Spirituality Fiction

By Essa Adams

What would you do if you realize you married your best friend's soul mate? The spiritual journey of one soul group.

Beginning of spirituality fiction novel prologue here…

Part One Contemporary spirituality fiction. Friendship. Divorce. Death. Soul groups. Women's fiction novel by Essa Adams.

Which Makes the Ghost Seem Nigh Me….
Of A Something That Came and Went

CHAPTER ONE – SECTION ONE

Change of life hitting the fan makes time a precious energy. Now Sam’s terminal cancer wound the clock tighter. Lindsay decided the lunch leftovers would save time when he needed her most.

As she opened the cottage’s vintage cabinet for a freezer container, a shadow made her turn to the back stairway. A spring breeze tickled through her and, seeing her great-uncle, she jumped.

“Uncle Herron!” She started toward him. Did he come in the side door? “I must not have heard you–” She stopped, realizing he wasn’t really there. Gray eyes dark as hers. Black hair pulled back, and for him, still not a gray hair at eighty-three. Could he hear her?

The new phone trilled. She squealed and he was gone.

Caller identification listed the steel mill. “Daniel?” she said, shrill as the phone, then frowned, shaking her head. She forgot to censor. What if this was Sam’s foreman?

“It’s just me, Lindsay.” Daniel’s voice was so near she was calm again. She pulled her dark hair to the nape of her neck, keeping vigil on Uncle Herron’s corner.

“There you are, Daniel. Sam’s going to be back from the video store soon. He returned a movie and…” But she cut herself from sharing more useless information, considering that for almost twenty years what she needed to say wasn’t best for anyone.

She pictured him in the mill office, smudged hands, mahogany hair barely visible under the hardhat, bronze freckles streaked with crane grease. She knew the strong line of his back, like a tall logger just past fifty. Goodness. “Do you need Sam?” she asked abruptly.

“You’ll do,” he said, and she knew he was smiling.

She tried not to grin as she rubbed her chilly forearms, exposed by the brown dress. That draft was winter whistling through barely open windows. She glanced into the living room to witness someone with floppy gray hair duck from the window. Withholding a curse, she gawked. A spy.

“I have that lift chair for Sam,” Daniel was telling her, “So hey, if you two are going to be around tonight?”

Hoping to see the spy, she leaned forward then attempted jumping for height but had none, so she vaulted as far as the phone cord allowed and gagged herself. “We’ll be home, Daniel,” she promised, circling to get out of the cord, knowing he would be disappointed if she wasn’t home. He admitted so nine years ago. Nothing changed.

They hung up and she checked where Uncle Herron had stood, then strolled to the front window, nonchalantly looking for the gray-headed spy. No one was outside except a little woman on a Harley taking the corner very slow. When she gave the thumbs up sign Lindsay raised a hand to acknowledge then closed the windows and layers of lace and sheers.

She covered her two skunks with crib quilts. Itty wiggled off her back to see if Lindsay had seeds, but got a pet instead. “Sleep now,” she said, patting Fern too.

One more time she checked Uncle Herron’s corner of the kitchen by a never used outside door and narrow stairway. She was being ridiculous, but he had visited other times just this way.

The phone rang. She recognized the number of a past acquaintance she didn’t want to see ever again. Gooee, who she met in pottery class and avoided for several months, thank goodness. But how did that woman get her new unlisted number? She reminded herself to tell Sam and Daniel not to answer anytime Gooee called. Gooee took too much time.

Her caution of Gooee aside, Lindsay needed time to organize. What to do for them when Sam couldn’t work. What to do for her living when he was gone. She always had ideas about promotional work but was too expended between everyone else. Their finances were in brittle shape after first one steelmill going bankrupt, then the next. Now his health.

She returned to the linen white living room to primp for Daniel’s visit, plumping layers of pillows in vintage floral, pink and brown. Though the room was new to her she felt nostalgic, probably from her patriarchal clock collection and this clutter. She started stuffing large baskets, drawers of the old white hutch and dark wardrobe near the east window, then the drawer on the walnut buffet behind the gray sofa. She solemnly maneuvered a quiet push broom over the enormous braided rug, around the massive black canine heartily snoring before the sofa, their newly adopted Newfoundland, Garth.

So far, so good. She practically rolled her eyes. She didn’t like that expression anymore. Gooee said it too often. “So far so good, darling.” Imagine looking up during pottery class and being adopted by your own personal psychic. Thank you, but no.

She had to stop rolling her eyes, little light bubbles clustered in front of her. She tried swishing them and decided she needed glasses.

She wandered through the French doors into her bedroom. Through matching French doors to the outside deck, she noticed a woman with long blonde hair stroll along the lake lane.

Gooee always wears long skirts like hers. Stop that! Stop thinking about Gooee.
As she closed another window, she could hear the woman singing a hypnotic tune that swelled on the stinging lake wind. She almost expected something to happen, felt a surge into an anticipated moment. A familiar moment. A dream… from long ago? No. Oh no.

Lindsay dressed as if Daniel was not on his way. Fluffy cream-colored socks. Matching cardigan buttoned to her chin, long French jersey skirt in stormy gray. Her thick, rounded figure was warmly shrouded, nothing visible but her solid fingers and indistinct, flat-planed face. Gray eyes with charcoal lashes blinked in the reflection of the white chifforobe mirror as she studied a new scar under her right jaw, another tiny mishap from misjudging the car door corner.

A wrinkled woman with copper hair glided behind her reflection, bicycling while wearing bifocals.

How does one ride a bike with bifocals? And the woman looked Lindsay right in the eye, right into her reflection, as if she heard the question, proving more chilling than Uncle Herron standing in her kitchen when he really wasn’t.

‘The woman did not hear the question, Clara Rose,’ she reasoned, using her given name, like her husband did too often. ‘No, only Gooee is capable of adept invasions of privacy even at long distances.’ And though Lindsay could feel Gooee out there tracking her like the robust polar after the wayward seal, she lied to herself. She told herself she was secure in a new home. She was, definitely.

Calm now. But what was there to be calm about. She tried detangling her hair with her fingers then gave up, touching the rounded cheeks dolloped too high on broad, flat cheekbones. Was it the new mirror, or did her cheeks seem pinker, too healthy, too happy when her husband was dying.

She smoothed the silken bedspread. Before long Sam would be sleeping here instead of upstairs. She knew he would gripe, but the steep climb hurt him. He could see their view of the sliver of lake from her bed just as well.

Sam knew he had prostate cancer a few months before he went to the doctor and hadn’t told her. He had decided not to do anything. The disease, taking three of Sam’s relatives before age fifty, terrorized him, mostly after witnessing their medical treatments.

Movers and friends brought the furniture Lindsay found at antique shops and settled them for the long wait. Just this morning they unpacked the last treasures. Then Sam hung their new slate plaque with a lake and moose etching, and their name, ‘The Davinsons.’

Lindsay had fortressed them to get through the next two-hundred and forty-four days. Eight months broken down without being outrageous, like hours or minutes.
Only, now, two hundred and thirty-four days.

No panicking, she cautioned herself. He needed her to get them through financially and emotionally. Then panic, then dying.

Or was it dying then panic? Priorities.