I sat in the circle and wrinkled my nose at the incense wafting out from the ceramic turtle to my right. The worn, red and purple rug beneath me scratched at my bare calves, and I welcomed the sensation because I was uncomfortable.
There were no eyes on me. Everyone kept their polite distance, glancing at the wall hangings or closing their eyes and humming along to the ambient music drifting out from the laptop perched on a small glass side table.
Dede, the spirit guide, sashayed into the room with bells clanging on her wide hips. They were silver and copper and hung above her camel-colored tulle skirt on a belt of leather and beads. She sat in the single opening of our circle on a turquoise meditation cushion that barely supported her voluptuous bottom.
I struggled to hold my lips in a straight, grim line. This was one of those moments. When Sammy and I would have shared silent laughter, and later in bed, we would have bellowed like children. Everything about the scene had the surreal quality of a bad movie. I was visiting a spirit guide who’d converted her garage into a New Age hovel, complete with mandala wall hangings and wooden statues of pregnant deities.
“Let us begin,” Dede told the group, turning down the lights.
The candle flames flickered on our ghoulish faces.
“We will connect now. Turn your left palm up and your right palm down. Take the hands of your brothers and sisters.”
I pressed my clammy left hand into that of a man wearing a baby blue polo shirt. Sweat stains spread beneath his armpits, and he gave me a tiny, tight smile. I felt his anxiety streaming into my palm, and I gave it a little squeeze because I knew he sensed mine as well. My right hand went into the palm of Miss Cleo. Or that’s what Sammy would have called her. She was a heavyset black woman in a burnt orange tunic rimmed with purple lace. Her thick braids were piled on her head in a sort of crown, run through with strings of colored pearls. She rubbed her thumb along my wrist and murmured something that sounded like “it’s all gonna be okay,” though I may have imagined it.
In the center of our circle stood a small shrine erected on a wooden block. On the altar, Dede had placed an Egyptian Book of the Dead, a string of maroon prayer beads, and photos or trinkets from our loved ones. I could see Sammy’s glasses sticking from beneath the photo of a slender, blonde woman leaning down to smell a bushel of pink roses. I knew the woman belonged to the man in the blue polo. He had not told me this, and I had not seen him put the picture on the altar, but still I knew.
Half-melted candles surrounded the shrine, and their tiny flames flickered and danced. I stared at the candle in front of me and watched it dip and rise, undulating from side to side like the sinewy body of a snake charmer. As I stared, the flame grew taller and more pointed. It rose until it stood higher than all the other flames, and when I realized that the woman in bells had shifted her attention toward me, I broke my gaze and the candle shrank back down.
“Sing through this body, speak through this body, I summon thee, I summon thee…” she chanted, and her eyelids flickered and she swayed from side to side. The bells on her skirt jingled, and my hands grew moist. The candle flames brightened, and the shadows in the surrounding faces deepened.
Nausea crept over me. It began in my throat with a trickle of saliva that seeped back and down, lingering. The nausea dropped into my chest, and then my belly. Only after it washed through my gut did it race back up into my brain, where the entire world tilted on its axis like a rolling ball.
I clenched my eyes tight, and the vision of blood-soaked towels stuffed into a black plastic bag raced behind my eyelids and sent lightning bolts of dizziness through my whole body. I slumped forward and my curly hair caught a flickering candle flame. It burst like a firework, as if I’d hosed myself with a can of hairspray, which I had not.
Startled cries rang out. The man in the blue polo patted at my burning hair, and seconds later, the woman in bells threw a glass of tepid water onto my head. I gasped and rolled away from the flames. I folded myself into a tiny ball and sobbed into my sweater, which I’d bunched up to my mouth, ignoring my exposed stomach and back.
Everyone was murmuring and moving, and someone turned the lights back on.
Time passed, and then I heard tinkling bells as Dede sashayed back across the room and knelt on the floor behind me. She rolled me over, and suddenly I saw her differently. Her face was warm and kind, filled with compassion.
“Let me help you up.”
I struggled up to sitting, my hair dripping little rivulets onto my collar. I touched the piece of hair that had been singed, and the end was crispy.
“Here,” she said, and clipped the hair with scissors. “Now it’s a reminder, a scar, and you’ll cherish it.”
She put the piece of hair she had cut into a pocket in her skirt.
“Do you mind?” she asked, and I shook my head.
I didn’t speak as she guided me to my feet and through the beaded curtain that led down a dark hallway, and then into a small house. She led me to her kitchen table, where I sat on a high stool and rested my elbows on the smooth red surface of her kitchen table. Everything in the kitchen was red. The toaster and coffee pot and dishtowels and throw rugs. The kitchen table was red, and little red cushions rested on the stools surrounding it. Red roses sat in a white vase on top of the refrigerator.
She returned with a t-shirt that boldly stated, Take Back the Night. I took off my shirt and slid hers on, too overwhelmed to feel awkward at my nudity.
“So, tell me about Sam,” she said gently, setting his eyeglasses on her table.
I stared at the silver frames against the red surface. I reached out and touched one lens, knowing if I put them on, I’d develop an almost immediate headache.
Blind as a vampire bat, he had told me the first time I tried them out.
“Lots of red in here,” I said.
“Muladhara,” she told me. “It’s the first chakra, or the root. Red is the color that symbolizes it. It’s about our connection to earth and groundedness. It’s also about safety and survival. This is my root chakra room.”
“Hmm…”
“And red makes me think of love, not to mention I like the color.” She winked at me and looked back at the glasses.
“Safety and survival.” I repeated her words, and then more images of red besieged me. Red on my white dress, on my pale hands, on the stones, at the edge of Sammy’s mouth.
The woman watched me but said nothing.
“Sammy was my husband, but he was murdered.”
She nodded, as if affirming something she already suspected.
“And these were his.” She touched the glasses, and I thought I saw her shrink from them, but couldn’t be sure.
“Yes.”
“Why did you come here?”
I stared at her watching me, and then I said the first words that popped into my mind.
“To see if he knows…”
The woman crinkled her forehead.
“To see if he knows what? That he’s dead?”
“Yes,” I replied quickly. “I can still feel him, and I wonder if he realizes he died.”
The woman turned to the stove where her teakettle whistled.
She took the kettle – red – and grabbed two mugs from the cupboard. She prepared our teas, adding ginger and elderberry syrup.
“Skull cap tea,” she told me, handing me a mug.
I took a sip and, despite the syrup, grimaced at the bitter flavor.
“It will soothe your grief. It’s pouring off you in waves.”
“Can you sense him? Sammy?”
I knew she could. How else had she known his name?
“Yes, I sense him. But I cannot separate what’s coming from you and what’s coming from him.”