Destined (39 page)

But I could also picture how things
might change. If people lived more consciously, if we paid attention to how the
different parts of our eco-community interact and kept the right goals in mind,
we could gradually start to do things differently. We could stop the
degradation of the system and start to build our resources back up again. Our
inner resources as well as our natural ones. People had been focusing on greed,
competition and fear for eons, but maybe now was the time for human attitudes
to change, before it was too late.

Starhawk had
told us that scientists predicted we might have only ten or twenty more years before
the global warming caused by the overuse of technology started to dramatically
raise the level of the oceans, flooding major cities in all parts of the world.
If we were truly all part of one giant web, along with the air and the water
and the soil and the bacteria and bugs and fish and birds and animals, what
would happen if large numbers of human beings suddenly became aware and started
to dream a new vision of the future? Wouldn’t it inevitably spark a chain
reaction through every filament of the web? It seemed to me that we could start
to heal the Earth community by first healing our own spirits, by thinking
positively and refusing to be discouraged. All was not lost unless we made it
so, by giving in to the seductive pull of entropy. Instead, we should direct
our thinking toward nurturing our fellow community members, rejuvenating and
restoring them. It seemed like the brightest hope for the future.

Description:
 
A full moon shines down from the sky.
Two wild dogs or wolves howl at it. A crayfish or lobster (the sign of Cancer,
the emotions) climbs out of a pool of water, waving its arms.

Meaning:
 
Intuition vs.illusion. Psychic power,
divination and the danger of misinterpreting the signs, which may be vague or
misleading.

A weird thing happened one cool, rainy, fall morning a
few weeks later. The summer heat had finally broken, the college students were
back in town and the kids had gone back to school. Henry had recovered well
enough to be more independent, so Tony decided it was time to deal with his
languishing business concerns, which had been neglected due to recent events.
He packed his bag, kissed me goodbye, and drove off to New York City for a few
days to visit the exclusive galleries that purchased the unique pieces he
brought into the country. I still didn’t want to leave Henry alone all night,
so Tree and I were planning to stay upstairs at Henry’s house until Tony
returned. I had already moved some of my things there, and I was over at Tony’s
house picking up my cat when the phone rang, and the answering machine in the
kitchen took the call.

“Hello, Tony,” a woman’s attractive
alto voice said, with a slight European accent, “
C’est moi, cheri!
I just confirmed that I can get away,
after all. I’d love to see you in New York, so watch for me at the hotel and I
will arrive very soon! OK, sweetheart,
ciao
.” The woman hung up with a click.

I stood in the kitchen staring at the
answering machine. Tree jumped up on the counter next to it, trying to divert
my attention. I stroked him absently. Then I pushed the play button and
listened to the message again. Unfortunately, it still sounded exactly the
same.

“Well, that really sucks, doesn’t it?”
I said to Tree. He blinked at me lovingly. I felt like someone had just punched
me in the stomach and thrown me off a cliff.

It just wasn’t possible. There had to
be some other explanation.

I picked up the cat and put him into
his carrier for the ride back to work. I cleaned the litter box and bagged it,
packing a grocery bag with some cat food, fresh litter and a few catnip toys.
There was another explanation, that’s all. She was an old friend, maybe a
relative. She was an old customer. She was an old…lover? Maybe, not so old. She
sounded sexy, sophisticated, and probably gorgeous.

I drove back over to Market Street and
brought Tree upstairs. When I was passing through the second floor hallway,
Henry heard me and came to the door of the study.

“Is this my new housemate?” he asked,
peering into the cat carrier. I brought it into the room and put it down on the
floor, unzipping the flap. Tree popped out his head and looked around the room
carefully, scanning for danger. Seeing none, he leaped out of the carrier and
immediately shot across the room to crouch under Henry’s reading chair. He
peered out at us cautiously, his tail lashing.

“He’ll need a few minutes to check out
the new place, but he’s usually a good traveler,” I said. “He got used to
Tony’s house fast.” I thought again of the message on the answering machine and
felt a little sick.

Tree had moved out into the open and
was grooming himself now, a good sign. Henry went back to his chair. I saw that
he had been reading the
I Ching
again.

“What does the Oracle say today?” I
asked, coming over to sit next to him. I had a few questions of my own I
wouldn’t have minded asking. Tree jumped up into my lap and started to purr
loudly. Henry looked over at him and smiled, reaching out to scratch him on the
head.

“It says business is good for us, but
our foundation is a bit shaky,” he said.

“Us? You mean, for all of us? What do
you think that means?”

“I suppose it has to do with my
health,” he mused. “We are warned not to forge ahead full speed at the moment,
due to some weak areas in the underlying structure.”

“Or, it could mean something else is
shaky,” I suggested, thinking about Tony, who had suddenly transformed into an
unknown quantity in my mind. It’s bizarre how such a drastic change can happen
within just a few seconds. I needed to be careful not to read too much into this.
It was just a phone message, after all. There were several possible
explanations. After all, Henry had told me that Tony was an honorable man. I
should trust him. He wouldn’t lie to me. He wouldn’t ruin everything. I started
to panic, trying to keep it off my face, smiling blandly.

“Emily,” said Henry slowly,
thoughtfully, “Do you ever find that the past tends to repeat itself? It
changes, and things progress and evolve, but there is still a pattern one can
sense underneath. It’s like an invisible grid, the warp and woof of life.” He
looked at me with his mind-reading expression, like my reality was an open book
to him.

I nodded my head, trying to appear
cool and collected. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

“Do you?” Henry said doubtfully. “I
wonder.”

I looked at him inquiringly, but he
did not explain and gazed back at me with a sympathetic expression. He had
definitely sensed that I was upset. Tree suddenly stood up and stalked across
the coffee table to climb into Henry’s lap, turning around in a circle once and
then settling down. Tree smiled his curly contented-cat smile, squeezing his
eyes nearly shut for a catnap. Henry moved his legs a little to make them both
more comfortable.

“Intuition is a tricky thing, Emily,”
he said. “Sometimes it is truly caused by a psychic flash, and sometimes it’s
based on an echo of some past experience, set off by a current event that calls
up the memory. We react the way we did before, and then a chain of events falls
into place, and the pattern repeats. In a way, we make it happen.”

Henry leaned over the sleeping cat and
looked at me meaningfully.

“It’s hard to escape the underlying
patterns,” he said. “You have to decide to deliberately change the outcome by
reacting differently. It takes a leap of faith.”

His eyes bored into mine for a moment,
and I realized he was saying something about me personally, not just anyone in
general. I wondered what the Oracle had been telling him about me, about my
future. I wondered whether he was talking about Tony and me.

“Henry,” I protested, shaking my head,
“You can’t just have faith that things will go the way you want them to. It
doesn’t work that way! Other people are involved, and you can’t control them,
or what choices they make.”

He smiled at me fondly and stroked
Tree, who had totally relaxed now, all four legs outstretched and lolling off
the edge of Henry’s lap.

“You can’t control other people, that
is true,” he said gently. “But you can try to make sure that what you are
feeling and doing is because of what’s really happening right now, not because
of something that happened in the past.”

I sat there and gazed at him, my face
crumpling as my eyes overflowed with tears.

“I try not to think about it,” I said,
wiping my eyes with the back of my hand and sniffling. How did he know these
things about me? I hadn’t told any of my new friends about my past
relationships, not even Siri. It was something I wanted to leave behind me.

“But, it’s so hard to forget when
something happens, when you’re vulnerable to someone and they hurt you,”
 
I said, my voice shaking.

I looked at him with my soul exposed
and cringing, the young woman again whose heart had been worn on her sleeve,
wide open and innocent, in love with love and living in a romantic fantasy.

Henry’s eyes were sad as he looked at
me with affection, but he did not reach out to touch me. Instead he continued
to stroke the cat, who stretched and yawned in ecstasy.

“The drama may be similar, Emily, but
believe me, the players have changed,” he said, almost sternly. I gulped and
nodded, not really convinced.

Just then the phone rang and a minute
later Siri called up the stairs that it was for Henry, who picked up the
extension. I took advantage of his distraction to end the conversation, which
was shaking my usually cool demeanor and delving a little too close to my
private emotional secrets.

I took Tree from the old man’s lap and
brought him upstairs to show him where I was putting the litter box. I set up
his food and water dishes on the floor in the third floor kitchen, and then I went
into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and pull myself together.
Tony’s razor and shaving gel were still sitting on the back of the sink. I
started crying again as soon as I saw them. I felt helpless, lost, completely
without power. I turned on the water and let it run, staring at the way it
swirled around in a spiral to rush down the drain. My mind swirled around with
it, rushing into the past, sucked down into a dark slick tube of memories,
flashing past like scenes from a movie trailer.

I was madly in love once before. I’d
had several other lovers, of course, but only one relationship that was really
serious. About ten years earlier, after I had finished school and was off
living on my own, I had met a man. I thought he was The Man. He was perfect.
Smart, romantic, handsome and funny. He was a writer, with a fabulous
imagination, and he spoke in poetic phrases like a character in a book. I was
completely charmed by him. He adored me, or so I thought. He called me
beautiful, made love to me with great passion, listened avidly to everything I
had to say, and he left a single yellow rose on the seat of my car every day,
so I found it there when I left work at night. He was also married, something I
learned after a few weeks.

He told me the marriage had been
breaking up for a long time, not because of me but because it was over. He
hadn’t told me right away because he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea. He
said, he was truly free and at this point it was really just a legal matter. He
had moved out of his wife’s house and into a spare bedroom at a friend’s
bachelor apartment. We spent some good times together there, but things started
to change and I began to feel that he was distracted or depressed. My lover
denied it. But his friend told me that after he talked to me on the phone at
night, he would cry. His friend asked me why, but I didn’t know the answer.