How coincidental was it that the place where I lived looked out over the Santa Lucias, and the ghost I was currently trying to mediate was called Lucia? It wasn’t that common of a name.
Feigning a lightheartedness I was far from feeling, I waved to my fellow tenants as I joined them in what had become a daily routine: the after-work trudge from our cars to our apartment doors, which we’d all unlock at the same time to get to our refrigerators and TVs and futons.
Still, I like my place. It’s nothing fancy, just a one bedroom in a thirty-unit building off the G16. Kelly Prescott Walters would probably sneer at the idea of living here instead of some two-bedroom condo over in Pebble Beach with a sea view and a private hot tub (though now she probably lives in a $20 million mansion with her billionaire husband).
But in good traffic my place was a less-than fifteen-minute drive from Carmel Beach (and my classes and place of work). Plus the other tenants—mostly young newlyweds with small children and singles like myself, either divorced or not yet married—were friendly. It was always good to be home, the one place I never had to worry about being attacked by the souls of the dead, because, “Evil spirits cannot enter an inhabited house unless invited.”
That’s what Sir Walter Scott—who’d written Ivanhoe and a bunch of other books Father Dominic tried very hard to make me read—said, and it’s (mostly) true. There are tons of ways unwelcome guests (of both the paranormal and human variety) can enter a home.
But there are also tons of precautions you can take to keep them out. I’m not just talking about hanging crucifixes or mezuzahs on the walls or doorways, either (though trust me, I have both. I’ll take all the protection I can get).
Before I’d moved in, I hired my own security experts to replace the unit’s dead bolts (in case any previous tenants—or their exes—had “forgotten” to return their keys).
Then I’d installed metal braces to jam the sliding glass doors to the balcony, even though they were located on the second floor. True, it was unlikely a burglar was going to scale the balcony of the unit below to break in.
But it wasn’t burglars I was worried about.
Then I’d sprinkled a mixture of sea salt and boric acid (the powdered kind you can get in a box at the hardware store) across all the outside doorways and windowsills, as well as the seams in the kitchen counters. The salt was to keep out Non-Compliant Deceased Persons. The boric acid was to keep away roaches. I figured why not kill two unwanted pests in one? Like Paul had said, I’m a modern kind of girl.
Of course, none of that stopped Father Dominic from coming over and doing a house blessing, dousing the place in holy water (which got me worried about the boric acid congealing, but it ended up being fine).
I didn’t mention to him that CeeCee’s aunt Pru had already been over and done a Wiccan cleansing, smudging the place with sage, or that Jesse had lain a shining copper penny, head up, in each outer corner of the unit, sheepishly admitting it was something one of his sisters used to do (of course, back then it had been halfpennies, and they’d been made of solid copper. Today’s pennies are mostly made of zinc), and he didn’t really believe in it, but why not?
Why not indeed? We all have our superstitions. I wasn’t going to begrudge anyone theirs. I have plenty of my own.
As soon as I’d locked the door behind me, I kicked off my wedges, undid my bra, and fed Romeo, the lab rat I’d stolen from my Operant Conditioning class after successfully training him to run a maze, then press a lever to feed himself.
The professor had warned us in advance not to grow too attached to our rats. It doesn’t pay for clinical researchers to become emotionally attached to their lab animals, any more than it does for therapists or physicians to become emotionally attached to their patients. In order for the professional to best serve their client, they need to remain detached.
And virtually every achievement in medical history owes its lifesaving advancements to animal testing. Eventually most lab rats end up getting dissected.
But I only took the class because it was a requirement. I no more planned on going into clinical research than I planned on becoming emotionally attached to my rat (this was becoming an upsetting pattern: as a mediator, I also hadn’t planned on becoming emotionally attached to any of the ghosts I’d attempted to mediate, but look what happened).
As soon as the final was over, I swapped out Romeo for a look-alike I’d found in a pet store.
Rats are a lot cleaner and smarter than people give them credit for. Romeo and I have grown to share a genuine and totally unique personal bond. He’s paper trained, and likes to sleep on my shoulder while I watch TV. No way would I have left my little buddy in that lab for some PhD candidate to experiment on—possibly even kill—over the summer.
Paul was right: I’m probably going to be world’s crappiest counselor.