What could she say to Rose that would make her better? Every story she’d started this morning led to a horrible dead end she couldn’t share, a reminder of that night on the hill. The white chrysanthemum was a symbol of truth, yet she couldn’t tell the truth to Rose, not all of it. It was so hard to stay positive when she talked about her life. The only solution was to talk about something wholly different. But what?
Looking down, Callie was surprised to see Rose’s Book of Trees on the windowsill. She was certain it hadn’t been there yesterday. She had seen it on an earlier visit in an unlocked cabinet with the rest of Rose’s belongings, but apparently someone had taken it out, and now it sat open to where Rose had drawn a winter branch, its bare spines extending across two pages. Callie flipped through, seeing more of the same. The journal was all drawings, pencil sketches of trees in different seasonal stages: fully leafed, then sparser, then bare branches covered with snow.
Realizing how invasive she was being, Callie closed the journal. Pissed off that someone else had been looking through Rose’s things, she approached the nurses’ desk. “Someone has been looking through Rose’s belongings. Do you know who?” Callie demanded.
“Don’t accuse me,” the nurse said.
“Well, it was somebody.” An aide? The guard at the door?
The nurse turned back to her computer monitor. “Take it up with her doctor,” she advised.
Callie realized she should have been more diplomatic. But seeing Rose’s belongings disturbed, her privacy invaded, had plugged into an old issue.
The same thing had happened at the children’s home. Periodically, the nuns rifled through the children’s belongings, searching for contraband: candy when they were little, drugs later on. Callie’s first foster father had searched her belongings the same way. For what? she’d always wondered.
Callie went back to Rose’s room and opened the cabinet to see if anything else had been taken. Rose’s beat-up down jacket and her black pants were neatly hung, her battered running shoes lined up on the floor. Her little grocery cart with the wheels was half folded and stuffed into the back of the narrow closet with her other meager belongings still inside. Nothing appeared to be missing. Callie buried the book in Rose’s cart, covering it with a ratty sweater that needed cleaning and both of Rose’s shoes. Then she locked the cabinet, pocketing the key. If—when—Rose woke up, Callie would unlock it, but, for now at least, Rose’s private belongings were protected.
She couldn’t talk any more. Not today.
Instead, she decided to meditate. When she was working with a difficult client, she often led her patient in a guided meditation. She wished she felt confident enough to lead Rose this way, but she didn’t.
So Callie closed her eyes and began a silent meditation, sitting at Rose’s bedside and picturing her own body filling with water and then slowly draining from her head downward. Others she knew complained that clearing their minds was difficult, but Callie could slip into the meditative state like a second skin. She sometimes taught meditation to students from the university, in addition to sound healing. Truth be told, she preferred this state to real life. Here, there were no barriers for her, and it was easy to travel, to merge with others and see what they saw, to understand what they were going through. Here, all beings were one, something that was difficult to explain to students. It had to do with openness and intention. But first you had to rid yourself of impediments and create an emptiness that would allow you to accept such a merger.
She allowed her focus to linger on every area where she felt a blockage: the crick in her neck from sleeping on Rose’s mattress through the tightening of her throat and chest muscles from swallowing tears. When she imagined the water streaming down her arms and out her fingertips, movement slowed from a steady flow to a drip. She could feel the scar on her left palm. And then through closed eyelids she saw a shadow darken the room and felt a chill wind creep through the dying leaves of a nearby tree and move close, jolting her. She opened her eyes.
Too-bright hospital lights. Outside the window, it was no darker than before. The lone oak on the hill across the parking lot was the same.
That was weird.
Callie closed her eyes again and resumed her meditation, taking things back a step, to the elbows. She imagined the liquid draining downward and out through her fingers. This time there was flow, and the rest of the exercise went smoothly. There were no more blockages, no shadows, no further impediments to the meditative state.
She rubbed her hands together and placed them on top of Rose’s.
She opened her mouth but didn’t sing. Instead she breathed a silent Om. Her intention was to merge herself with Rose and to discover Rose’s home tone, the frequency her body was most comfortable with, the one that would become her healing modality. Everyone had one note of the scale that was home for them; sometimes Callie had to listen hard to discover it. When she was able to merge through meditation, the tone often played through her, moving through her fingers, then upward and out her mouth, expressed in a clear healthy tone as if in song.
She’d accomplished this type of bond before—she had a talent for emptying herself of herself when someone was very ill or when she sensed a misdiagnosis, and then joining with them. Empathetic healing sometimes accompanied this type of embodiment.
But today nothing happened.
Rose wasn’t easy to inhabit. Callie kept stopping and starting, completing a series of deep breathing exercises before she felt the familiar falling feeling and recognized the scent of oranges that always accompanied a merging.
For Callie, the sound she heard when she meditated—she dubbed it “the music of the spheres”—was akin to a gentle sea breeze. As she went deeper, the sound grew more complex, revealing additional layers. On particularly successful days, it became a series of harmonics in which she could hear all the sounds of nature in gentle concert.
Today, she heard nothing. Instead, as she approached the place Rose inhabited, all sounds ceased. It wasn’t silence so much as it was nothingness. The visuals she experienced changed as well, moving from a brightness that lit from within to a darkness that surrounded everything. In the space Rose inhabited, it wasn’t frightening. Or painful. It was simply empty.
Empty.
All the time Callie had been telling Rose her life story, she’d feared that the negativity of the narrative would be upsetting. She’d even worried that the simple shock of hearing her voice for the first time in twenty-five years might be making Rose worse. But now she knew that this wasn’t the case. Despite what Zee Finch had said, it was clear to Callie, as she released herself from her trance, that in the days Callie had been talking, Rose hadn’t heard a single word.
Callie climbed the steps to Towner’s house. It was late afternoon and the tearoom was closed, but Towner was there as usual. Callie was surprised to see Zee still sitting at one of the tables, sharing a pot of tea.
“Join us,” Towner said with a smile when she saw Callie. She took a cup and saucer from one of the other tables and set a place.