out of place.

  Marc took in several long breaths to get his breathing under control. At last he asked, “What was that all about?”

  I snapped, “What was what?”

  “I thought we were getting along. And Serena said you weren’t seeing anyone. Hadn’t been for a while.”

  Fresh outrage coursed through me. “You’ve been asking Serena about my love life?”

  He put his hands up. “I just wanted to find out if you were available. So I didn’t go mucking up any existing relationships you might have, if I spent time with you.”

  I jabbed a finger into his chest. I did it a little harder than I intended, given my emotional state. “Yeah? And how about you? How about your relationships?”

  His brow creased. “What about me? I’m not in a committed relationship.”

  I laughed out loud. “Oh? So that’s how you’re going to play it? That you’re not committed?”

  His look was more cautious now. “It’s not that I don’t want to be committed. I just haven’t found the right person yet.”

  My anger bubbled over. “And so you’re just going to keep dragging along Alex, and she’s going to have you in her bed, but Roger on the side, and then you’re going to date me, and then we’ll have Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice –”

  Marc gently grabbed my waving hand.

  His eyes were dancing with amusement.

  That made my fury notch up –

  He said, “Alex is my sister.”

  I stared at him in horror. This was even worse than I’d imagined. This was Flowers in the Attic merged with Game of Thrones with –

  His brow drew down. “We’re not married.”

  That got through.

  I stared at him in disbelief. “But you said –”

  I stopped.

  When had anything ever been said?

  I had just assumed, when I showed up at their home, that they were married. After all, they were sharing a house. Alex had talked about her mother, Josephine, and the family’s challenges. And there’d never even been a hint of a son in that family.

  There’d never been a hint of a daughter, either.

  The anger whooshed out of me like water pouring from a pipe, and I was left with a sense of absolute foolishness. This entire time I’d been so absolutely convinced that they were a couple. The way they had spats. The way they shared their space.

  They were brother and sister.

  I wearily ran a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  He smiled. “I can see how you might have thought that. I came out east for my mother’s funeral. Thought I might as well stay a little while and learn some more about her while I was here.”

  My brow creased. “Did you and your mother have a falling out, too?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly. It was my father. He went to the University of Wyoming at the same time Josephine did. They had common interests. He wanted to be a forest ranger; she loved herbs and plants, history and traditions. When she got pregnant with me, they got married. They figured they’d settle down and have a family.”

  I was intrigued. “So what happened?”

  He gave a small smile. “A spirit happened.”

  I’d heard similar stor
ies so many times that I didn’t need to ask what came next. Outrage. Accusations.

  I said, “So you stayed with your father?”

  “I was only three at the time. My father was fairly high up in the local church. He made it clear to my mother that, if my mother tried to contest the custody, he’d have her committed for being insane. He informed her that she was lucky he was only driving her out of their home.”

  I nodded. “I can see how she might have felt upset after that.”

  “He made her swear never to contact me again. But he didn’t tell me that. He told me that she wasn’t interested in seeing me. So I grew up angry with her. Graduated from college. Joined the police. I never made one attempt to find her or talk with her.”

  His gaze moved to look out over the ocean. “Now, of course, it’s too late. Now that I know the truth. I can only imagine how she suffered. How she must have felt.”

  I nodded.

  We stood in silence for a long, long while. Salty breezes curled in along the shore, lifting my hair.

  At last he sighed and glanced at his phone. “It’s nearly two. Are you ready to go face your ex again?”

  I gave him a wry smile. “Well, all things considered, it’s probably a good thing I never married him. Because, you know, he ended up like he is. And I ended up like I am.”

  His gaze held mine. “I like the way that you are.”

  A new warmth warmed me, and for a moment, for a long, drifting moment –

  I shook it off. Marc was only visiting from Wyoming. Undoubtedly once his mother’s estate was wholly settled, and this spirit issue was resolved, he’ be heading back home again. Back to his job. Back to his other family.

  I nodded my head. “All right. Let’s go see what Bryane has to tell us.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Bryane was sitting at the bar at the Black Cat when we arrived, and the drink he had in front of him appeared to be a double scotch. I blinked in surprise. He hadn’t been a drinker when I knew him. But, then again, that had been a while ago.

  People certainly changed.

  He looked up and gave us a wave. “Come on, grab a stool.”

  I sat alongside him, and Marc took my other side. In a moment we had beers.

  Bryane clinked his glass against our bottles. “To spirits.”

  He chuckled broadly, looking at his glass.

  I wondered if maybe we’d arrived after he’d already drunk one. Maybe two. I took a sip of my beer.

  He waved his free hand expansively in the air. “So, let’s see. We were talking about locations. It’s all about location, isn’t it? But it isn’t always. It’s actually about connections. The connections between a life force and … and what? A pile of bones and sinews and fat globules that are animated for the blink of an eye and then stops working again? What does that really matter to an eternal spirit?”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a rhetorical question or not, so I gave him a moment to answer. When, instead, he took another long drink of his scotch, I thought I’d take a stab at it.

  “Well, it seems that our spirit remains tied to our human body as long as that body is alive. When the body dies, the spirit is released.”

  He snorted. “Sure. And in the sixteen hundreds, we thought a person was dead when their heart stopped. No heartbeat, no life. But nowadays?” He hammered his hand hard on the bar. “We just thump the thing a few times to start it up again. They’d cry witchcraft back then. Sorcery!”

  I nodded. “All right, then. Maybe true death comes when the person stops breathing for ten minutes. You can pump the blood around, but if there’s no oxygen in it, the brain dies. Brain activity ceases.”

  He pointed a finger at me. “Bingo! But how about that woman in West Virginia? She suffered a heart attack. Seventeen hours, the family had her on life support. Kept her heart beating. Her lungs breathing. Circulating that oxygen. During that entire time there was no brain activity. The brain had shut down. Her family lost hope and agreed to turn off life support.”

  Another drink of spirits. “But soon after she was left on her own, her heart just re-started! All by itself! And her brain showed signs of activity!”

  Marc nodded. “We don’t understand all the intricacies yet. I’ve studied the water rescue stats. You might think that if someone drowns that they are done. They can’t breathe underwater, after all. But it turns out we humans have a ‘diving reflex’. If our lungs flood, our body automatically diverts existing oxygen to where it’s most needed, like the brain and heart, to keep those alive. Plus, water is typically cold. That cools the brain and causes more blood to nourish it. So even though your lungs are full of water, and you’re not getting fresh air into you, your body does everything it possibly can to make the best use of the oxygen you do have until you’re rescued. It can be hours later.”

  I blinked. “Wow, I had no idea that happened. And I live here by the ocean, too.”

  Bryane waved his glass around. “Death. Death. What is death? It’s not when the heart stops. Blam! We can just start the heart up again. And it’s not when breathing stops. The body can do amazing things to conserve the oxygen it has. So when is it? When some brain cells die? Heck, brain cells die each time football players collide. We have ample proof of that. So clearly it’s not about just a few cells. Is it more? Older football players have advanced CTE but they’re still considered alive.”

  I pondered that. “I guess it’s complicated. Maybe it comes down to our current level of medical technology. We still have people dying because there aren’t enough kidneys to go around. If someone’s kidneys fail, we know how to fix the problem. But we don’t have the actual kidneys to do it with.”

  Marc nodded. “Exactly. Even with cancer, often it’s that the cancer takes out an important body part like a lung. If we were able to plunk in a fresh lung quickly and easily, we could keep helping that person. Our problem is we don’t have enough on hand.”

  “Sure, we can replace kidneys and lungs. Hearts. But how about brains?”

  Marc smiled. “They used to think our brains were set in stone. Once we turned eighteen, that was it. But now we know that brains aren’t even fully formed until a person is thirty. And later in life? The brain is still forming new connections. Spawning fresh neurons. A person who loses functionality in one area due to an injury has other areas leap in to take over those tasks. The more we can learn to encourage that new growth, the closer we get to overcoming issues with dementia. With Alzeimer’s. With CTE.”

  Bryane growled, turning his glass around on its coaster. “Soon we’ll be a supermarket society. If a heart gets weak, we put in a new one. When a lung begins to fail, a fresh one gets added in. We’ll be able to graft on healthy skin and replace worn-out eardrums.”

  He slammed his open palm on the table. “But this spare parts system is wrong. Our physical body is a chrysalis. It’s meant to be temporary! If we trap a spirit here forever, how can it ever move on to its next stage?”

  Something was clearly bothering Bryane. I said, gently, “I might agree with you for people who lived a full, long life. But what about Sarah? She never even got her chance to live.”

  Bryane snarled, “You’re just being selfish. You would want your parents to have been repaired after their accident. After all, they abandoned you when you were nine. Just about the age of that insipid portrait Her Royal Highness Lady McGillicuddy was sending around to everyone.”

  My hands clenched. It was one thing for him to drunkenly rant. It was another for him to drag my personal life –

  A hand pressed gently over mine, and I looked over.

  Marc held my gaze. His eyes were calm and steady.

  I breathed in a long, slow, deep breath. I nodded.

  I turned to Bryane. “Hey, Bryane, let’s go for a walk down to the beach. Like we used to do. Talk by the ocean.”

  He looked like he might argue, but at last he nodded. He downed the rest of his drink and tossed some money onto the bar.

  We stepp
ed out into the warm sunlight.

  I could almost see him relax as we walked. As the sunlight eased into his shadows. We were heading back toward the lighthouse, and soon we were sitting along the quiet shore. The waves lapped toward us against the sand.

  At last Marc broke the silence. “I’m curious about the metaphor of a chrysalis as a stage. Are you saying that our essences move along a continuous path? I guess we often think of life as beginning when a child is born and ending when that body stops working. But you’re pointing out that we often choose arbitrary points for the two ends – shaded by our limited medical knowledge.”

  “Exactly,” Bryane agreed. “We keep changing when life ends. But does it really end?” His eyes grew shadowed. “I imagine Sarah would disagree with that.”

  I winced. I hadn’t meant to reveal any information about the two sisters. Certainly not to a man in his state. But it was too late. As Marc and I had discussed, it was impossible to go back in time.

  I nodded encouragingly to Bryane. “All right, then. Let’s say our spirit is eternal. It comes into our physical form when that physical form begins. At some point our physical form shuts down, for whatever reason. Our ethereal form still continues on. It can still think. Feel. Communicate.”

  Bryane traced a line in the sand. “Straight lines. Nothing is ever a straight line. Think about a sperm wriggling its way inside an egg. Does a life force connect at that moment?”

  Marc gave that thought. “The Catholic church would say yes. All souls that will ever be were created at the beginning and were present in the Garden of Eden. Each soul is pre-assigned a matching embryo. I believe Jewish people believe that as well.”

  I added, “And in Islam, a soul is introduced to a fetus at four months. There’s a specific quote that describes how this soul is now connected to its matching body.”

  Bryane drew a circle intersecting his line, splitting the circle in half. “That makes more sense. You can’t start at day zero. You just can’t. What happens to that one fertilized egg when, ten days later, it splits into two identical twins? Was there only one life until that moment? And that life is ripped apart into two halves?”